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165 “You Know the Name Is No Accident” Hemingway and the Matter of Santiago h. r. stoneback “ISLE OF THE BLEST or FORTUNATE ISLANDS . . . placed in Greek mythology in the Western ocean, and peopled, not by the dead, but by mortals upon whom the gods had conferred immortality.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1944 edition For many years I shared the widespread assumption of many Hemingway readers and critics that The Old Man and the Sea was his most direct and straightforward work of fiction; that all that was there for the getting was more or less on the surface; that the “iceberg theory” did not apply to this work; that here—uniquely in Hemingway’s fiction—we need not concern ourselves with theories of omission, with indirection and obliquity, with deep structure and buried allusions. Like so many others, I had been lulled into the ill-considered conclusion that there was little left to say, little new information to report, nothing left to clarify regarding The Old Man and the Sea. This is not to say that I ever agreed for one moment with those who have dismissed and debunked this work, or that I found the novel anything less than the moving, compelling, admirably realized masterwork that it is. I just thought that its many virtues were obvious to all those who would see them, a critical sin on my part, for which I hope to receive some absolution here. For many decades, it seemed fairly clear that there were two irreconcilable critical camps: either The Old Man and the Sea was dreadful stuff, a thin soup, a sloppy pastiche, overstated sentimental uplift, or it was Hemingway’s last polished work, a powerful narrative with a strong spiritual “message” for the millions 166 H. R. Stoneback of readers around the world who love this story and its style. Recently, however, in this age of the shining paths of ethnic, religious, cultural, critical, theoretical , and gender Puritanism and fundamentalism, it has become all too clear that there are more than two embattled camps. I have no desire to serve as negotiator, as Special Envoy to the MLA Security Council or to some Hemingway Disarmament Conference convened to draft a treaty that will accommodate radically disparate views of The Old Man and the Sea. I would prefer to say, simply and directly , that I am here to celebrate Hemingway’s Cuba, Hemingway’s Santiago, and to call attention to some allusions, some details regarding the naming and placing of Santiago that have not been noticed before. Before I do that, however, allow me a reminiscence and permit me to engage briefly the current cultural modalities, the miasma that now enshrouds this work, the poisonous critical vapors that threaten to choke off understanding of this last great illumination and distillation of the Hemingway Code—or, as I prefer to say, the Hemingway Creed. What is and what was, really, this small novel that more than five million readers avidly devoured in Life magazine in that first memorable week of September 1952? That week when I—a kid hitchhiking through strange cities—saw people reading it on street corners, heard drivers who gave me a ride talk passionately about it; that week when I—not yet a teenager—first read The Old Man and the Sea at a truck stop in the Ozarks, at three a.m., after two waitresses and the truckdriver I had hitched a ride with were through reading it, long parts of it were read aloud to the cathedral-hushed truck stop—jukebox silent, all orders, all eggs and burgers and apple pie, on hold, coffee cups poised in midair, the timeless suspension of another dimension as Hemingway’s words filled the truckstop, first in the lilting mountainy accent of that waitress, then in the clipped New Englandese of that truck driver. Then, after they were through reading, and after I had read it straight through, sitting at the truck stop counter, even forgetting to put extra sugar in my coffee for nourishment for the road, I handed the magazine back to the waitress. She said: “Honey, that old man is some kind of saint, ain’t he? He’s my kind of saint.” I said nothing, for I knew nothing about saints and I was still deep inside the story. I smiled at her, however, for she was very nice and very pretty even with her streaky bleached hair, and I can still see that waitress’s face and eyes...

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