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263 Trolling the Deep Waters Hemingway’s Cuban Fiction and the Critics kelli a. larson While many scholars have eagerly welcomed a new literary era with the arrival of the twenty-first century, critical interest in the twentieth century’s bestknown American author has yet to wane. Hemingway scholarship progresses at a feverish pace with more than two hundred articles, essays, and books published annually on the man and his work. With Hemingway studies long established as a cottage industry, finding open areas for critical exploration can prove frustrating—unless one knows where to search. For those interested in exploring some of Hemingway’s lesser-critiqued works, the Cuban fiction provides abundant opportunities for close readings, biographical approaches, and theoretical applications. Perhaps it is the exclusion of these works (with the possible exception of The Old Man and the Sea) from the typical college syllabi that has contributed to their critical neglect when compared to the overwhelming bulk of scholarship devoted to such college classroom mainstays as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. After all, teaching scholars tend to write about what they teach and thus know well. Certainly The Old Man and the Sea enjoys popularity among college faculty, but many may be reluctant to include the novella because of its heavy use within secondary school curricula (Donahue D4+). Having encountered once too often that resisting undergraduate, clinging to the erroneous supposition that the depths of The Old Man and the Sea had been plumbed in high school, college teachers may be reluctant to assign the novella in their courses. Thus The Old Man and the Sea, while cornering the critical market among the Cuban texts, still lags a clear third overall behind The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms in published criticism. 264 Kelli A. Larson The publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 restored Hemingway’s sagging reputation, a feat he’d hoped to achieve back in 1937 with the publication of To Have and Have Not. Although some current criticism of To Have and Have Not focuses on the novel’s deficiencies in character and dialogue development , which may explain in part the limited scholarly interest in the text, other critics have seized the opportunity to reconstruct Hemingway’s method of composition through a firsthand examination of the author’s manuscript drafts and revisions, resulting in a keener appreciation of the novel’s subtleties. Indeed, recent analysis of Hemingway’s experimental style within To Have and Have Not suggests greater narrative complexity than previously thought and points the way for future scholars, especially those interested in the application of new critical approaches and theoretical lenses. Manuscript studies, like those mentioned above on To Have and Have Not, very wisely have not been confined to Hemingway’s completed works. The warnings heralded by many regarding the distortions, errors, and misrepresentations in Hemingway’s posthumous publications have been heeded in the case of Islands in the Stream, though clearly more needs to be done. At the time of Hemingway’s death, the novel still lacked a clear narrative structure, necessitating extensive editing by Mary Hemingway, Charles Scribner Jr., and Carlos Baker to meld the three sections of the manuscript into a coherent whole. Because the editors did not document their deletions and alterations of the text, scholars are compelled to dig into the original manuscripts, however unformed or unfinished, to recover the authentic Hemingway. Although it is tempting to stand on a soapbox and prattle on about authorial integrity and editorial responsibility, I am ever mindful that without the efforts of various editors over the years, these posthumous contributions to the Hemingway canon might never have reached the vast majority of Hemingway aficionados. Publication of the manuscripts brings them to the larger reading public and grants scholars a wealth of critical fodder in both published and manuscript form (with the latter readily accessible in collections at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and elsewhere) for years to come. Thus, this may be one of those rare instances of the end justifying the means. In looking over criticism pertaining to the short stories, a quick perusal of the MLA bibliographical listing reveals that, at least in Hemingway studies, size does matter. Scholars of Hemingway have long favored the novels over the short stories, despite the richness and complexity several of those stories reveal. Certainly heavily anthologized works, such as “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “A Clean, Well...

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