Fat Words, Fat Souls: Momaday, Hemingway, and the Nature of Truth

In this essay, I argue that N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn responds to a modernist understanding of the nature of truth and its relation to the written word. Specifically, Momaday’s novel responds to Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which suggests a separation, and at times even an antagonism, between the written word and what can be understood as truth. At the heart of both texts is the nature of the word and the narrative form necessary for that word to convey truth. For Hemingway, the word is a vehicle for expressing the truth excavated from the soil of the writer’s life or, alternatively, a mask to veil that Truth. Hemingway’s image of the “fighter” burning the fat from his body suggests an antagonism between the writer and language. Momaday, on the other hand, understands the word as truth, which a writer must transmit without creating interference, without making it “fat” in the words of his character Reverend Big Bluff Tosomah. Momaday emphasizes language’s ability to generate Truth rather than merely expressing it. Both writers acknowledge the potential for corrupting Truth with language, and by reading Hemingway and Momaday in conversation with each other—and with Julia Kristeva’s theories on language and abjection—we gain a perspective from which language does not merely express truth but generates and affirms it as well.

Hemingway and Momaday both position written language as closely intertwined with life and death. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway’s hero, Harry, constantly associates writing with death, which speaks to Julia Kristeva’s claim that language, literary language in particular, skirts an “apocalypse” at the “fragile border … where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so” (207). According to Kristeva, literature reveals the abject by forcing us to confront the linguistic barrier we place between ourselves and meaninglessness and “compels language to come nearest to the human enigma, to the place where it kills, thinks, and experiences [enjoyment] all at the same time” (206). Hemingway’s Harry lingers on the fragile border between life and death while he lies dying of gangrene from an infected wound in his leg. Harry thinks of all the moments he “had saved to write” (42), for which death is often the centerpiece. “He had never written a line,” for example, of the winter day “Barker had flown across the lines to bomb the Austrian officers’ leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran” (42). Nor had he written a word of Nansen sending his secretary to die in the snow, nor of the dead Constantine officers and Turkish soldiers on his trip to Anatolia. Death pervades the experiences Harry regrets not writing, so much so it’s little wonder he never wrote them. To avoid considering his own death through putrefaction, Harry thinks of all the deaths he has seen but not written about—he attempts to corral his own death with literature he will never write.

Harry also associates death with literary endeavor in his conversations with Helen. “I’m full of poetry now,” he angrily tells her, “Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry” (43). He can’t even listen to her read to him: “Talking is the easiest,” he claims (40). He even likens writing to a deadly lie: “It’s trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine” (43). Having drawn Helen to him partially because of his writing, Harry decides that “If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it” (45), and makes the decision too late to write any of the genuine experiences to which he should have devoted his life. “It was not so much that he lied,” Harry thinks, “as that there was no truth to tell” (44). For Harry, truth is something separate from its utterance, and language a tool to uncover or obscure it. Language is Harry’s way of denying the idleness—the void, Kristeva might say—of his life.

In many ways, Momaday’s hero in House Made of Dawn shares Harry’s predicament. Abel...