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boundary 2 29.1 (2002) 223-257



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Fathers, Lovers, and Friend Killers:
Rearticulating Gender and Race via Species in Hemingway

Cary Wolfe

He did not move but his eye was alive and looked at David. He had very long eyelashes and his eye was the most alive thing David had ever seen.

—Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

No modernist writer has come to embody more of the clichés and caricatures of modernism than Ernest Hemingway, which is another way of saying, I suppose, that no writer is more overdue for a critical face-lift. 1 If that seems an odd way of sizing up the current situation for modernism's self-styled macho man, it is nevertheless quite appropriate, for we are beginning to understand that Hemingway—despite the hairy-chested persona of which he remains the nearly parodic literary exemplum—was, all along, intensely interested in the transgressive possibilities of gender performativity. [End Page 223] What has made this critical reassessment of Hemingway possible (and indeed unavoidable) is not so much the ballyhooed recent publication of True at First Light—a diffuse and belabored piece of work culled from the vast body of late Hemingway manuscripts—but rather the posthumous publication by Charles Scribner's in 1986 of Hemingway's unfinished novel, The Garden of Eden, which he started working on in mid-1946 and to which he returned off and on until the end of his life (Burwell, 95, 98). Though unfinished and entangled in a complex textual and editorial history that scholars are only now beginning to fully understand, this book is, by nearly all accounts, one of Hemingway's most ambitious and important novels. 2 This assessment hangs in no small part on Hemingway's fascination with themes of androgyny, gender experimentation, and their relation to creativity, ballasted by what many critics agree is the most sympathetic and accomplished rendering of a female character (Catherine Bourne) in all of Hemingway's fiction. With Eden (and preferably some knowledge of the larger textual and editorial history) in hand, it is impossible not to reconsider what has, over the years, hardened into one of the most famous caricatures of literary modernism—a caricature, it should be added, that Hemingway himself did much to establish. West of Eden, as it were, what has come into view is a much more interesting and much more ambivalent body of work, one in which, as Mark Spilka has suggested, the Hemingway of Papa's Code is representative not of the entire career, nor even of its most ambitious undertakings, but is instead anchored largely in the macho postures—in both life and writing—of Hemingway in the 1930s, a self-commodifying and often desperate chest-thumping on Hemingway's part that obscures the quite conspicuous interest in gender malleability and performativity which bookends that period in Hemingway's work (Spilka, 2).

At first glance, Hemingway's intense interest in cross-gender identification and the transgressive possibilities of gender performativity that he saw in friends such as Gertrude Stein may be seen as his own version of [End Page 224] the prototypically modernist rebellion against bourgeois social and sexual mores of the sort voiced, for example, by Ezra Pound in his famous 1917 essay "Provincialism the Enemy." But it does not end there, for Hemingway's rebellion must also be viewed in more pointedly psychoanalytic terms, as a war against the largely unmitigated horrors of living in a universe relentlessly organized by an Oedipal regime of subjectivity—a regime that Hemingway (in prototypically Oedipal fashion) at once loathed and embodied. If we believe Nancy Comely and Robert Scholes in their recent study, Hemingway's Genders, those horrors are well captured in many of Hemingway's early stories, such as "Fathers and Sons" and "Indian Camp," and they are reiterated at the very end of Hemingway's career in Eden. His texts, as they put it,

pose the problem of how to attain maturity without paternity. They ask how one can cease to be a boy and become a...

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