The Search for the Absolute in Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

CRITICISM THE SEARCH FOR THE ABSOLUTE IN HEMINGWAY'S "A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE" AND "THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO" Sam Bluefarb Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro ," express a Manichean split between an Absolute (or perfect) in which God or His equivalent is to be sought, and a world in which, if God is indeed dead, one must look for an Absolute which might fill the void of His loss. What has replaced lost faith in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is the older waiter's sense of despair—which in itself becomes a negative statement of the old faith, as expressed in the older waiter's recital of the Hail Mary in negative terms of nada. In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Harry the writer, though he does not explicitly think of God, seems to have a need, as he lies dying of a gangrenous leg on the African plain, for an absolute value that would replace a God that may or may not have failed him, but which in any event has become irrelevant for him. That Absolute, for Harry, is the need—never fulfilled— to perfect himself as a writer. Both of these visions—the older waiter's in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and Harry's in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro''— demand a response; for both are challenges to sensibilities that deal with nearly identical questions: what replaces faith when the basis for faith has gone? And what replaces creative integrity when integrity itself has wasted away? In an article published in the Catholic World in early 1940, Hugh Allen takes Hemingway to task for not attaching himself to a religious faith —presumably Catholic—instead of listening to Gertrude Stein when "Miss Stein siphoned over to him her blind racial will [sic] not to believe."1 The rest of this article, appropriately if heavy-handedly entitled "The Dark Night of Ernest Hemingway," proceeds to exhibit an individual (Hemingway ) who is not only bereft of all religious feeling, but who denies all of the values that faith alone affirms. Certainly there are enough spiritual dark nights in Hemingway's work to suggest that Hemingway was not altogether unaware of the problem. Indeed, in much of the criticism of the past several decades there have appeared arguments which support the presence of "religious" elements in Hemingway's work, precisely because of that writer's preoccupation with nada, or what William James has called 1HUgIi Allen, "The Dark Night of Ernest Hemingway," Catholic World, CL (February 1940), 522. 4 RMMLA BuiXETTNMarch 1971 "world sickness." It is in these two stories that we see a longing for a way out of this impasse, the need to break through to some transcendent purpose —esthetic or religious—without which life seems to have little or no meaning. In "A Clean, Well-lighted Place" there is a split between an older waiter and a young waiter. This gap is catalyzed by the presence of an eightyyear -old patron of the café who wants to stay late into the night so that he might have, if we are to believe the older waiter, a "clean, well-lighted place" for the night. The young waiter impatiently shouts at the old man (who is deaf), "You should have killed yourself last week. . . ."* The old man, the reader discovers, had bungled an attempted suicide. In his own way, he had tried to find an absolute answer to his own absolute despair. But the young waiter cannot understand this. He is still too far back on the threshold of life, with his young wife waiting for him at home, to be able to sympathize with the old man. He has the impatience of the young. The young waiter's response to a condition of life is a contrast to the response of the old waiter. According to William James, healmy-mindedness— which the young waiter seems to possess in such abundance that it becomes a sickness in itself—is not as true a guide to the evils of life as a more melancholy outlook. Of this state of mind, James has said·. there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a...