Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory

11. The Persistence of Memory and the Denial of Self in A Farewell to Arms

11 The Persistence of Memory and the Denial of Self in A Farewell to Arms Mark Cirino • How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a breakwater of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interests and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as from within the water had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man The wave of remembering has finally risen so that it has broken over the jetty that I built to protect the open roadstead of my heart. —Ernest Hemingway, 2 October 1951 Two years after the publication of A Farewell to Arms, Salvador Dali’s surreal masterwork The Persistence of Memory showed melting clocks on a desolate landscape, suggesting the inapplicability of linear chronology to modern life and its irrelevance to the way human consciousness truly operates.1 In 1929, the year A Farewell to Arms was published, William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson futilely attempts to destroy time by mutilating its instrument of measurement, recalling his father’s teachings that “time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels: only when the clock stops does time come to life” (Sound and the Fury 85). Quentin’s father cautions that the watch should not encourage 149 150 mark cirino “constantspeculationregardingthepositionofmechanicalhandsonanarbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function” (77). A Farewell to Arms—unlike the works of Dali and Faulkner—has never been widely recognized as a particularly profound statement about the nature of memory, or praised as an incisive investigation into the psychological or philosophical implications of time. Hemingway’s war novel is most fruitfully read as an eloquent, complex example of the writer’s own attitudes toward the past and toward consciousness in general. It is too easy to dismiss a war veteran and widower’s view of the past as simplistic. The complexity of trauma and grief is the subtext of a seemingly straightforward narrative. By discussing A Farewell to Arms in its manuscript stage, as well as its crucial moments in its published version, we can expose memory as a crucial hidden player in the tragedy. Through an examination of memory’s role in the novel, we can better appreciate the novel’s structural subtleties and the more fragile dimensions to Frederic Henry’s character. Why would Dali’s concern have been the “persistence” of memory? Surely Dali was not alluding to pleasant memories. The connotation of “persistence” is that of a dogged, unyielding force that even when temporarily repelled returns unbidden. In Daniel L. Schacter’s recent study, he lists “persistence” as a major problem in the way that we remember and incorporate the past into consciousness and includes “disappointment, regret, failure, sadness, and trauma” as the “primary territory of persistence” (162). Hemingway’s fiction always exists in the arena where such persistent memories would be in play; Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Richard Cantwell, Robert Jordan, Thomas Hudson, and Frederic Henry all either cope with traumatic memory of a war or deal with sadness and regret and failure during the war. “Persisting memories,” Schacter writes, “are a major consequence of just about any type of traumatic experience” (174), including war. Philip Young’s “wound theory” thesis, then, extends beyond the psychic trauma of unseen wounds and influences matters of consciousness and cognitive functioning. The famous first sentence of A Farewell to Arms reads, “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains” (3). When Frederic begins his retrospective narrative by specifying “that year,” he immediately signals that he intends to embark on a distant and particular memory. “That year” denotes the process of selection in memory, in conjuring up an experience from the past that is the responsibility of any storyteller, and the role of any individual consciousness in calling forth an intentional memory. The narrator, by pinpointing the year 1915 persistence of memory & denial of self in a farewell to arms 151 as significant in his past, is constructing a novel in which the artistic canvas will be his own autobiographical memory. Although the Italian army’s clash with the Austro...