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194 Into the Terrain of the Bull Hemingway’s “The Undefeated” ann putnam In his Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Paul Smith suggests that the story “The Undefeated” reveals a “pattern” of action that would come to “[serve] Hemingway well in later fiction” (108). Though Smith does not specifically mention The Old Man and the Sea, his comment is significant because it implies that there is indeed an overreaching pattern evident in Hemingway’s fiction from the very beginning. I would like to suggest that there is a strange and provocative connection between the form and vision of “The Undefeated” and The Old Man and the Sea, two works written thirty years apart but that tell essentially the same tale. That the tragic vision came so early and with such fully rendered awareness reveals the astonishing strength and unity of Hemingway’s creative vision present from almost the very beginning. Seen in the context of Hemingway’s developing short fiction of the twenties and early thirties, “The Undefeated” appears to be an anomaly in every way. It is a strange story in several respects. We find it in the third collection of stories, Men Without Women (1927), but it was written in the fall of 1924, a year before the publication of In Our Time, and first saw publication in a German periodical in the summer of 1925, then in This Quarter a few months later. The dates are important because they reveal that Hemingway was working on the story a year before the publication of In Our Time. What is so striking about this story is that with its linear unfolding it prefigures The Old Man and the Sea during a time when Hemingway was experimenting with quite a different form: lyric, sketch-like stories revealing a different sort of heroism—a heroism found in the posture of holding steady, waiting for the end with quietude and dignity. These stories suggest a nihilism that assumes the Into the Terrain of the Bull 195 inevitability of catastrophe and the impossibility of any significant action with which to oppose it: in story after story blows fall unexpectedly and without reason upon characters whose only reaction is a dazed and bewildering silence. In these lyric stories, characters learn to hold steady against the chaos and pain of existence by exhibiting a gesture of defiance, however small, in refusing to lose control: Nick building his camp and fishing the stream with precision and love; the major returning to the machines he knows will never heal him; Ole Andreson lying, fully dressed, waiting for the end; the old man in the café watching the shadows of the leaves against the light. These are characters who learn to hold themselves with dignity and grace through the creation of their own clean, well-lighted places. Thus the Hemingway protagonist confronts the overpowering presence of the thing called nada in his walk home late into the night, or in the black form of a raging buffalo, or in the tangled mysteries of the swamp, or in two men with an odd bulk under their overcoats—in whatever it is that keeps him awake all night listening to the radio, or staying late at the cafe, or seeking oblivion from the point of a needle. With its mode of indirection, the lyric form provided Hemingway with the perfect vehicle for these stories of tenuous holds and motionless posturings, a perfect form for a nihilistic vision that precludes the possibility of meaningful action. Yet “The Undefeated” reveals a fully formed vision of the tragic nature of human existence that emerges once protagonists move out of their long-suffering , careful stances and on toward ends they themselves have made. They meet disaster head on, knowing they have helped bring it about, even while they have prevailed over it. Here Hemingway fashions a classical pattern of struggle against fate, defeat on one level but triumph on another.1 What results is not only a conventional, linear structure but a fulfillment of the tragic potential latent in the lyric stories. Here the protagonist takes an active stance against what is always the inevitability of defeat. Catastrophe comes as much from Manuel Garcia’s decision to act as from the way things are. His decision to persist, against all reason, in saying “‘I am a bullfighter’” brings him both triumph and defeat. It anticipates Hemingway’s move from the lyric to the linear story years later, and prefigures...

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