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254 The Context of Hemingway’s Personal Art and the Caribbean Subject joseph m. defalco In Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway appropriated materials from Homer’s Odyssey, as James Joyce did before him in Ulysses. For Hemingway, however, these appropriations serve somewhat different ends than did the literary borrowings of his accomplished contemporaries, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Like them, Hemingway generated a quasi-mythic and historical portrayal of the ontological reality of a modern man’s life “in being” (Hemingway ’s phrase) in the period preceding and encompassing the world of World War Two. Hemingway accomplished this portrayal while adhering in his usual way to the strictures of Jamesian realism in his primary or surface narrative structure. In other words, he “back- grounded” his classical subtext, whereas his distinguished contemporaries “foregrounded” theirs, letting their subtexts become, in effect, their surface narratives—a technique most patently obvious, of course, in Joyce’s Ulysses. Hemingway also kept his classical source from intruding on his surface narrative by limiting the similarities between Islands in the Stream and The Odyssey to what I will refer to as resemblances, rather than the more conspicuous parallels. Hemingway delivered his views on the subject of literary borrowings in his 1935 nonfiction work, The Green Hills of Africa, when he asserts, in his own voice as a character, that “a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than.” Refining and qualifying this view, he adds that, “Some writers are born only to help another writer to write one sentence. But [a classic] cannot derive from or resemble a previous classic” (21; my emphasis). I take Hemingway’s meaning here to be that “true” original works cannot be derivative or obviously imita- The Context of Hemingway’s Personal Art 255 tive in a literal sense. But they can exhibit an original relationship to reality, the reality called for by Wallace Stevens in The Necessary Angel when he asserts that “reality is the central reference for poetry”—and prose, I would add—and that “there is a structure of reality, which is the resemblance of things” (85). Resemblance in this sense, he adds, need not be imitative, for that would produce inferior art. Hemingway’s later works, particularly those set in the Caribbean, reveal a shift from his earlier views and illustrate his agreement with Stevens’s definition of resemblances. The use of literary and historical allusions was usual for Hemingway throughout his career, of course, but they became increasingly evident in later works, and his preference for the use of resemblances rather than parallels will be clear in the following analysis of Islands in the Stream and its Homeric antecedents. Two resemblances will serve as introductory examples. , the first from the opening section of part 1, “Bimini,” is characterized by settled, domestic scenes and evasively tranquil artistic pursuits, just as Homer’s Calypso episode presents Odysseus during a passive moment in his journey. The second resemblance is from part 2, “Cuba,” which focuses on Hudson’s alcoholic escape into a Circean world of “pig-like things,” the phrase Honest Lil, a prostitute at the Floridita, employs to describe sexual acts she considers perverse (275). What is noteworthy here is Hemingway’s use of allusion to represent Hudson’s personal moral decline in “Cuba.” Rather than emphasizing the many one-for-one parallels, he accomplishes this by association, allowing his readers to observe these allusions for themselves. These sordid reminders of Circean transformations of men into beasts are also associated , appropriately, with details of war and of Hudson’s persistent nostalgia for the sheltered home life he left behind on the symbolically smaller island of Bimini, as a momentarily “static” wanderer, like Homer’s Odysseus. Important differences between Joyce’s and Hemingway’s narratives become apparent in their structures, relative to the three-part divisions in Homer’s Odyssey: Telemachia, Wandering, and Nostos. On the one hand, the divisions in Joyce’s Ulysses form a parallel, with eighteen chapterlike subdivisions, each dealing with a specific Homeric subject, viz. Telemachus, Nestor, and Calypso. In Islands, on the other hand, Hemingway’s division of the text into thirty-six chapters, both in the manuscript and in the published work, organizes the narrative action in terms of scene or episode. Although we cannot be sure what the final organization might have been had Hemingway finished the book himself, the three parts of...

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