"A Divine Gesture": Hemingway's complex parody of the modern.

An artist, it seems to me now, has not always to finish his work in every

detail; by not doing so he may succeed in making the spectator his

coworker, and put into his hands the tool to carry on the work ...

--Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life

Nearly always one parodies, for good or bad, those writers who deeply

matter.

--Irving Howe in The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson

INTRODUCTION: "A DIVINE GESTURE" AND THE QUESTION OF FORM

ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S FIRST professional publication, "A Divine Gesture," appeared in the May 1922 issue of The Double Dealer. A strange work, it reads like a bizarre, truncated dream: God and the Angel Gabriel meet animated flower pots, bath tubs, and boot jacks whose non-stop, nonsense chanting drives them from a garden and up a flight of stairs. End of dream. End of story.

Written in July 1921, "A Divine Gesture" has proved an ongoing enigma to Hemingway critics--to date, no one has effectively interpreted it. Among other things, it has been categorized as "a Symbolist tale," "a burlesque of a kind of fable" and "a satire" (Joost 28; Reynolds 242). While such categorizations are accurate as far as they go, I believe an examination of "A Divine Gesture" in relation to Synthetic Cubism, Dadaist notions of chance and randomness, the art of Sherwood Anderson, and Havelock Ellis's theory of dreamwork will go a long way in clarifying its form and content.

At the time Hemingway composed "A Divine Gesture," he had known Sherwood Anderson for six months and had learned about modernist composing techniques during their numerous conversations and visits to art exhibitions. Anderson, of course, was indebted to Gertrude Stein's experimental method which he considered "the most important pioneer work done in the field of letters in my time" ("The Work of Gertrude Stein" 30). Anderson had learned Stein's Cubist/Dadaist techniques, including automatic writing, and applied them in his work. In his "even more dreamlike fiction," he used Stein's "recurrent repetitions with their effect of ballad refrains" and told stories "in a series of simple declarative sentences of almost primer-like baldness" (Wilson 239). Technically, Hemingway followed Anderson's lead: "A Divine Gesture" is a dreamlike, symbolic fiction based on repetition and the simple declarative sentence.

During his stays in New York City, Anderson had been a frequent visitor to Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291, the center of the American avant-garde movement in the arts from 1913 through the 1920s. "Stieglitz had begun to assemble a large private collection of key works of the modern movement, and he was willing to show any of these works to his acquaintances ..." (Dijkstra 39). Anderson met many former Cubists, now Dada painters, who congregated there: Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Marsden Hartley among others. During one of his New York stays, Anderson became friends with Hartley (White 10), a friend of Gertrude Stein whose experimental writing had been well-received by Stieglitz and the Dadaists as well as Anderson (Dijkstra 12-13, 28). In his famous letter of 3 December 1921, introducing Hemingway to Stein in Paris, Anderson sends along "Love to Marsden Hartley" (qtd. in White 11).

Anderson's association with Stieglitz, Gallery 291, and Dada painters such as Hartley became part of the "inside talk, the literary gossip" which Anderson shared with Hemingway in Chicago in 1921 (Reynolds 186). Already an important figure in Chicago's literary life, Anderson was viewed as an authority on "The New Movement" in the arts. He was the spokesman for the new, the strange, the unheralded in art. In addition, he was also a modern painter who had recently exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club (Letters To Bab 144). He no doubt encouraged Hemingway to look at the work of Picabia, Duchamp, Hartley, and other Dadaists.

In July 1921, the month in which Hemingway composed "A Divine Gesture," Anderson insisted that Hemingway view an exhibit of experimental Swiss painters at the Chicago Art Institute. These Swiss artists, "`under the spell of Cezanne and Van Gogh' had `built up an art as full of the strange investigations of modernism as any art in Europe'" (qtd. in Reynolds 159). According to an editorial which appeared in the Art Institute's Bulletin nine months earlier, modernist painters had "added to the old objective motives a new subjective type of theme. They try to paint their mental reactions to things ..." (qtd. in Reynolds 159). The Cubists in particular were concerned with painting "mental reactions to things" because of their "constructivist" attitudes toward art. They believed that artistic composition involved a process of destruction and reconstruction of familiar forms based upon the individual gestalts of the artist and viewer. Once the visual clues had been seized upon, "organized" by the viewer, he or she constructed the work. In effect, the work became a collaboration in form between artist and viewer.

In "A Divine Gesture," Hemingway surprised his reader with animated and talkative bath tubs, flower pots, and boot jacks. Like modernist painters, he was interested in "mental reactions to things." Like the Cubists and Dadaists, he took ordinary household objects like flower pots and bath tubs and subjected them to radical recontextualizations to elicit subjective reactions in his readers.

According to Michael Reynolds, Hemingway's exposure to modern art began with Post-Impressionism and Cubism (158). By 1921, Analytical Cubism had given way to Synthetic Cubism. Juan Gris, a Hemingway favorite, described the shift in this way: "Cezanne turns a bottle into a cylinder, but I begin with a cylinder and create an individual of a special type: I make a bottle--a particular bottle--out of a cylinder" (qtd. in Chipp 274). The Synthetic Cubists, in other words, refused to abandon the subject, but in doing so, they turned it into a symbol.

Hemingway appears to have adapted this Cubist strategy in composing "A Divine Gesture." Because "A Divine Gesture" is deliberately left "unfinished," it invites the reader to engage in a dynamic reading experience, to construct meaning from the fable's constituent elements. Like Cubist paintings, or the Cubist stories of Anderson and Stein, "A Divine Gesture" is symbolic rather than representational, thus making it subject to a host of interpretations. Hemingway has provided just enough clues to allow for conflicting readings. His approach has confused critics who are looking for a single, predetermined meaning to the fable.

In modernist fashion, "A Divine Gesture" begins in medias res, the reader immediately disoriented because of a narrative ambiguity: some action has already taken place in the house, but no explanation is given. In the first sentence, the reader is simply told, "And then when all was come and gone, the Great Lord God strode out of the house and into the garden, for in the garden he found the deep peace of Rome" (267). This narrative trickery (that is, beginning the story with "And then," thus opening in the middle of the action) leaves the reader to question what happened inside the house before the story began. In addition, there is an allusion to the gospels which relate the story of The Last Supper and Christ's passing into the garden at Gethsemane with his disciples. And then, what is one to make of the cryptic comment about "the deep peace of Rome"? Because of narrative omission the reader is forced from the very beginning to consider several subjects at once. This move to simultaneity, juxtaposition, and interruption is a characteristic strategy of Cubist painting and modernist prose.

Instead of finding "the deep peace of Rome," God abruptly finds a host of random items--bath tubs, boot jacks, broken flower pots--scattered across the garden. These objects are typical of the manufactured items, the "kitchen and household utensils, musical instruments," that Cubist and Dada artists exploited in their work to make viewers see and love these things in a new light" (qtd. in Seitz 22). Clocks, stoves, chair caning, rope, nails and so forth appear in or on their works. In "A Divine Gesture," the bath tubs, boot jacks, and flower pots are also presented in a new light: they are fragmented, animated, and vocal.

The bath tubs recall Marcel Duchamp's exhibition of a urinal at the "Independents Exhibition" in New York in April 1917. The exhibition's organizers claimed to show no bias to entries, but Duchamp, one of the organizers, was skeptical. Therefore, he entered an inverted urinal which he titled "Fountain," and signed "R. Mutt." It was immediately declared ineligible and removed from the exhibit. Its removal "became immediately a cause celebre for the avant garde" and provided Duchamp with newfound recognition. Stieglitz published a photograph of "The Fountain" in the second issue of The Blind Man, a New York Dada publication, which editorialized as follows: "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hand made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view--created a new thought for that object" (qtd. in Dijkstra 36).

The case of the boot jack is especially intriguing. Shaped like the upper case "V" or "Y", a boot jack is a metal or wooden device used to pull off boots. Stood on end, a boot jack resembles a man or woman standing on solid legs--thus their animated state is easy enough to imagine. Like the "heavily earnest" bath tubs and "tired" flower pots, they appear as visual puzzles. By animating them, and giving them something to say or sing, Hemingway manipulates the reader's auditory and visual channels. As in his later works, Hemingway is already preoccupied with sensory stimulus and response. Imagism and Dada provided two models for such: "Hemingway had learned from both Dada and imagism of the necessity of audio-visual, even tactile, responses. Dadaists such as Apollinaire and Tzara had already carried these poetic principles into prose" (Watts 19).

In "A Divine Gesture," the boot jacks cannot be quieted. They chant over and over again, "We mustn't squirm today. We mustn't squirm to-day. Hy ya ta did eeyay. We mustn't squirm today!" (267). Hemingway immediately repeats this absurd linguistic gesture in a slightly altered form to reinforce and heighten the bizarre effect: "... Hy Yah Ta Did Esay ..." Here, Hemingway is crafting a style based upon repetition reminiscent of Dada's absurd chanting. As Susan Beegel notes, this refrain "sounds ... suspiciously like `Ta ra ra boom de ay, there is no school today'--a comment on Dadaism for sure."

Put into the mouths of the boot jacks, the chanting of nonsense verses becomes automatic, vertiginous. Because the boot jacks' chanting is momentarily deprived of normal meaning, it becomes pure gesture, calling attention to itself as sound in the manner of Dada poetry. It certainly arouses our emotions. We ask indignantly, "What are they saying?" or "What do they mean by that?" However, there is no response--the meaning is the poetic form, the gesture. As R. P. Blackmur states, "[t]he whole movement in the arts known progressively as dadaism and surrealism was devoted, in its poetry, to releasing ... gestures from language by the deliberate obliteration of the normal modes of meaning from the context" (19).

In sentence five, God asks, "`Where is Adam?'" but "No one answered for all the flower pots were tired and none of the bath tubs remembered it was Sunday" (267). The first clause of this sentence exhibits appropriate syntax and logic, but the second clause is a complete non-sequitur, with no sequential or logical relation to the previous clause or question. It stands, illogically, by itself and effects narrative rupture. Again, as readers, we puzzle over this irrational response and try to make sense (that is, narrative sense) where only nonsense is possible. The sentence is meant to confuse and surprise. As in Cubist and Dadaist composition, "surprise plays an important role" (qtd. in Chipp 244).

Linguistic confusion and narrative rupture, encouraged from the outset, continue unabated throughout the story. Immediately after God asks, "`Where is Eve?'" another narrative interruption occurs: "at once all the bootjacks began to leap and chatter and a flight of blackbirds swooped down into the garden and commenced to strut around, exploring into the flower pots with their beautiful shining bills" (267). The totally unexpected, the unpredictable occurs: "Where have the blackbirds come from?" we ask. Chance, randomness, the irrational have taken over the fable. Everything is Dada: absurd linguistic gesturing. It becomes impossible to predict what will happen next because the narrative itself is completely unpredictable. It is, in effect, one version of automatic writing.

In the sixth paragraph, "the largest and weakest bath tub" responds to God's question by saying that Eve has gone out, "that she would return around four o'clock" (267). Here, Hemingway's narrative strategy becomes evident: he interrupts narration at intervals, but will not sacrifice it completely to the interruptions. The interruptions, in fact, are arranged in a specific order to enhance the narration. Hemingway composed a coherent story despite the interruptions, and in so doing reveals his preoccupation with experimental form, and his dissatisfaction with automatic writing when it is taken to extremes as happens in Anderson's and Stein's work. Looked at in painterly terms, Hemingway's method is like that of the Synthetic Cubists who arranged their interrupting planes to constructivist ends. In paintings like The Open Window (1921) and Dish of Pears (1926), Juan Gris refused to abandon his subject in favor of total abstraction. He treated an open window like an open window, and a dish of pears as a dish of pears, but in a fashion which presented his subjects from entirely new points of view.

Hemingway's experimental prose in "A Divine Gesture" is indebted to Synthetic Cubism, especially to Cubist spatial interruptions which highlight the art of omission. Hemingway's prose also owes something to Dadaist prose: at times it appears almost random, in the manner of automatic writing, and at times it sounds like pure nonsense. Nevertheless, this "accidental" prose seems purposeful, repeating itself at intervals and contributing to the overall narrative effect of the story. In effect, Hemingway uses even the random to formal ends.

When Sherwood Anderson returned to Chicago in the fall of 1921 after spending the late spring and summer in New York and Paris, he told Hemingway that "Dada was all over, done with" (Reynolds 253). Nevertheless, Dada spirit and technique continued to flourish in the works of Anderson, Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and other modernists. In fact, during the same month that Hemingway composed "A Divine Gesture," Eliot was in the midst of composing The Waste Land, wherein the sounds "DA/Da ... DA/Da ... DA/Da" (The Complete Poems 49) are accompanied by a host of strange utterances ("Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop," "Co co rico co co rico," "Weialala leia/Wallala leialala") signalling Dada's effect upon the artist and the poem (Smith n9). Eliot was not the least of the many artists Dada affected over the period 1915-1921. Hemingway, just coming into his own, also learned from Dada, but mocked it and adherents like Sherwood Anderson who had taken the movement too seriously.

THE OBJECTS OF PARODY: SHERWOOD ANDERSON AND AUTOMATIC ART

Lewis Galantiere told biographer Carlos Baker that shortly after meeting Ezra Pound for the first time in Paris in 1922, Hemingway wrote a satire "which attacked Pound's pretentious Bohemianism, his wild hair, his unclipped goatee, his open Byronic collar" (Baker 86, 577). Although he later tore up the satire, in it Hemingway apparently responded to a habit of mind that had in his opinion become predictable. Whenever he felt threatened by a writer, he attacked that writer satirically in prose. He would do it again a few years later to T. S. Eliot in "Mr. And Mrs. Elliot," and he had done it once before--to Sherwood Anderson in "A Divine Gesture."

Nicholas Joost argues that Anderson is the butt of Hemingway's first satire. Anderson had spent the winter and spring of 1922 in New Orleans and had become friendly with the editors of The Double Dealer, a new "little magazine." Joost believes that Anderson submitted "A Divine Gesture" to the editors on Hemingway's behalf (21). By the time Hemingway wrote it, however, he had "violently rejected altogether the regionalism of Anderson's fiction and with equal violence rejected Anderson's aesthetic primitivism, what, with pride, Anderson termed his `crudity.' The significance of Sherwood Anderson as a god to be worshipped in the little magazines of the New Movement by his votaries or alternately to be cast down and shattered by his erstwhile disciple is explicable in terms of the conflicting factions within the New Movement" (22).

A segment of Anderson's "A New Testament" had first appeared in The Double Dealer in February 1922. Begun in New York in 1919 during the heyday of Dada, this piece of automatic writing smacks of Bergsonian vitalism and the notorious "elan vital": "We stand here, Now, in this instant, in the presence of the breathing sea that is myself, yourself, We are in the presence of a wind that runs, we are at the head of a street, watching the people pass, we are in a forest under trees" (65). Caught in a life stream of vital impulses which echoes Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, Anderson's "A New Testament" proclaims his status "as Messiah of the New Movement through such prophetic utterances as `It is not true that God created the world in six days, or rather perhaps he did--a fact that would account for the corruption of the world. Worlds should be created as gestures of gods'" (Joost 24). Joost concludes that "A Divine Gesture" is "specifically a parody of Sherwood Anderson's prose-poems, of which The Double Dealer's `A New Testament' is representative" (29).

The Double Dealer went on to publish two articles in its March 1922 issue that also bear on Anderson's vitalist-nativist prose tendencies. The first, an editorial entitled "Back to Chaos," focuses on a five-year-old Anderson essay called "An Apology for Crudity" in which Anderson had proposed the following: "For a long time now I have believed that crudity is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day American literature ... And if we are a crude and childlike people how can our literature hope to escape the influence of that fact? ("Back to Chaos" 114). The editorial writer went on to say that Anderson's conception of a "crude" American Literature was "the vitalist thing [emphasis added] in the cultural development of an emerging people" (115).

The second article, "New Orleans, The Double Dealer and the Modern Movement in America," written by Anderson, is a "rhapsodic paean" which equates the modern movement with the flourishing life; traditions, and culture of the Crescent City. To Anderson, "Culture" means the following: "first of all the enjoyment of life, leisure and a sense of leisure. It means time for a play of the imagination over the facts of life, it means time and vitality to be serious about really serious things ..." (126). The modern writer emphasizes "the joy of living" in his work: "there is more vitality to the Modern Art Movement, as expressed in America in sculpture, painting and writing, than in any of the older cultural centers of Europe" (123). As an American modern, Anderson does "not love work too much. Often I want to loaf and I want others to loaf with me, talk with me of themselves and their lives" (124).

Anderson's posing as a modern-day Walt Whitman who works out his art unconsciously while lolling on the grass must have rung hollow even to artists of a less serious turn than Hemingway. Anderson's Bergsonian vitalism and his ideal depiction of the modern artist as the product of a leisure life full of imaginative play is spoofed throughout "A Divine Gesture" in the vital antics of the boot jacks and the portrayal of a dreamy God whose total inactivity belies all his talk about keeping busy.

"A New Testament" had grown out of Anderson's previous book, Mid-American Chants, a collection of experimental poems which evoke the vital impulse with the exuberance of Whitman. And it is these poems which appear to be the immediate object of Hemingway's parody. In the foreword, Anderson wrote of the "hurried and harried" lives of Midwesterners who were subject to that "terrible engine--industrialism" (7). He prophesied that a singer would rise up among them, and that the Midwesterners would awaken "like awkward and untrained boys" and "begin to turn toward maturity" and "hunger for song" (7). In the first poem, "The Cornfields," a singer does appear "pregnant with song" to "renew in my people the worship of gods. I will set up for a king before them" (11). Accordingly, in the second poem, "Chicago" a god-child rises up, his head held high "above the cornfields" (13). The magisterial, prophetic tone of the volume is set up in these opening poems, and "gods" rise up in the rest of the poems to lead the singing: "Deep in the cornfields the gods come to life, / Gods that have waited, gods that we knew not. /Gods come to life/In America now" (68).

In "Song of Industrial America" song has finally come to Americans, "here now, in our time" (Mid-American Chants 15). These Americans are "broken things" and their song is "shrill" a crude "rattle" Their "tired" voices precede "little voices" which chant a ditty: "Drifting along. Drifting along. / Winter of song. Winter of song" (16). These voices are succeeded by an empty old barrel floating in a river which warns, "You stand away. I've come to life. My arms lift up--I begin to swim" (17). Then the flood turns loose and a speaker is plucked from the torrent by "the hand of God." God's intervention is taken as a divine gesture, a sign that "we have to find each other. Have you courage to-night for a song? Lift your voices. Come" (18). The animation and chanting of "little voices" is suggestive of the animated and chanting boot jacks.

In "Manhattan" god climbs "to a high place overlooking the city," while "on the stairways [below] there was the endless threshing of numberless feet" (Mid-American Chants 29). In "Song For Dark Nights" cities are filled with "all the squirming, changing hordes of men" who "wriggle into life"--men who "yearn and strive toward gods" (48). In "Song of the Drunken Business Man," the singer proclaims, "I'm a blackbird hovering over the land" (64), and in "Song to New Song" a terrible god is a "black bird" (47). All of these poems contain lexical items which also appear in "A Divine Gesture" in similar or identical contexts.

The "heavy earnestness" of the bath tubs in "A Divine Gesture," besides being a pun, appears to be an allusion to "the heavy ones, heavy and sure ... We the Americans" of "The Lover" (Mid-American Chants 49) and various forms of "earnest" which appear in Winesburg, Ohio (58, 85, 150, 196, 225, 229). What delight Hemingway must have taken in contrasting his own "heavy earnestness" (that is, his absolute seriousness as an American artist) to Anderson's seemingly European-inspired notion of the artist as a joyous, vital thing!

Hemingway's depiction of God as a harried business-type and of Gabriel as a "yes-man afraid for his family and his job" lampoons Anderson's business background and all those literary disciples who looked to him as the high priest of a new artistic order (Joost 27-28). As far as Hemingway was concerned, the automatic writing, dreamy sentimentality, and vitalism of Anderson's experimental publications precluded any such assessment. Hemingway simply could not tolerate Anderson's careless, automatic style. In fact, "he was thoroughly hostile to Anderson's concept of unconscious art. Once or twice he was vocally critical of Anderson's style": "`You couldn't let a sentence like that go,'" he had told his friends at the Chicago Street apartment one evening "after Anderson had left, taking with him the story he had just read" (Fenton 104).

The depiction of God as a "leader," "deaf at times" to the importunities of his subjects, and of Gabriel as his willing lackey, served another ironic turn. Following World War I, politicians and intellectuals had debated the future of personal freedom because of the imminent threat posed by Communism and the resurgent German war machine. Anderson thought that Germany had "made every man a soldier, disciplined every citizen with an `iron hand; crushed the individuality out of everyone, and finally succeeded in creating the terrible military machine, that made the rest of the world tremble in anticipation of the time when it would be set going against them" ("New Orleans" 120). In postwar America, he found that conformity was rapidly spreading: "A rather strange doctrine, that, to be so universally accepted in `the land of the free and the home of the brave?'" (120). In Hemingway's "A Divine Gesture," God wants his "faithful," child-like boot jacks to show more discipline and self-control. They should not act so absurdly, so independently. They should conform like Gabriel. After being reprimanded for daring to correct God's grammar, "Gabriel smiled uncertainly and followed God up the long stairs, thinking of his wife and children." Then he dutifully mimics his master's faulty speech: "`I am sure there is only twenty-four hours' he said, panting a little from the stairs" (268).

By extension, Hemingway's fable is also critical of literary conformity in postwar Chicago. Anderson had published Winesburg in 1919 and by 1920 it was receiving significant critical acclaim. Foreign publishers were starting to show an interest in some of Anderson's earlier works, and that interest intensified when Anderson received the first Dial Prize for literature in 1921. To the Chicago art community, Anderson had become a literary god whose name was mentioned in the same breath with those of the best artists of the day. His theory of automatic art--which highlighted the crude, the random, the spontaneous--was receiving wide play, and he was gaining disciples. The conservative and circumspect Hemingway, however, was not much swayed. He probably took an ironic view of the surrender of serious young talent to this "nativist" faction of the New Movement, a movement which Anderson called "an effort to re-open the channels of individual expression" ("New Orleans" 120):

In "A Divine Gesture," Gabriel's slavish imitation of God's flawed speech parodies literary conformity. God usually speaks in simple, abrupt sentences, but when he employs compound sentences, his ignorance of noun-verb agreement surfaces: "`more valuable lessons is what we need'" (267); "`there is only twenty-four hours in a day'" (268). God's ungrammatical speech, and Gabriel's ready imitation of such, is an apparent spoof of Anderson's "crudity," foregrounding the problems of literary conformity and the utter thoughtlessness of mimicking a fashionable style which Hemingway considered too easy, too juvenile.

To Hemingway, Anderson seemed to be in too much of a hurry to get the words down on paper. In fact, when writing about Gertrude Stein in 1921, Anderson admitted that "[w]e writers are, you see, all in such a hurry. There are such grand things we must do. For one thing the Great American Novel must be written ... We are all busy getting these grand and important thoughts and emotions into the pages of printed books" ("The Work of Gertrude Stein" 31). Comments like these validate Hemingway's characterization of Anderson as a "hurried and harried" God, a business-type always in a rush to make a sales pitch.

To Hemingway, it must have seemed that Anderson had used automatic writing to attract public attention. Anderson himself had tried to "put something across" to get "discussed in the newspapers, become for a time a figure in our hurried and harried lives," tactics for which he criticized his friend Gertrude Stein ("The Work of Gertrude Stein" 29-30). Ironically, in the same 1921 essay that Anderson had written about Stein "putting something across" on the American public, he wrote that it would be "a lovely and charmingly ironic gesture of the gods [emphasis added] if, in the end ... [Stein] were to prove the most lasting and important of all the word slingers of our generation" (32).

HAVELOCK ELLIS AND THE WORLD OF DREAMS

In January 1921, "Ernest caught a sore throat and lolled around the apartment reading Havelock Ellis's The Dance Of Life" (Baker 77). The winter before, he had "bought and read ... Erotic Symbolism" (Reynolds 120). Hemingway encouraged his friends to read Ellis's Psychology of Sex and "[i]n January he sent a copy to Hadley ... By April, Ernest had sent her three volumes of Ellis ..." (Reynolds 184-85), and the young lovers discussed Ellis's studies of male and female sexual psychology in their letters of January through May (Reynolds 197, 225).

Ellis's books ranged from studies in clinical psychology, human behavior, and sexuality to speculative, mythopoetic studies about men and women functioning in society. The case studies and clinical findings accumulated in one book provided the impetus for subsequent inquiries in different fields. His complete corpus is a unified series which reflects his chief interests--psychology, sexuality, anthropology, culture, and the arts. His output was prodigious: by 1921, he had written at least 24 books, many of them already reprinted or appearing in several editions. It is not certain how much of Ellis Hemingway read before he composed "A Divine Gesture." He probably read more than we know about.

The Worm of Dreams (1910) is a representative selection which, when read in conjunction with "A Divine Gesture," helps to make some of the confusing content in the fable understandable in terms of Ellis's dream psychology. The book also throws some light on Hemingway's composing strategies. According to Ellis, the two sources of dreams are "the vast reservoir of memories" (7), which he terms the "representative group," and "the actual physical sensations experienced at the moment of dreaming" (17). These he calls "presentative impressions." Physical sensations trigger the psychic apparatus, which automatically produces a succession of dream images to account for the sensations. This process is a form of psychic automatism.

Sensations must always undergo transformation. For example, dreams always magnify sensory excitation: the slightest movement of the tongue is magnified tenfold (Ellis 135). A person suffers a mosquito bite and "the only adequate explanation of the transformed impression received is to be found ... in a creature as large as a lobster" (161). As uncontrolled and absurd as dream images appear, they do exhibit a logic all their own for "in dreams we are always reasoning" (56). Always readily accepted by the dreamer, dream logic is "a mode of instinct": that is, it is spontaneous, automatic, and "follows with the certainty of a reflex" (57). Dreaming, then, is a process of automatic image formation "based on resemblance and contiguity" (57).

Like Freud's, Ellis's description of the dream process suggests the fragmentation, displacement, and distortion characteristic of Cubism and Dada (Freud 60-64). As Ellis builds his case for dream structure as a "succession of separate images" (23-24), he repeatedly employs terminology associated with Cubism and Dada: "logical connections are superadded" (5),"ensemble of images" (6), "inexplicable lacunae" (12), "two images chosen at random" (24), "dissolving views" (36), "constant fusion of images" (45), "one image melting into the other" (46), "the piling together in a brief space of time of a great number of combined memories" (213). In one sense, Dada compositions are clearly simulacra of dreamwork in action, its free association and random arrangement of available materials forming "a single bizarre congruity, a confusion in the strictest sense of the word" (Ellis 204). In fact, Dada is "most of all ... the application of a system that is enjoying a great vogue in psychiatry, the `psychoanalysis' of Freud" (Breton 201).

It appears that when Hemingway wrote "A Divine Gesture," he realized the possibilities of dream form for the fable. Ellis's theory of dreamwork may well have helped Hemingway in this regard, and proves quite useful in examining some examples of narrative rupture that occur later in the fable. In the first instance, narrative rupture occurs after God has shouted at the boot jacks for the second time to stop squirming. They do, having been frightened by his "terrible voice." Shortly thereafter, one of the braver boot jacks speaks up: "`Why mustn't we squirm today God?'" (268). God responds, "`I'm busy! ... I'm busier than ever!'" (268).

Examined closely, God's response may or may not be an answer to the boot jack's question. His words may simply be self-directed, or a random response to sensory stimulus, for this god is never busy. He is a loafer--he spends his time sitting, fretting, and repeating obsessively to himself "I'm so busy" in an autosuggestive manner. In fact, God becomes so distracted by the notion of keeping busy that his attention is displaced. Within the space of a few seconds, he totally forgets that the boot jacks are the source of the chanting sounds he detests. His speech becomes confused and rife with contradiction. Mentally enfeebled, he exhibits,

a state of mental weakness associated with defective apperceptual control

and undue suggestibility, very similar to the state found in some

forms of confusional insanity.... Consciousness feebly slides down

the path of least resistance; it accepts every suggestion ... the things

that are suggested to it to do seem things that it already wanted to do

before. Paramnesia [memory distortion, deja vu], thus regarded, seems

simply a natural outcome of a state of consciousness temporarily depressed

below its normal standard of vigor. (Ellis 231)

"This form of paramnesia" Ellis asserts, "is common in dreams" (230). Its chief symptom is lack of mental control, chronic inattention. Sleep itself is the most obvious example of the relaxation of attention: "Mourre shows ... that the deeper the sleep the more absent is volition from dreams" (24). Simply put, the dreamer has no control over his or her dream associations. In effect, the will has been suspended because of a narrowing in dream consciousness: sensory and cognitive responses, ever active in the waking state, are severely retarded in the dream state. Attention is "enfeebled and diminished, if not abolished, in sleep" (68).

God's attention, then loss of attention, his control, then loss of control over the actions of the squirming and chanting boot jacks, is consistent with Ellis's discussion of paramnesia. If the reader regards the God of "A Divine Gesture" as Ellis's typical dreamer, and the boot jacks and other paraphernalia as the automatic responses of his dream consciousness, much of the apparent confusion in the fable is cleared up: the fable, in effect, parodies the operation of dreamwork, with Anderson (as God) serving as the butt of the irony.

The boot jacks "were curling and uncurling in an alarming manner" (267), obvious manifestations of automatic motor response to sensory stimuli. God exerts his control--that is, he pays attention to them--and they stop. However, in a little while, "One boot jack nudged another" and soon all were whispering, "squirming more than ever," and chanting: "We mustn't squirm today. We mustn't squirm today. Hy Yah Ta Did Esay! We mustn't squirm today!" (267). Representative of God's dream consciousness, the boot jacks dramatize his present preoccupation: their repetitive, autosuggestive chanting, and constant squirming and nudging reflect God's own autosuggestive obsession with keeping busy. Representative of the conditions of dream life and the logic of dreams--a logic based on automatic, instinctive response--the boot jacks serve double duty in the story: they are the source of the "automatic impulse toward symbolism" and the resulting "visible images" of the dream process itself (Ellis 149). They represent the play of dissociation, that process by which the "ordinary channels of association are temporarily blocked and the conditions are prepared for the formation of the hallucination" (67). Symbolism is the natural and inevitable result of these conditions (160).

The dissociation of God from his dream sensations effectively dramatizes the splitting or breaking up of personality in dream consciousness. "Dreaming consciousness never realizes that the universe that confronts it springs from the same source as itself" (Ellis 64). This is a simple case. Ellis presents more complex ones. "An interesting and significant group of cases is furnished by those dreams in which--as the result of some compression or effort--the tactile and muscular sensations of our limbs are split off from sleeping consciousness and built up into an imaginary personality" (180). The boot jacks, most obviously in their curling, squirming, and nudging, represent this splitting off of tactile and muscular sensation, the building up of an imaginary personality. The imaginary personality acquires portions of the dreamer's thoughts and feelings as the dream progresses. Dreamers often "endow the persons thus formed with thoughts and feelings more native to our own normal personality than those which we reserve for ourselves" (184). The boot jacks, for example, busily "curling and uncurling," dramatize God's most urgent feelings about staying busy.

God quiets the boot jacks for a second time, but they automatically recommence their squirming and reflexive chanting, even echoing God's words: "`He's busier than ever. That's why we mustn't squirm today'" (268). The resounding and terrible quality of God's voice--"`Stop it!'"--combined with the boot jacks' "chanting at the top of their voices" indicates a dream of auditory type, and suggests "the polyphony of simultaneous voices which say different things" (Isaak 82), one of the hallmarks of literary modernism. The Waste Land, for example, has been described as a poem delivered in many voices and reflecting the conditions of the dream state.

Supplementing the visual channel, auditory-type dreams contain elements of paramnesic delusion--that is, the feeling that the thing that is happening has happened before. The delusions are conveyed by verbal repetition and echolalia (the childlike tendency to parrot automatically something said by another). Auditory-type dreams are also rich in displays of verbal nonsense (Ellis 48). Again, "A Divine Gesture" and The Waste Land suggest themselves. Interestingly, Dada's nonsensical discourse is the discourse of dreams, and Hemingway employs this discourse to poetic ends in his depiction of God, Gabriel, and the boot jacks.

CONCLUSION: THE DEVELOPMENT OF HEMINGWAY'S EARLY STYLE

There is no question that "A Divine Gesture" is a minor experimental tale. Nevertheless, the story is important historically because it helps us to understand the development of Hemingway's early style: "A Divine Gesture" appears to be Hemingway's first attempt to come to terms with the modern. Hemingway used this fable as a testing ground for narrative techniques and character typing among other things. In doing so, he worked through a series of different influences to develop modern writing techniques and forms that he would further refine and adapt in writing the important early short fiction and novels. Among other things, Hemingway wanted "A Divine Gesture" "to embody the world of dreams and the irrational like the surrealists [nee dadaists]" (Watts 28).

At the same time, "A Divine Gesture" makes clear Hemingway's determination not to embrace the kind of modernist writing Anderson had. Stylistically, the fable parodies automatic writing, and, in terms of content, burlesques Dada, Sherwood Anderson's literary preoccupations, and those of his literary disciples. It should be noted, however, that in early short stories like "Up in Michigan" and "Mr and Mrs. Elliot," and in the major fiction, Hemingway adapted the automatic method to write repetitive paragraphs which revealed the emotions and mental states of his characters.

As evidenced in this fable, as early as the summer of 1921 Hemingway was aware of contemporary intellectual and literary trends. "A Divine Gesture" is not mere "juvenilia" (Fenton 102), as some critics have confidently judged over the years, but a complex parody of juvenilia which marks the beginning of Hemingway's early style. "A Divine Gesture" shows the signs of a rapidly maturing, selective intellect quick to discard overt satire in favor of seriously crafted parody. As Nicholas Joost concludes, Hemingway had displayed in this fable "an acute, cruel, comic wit more sophisticated, complex, and probing than mere mimicry" (28). Like Anderson, Stein, and other moderns, he had composed a story filled with complex ironies, irrationalities, and symbols which readers found difficult to penetrate. He did not achieve complete consistency, but I would argue that that was not his purpose. Practicing a form of literary gestalt better known as "art by omission," Hemingway wanted to enlist the reader as co-worker in the unfinished work of this fable. Even the fable's irony points to this fact: the reader must work his or her way through the superficial narrative to get to the meat of the matter.

As Michael Reynolds concludes, "that fall [1921] Hemingway's prose, still grounded in nineteenth century technique, was about to change" (159). Indeed, it had already begun to change with the composition of "A Divine Gesture."

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DENNIS RYAN Buena Vista University