A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation.

By Gerry Brenner. 2 vols. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. 823 pp + xxi. Cloth $119.95.

To grasp the import of Gerry Brenner's two-volume A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation, one needs to place it briefly within the broad context of the field of hermeneutics. Originating in German biblical exegesis in the 19th century, and shaping up most extensively as a philosophy of interpretation in the works of Hans Georg Gadamar in the 20th century, hermeneutics has consistently privileged the interpretive enterprise over other textual approaches. That is so because hermeneutics takes the Bible as its original text and, like the closely related field of homiletics, has an evolutionary interpretive horizon of considerable importance.

Inspired by the attributive narratives of the Gospels, each designated as "according to," hermeneutics vastly enriches biblical and, by extension, literary studies. Hermeneutics enables oral and scriptural discourses first to appropriate and then transcend their boundaries by discovering their own inexhaustible surplus of meaning. What was once accepted as an inexorably literal discourse becomes open-ended in unlimited sequences of interpretive activities.

The uniquely privileged position accorded to hermeneutics in our time is justified by an array of indispensable prior studies falling into two broad categories. The first includes all of the fields in which structural analysis plays a crucial role: phonology, lexicology, lexicography, morphology, grammar, syntactics, semantics, rhetoric, and discourse analysis; as well as bibliographies, glossaries, annotations, encyclopedias, and the like. The second category comprises the more synthetic practices of clarification, explication, classification (genre studies), evaluation (criticism and aesthetics), and interpretation. These synthetic practices draw closely upon the analytic ones as unavoidable prerequisites. Together, they make up many of the exigent, rigorous modes of study that academic and nonacademic scholars and critics undertake.

Placed within the preceding synopsis of hermeneutics, Brenner's extensive and sustained work on A Moveable Feast offers a clear example of well-integrated literary analysis and synthesis. A self-reflexive work, it discloses at once the often repressed but always inevitable connective tissue between interpretive and pre-interpretive literary studies. The descriptive subtitle of Brenner's study, "Annotation to Interpretation," makes manifest the nature and trajectory of his textual analysis of A Moveable Feast and the concentric interpretive circles it subsequently generates.

On the one hand, Brenner's annotative work provides detailed factual information on "people, places, terms, events, ambiguities, and allusions to the text that the readers might not recognize or understand or, as with allusions, might misunderstand ..." in A Moveable Feast (v). On the other hand, his interpretations apply specific modes of Freudian and textual analysis to A Moveable Feast;, that is to say, to the extent that one might read it, either sequentially or simultaneously, as a "memoir," a "case study," or a "quasi-fiction."

Read as "memoir," Brenner argues, A Moveable Feast will lead to "subtexts latent in the manifest content," divulging its dreamlike quality and its therapeutic value for the writer (x). Read as "case study," the text will reveal "Hemingway's injustices to fellow artists silenced by death" (x). Finally, read as "quasi-fiction," the text will divulge "irregularities and discontinuities that continually destabilize its narrative integrity, at times so abruptly blurring allegedly factual episodes that they take on the life of tictive vignettes" (xii).

On yet another plane of literary discourse, the various textual "discontinuities" and self-reflexive qualities of A Moveable Feast render it a quasi-postmodern text. A Moveable Feast carries traces of the postmodern concept of the world as text, regarding experience as textualized reality and every mode of interpretation as a linguistic construct. These discontinuities occur in A Moveable Feast either as the absence or seemingly incomprehensible presence of aesthetically dissonant narrative elements. For Brenner, such textual discontinuities and dissonances mark sites where certain unconscious motivations are at work in Hemingway that may surface and be made conscious by the intervention of the psychoanalytic critic. This work of analysis draws legitimacy from its analogue in a clinical setting, which generates oral discourses between the analyst and the analysand, producing a heuristic and a therapy based on the subsequent analytic interpretation.

Brenner divides each chapter of his annotations and interpretations into three parts: a "headnote," consisting of "editorial alterations and authorial revisions"; citations of the "terms, names and quoted passages," followed by annotations, explanations, commentaries, and interpretations; and, finally, an "endnote," foregrounding" subtexts, thematic issues, or aesthetic matters" not sufficiently dealt with in the "piecemeal entries" (xiv).

Assuredly, present and future Hemingway scholars and researchers interested in the textual concretia and. the extraordinary stylistics of A Moveable Feast will appreciate the rigor, accuracy, and lucidity Brenner brings to his annotative work in these two volumes. It represents massive, painstaking, and time-consuming efforts of verification, correction, and explication that lead him to the threshold of his subsequent interpretations. I was delighted, for instance, to find nearly two pages of information on the writer Hilaire Belloc (232-234).

But, as Brenner himself rightly foresees, it is his passage from annotation to psychoanalytic interpretation that some readers might find problematic. Generally, one may divide such readers into three distinct groups. There are those who resist, on philosophical or psychological grounds, according any validity to the foundational, generative Freudian concept of the "unconscious." Others may object to orthodox psychoanalytic interpretation of literary works and writers as unfailingly negative and therefore destructive. For them, psychoanalytic, criticism places literary and artistic works in the impenetrable darkness of unconscious fantasies, a forbidding place where no creative impulse may dwell and burst forth.

A third group of readers may willingly accept the unconscious as an. irrefutable universal concept possessing its own vast theory and practice. For them, unconscious fantasies and preconscious intimations constitute the very core of literary and artistic impulse and its attendant creations. From their perspective, psychoanalysis may reveal these intimations to be creative and healthy, injurious and pathological, or often both at the same time. But even within this community of psychoanalytic critics and readers, other problems inevitably emerge: Are the unconscious intimations in literary works attributable to the writer? to the reader? to the literary text itself? or simultaneously to their vast triadic web of relations, which one may consider as an inextricable whole?

I would put Brenner's psychoanalytic interpretations of A Moveable Feast within the context of psychoanalytic works that French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur designates as the "hermeneutics of suspicion," closely bound up with postmodern epistemology and hermeneutics. To this I would add the subcategory "hermeneutics of speculation," carrying the dual heritage of Marxist and Freudian analyses. Both modes rigorously attempt to discover and expose the disguises that all our basal--albeit suppressed and unconscious--economic, social, and libidinal motivations as readers and writers are apt to take. Such hermeneutics affirm the literary text as the manifest account of a fantasy or daydream, akin to the conscious account of a nocturnal dream. Always and everywhere, literary and psychoanalytic discourses surface from the immense depths of the empire of language. As Ricoeur argues in a different context, each of these discourses involves a triangular relationship between someone who speaks or writes, someone who listens or reads and responds, and the world that their dialogue opens up. The "hermeneutics of suspicion" legitimizes itself by analyzing this triangular relationship.

Under the aegis of such hermeneutics, Brenner's psychoanalytic interpretation of A Moveable Feast creates its own extensive circles of narrative, each circle spawning specific intensities of "tacit knowledge" to use Michael Polanyi's language, as a reader-response. Readers may agree or disagree partially or totally with Brenner's interpretations. But that is as it should be. Paradoxically, their disagreements may become salutary contributions to the absolutely essential "critique of the critic." An unprejudiced and attentive reading of all 800 pages of Brenner's book will be of value to all Hemingway scholars and researchers. No doubt there will also be many compelling occasions to dip into it as a reliable reference book, discovering the strands of textual detail that make up the warp and woof of the unique lingual tapestry we have been fortunate to know as Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

--Erik Nakjavani, University of Pittsburgh, Bradford