Very short stories: the miniaturization of war in Hemingway's In Our Time.

IN 1999, the centennial year of Hemingway's birth, Charles Scribner's Sons refashioned all of the cover designs of its Hemingway titles. The previous design of In Our Time had featured a lone soldier, of dubious nationality, marching through a desolate European village; the new design featured a barreling, bellowing steam engine framing the profile of a contemplative Nick Adams, with bedroll and tin cup, beneath which, as a superimposed inset, appears a fiery vignette of two faceless soldiers "going over the top." While the earlier cover illustration seems to suggest that In Our Time is a war book, the centennial design calls the unity or focus of the work into question; or, at the very least, minimizes the importance of war to the collection. Juxtaposing the two cover designs invites a question which the work itself tacitly invokes--to what extent is In Our Time about the Great War, or war generally?

Many critics answer that the stories and vignettes, even those that concern relationships or youthful initiation, are inseparable from World War I and the general pall it cast upon that time. Philip Young, for example, asserts that "Hemingway's world is ultimately a world at war--war either in the literal sense of armed and calculated conflict, or figuratively as marked everywhere with violence, potential or present, and a general hostility" (127). (1) Several other critics argue that the collection is a kind of fragmentary novel about the war, an inchoate Ur-Farewell to Arms.

Yet few of the stories, particularly compared with the vignettes, have much to do, overtly at least, with the Great War. At this point many critics might remark that perhaps I'm not reading the stories carefully enough, that in many cases the war is exactly the thing Hemingway left out so that, as he once put it, "the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood" (AMF 58). It is not my purpose to debunk this generally accepted view, whether true or not, but it does seem remarkable that in a book reputedly about war, so little of war or its aftershocks are dramatized to any great extent. With the important exception of a few vignettes, the action in Hemingway's In Our Time tends to occur well behind the front lines.

Yet Hemingway's elliptic, elided portrayal of war illumines, even denotes, his vision of war. Among all the stories and vignettes, only "Soldier's Home" looks directly and for an extended time at the experience of soldiers either during or after combat. War, Hemingway seems to be suggesting--if only by omission--cannot he confronted directly (a central theme of "Big Two-Hearted River") or even rendered in a direct, sustained narrative. "On the Quai at Smyrna" (first published in 1930), "A Very Short Story," and vignettes I through VII--the longest of these works is less than eight hundred words in length--offer only oblique, passing glimpses at the horrific reality that underlies so much of the collection. This, in my view, results not so much from Hemingway's famous "minimalist" approach as from his apprehension--conscious and otherwise--of war as something too large, terrible, and mentally overwhelming to grasp in its entirety. Perhaps all one can do in the modern wasteland the Great War has wrought is to shore up fragments against one's ruin?

Against this reading of the collection is a more prevalent view holding that In Our Time constitutes a work of deceptively intricate unity. Debra A. Moddelmog is one of several critics who argues that In Our Time should be seen as "a novel, not merely a collection of short stories." "In Our Time; she writes, "is not at all fragmentary. It is a complete work, unified by the consciousness of Nick Adams as he attempts to come to terms through his fiction with his involvement in World War I and, more recently, with the problem of marriage and his fear of fatherhood" (30). Many others make the same or a similar claim; Clinton S. Burhans, for example, states: "In Our Time is indeed a consciously unified work built upon a noble model and containing the careful artistry and the central vision of the world and the human condition which characterize Hemingway's writing from beginning to end" (15). Although Burhans rejects the collection-as-novel interpretation, he does agree that the work has "something of the unity of the novel" (28-29). Jeffrey Meyers describes the vignettes or interchapters as "independent yet related to each other, like a sequence of sonnets" (143). Even D. H. Lawrence, an early reviewer of the collection, denies that the work is a "book of stories": "it is a series of successive sketches from a man's life," he writes, "and makes a fragmentary novel" (73). Lastly, Hemingway himself claimed that the work "has a pretty good unity"--tepid praise considering the source.

Yet whatever unity In Our Time achieves--a unity which I would argue derives primarily from its tone and style and from the recurrence of Nick Adams--differs significantly from the sort of unity typical of most pre-modernist novels, based upon such elements as a unified consciousness, consistency in point of view, and traceable causality. As Ian Watt points out in his landmark The Rise of the Novel, "the novel's plot is ... distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure" (22). But only the barest devices of novelistic cohesion can be found in In Our Time: it's as if the Great War not only blew apart the beautiful world, as Dick Diver says in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, but shattered the customary narratological ways of making sense of it. Where the old epistemological ways of delineating character no longer apply, when consciousness itself--or, as Lawrence put it, the "old stable ego"--has slipped its moorings, new ways of transcribing experience must be found. One could even argue, as Edmund Wilson did as early as 1924 in a review of Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and in our time (1924), that "in the dry compressed little vignettes of in our time" Hemingway "has almost invented a form of his own" (63). Indeed, the vignette represents the young Hemingway's answer to the challenge of rendering catastrophic, mind-shattering experiences. What he offers are discrete glimpses into hell--or, as Milton Cohen characterizes them, "sudden flashes" ("'There Was a Woman Having a Kid'" 107)--like the wreckage of battle lit up from a shell-burst at night.

While the first seven vignettes, all of which depict the horrors of war on some level, might seem to constitute a kind of continuous story, or at the very least pictures in a contiguous series, Hemingway takes pains to dispel the sense of continuity, bounding nearly every sketch in a distinct, enclosing frame. The linkage established by the common elements of subject and tone is broken, or weakened anyway, by shifts in point of view as Hemingway flits from one anonymous character to another. With only a few exceptions--most notably chapter six, which features the wounded Nick--the men are unnamed, referred to only by pronouns, having no more individuality than the words 'we,' 'they' and 'he' can convey. This strategy not only eliminates the reader's ability to identify with the characters-which might have blunted that quality of "objective vividness" that Hemingway wanted (Young 181)--but also emphasizes implicitly that war effaces individuality. A soldier, Hemingway seems to be saying, is the soldier-much as Nick Adams is said to represent Everyman. (3)

Ironically, the next-to-longest piece in the collection featuring a character explicitly identified as a soldier is "A Very Short Story." Not only is the story very short, even by Hemingway's standards, it is also, as Robert Scholes argues in a semiotic analysis of the story, "exceptionally reticent" (37). This reticence--or "selective reticence"--that Scholes attempts to plumb concerns the abortive relationship between an unnamed soldier and Luz, the nurse-prototype of Catherine Barkley. Still other, even more significant reticences exist, however. For my purposes, the most significant are those pertaining to the identity of the soldier and the circumstances of his wounding.

Although I agree with Scholes generally that the story privileges the man's point of view, it is peculiar that the protagonist--"he"--is a man with no name while the antagonist--"she"--is named. Feminist critics are quick to infer misogynistic intent in Hemingway's occasional habit of referring to his female characters only as "she" or "the girl," as in "Cat in the Rain." The women's anonymity is supposedly an index of their unimportance. Yet Hemingway may have had some other purpose in mind when leaving his soldiers, all but Nick in chapter VI and Harold Krebs in "Soldier's Home," nameless. Joseph M. Flora agrees: "Hemingway was wonderfully skilled at naming his characters, but he often made the not naming of them an important device in the stories" (38). A character who is not given a name, a proper name, cannot acquire that high degree of individuation so typical of fiction since the 18th century. (4) When a character is no more than "he"--and when, additionally, the narrative consists of only a few dozen words--attention shifts somewhat from his particular story, about which little can be known, to the general circumstances enveloping him. Hemingway's soldiers in In Our Time tend not to be agents of their own destinies, but simply reactants set down in a deadly welter which, whether it kills them or not, will at the very least transform their identity. "He," Hemingway seems to be suggesting, most accurately names men whose identity the war will destroy or remake.

It is also interesting that Hemingway, who was so drawn, both as a writer and a man, to war, should write a story in which the drama of war and the war injuries of his protagonist are eclipsed by the denouement of a wartime "boy-girl relationship." Just as the soldier's name is untold, so, too, are the details concerning his wounding--or at least the details of his wounding in battle. This seems to be an instance where Hemingway conflates the dangers of war and those of the world generally, suggesting a kind of equivalency between them. "He" can be wounded in battle, over there, but also over here by the duplicity of a woman; even a chance encounter in a taxi can have dire consequences.

Yet another element serving to set off and isolate each vignette is its placement within the collection. Although ordered numerically one through fifteen, with the sixteenth sketch given the title "L'Envoi;' the vignettes do not appear one after another, but alternately with the short stories--thus the frequent references to them as interchapters. And since most critics agree that Hemingway took some pains when arranging In Our Time, the question of the purpose behind, or the effect of, this ordering Seems worth posing. Philip Young claims (distilling the vignettes from the larger collection) that "They are arranged at least roughly according to the order in which their author experienced them" (30), which is next to no kind of order at all given that no internal evidence exists to denote this pattern.

But even if some kind of order were intended, its effect would be attenuated by the intervention of a short story between each successive vignette. Even in these post-structuralist times, most people read a book from front to back, though good readers often retrace their steps. Thus, the very act of reading In Our Time as Hemingway arranged it vitiates whatever correlations do exist among the vignettes. What this suggests--and what the experience of reading In Our Time attests--is that Hemingway believed each vignette could stand alone, unaccompanied, which is not to deny the possibility of cumulative effect. Even their publishing history suggests Hemingway's faith in their autonomy, since several of them were published at various times previously as newspaper dispatches (Burhans 15).

Perhaps one of the things Hemingway learned as a newspaperman, a lesson consistent with his naturalistic purposes, was a genuine respect for the names of places and things. A famous passage in A Farewell to Arms declares a soldier's preference for the substantiality of count-nouns over the numinousness of ideal concepts: "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates" (185). The vignettes and stories in In Our Time evince this same regard for the concrete, thus enabling us to place where most events occur. The settings range so widely, from Turkey to Belgium to Italy, that the young Hemingway almost seems to be making a display of his geographical breadth. The first story, a war story, is "On the Quai at Smyrna," a port in western Turkey. From there Hemingway, in the first interchapter, shifts the scene to a battery of soldiers "going to the Champagne" before, in chapter II, transporting us back to Turkey. Vignette III, and perhaps vignette IV, is set in Mons, a town in southwest Belgium. Chapter VI, in which Nick lies wounded, seems to be set in Italy; we know with certainty that chapter VII is set in Fossalta. Finally, "A Very Short Story," which records the bathetic aftermath of a soldier's brief affair with a nurse, is set in Chicago: specifically in a cab traveling through Lincoln Park. Enumerating the vocal and geographical range of the soldiers in the collection, Milton Cohen finds the following: "three nationalities, ranks from officers to enlisted men, three battle theaters, and two wars--World War I and the Greco-Turkish War of 1920-1922" ("Soldiers' Voices" 23).

The geographical diversity of the vignettes suggests a couple of different aims. First, it reflects the vast expanse of the conflict, emphasizing that this truly was a world war (although it should be noted that "On the Quai at Smyrna" recounts a scene from the Greco-Turkish War). But, secondly, it further undermines the case some make that the sketches chronicle the travails of a single soldier. Although it is not impossible that a long-lived soldier might see action in various theaters of the war, it is more likely that the combatants represent different, if anonymous and undifferentiated, men. In A Farewell to Arms, a true novel, the great majority of the story is set in Italy, in the same region where Hemingway himself saw action and was wounded. This lends coherence not only to events--giving them a kind of unity of place--but to the characters as well, who usually can only come alive against a definite backdrop. All of that, familiarity of place and habit, is absent from the vignettes, where there are only scared, scarred men amongst the ruins.

Even in Chapters III and IV, the two vignettes which seem to be set in the same place, Mons, and are narrated by a British soldier, radical differences in tone and style tend to fray the few connecting strands. Both sketches are narrated in the third-person plural and recount the surprising ease with which British troops shoot and kill, or "pot," advancing enemy soldiers; the similarities end there, however. Chapter III is narrated in Hemingway's clean, declarative early style: "We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his pistol from across the river. The first Ger: man I saw climbed up over the garden wall" (29). The only intensifier used is the adverb awfully, but even it modifies something seen--the surprised look on a "potted" German soldier--not something thought or felt. And since no firm basis exists for discerning the speaker's attitude, the sketch's tone might best be described as impregnable. By contrast, the narrator of chapter IV displays unrestrained delight (if not hysteria) at the "absolutely topping" sport of "potting" men climbing over a "perfect barricade." This Englishman, in contrast to the first, seems unable to contain his emotions: "It was a frightfully hot day. We'd jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply priceless" (37). The word frightfully is used twice, while absolutely appears three times. Although the use of the verb "pot" in both sketches suggests the possibility of a single narrator, and thus an ongoing narrative, the diametrically opposed responses to very similar circumstances calls this possibility into serious doubt. If this is the same man who narrated chapter III, then, as Milton Cohen argues, he "appears to suffer from a split personality" ("Soldiers' Voices" 25). The more likely case is that chapters III and IV are narrated by two different Englishmen, soldiers whose irreconcilable responses interpose a divide, a breach that cannot be repaired. Here, as in most of the other vignettes, Hemingway ensures that we cannot know who is narrating--like the soldier in chapter IV, he has erected his own "perfect barricade."

Another characteristic of Hemingway's war stories and sketches is the frequent inclusion of non-combatants, yet another feature that reflects the nature of war in our time. World War I was not a surgical, by-the-book war. Nor was it a war to end all wars, rather, it ended all existing assumptions about the nature of war. As the historian David Thomson has argued, World War I "was the first war of the masses, a war between whole peoples and not merely between armies and navies" (511).

"On the Quai at Smyrna" involves both soldiers and civilians. In this short story, the dead are not soldiers killed in action, but babies and old women, casualties of war, or of life, while the soldiers, trained killers, minister to the dead and dying and "[dream] about things" (12).

Chapter II describes an evacuation of straggling, bedraggled civilians, stretching for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. The only explicit evidence that this is a military operation, or the outcome of war, is the line "Greek cavalry herded along the procession" (21). Hemingway's use of the word herded, in conjunction with various references to animals belonging to the "procession"--including water buffalo, cattle, and camels--underscores the dehumanizing effect of war, where human beings, mostly "old men and women" and children, are herded like cattle.

Most of the sketch, all but the penultimate line, is narrated in a restrained, reportorial style, and apparently in the third person. The line "Scared sick looking at it" then appears unexpectedly, not only revealing the emotions of the narrator for the first and only time, but also disrupting the uninflected, dispassionate surface of the prose. It strikes a discordant minor chord that continues to reverberate beyond the conclusion of the piece. In the final line of chapter II, "It rained all through the evacuation" (21), Hemingway modulates back to the major strain--though the rain might be seen as an index, an "objective correlative;' of the narrator's emotions. These two distinct chords do not entirely harmonize; throughout most of the piece the narrator is, to use Joyce's phrase, "refined out of existence," but then makes a brief, revealing appearance and, finally, attempts, with much less success, to recede behind the third-person persona. Ironically, in the one line that reveals the mostly hidden depths of the speaker's emotions--"Scared sick looking at it"--the subject is unstated and must be supplied by the reader. Thus, even when confessing the emotional cost of the nightmare he is chronicling, the narrator withholds himself, as if a full acknowledgement of his own pain would be admitting too much.

Chapter V focuses upon other civilian casualties of war, in this case six cabinet ministers executed against the wall of a hospital on a rainy morning. The disjunctiveness, or incongruity, of this sketch stems mostly from the many ironies that further delineate the nature of war in our time. The first irony is that the cabinet members, men who had directed the affairs of the state and, presumably, the conduct of the war, are apparently executed by men they once commanded. This recalls the disturbing question asked so often by the soldiers in the trenches: who is the real enemy? A less subtle irony is that the cabinet members are executed "against the wall of a hospital" (51); in this war there is no sanctuary, no quarter given. The hospital setting is particularly ironic given that one of the ministers, suffering from typhoid, belongs in the hospital. He is so weak that he must be carried downstairs and is unable to stand without support (the other five stand "quietly against the wall"). Finally he crumples to the ground and is shot "sitting down in the water" (51). Here we see, as so often in Hemingway's war sketches, a transvaluation of warrior values: soldiers shooting their own leaders, one of whom must be dragged from his sickbed, if not his deathbed, to be executed by his own countrymen as he slumps before the wall of a hospital.

The final war vignette, chapter VII, features another anti-heroic, inglorious episode. During a heavy bombardment, a badly frightened soldier prays to Jesus for salvation--of the earthly rather than celestial variety. Whereas Hemingway's usual tendency is simply to suggest, often in indirect ways, the emotions of his characters, in this sketch he employs stream-of-consciousness to record the desperate, unmanning fear of the soldier: "oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please christ" (67). This litany sounds as much like a curse as a prayer, which is further suggested by the lower-case spelling of Jesus and Christ. On the battlefield, even Christ has lost His majesty, like one of those war-rousing abstractions that soldiers come to distrust. Although it appears that the soldier's prayer is answered--"The shelling moved further up the line"--he breaks the promise he has made in extremis to "tell every one in the world that [Jesus is] the only one that matters" (67). What Hemingway seems to be saying, or suggesting, is that war does not ennoble, does not, by forcing men to come to terms with their own mortality, endow them with a redemptive, saving wisdom. This is yet another of those "old lies" that Hemingway, like Wilfred Owen, endeavors to expose. The soldier's visit to the prostitute later that night also emphasizes that war does not ennoble men. The final line of the story, "And he never told anybody" [about Jesus], extends the soldier's hypocrisy," if not his faithlessness, into infinity. Like Krebs in "Soldier's Home," who tells his mother that he is "'not in His Kingdom'" and that he can't pray (75-76), the soldier featured in chapter VII cannot really pray because his faith, if it ever existed at all, has been forever shattered. In war, then, even prayer becomes simply a gambit, a variation of Pascal's Wager, hazarded calculatingly simply because the stakes are so high.

The continuity of the war stories is also disrupted by various shifts in point-of-view. Of the nine pieces being considered, three" are narrated in the third-person singular, three in the first-person singular, and four in the third-person plural. Additionally, "On the Quai at Smyrna" is related second-hand; it begins: "The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight" (emphasis mine 11). The use of a framed narrator for a story so short would seem to have no other purpose than to distance readers even further from the "he" who actually witnessed the scene described. These numerous anonymous, polyphonic narrators act as yet another divide, another estranging device, between the various stories, while also serving to advance Hemingway's larger purposes. As Cohen observes, "the many soldiers' voices and experiences become Hemingway's meta-commentary on writing war fiction and on the experience of war ... their diversity undermines paradigm, resists stereotype, opposes cliche" ("Soldiers' Voices" 28). Novelistic consistency in point-of-view is abandoned in favor of a modernistic divarication of vision, a kind of Cubist jumbling. Notwithstanding the unity lent by Nick Adams, In Our Time, to the extent that it concerns war, is not so much a novel as an antinovel, a work, in other words, that defies the narrative conventions established by "the great tradition" The anti-novel, as defined by A Handbook to Literature (4th edn.), "experiments with fragmentation and dislocation on the assumption that the reader will be able to reconstruct reality from these disordered and unevaluated pieces of direct experience" (28). In the case of Hemingway's vignettes, however, no assembly--no reconstruction of reality--is required because the world is as fragmentary as it is portrayed.

But my main point is not that Hemingway wrote a series of discrete, disconnected sketches about war, but that war as Hemingway experienced it caused him to recognize its absolute dislocating nature: Hemingway adapted the form of his work to the realities of war, realities which resist the diachronic concatenations of a conventional narrative. What follows are three brief excerpts from vignettes one, two, and six, respectively: "Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark" (13); "Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying" (21); "The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street" (63). What these brief passages capture, to the extent that words can, is the hideous chaos of war, particularly war in our time. Not only is it senseless, but it tends to frustrate our ingrained epistemological constructs, our accustomed modes of sense-making. Although Hemingway was not the first writer to depict the savagery of war, he was among the very first to depict its particular manifestations--i.e., its indiscriminateness, its senselessness, and its technological deadliness--in the world's first modern war. (5) The irony, and perhaps what makes the stories "modern," is that the "Goya-like quality" Charles A. Fenton detects in the vignettes is conveyed in prose as restrained as a Hemingway hero under fire, with only occasional twitches to betray the underlying emotion (84).

So, we return to our original question: to what extent is In Our Time about the Great War, or war generally? The work is about both, but what really distinguishes the volume is not its subject, but its treatment. For this reason, perhaps the earlier cover design--featuring a soldier not on a battlefield but alone, an illegible expression blotting his face--more accurately captures the depiction of war found between the covers. In In Our Time, there is none of that camaraderie, that blutbruderschaft, that Paul Baumer in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front singles out as the one redeeming element of a soldier's existence; Hemingway's soldiers are loners, men who, like Nick Adams and Frederic Henry, make a "separate peace" and go their own ways.

Before Hemingway fashioned the sustained, novelistic adventures of Henry or the bildungsroman-like stories of Nick Adams, his first artistic response to war, the vignettes, reflected the atomized horror he witnessed. The vignettes constitute the miniaturization of war, drawn on a small scale not simply because one gets "scared sick looking at it," as the narrator of chapter II confesses, but, more significantly, because the sketch more truly reflects the actual experience of war, testifying, by its very form, to a view of war as disordered and disjunctive. War precludes a privileged, panoramic view (a defining purpose of continuous narrative); all a portraitist can do is to offer brief, disconnected glimpses, a series of miniatures. (6)

For Hemingway and for so many others, including Remarque and Graves, the attempt to make novelistic sense of the war on a large scale came later, in 1929, the year of the war-book boom. Yet perhaps Hemingway's fragments, drawn originally under the quickening pressure of deadlines, capture certain truths about the war--its casual brutality, its surreal horror, its apocalyptic chaos--that all the later three-volume novels simply drown out with their torrent of words.

NOTES

(1.) In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argues that "The idea of endless war as an inevitable condition of modern life would seem to have become seriously available to the imagination around 1916" (74).

(2.) Joseph M. Flora argues that The Waste Land influenced Hemingway "as profoundly as it did any writer" (41).

(3.) In discussing Hemingway's story "Fathers and Sons," Flora observes that "Nick again becomes archetypal--he can represent many fathers and many sons" (47).

(4.) In his study of 18th-century English fiction, Ian Watt sees the, use of "ordinary" names for characters as a telling feature of the novel form: "The parallel ... between the tradition of realist thought and the formal innovations of the early novelists is obvious: both philosophers and novelists paid greater attention to the particular individual than had been common before. But the great attention paid in the novel to the particularization of character is itself such a large question that we will consider only one of its more manageable aspects: the way that the novelist typically indicates his intention of presenting a character as a particular individual by naming him in exactly the same way as particular individuals are named in ordinary life" (18).

(5.) David Thomson characterizes the Great War as follows: "This war between the grand alliances had many of the qualities of a Frankenstein monster. The accumulation and release of so much concentrated power proved to be not only more destructive of human life and material than any previous wars, but also to be more uncontrollable in its consequences, and completely incalculable in its aftermath" (512).

(6.) Carlos Baker also refers to the vignettes as "miniatures" (133).

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