The wound, the scar and the other in the life and work of Ernest Hemingway

Abstract

This thesis joins the critical conversation on the wound and the scar in Hemingway’s life and works. Previous analyses have generally reproduced Hemingway’s narrative of nihilism (Hemingway himself used the term ‘nada’ to describe his characters’ feelings of loneliness, angst and despair), reading this ‘nothingness’ as evidence of Hemingway’s understanding of the single, separate self in opposition to a harsh world. The brutality that permeates his work, along with his emphasis on the sensate, wounded body, is read as reinforcing this narrative of the discrete self, set in defiant opposition to the other, to the world, and to death.

My thesis offers a new approach, arguing that this nihilism is a space that opens up, through the metaphor of the wound, the self’s keen awareness of the multiple other as the cause of such wounding, and from which a new dimension of the self emerges. It establishes a fresh perspective on Hemingway’s understanding of the self as dynamic and multiple, rather than static and solitary, and advances the notion of the other beyond gender and sexuality. It shows how the wound exists not simply at the level of content, but that Hemingway’s style--with its disruption of syntax and binary signification, its galvanizing of banal words, its silences and ellipses--is the saving wound of his artistic process.

The inextricable link between the wound, the scar and the other is demonstrated through analyses of selected Hemingway short stories and novels – In Our Time, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. Hélène Cixous’ philosophy of the self and the other, unpublished archival material, and the implementation of a thematic structure focussed on ‘initiation,’ ‘medicalisation,’ and ‘de-personalisation’ together provide an original contribution to Hemingway studies.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English
Supervisor	Willa Murphy (Supervisor), Kathleen Mc Cracken (Supervisor) & WILLIAM LAZENBATT (Supervisor)