Going Back to Sea With Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is often described as a hard-boiled writer. The description fits his short sentences and plain verbs. It can obscure how much feeling those sentences leave for a reader to find.

I thought of Stephen King’s On Writing and its preference for a direct, economical line. Hemingway offers a good chance to see what such a line can carry.

What the plain sentences let you hear

The Old Man and the Sea is approachable in English because the sentences rarely call attention to themselves. I felt much the same reading it in Korean. The language lets the weight of an action emerge from the action itself.

While the old man holds on to a great fish, he talks aloud, wishes the boy were with him and remembers an arm-wrestling match that lasted through the night. He also dreams of the lions he saw on African beaches as a young sailor.

Hemingway gives those thoughts the same plain attention he gives the boat and the line. The old man’s affection for the sea comes through a few words at a time.

Why Santiago says la mar

The fisherman’s name is Santiago. In the book he thinks of the sea as la mar, using the feminine Spanish article. Some of the younger fishermen call it el mar, with the masculine one. Their words carry a different feeling about the water they work on.

Santiago knows the sea can be dangerous and speaks of it with affection anyway. I read that affection as a way of living within a place that does not answer to him.

Eighty-five days and a fish

Santiago has gone 84 days without catching a fish. On the eighty-fifth he sets out alone in a small skiff off Cuba.

The boy Manolin has been fishing with him, but his parents have sent him to another boat. They believe Santiago’s run of bad luck is reason enough to keep the boy away.

Far out at sea, a marlin takes Santiago’s bait and tows the skiff. Over the next few days he holds on. When he finally brings the fish alongside, it is too large to get aboard, so he lashes it to the boat.

Blood draws sharks on the way back. Santiago fights the first attacks and loses weapons as the sharks keep coming. By the time he gets home, there is little of the fish left beyond its skeleton.

Manolin is relieved to find him alive. The boy resolves to fish with him again. I like the fact that the promise is so ordinary after the scale of what has happened at sea.

What the boy brings back to the story

The story has room for both an extraordinary catch and a relationship you can imagine in everyday life. A boy wants to learn from an older person whose luck seems to have run out. Both have reasons to go back to the work.

That is the quiet part of the book that stayed with me. It keeps asking how you carry on after an experience has taken away the thing you thought you were bringing home.

Reading it again in an ecocriticism class

I read the novella in elementary school without giving it much thought. I felt the distance between that reading and my second one when I opened it again as a university student.

In my last semester at Sungkyunkwan University, I took Professor Kim Won-jung’s class on ecocriticism. We discussed writing about the natural world and read scholarship alongside it. An essay on literature and the environment brought me back to Hemingway.

The second reading gave me both the book and a memory of the first time I had read it. I wonder what I will find in these pages the next time I open them.

Book details

The Old Man and the Sea

Author

Ernest Hemingway

Korean edition published

January 2, 2012

ISBN-13

9788937462788

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