Hemingway's debt to Cezanne: new perspectives - Ernest Hemingway; Paul Cezanne

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Theodore L. Gaillard, Jr.

Furthermore, later in the story Hemingway uses similarly mirrored perspectives to suggest that Macomber's death was anything but accidental. Having gained his manhood early in the buffalo hunt, Macomber "aimed carefully at the center of the huge,jerking, rage-driven neck and shot" (29) as he mercifully dispatches one of the buffalo that had been only wounded. Here Hemingway presents the targeted animal almost through Macomber's rifle sights. Minutes later, when Margot tries to "save" her husband from the charge of the first wounded buffalo that had gotten up and gone into the brush, she shoots "at the buffalo" with her Mannlicher(11) and hits her newly empowered husband "about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull" (36; my emphasis). Without further narrative comment, this perspective shift reveals, as if through a rifle scope's crosshairs, an aim even more precise than when Francis had put the wounded bull out of its misery. The connection made, Margot's intentions (despite objections by those few critics who still feel she did not murder her husband) become quite clear.(12)

"The Undefeated" also pits man against bull in a meticulously crafted blend of painting and fugue.(13) Hemingway presents the negative perspective of the critical, cliche-ridden account by El Heraldo's champagne-swilling substitute critic as an ironic counterpoint that heightens the narrator's description of Manuel's desperate, virtuoso performance against the bull ("a good bull" [Short Stories 251], Manuel observes) early in the corrida.(14) But as the end nears, we view portions of the bull as Manuel "watch[es] the bull's feet," for "[t]he bull could not charge without getting his feet together"; conversely, we then observe Manuel from the viewpoint of the doomed bull, who is weakening rapidly: "His eyes watched Manuel. He felt he was going to get this little one with the white face" (257). He does. His hooking horn gores Manuel as he trips on a cushion hurled by a spectator. But on his fifth attempt, his last dying lunge, Manuel "felt the sword go in all the way" (264). Finally, the coup de grace - but Hemingway's use of contrapuntal descriptions and reversed perspectives reveals the skill, determination, and nobility of this has-been torero and his tormented toro. Both have become sacrificial victims of an unappreciative bullring audience, but Hemingway raises them in our eyes to paradigmatic status.

Instead of establishing a foil relationship by which protagonist and antagonist are measured against each other, the shifting Cezannesque perspectives in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" reveal how youth, middle age, and old age cope with potential emptiness in life, the nada that haunts so many Hemingway characters. The opening scene offers a nocturnal combination portrait/landscape as a depressed, deaf old man sits at a table "in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light," trying to drink himself into a stupor. Beyond the old man, a "girl and a soldier went by in the street. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar" (Short Stories 379). One of the waiters comments that the guards who went by a few minutes before will pick up the soldier - presumably for being out of barracks after curfew. That Cezannesque daub of color, that flash of brass described from the viewpoint of the old man, vividly targets the soldier against the picture's dark background. Finding a woman has been his solution - albeit a potentially dangerous one. They have been pinpointed, and they are vulnerable: the "girl wore no head covering and hurried beside him" (379). They seem worried - in contrast to the hubristic younger waiter, who boasts, "I am not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me" (380). Later, perspectives shift again, and the older waiter - in a parallel to the deaf old man who quietly and "without spilling" (381) anesthetizes himself every night in the clean, well-lighted cafe - will himself stop at another coffee shop (with its unpolished bar) before he returns to his room: "deliver us from nada" (383), he will pray as he, too, faces yet another night of emptiness and insomnia.