Hemingway's critique of anti-Semitism: semiotic confusion in "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by Robert Paul Lamb

Hemingway's treatment of Fischer's otherness--which the author approaches in his characteristically indirect fashion--is explored in the final two pages of "God Rest You" and points to the larger cultural issue in this sardonically titled Christmas tale. After Fischer implies that the boy may die due to Wilcox's incompetence, and Wilcox responds by telling his colleague to go to hell, Fischer disingenuously relents while staring down at his "gambler's hands" that had, as the narrator silently observes, "with his willingness to oblige and his lack of respect for Federal statutes, made him his trouble" (49). This odd observation by the narrator, later brought into the open when Fischer says that he had been too "damned smart on the coast" (49), introduces into the text Fischer's "back story": why this able doctor finds himself buried in a relatively lowly position as a night ambulance surgeon in Kansas City. The famous Hemingwayesque "thing left out"omitted yet powerfully present--here as in "Hills Like White Elephants," most likely has to do with abortions.(4)

Fischer's "gambler's hands" have made him into a criminal in the legal system just as, analogously, his ethnicity and religion place him outside the social pale; and both his legal and cultural otherness have as their specific analogue his current professional marginalization. This indirectly glimpsed past event, which Hemingway has both the narrator and Fischer allude to lest the reader miss its significance, illuminates Fischer's response to the boy's mutilation, which has clearly reminded him of how he tried to prevent another kind of self-mutilation on the coast (i.e., the sorts of mutilations that frequently occurred when women attempted to self-abort or else found themselves at the mercy of incompetent abortionists). In other words, what has happened to the boy bothers Fischer for the obvious reasons why it would disturb any doctor, even Wilcox (who has been drinking when the narrator enters the hospital); he has been unable to help someone in need. But it bothers him for other reasons as well. Fischer identifies with the boy because both of them, in different ways, have fallen victim to a culture of fundamentalist Christianity. And all of this helps explain Fischer's hostility toward Wilcox, who signifies, for Fischer, the hostile cultural mainstream through whose eyes he is obliged continually to view himself as a result of the double-consciousness that he has developed for his own self-protection.

On a more abstract level, one is tempted to say that the boy's amputated penis is a telling symbol of Fischer's own situation. Just as the boy, if he lives, will continue to feel desire but possess no outlet for its release, so too will Fischer continue to desire to escape his cultural and professional marginalization, but with no chance of doing so. Nor will he have an outlet for helping many others, pregnant women in distress among them, in order to fulfill his sense of vocation. Metaphorically, Fischer is both the amputated penis and the amputee; he has been cut off from the larger social body and he is a man who is unable to act on his desires. It is, of course, highly doubtful that Fischer himself perceives the amputated penis in these sorts of symbolic terms, but it is also clear that this incident resonates for him in a way that it does not for the other characters.