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

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

Recognizing the ineffectiveness of his witticism, his smartness, Fischer abandons his "ass" joke and adopts a rhetorical strategy of acknowledging his own failings, of addressing Wilcox indirectly by speaking to the narrator, and of once again assailing Wilcox on the grounds of professional competence in his sarcastic comment on diagnosing without the book. In referring to the events on the coast, Fischer shifts the referent of being "smart" from the hostile host culture's anti-Semitic stereotype to a specific event, which gives it less blanket condemnatory power. By addressing Wilcox indirectly, he excludes his adversary from the verbal exchange and forces him to overhear, thus robbing him of the prerogatives of replying to direct address. And by bringing up Wilcox's medical guide, he again puts Wilcox on the defensive by foregrounding Wilcox's professional inadequacies rather than his own cultural marginalization.

When Wilcox replies, "The hell with you," he gives Fischer the opportunity to replay their first exchange, the one in which Fischer had responded to this imprecation by pretending that he meant no offense, and then making the ineffective "ass" joke that gave Wilcox an opening to attack:

"All in good time, Doctor," Doc Fischer said. "All in good time. If

there is such a place I shall certainly visit it. I have even had a very

small look into it. No more than a peek, really. I looked away

almost at once. And do you know what the young man said,

Horace, when the good Doctor here brought him in? He said,

`Oh, I asked you to do it. I asked you so many times to do it.'"

(50)

This time, Fischer does not retreat behind a mask of disingenuous apology, but accepts Wilcox's curse with patient reasoning. His putative agnosticism is both a proud claim of ethnicity--as a Jew he rejects the notion of an afterlife--and a calm assertion of superiority, since hell holds no particular terror for him as, ostensibly, it would for Wilcox. Hell, for Fischer, is what happens on earth and the misfortunes, of which the boy's tragedy is the most recent, that he has had to endure. By invoking the words of the boy, who has also been victimized by the culture of Wilcox (whom Fischer insists on calling "the good physician" and "the good doctor" in a parodic allusion to St. Luke), Fischer goes beyond the specifics of Wilcox's incompetence and correctly signifies communal responsibility for the boy's tragedy, and communal guilt.

All of this is lost on Wilcox, who can only express the cultural code of anti-Semitism without really reading or understanding it; he follows Fischer's speech by adding, "On Christmas Day, too" (50), again revealing his inability to read the true spirit of Christianity. Fischer's chastening response--"The significance of the particular day is not important" (50)--is an admonition that the tragedy is communal and transcends such matters as specific faiths. But Wilcox can only seize the opportunity to invoke, once more, Fischer's otherness--"Maybe not to you" (50)--rejecting the holistic notion of a larger community that shares responsibility and guilt. Fischer may be too smart, but Wilcox is too dumb; his incompetence at medicine extends to all of his attempts to comprehend signifiers and employ sign systems. He can only express a distorted and bigoted version of Christianity that defines itself through exclusivity, not through any transcendent message of love and redemption. When Fischer comprehends this fully, when he is at last able to read Wilcox as a text and not just as an adversary, he realizes the impossibility of his situation--he is a Jew and cannot deconstruct for the Wilcoxes of the world this defining social construction--and he gives up by way of mock commentary: "You hear him, Horace? ... You hear him? Having discovered my vulnerable point, my achilles tendon so to speak, the doctor pursues his advantage" (50). Wilcox's reply--"You're too damned smart" (50)--inadvertently underscores Fischer's point; the false sign system of racial chauvinism, of which anti-Semitism is a symptom, has the final word in the text, as it does in life. Once again, a Jew who has ridden an ass is sacrificed by a society in order to cover up for its own shortcomings.(6)