Pursuing authentic performance: Animals, actors, and audience in the works of Ernest Hemingway

An examination of Ernest Hemingway's animal pursuit literature (texts in which animal encounters such as bullfighting, hunting or fishing are predominant) reveals ways in which human performances are authentic or "inauthentic." Authentic performances often occur in conjunction with animal encounters and are performances for the self, not predicated on the expectations of a viewing audience. Typically, authentic performances are private, tragic and instinctual. Inauthentic performances are public, comic and socially constructed, performed for an external audience. Ritual is a way of publicly performing private authentic acts whereby the prescribed rules for the ritual obviates audience-based behavior.; Animals are usually ideal witnesses because they are incapable of behaving inauthentically and because they elicit correspondingly authentic performances from humans. However, Hemingway often inappropriately anthropomorphizes, attributing human virtues (especially the ability to choose to behave authentically) to animals. While the existential virtue of choosing to live authentically is highly valued in Hemingway, animals often unconsciously behave authentically. Often Hemingway confuses and conflates instinctual animalX authentic performances. The reverse is also true. That animals are more consistent authentic performers in Hemingway reflects his uncertainty as to whether humans can consistently choose to perform authentically.; In Green Hills of Africa Hemingway's public performances as protagonist reveal the ultimately self-defeating nature of engaging in inauthentic (public) performances. In Death in the Afternoon and The Sun Also Rises, the primacy of the bullfight permits authentic performances for matador and bull which are tragic, private and instinctual in nature. Santiago's solitary struggle with the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea, points to the authenticity of isolate experience while his reintegration into society via Manolin shows the value of ritual. In "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" the lion embodies the virtues of the code hero and sets up an ideal that Macomber learns from and ultimately emulates in his tragic transcendence. Nick Adams' ritualistic, private and instinctual behaviors in "The Big Two-Hearted River" reveal the ways in which authentic solitary experience can be ritualized and therapeutically integrated into the self.