Lacanian Reinterpretation Of Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. In the nearly sixty two years of his life that followed he forged a literary reputation unsurpassed in the twentieth century. In doing so, he also created a mythological hero in himself that captivated (and at times confounded) not only serious literary critics but the average man as well.Hemingway often described competition among writers in boxing terms. He felt he had been punched and knocked to the canvas by the critics on Across the River and Into the Trees, but as if he had been saving it for just such an occasion, he believed the fish story would allow him to regain his position as "champion."Hemingway had initially planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of a random intimacy between mother and son and also the fact of relationships that cover most of the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as "The Sea Book."In September of 1952 The Old Man and the Sea, in its 26,500-word entirety, appeared in Life magazine, selling over 5 million copies in a flash. The next week Scribners rolled out the first hardcover edition of 50,000 copies and they too sold out quickly. The majority of concurrent criticism was positive, although some dissenting criticism has since emerged. The book was a huge success both critically and commercially and for the first time since For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 Hemingway was atop the literary heap and making a fortune. Though Hemingway had known great success before, he never had the privilege of receiving any major literary prizes. The Old Man and the Sea led to numerous accolades for Hemingway, including the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also earned the Award of Merit Medal for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters that same year. Most prestigiously, the Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1954, "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."The novelist William Faulkner found the work to be Hemingway's best, venturing even that it was perhaps the best single piece of any of his contemporaries. From 1952 to 1966, most commentaries on the novella were reverential, and humanistic critics like Philip Young, Leo Gurko, and Clinton S. Burhans admired the book's noble and tragic hero, its veneration for humanity, and notions of fraternal interdependence. Other commentators, including the well-known Hemingway scholar Carlos Baker, welcomed the elegantly presented Christian themes, including Santiago's piety and suffering, his saintly humility, and the idea of redemption from meaningless existence.After 1966 came a shift in assessment. Young, who had earlier praised the work, withdrew his earlier adulation, objecting to its affected simplicity, and Robert P. Weeks pointed out its lack of realistic detail. By the mid-1970s few articles on the novella appeared in scholarly journals, and those that were published tended to concentrate on uncovering previously undetected biblical, baseball, or other allusions. The 1980s and 1990s saw even less critical interest in the work, with longer studies about Hemingway often dismissing the novella as using crude symbolism and lapsing repeatedly into sentimentality.This novel is the utmost achievement in which Hemingway successfully applied his "Iceberg Principle " to the practice and the one-eighth of the iceberg of the narrative represents seven-eighths portion of the hidden. This thesis applies Lacan's theories to the re-reading of the old man, his dreams, and daydreams in the novel so as to have a new and deeper understanding of them, and especially the unconscious and the desire of the old man, Santiago, manifest Hemingway's.This thesis consists of six parts. Following the introduction come four chapters and the conclusion. In Introduction, it will introduce the background of The old man and the Sea by Hemingway and the literary criticisms for the work for about half a century. Besides the introduction and conclusion, it will apply three related theoretical elements of the unconscious (desire), the mirror stage, and the Three Orders to make a Lacanian re-reading of The old man and the Sea.Chapter One deals with a review of the relevant research. First, it introduces the creation of Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea and the literary criticisms it devoured in the past century. Then introduction of Jacque Lacan and his theories follows, which refers to the application of Lacanian Theories.Chapter Two will discuss Santiago's dreams and daydreams with Lacanian terms such as metaphor, metonymy, and metonymical slippage. Santiago's unconscious (desire) involves dreams of Africa and the lions, and daydreams of DiMaggio, bone spurs, and cocks.In Section 1, it will introduce the development of the unconscious theory from Freud to Lacan. For Freud, dreams are even the key to theoretical understanding of subconscious. Freud first developed the theory about the role of the unconscious on the individual. For Freud and for psychoanalysis in general, however, actions, thought, belief, and the concepts of "self are all determined or shaped by the unconscious, and its drives and desires. While Freud's work is haunted by biology, Lacan's work, on the other hand, has a strong anti-biological tendency. For Lacan, the ego or "I" self is only an illusion, a product of the unconscious itself. In Lacan, central to the conception of the human, is the notion that the unconscious, which governs all factors of human existence, is structured like a language.In Section 2 Analysis of the metaphors and metonymical slippage in Santiago's dreams and daydreams by two devices of signifier and signified. All the dreams and daydreams of Santiago can be read as condensation and displacement that disguise the content of the unconscious in the dream in the same way that metaphor and metonymy veil the pulsive forces of the subject desire. Two concepts of signifier and signified are also introduced into reading Santiago's dreams and daydreams, and further, the operation of the metonymical slippage is discovered. In the narrative (in this case it is Santiago's narrative), unconscious content in the dreams and daydreams is condensed as metaphor and displaced as metonymy. The reader's role is to discover how the manifest discourse veils the latent meaning, how the signifiers resolve into manifest signifieds and latent referents. With a diagram of It analyses lion, DiMaggio, and bone spur in the novella. We can find that from one signifier, lion, to another signifier, DiMaggio, or fighting cock with bone spur, they form the chain of the signifiers, as if floating from one to another. But the sliding and floating chain is a kind of stable referential behavior. The reason is that the readers perfectly complete the task of discovering how the manifest discourse veils the latent meaning. In other word, the readers shift the manifest signifiers (lion, DiMaggio, fighting cock and etc) to the referent meanings (king, the best, the strongest, the champion, and etc).In Section 3, it will discuss Santiago' s absent desire with the term of Phallus. Phallus is a transcendent signifier which can cease the chain of signifiers' sliding endlessly so as to guarantee the stability of the referential behavior. Briefly, phallus appears to be a signifier which defines all the referential effects.Phallus bears no fixed feature inside. Lacan says that it is nothing but the presence as absence. Phallus is presence because it appears to be a background identity or a referent. From the text analysis, we can find that it is the presence of absent phallus (impotency) that defines Santiago's dreams and daydreams. It is certainly deduced that Santiago will restore his potency to acquire his identity. Dreaming of the lions is the main thing that is left. Santiago's unconscious desire is that his male virility can be restored.In Chapter Three, by comparison of Oedipus in Lacanian reading, Santiago's fishing experience is treated as a paradigm case of the passage from infancy through the steps of the mirror stage. He is shown in the beginning going through the first step of the mirror passage, where he finds images of identification and antagonism. At last, his climactic step takes him through recognition of the loss of the phallic symbol and acceptance of symbolic castration, to final submission to the death and the Other and authority of the father. In Section 1, it will introduce Lacan's theoretical concept: the mirror stage.The mirror stage occurs when an infant, beginning at six months, discovers its own reflection in a mirror. Lacan said, "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".As he further develops the concept, Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship".In Section 2, it will analyze Santiago in the mirror stage. The stage involves the Formation of The Subject of Desire, the Construction of Self-contradiction by the Subject of Desire, and the transformation of the object of desire which is the turning point of the fate.Lacan detects the process of forming the subject of desire as manifesting itself at every subsequent identification with another person, identity (not to be confused with 'identification') or suchlike throughout the subject's life. This is the start of a lifelong process of identifying the self in terms of the Other. Santiago identified with the little boy and with the lions in the dream to form the subject of the desire. And then, the subject starts constructing the self-contradiction. On the one hand, he was abandoned by other fishermen, which left him lonely and helpless. On the other hand, he was eager to be involved and respected and identified. So there appears a pair of irreconcilable contradiction between his real survival conditions and ideal-I in the imagination. The subject has to discover a certain identified object of desire as the substitute in order to construct the perfect ideal-I. Santiago encountered the Marlin. The marlin was not only the object conquered by Santiago but also was the identity with the old man to some extent. At last in other fishermen's eyes gaze, he became the object of the other desire. We found that this is the circle of the life in which Santiago, as the subject of desire, set out from the starting point and returned to the ending point. The whole circle process satisfied the drive and desire for returning to the mother and completely filled up the primitive absence. In Section 3, with Lacanian reading of "Oedipus complex", it will make a comparison of Santiago and Oedipus. Santiago was born to be a fisherman as Oedipus was born to be a king. Santiago, the old man, was abandoned by his fellow fishermen, as Oedipus, the infant, was abandoned by his parents. Santiago, a man of inordinate pride, leaves the security of the coastal waters because he must restore his honor. Oedipus leaves the home of his foster parents in search of his identity, but his name, meaning "swollen foot," is symptomatic of his swollen ego, his pride, and self-reliance that result in patricide and incest—his downfall. Oedipus and Santiago are destroyed, but not defeated, and they narrate their stories in order to assume the Other in themselves.Chapter Four will discuss the movement of the desire.In Section 1, it will introduce Lacanian theoretical concepts—Three orders—The Imaginative, The Symbolic, and The Real.The three Lacanian orders seem inseparate. They work together to coordinate acts of consciousness.Imaginary order is the domain of imago and relationship interaction. (It is called Pre-Oedipal Period). It is by the fundamental narcissism that the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire, according to Lacan.The symbolic is the sphere of culture and language. (During the Oedipal period, it goes into the Symbolic, where father splits the unit child-mother and "phallus " represents the law of father and the threat of castration because it prohibits child's access to the mother.) From now on the loss suffered and the desire for the maternal must be repressed.THE REAL (by Lacan)—The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction.In Section 2 it will discuss the movement of desire to Pleasure and death.The imaginary order, at the disposal of pleasure principle, pursues to seek dynamic equilibrium while the symbolic order, in a blind automaticity, always interferes with this dynamic equilibrium; it is beyond the pleasure principle. Once people fall into the signifying network, the network will have to repress him and he will become a part of the strange autonomy order which constantly interferes with its natural dynamic equilibrium . The pleasure principle cannot account for the constant repetition of the painful experience. Freud introduced the death instinct to his theory. We have to admit that the utmost goals of all lives will be death. When the subject of desire finally discovers his pursuits just for nothing, the result will be the destruction of desire and the death befalling.In Section 3, it will analyze the old man going from the imaginary to the real which is the rupture and reversion of the subject.In the novella, the old man and the sea, the old man, the subject of the desire, goes from the imaginary order to the symbolic order and finally to the real.The sea, as a symbol of the Real, is present with its absence. Death, the being of transcending all language symbols, belongs to the Real in which the old man and the sea blend with each other. The subject's desire to integrate with mother is fulfilled, which fills up the primitive absence. Hemingway titled the novella as "The Old Man and The Sea", which defined a great metaphor, suggesting that the human was well on the way to the pursuit of the ultimate real.In Conclusion, the paper summaries the main ideas of the dissertation and then describes the advantages of the Lacanian analysis in order to point out the possible directions for further study.