Disputed Speakers in Hemingway

The final class period that the HL class spent on Hemingway short stories involved a group reading of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Dialogue represents at least half of the story’s page-space, and I planned to have the same two students read the lines of the two waiters, as if they were reading from a play script. I had done the same thing for “Hills Like White Elephants,” which had been effective, but our readers had faltered a few times when it wasn’t clear which character was supposed to speak the unadorned dialogue. 

“Clean” has very few indications of who is speaking, and when the speaker is identified, the pronoun used is often “he” which doesn’t clarify which of the two male waiters was speaking. I cdecided to go through the piece and number each line spoken by the waiters, 1, and 2, so I could give the numbered scripts to the people I assigned those parts to. 

It’s a darn good thing I did. The story is about a clean, well-lighted cafe where an “old man” is sitting drinking. He is deaf. The two waiters on shift talk about him. The opening dialogue is:

"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said. 

"Why?" 

"He was in despair." 

"What about?" 

"Nothing." 

"How do you know it was nothing?" 

"He has plenty of money." 

I assumed the first five times I read this that the younger waiter was the one who had knowledge of the attempted suicide, and that the older one asked the necessary questions and pursued the subject no more, almost out of respect for the man’s presence, even if he is deaf. (Wow, I just mis typed “deaf” and wrote “dead”. I wouldn’t be surprised if the similarity of those two words on the page is not an accidental element of the story.)

I had felt, on reading the story, so confident in my interpretation of the speaker that I didn’t even register ambiguity. Later on, you see, we learn that the older waiter feels a certain kinship with the old man, because he too “is one of those who stays late at the cafe”…..

Because of this I didn’t expect him to be the one apparently gossiping about the old man. 

When I was numbering the speakers though, a little later it is obviously the younger waiter who says “You said he tried to kill himself.” THat threw me, and I very carefully went back through to make sure I hadn’t missed a line, and felt sure there would simply be a point where one waiter speaks two lines that I had treated as a back-and-forth. No such moment. 

So I turned to the internet, to get a synopsis of the story, which would surely indicate which waiter told the other of the attempted suicide. Lo and behold, there has been a decades-long controversy and debate (which wikipedia made sound as though it has taken the greater energies of the best and brightest of our intellectual community) about whether Hemingway made a mistake in this story by misassigning the speakers. The seems to me a preposterous argument. 

Maybe, the older waiter told the younger waiter about the suicide in hopes to encourage sympathy toward the deaf man, because the younger waiter is fairly disdainful of him. Maybe too, the older waiter indulged this impulse to gossip, said the “he had plenty of money” hoping for a cheap joke (he admits to making a lame joke later on by asking the younger waiter, 

“And you? You’re not afraid to return home to your wife before your normal time?”

“Are you trying to insult me?”

“No, hombre, only to make a joke.”

Maybe he regrets making the comment, which inspires his later comments about how he himself is like the old man. Read in this light, I can see those lines as repentant in nature. 

Hemingway reveals how unreliable dialogue is as a source of truth. In each story, one doubts the sincerity or the truth of the character’s spoken words. The narration, so sparse, is heavy with undeniable truth, giving inflexible data about physical setting and physical action. THe contrast with the dialogue, which passes like a mist between these physical non-negotiables, highlights how frequently we say what we don’t mean, even without meaning to. 

It’s strange how little permission there is for revision of our spoken words. It is rare to hear anyone say, “OK, let me rephrase that, that’s not really what I meant.” or “You know what, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.” What a high order it is to expect someone to speak appropriately and accurately his first time around. We’re constantly expressing things we’ve never expressed before. A little rehearsal time would be helpful, particularly in terms of tone and delivery, moreso even than words; but rehearsal is, most of the time, out of the realm of possibility. 

I was not very pleased with the timbre of the discussion after the story. I didn’t feel I was asking the right questions. Although, M did make an excellent, excellent comment, which I think was probably more educational to his classmates than anything I said, about how the nature of the simultaneously heart-wrenching and funny Lord’s Prayer at the end where “nada” replaces all words having to do with divinity (“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy nada. They kingdom nada, thy will be nada, as nada as it is in nada.”) He said that the “nada” implied some degradation of the power of prayer and religion - like this guy had had faith at one point, but had lost it. This comment turned up in a few essays by the more perceptive people in the class. 

One good question was “Who else from our stories might appreciate the clean, well-lighted cafe?” They referred to Senor Tenente from “Now I Lay Me” and the suicidal father from “Indian Camp”. We also talked about band-aid solutions. This is a concept I would have liked to really draw out in more writing and discussion. Hemingway’s stories seem to me to emphasize that we use band-aid solutions to cure what ails us. Dialogue that doesn’t actually get to the heart of a matter is one of these. A blind faith in the power of a relationship, or a marriage, is another. In “Hills,” the characters discuss an abortion as if it would solve all their problems; religion, turned to in prayer, ends up being a meaningless repetition of “a Hail Mary for her, an Our Father for him,” for Senor Tenente, and the breath-steeling emptiness of the “Nada” prayer. Many students noted the use of prayer by these “devout” and “faithful” characters, which indicated to me that we hadn’t fully drawn out the way that rote prayer doesn’t always indicate a faithful heart. 

I really, really look forward to teaching these stories in a Hemingway unit in the future, because I want to try different ways of engaging the themes in a class that meets more than once a week. One change I will not make is having them read the stories at home. Reading it together is fresh, focused, and puts everyone on even ground when we start discussing. And I love seeing what sticks out to them. They are remarkably perceptive. It’s hard for me to imagine back to what it was like to read this or that story for the first time, and since I’ve been studying and reading up on the story in preparation for class, I have to remind myself that what seems obvious to me on read-through number three, is probably not so for them. Given that, I am often delighted and surprised when they point out the significance of subtle detail. 

Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival

This evening A and I, during our tutoring session, read the story of Narcissus from Greek mythology, then worked on his brochure about Poseidon (feels like a bit of a contrived assignment - make a brochure about a Greek god - but the literature is fun). I know very little about Greek mythology, so the stories he's reading are new to me. Hera seems like a real pill.








Last night Katharina told me about a dance concert tonight at the cultural palace, so rather than go home after working with A, I stayed downtown and went to a falafel shop. While I ate a sandwich, I read this article about poetry in translation. It seems this French poet, one of the forefathers of modernism, wrote poems so abstract and cryptic that many readers don't bother pursuing them. Reading some of the extracts in the article, I smiled thinking about how my 11th grade classes, who had enough to roll their eyes at with Ted Hughes's ambiguity, would have gone to pieces over such pieces.


As it turned out, such abstruse extracts as that below ended up being the perfect pre-reading for the dance concert:


The virginal, enduring, beautiful today

will a drunken beat of its wing break us

this hard, forgotten lake haunted under frost

by the transparent glacier of unfled flights!



A swan of old remembers it is he

magnificent but who without hope frees himself

for never having sung a place to live

when the boredom of sterile winter was resplendent.



His whole neck will shake off this white death-throe

inflicted by space on the bird denying it,

but not the horror of soil where the feathers are caught.



Phantom assigned to this place by pure brilliance,

he is paralyzed in the cold dream of contempt

put on in useless exile by the Swan.




Once at the cultural palace, I settled into a full house to see a piece that would take over an hour. Sometimes one dancer, sometimes five. Sometimes no music, sometimes percussive vocals, sometimes suspenseful strings, sometimes electronic vibrations. Sometimes brightly lit, sometimes so dim I could only see glimmers shining on the shapely shoulders of the dancers.


It was one of the best dance concerts I have ever been to. The technical mastery of the dancers created an all-engrossing audience experience, as I was drawn into every movement. There was no perceptible story, a fact which clearly irked my German row mates, but which I liked. I didn't find myself missing context or storyline. The movement and energy was enough, and then some, to carry the piece. The length was essential to the success of the piece. As it went on I became more and more deeply embedded in the experience of their movement, and when, toward the end, they began repeating some of the opening motifs, I felt my stomach lurch - "No! Don't end!"


Like the Mallarmé poem, the piece felt to me most invested in putting into dance what cannot be put into words. I cannot describe the feeling I had watching them, and I think that's appropriate. Tonight, for me, art reached the place that is not accessible with the words that we deal with in the classroom. What a good thing it is that we have more than one art form. Literature can't do it all, neither can dance. But they are marvellously complimentary in their attempts to capture the complexity of our experience.

What students care about

This blogging unit is exciting because the students all get to choose the topics for their blogs. I may regret this decision when I have to read 48 blogs this weekend on different topics, but at this point I'm enjoying hearing what topics they're choosing.

N is going to write about classical music and how it is under appreciated. I thought of her today when I read this article from the New Yorker about small opera houses  in New York bubbling up to compete with the Met.

While the journalist is in favour of much of the avant grade work in opera taking place, the article refers to a performance of Tosca at a small theatre which didn't come off properly:

In early March, LoftOpera attempted “Tosca,” the kind of big-boned late-Romantic work that more or less requires a large orchestra. In some ways, the experiment fell short. An ensemble of thirty-two musicians, led by Dean Buck, conveyed much of the atmosphere and the nuance of the first act but came under strain in the second. The heroine’s ceremony around Scarpia’s corpse—the arrangement of the candles and the rest—was undercut by sketchy string intonation, and the frigid final chords of E minor and F-sharp minor, which should incite a shiver, merely wheezed.

While I certainly don't have this nuanced appreciation for the sound of the F-sharp minor, I appreciate the concept of cramming a grand form into a smaller mould. I think this relates to my class's discussion today of how sensationalism can only be effective to a certain point in conveying a message - after a certain point, it degrades the value of the message. 

If a blogger is talking about freedom for Palestine, or justice for women, or a gravely endangered species, using humour, farce, or other sensational tactics will make it seem as though an "opera" of a topic is being presented on a "tatty fairground" stage. (That was an allusion to the tatty fairground in the closing simile of Ted Hughes's The Seven Sorrows, a poem which most students roundly disliked and I love).

The same article referred to one brave composer who has proposed a piece to compete with the traditional and well-loved Bach passions staged so frequently at this time of year. Frank Martin wrote "Golgotha," which sounds to me as though it would require a big stage. 

Novel discussions about blogging

Web services that connect teachers with independent schools seeking new faculty members allow candidates to upload videos of themselves. This fall I made two such videos for Carney, Sandoe and Associates and the Southern Teacher's Agency. In each, I expressed that one of the reasons I like teaching secondary students is that I enjoy the task of coming up with curriculum that sufficiently challenges this age group. They have thought about a lot of things, and they've been asked all the classic questions of grade school curriculum: what is the moral of the story, who is the protagonist, is this a static or dynamic character, how do we speak when we're writing an email versus writing a speech?

I know that these questions don't thrill them, but it is still hard to know just what approaches to a subject will light their fires. The current unit on blogs has been an exercise in letting their comments direct the course's content and outcomes.

Last week we started talking about blogs, and in the first discussion, students listed attributes that make blogging different from other kinds of media. These are their notes (we were comparing blog as a form of new media to 17th century pamphlets in Britain as a form of new media).

Y. raised her hand and argued that this is not how blogs work. People aren't this bold. She said, people are afraid to write what they think. A. countered that people do all kinds of criticism online, that there is critical blogging on almost every topic imaginable. I agreed with A, but I realised that Y had a point. We are constrained by our sense of audience. We don't write things that the audience will discount. 

This brought me back to the drawing board for a minute, because what Y had brought up struck me as useful. The need to attract eyeballs to my post influences what I write and how I write it.

Say I have a message I think is really important, but which other people don't necessarily think is important. How do I get them to care? Well, today students pointed out that I could link it with some sensational news event. I could use a headline that exaggerates, or poses a provocative question. 

Part of our discussion involved looking at tmz.com, the celebrity gossip site which is the second-most frequented blog in the world, behind Huffington Post. We looked at TMZ's sensational homepage laced with gossipy headlines and lewd photographs. 

We talked about the power of these tactics to attract eyes, and they introduced me to the term click-bait, a tactic in which you give a juicy headline in order to get someone to click, with minimal investment in whether that person ends up reading your whole article. 

Then, H made exactly the comment I was hoping someone would make. "I'm writing about feminism. I can't use a gossipy tone." This catalysed a conversation on what effect using such a tone has on the writer's message. Hands were in the air all over the place. So many people had good comments. I felt glad, because it indicated to me that I had hit the "novelty" sweet spot. They had thought about these things before, and had things to say, but hadn't necessarily had an opportunity to express themselves on this topic. That's the magic zone of the secondary English classroom that I am fascinated by - when they get to say things that are the result of ideas that have been percolating, awareness that has been mulling, perhaps for years. 

A simile

In the Ted Hughes poem "The Owl", the speaker seems to be showing "his world" to another person - perhaps a child, perhaps a lover, perhaps a wife. The subject who the speaker is addressing "takes it all in with incredulous joy, like a mother handed her new baby by the midwife." 

Students have spent a good deal of time working on this poem, and almost without fail when we reach this simile they identify "happiness" as the emotion the mother is feeling. I love group work for this reason: when I'm working with four students I can say, emphatically, "OK, yes happiness, but what else might a new mother be feeling when she's handed her baby?" 

Always, at least one person in the group is able to immediately pick up on the fact that the mother is feeling overwhelmed, perhaps fearful, perhaps just now realising the responsibility involved in having a child... 

Working with this simile has been a testament to the importance of a) reading as a social activity, where others' ideas and knowledge inform your own reading, and b) the importance of talk as a tool to understand poetry. Our initial understanding is so rarely the fullest one.

The Owl by Ted Hughes

I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table. Common mallards
Were artefacts of some unearthliness,
Their wooings were a hypnagogic film
Unreeled by the river. Impossible
To comprehend the comfort of their feet
In the freezing water. You were a camera
Recording reflections you could not fathom.
I made my world perform its utmost for you.
You took it all in with an incredulous joy
Like a mother handed her new baby
By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy.
It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood
Of fifteen years before. My masterpiece
Came that black night on the Grantchester road.
I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit
Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse
Where a tawny owl was enquiring.
Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions
Into my face, taking me for a post.

By the way, this morning during worship at Meeting I was thinking about this poem and how much it reflects my feelings as a literature teacher to students who speak English as a second language. I do feel, when I bring literature that I love into the classroom, from my culture, that "I made my world perform its utmost for you"; I want them to respond with incredulous joy, and when they do react with the wonder and amazement of the "you" in this poem, their "frenzy" makes me "giddy". 

There are also elements of English class that are, for some students, "impossible to comprehend", like the feet of a mallard not freezing in the freezing water of winter. For example, H. finds it "impossible to comprehend" how we are supposed to find meaning in the placement of a comma. S. thinks that finding meaning in the repetition of o or a sounds in a line is silly. 

I have to say, I am inclined to agree with them sometimes. When you analyse poetry or prose for sound devices, you have to enter an alternate state of mind, a sort of "hypnogogic" half-dream in which everything is allowed to carry meaning. Once you're there, it's a liberating place to be, but when considered cold, many literary devices seem like things invented by bored scholars in towers, which they probably are.

If you're like our students, you're wondering what pinions are: 

Imagine having this bad boy fly up into your face! The pinions are the extremities of the wings.

A hike, and a Hemingway story

While I was reading up on Indian Camp earlier in the week, I read that Hemingway considered it a good story; another story that won his approval was "Big, Two-Hearted River". So today I took a copy of that short story on the hike.

We so rarely have a trail to follow. Today was great that way.

Fittingly, it was about someone on a hike. It's a haunting story with so little background information given, and so much sensory detail of the character's experience described, and such a deliberate delivery of play-by-play actions done by the man who is hiking, camping and fishing in the story, that I expected, at any minute, something truly terrible to happen. The sentences are brief. The explanations of sensory experience are evocative. The paradoxes of emotional responses to situations are simply and gratifyingly stated.

The main character, Nick, whose age and situation we never learn, has just disembarked from a train at the beginning of the story, with "a bundle of canvas and bedding".

"There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground."

A Bedouin camp we passed at the start of the hike.

This bleak beginning gets no exposition - we never learn about the fire, or about the history of Seney, or why Nick has come to it with a bundle of canvas and bedding. Indeed, his own history seems to have been burnt and charred away, and even he seems not to think of his past or his situation beyond the immediate present. The word happy is used to describe Nick at least half a dozen times in the story. The only dialogue we get is when he eats dinner on his first night at a camp he's set up.

"Chrise," Nick said, "Geezus Chrise," he said happily.

The combination of his slurred speech and his repeated happiness, and lack of references to any life beyond or other people, makes me think that he's like John Steinbeck's Lenny, from Of Mice and Men, which the English B classes are reading right now: a guy with a mental handicap who is very keen on sensuous experience and lives mainly through his physical, not his mental, world. Both men experience life on a visceral, immediate, unselfconscious level that inspires, in me at least, a longing for a culture in which childlike responses to the world are not quite so stifled.

Coffee/cigarette break number one, about 30 minutes in...

It was a satisfying story to read as we went along.

Today we had a guide, well, more of an accompanier. One of the Shat7a group members has a connection to this man, Abu Saliah, who knows the area we were hiking (Ein Samia) very well. He accompanied us the whole way, as did his two grandsons, Hamoudeh and Usslieh.

Abu Saliah wore a kuffiyeh on his head and hiked in a knitted vest and loafers. He smoked a cigarette about every fifteen minutes and spoke at very high volume about the route, and probably other things, which I did not understand. When we stopped at 10 to make tea, he took out a flute and started playing it.

When we reached the Ein, the spring, at the end of the trail, there was a load of garbage around the water where families were laying out picnics and playing in the water. I was impressed to see the members of Shat7a jump into action collecting the garbage in bags which they then carried more than an hour to our end point. The other Palestinians looked on at them, bemused. I watched Hammoudeh throw his disposable cup into the water.

Out accompanier, Mr. Palestine

Coffee/cigarette break number 2

The trail we took is the one labelled "Mu-ajarrat" that goes east from there toward the water and Jericho. 

The Wadi was quite beautiful. I've not been on a hike like this in Palestine. It reminded me of hiking the valleys and gulches of Utah.

Here's where, all of a sudden, the spring jumped up our of the rock and suddenly there is lush growth (and lots of people and trash).

Water park.

Week Two on Hemingway's "Indian Camp"

This week the HL class was depleted because of a Land Day field trip to plant trees which took up most of the day, and which many students skipped. First period, which did take place, therefore saw a 75% showing of the HL class for week two on "Indian Camp," the Hemingway story that tells of a young boy who goes with his doctor father to help deliver an Indian woman's baby, and after the C-section discovers that the father of the newborn son has committed suicide in the upper bunk. 

Last week we had them do initial written responses before we discussed the piece. Here is A's:

I was so delighted as I read this - my comment, cut off in the photo, is how immediately A. identified several of the key characteristics of Hemingway's writing. If ever there were an argument not to tell students what they'll draw from a piece of literature before they read it. If the essential of a piece is actually true, then they'll pick up on it themselves. And if they don't, I have to be very careful about what I try to get them to see, since that doesn't tend to work very well. I felt good about Wednesday's class though, because I felt like our discussion allowed us to play right on that line between the students being drawn out to the extent of their perceptiveness, and then being challenged to see something that they wouldn't have seen had I not mentioned it.

We started by reading the story for a second time. I was so excited to as them what details they felt took on new significance the second time around, now that they know the story ends in suicide, but that question went close to no where. They drifted into discussing why the man kills himself, which we had already talked about last week, and which felt like a dull direction to take this second discussion. 

I tried to direct the conversation in new directions, particularly to their opinions last week that the story was incomplete. I asked them what a complete story is, and why this one was incomplete. They said that this one didn't allow us to connect with the characters because there was so little detail given. The same few people were sharing their opinions, and I had the impression that they were not necessarily representative of the whole class's perspectives. 

N. said "I think the son is important in the story, because it makes it so the father is explaining everything to the son, so we have everything explained to us as readers." I got up from the circle and took up this moment for a mini-lecture. 

We looked at the father's role more carefully - I wrote the word omniscient on the board and discussed the ways this character seemed to be all knowing - he knows why women scream in labor, he knows all about the birth process, and how to do a Caesarian with a jack-knife, and how to work with Indians, and he knows about how many women and men kill themselves, and he knows that death is easy (at least, he says these things in response to his son's questions). I asked the students what the father didn't know - J. said he didn't know how much pain the woman in labor was actually experiencing, because he'd never experienced it himself. I agreed. No one said that he didn't actually know what was wrong with the father, and the fact that something unbearable was eating him in that upper bunk while his wife gave birth. We established that, and then talked about how limited our knowledge is. The doctor didn't know very much about the situation in the camp, even though he thought he knew a lot. We as readers think we know what's going on in the story until the suicide at the end, then we realise that we have been focusing on the wrong experience. 

We used the following graphic to talk about this concept: 

This ice berg is used to describe Hemingway's story-telling technique. The part of the ice berg above water represents the story, and what the reader feels aware of but never sees, is the ice under water. The true significance of the ice berg is this part, that lies underneath the water, out of sight, but which directly influences the way the ice berg sits, floats, and moves. I pointed out that our own stories of the world around us are similarly limited. We only ever see the ice berg. "My story of each of you is incomplete. My story of even my closest friends and family is incomplete; it has to be, because there is so much about them and their experience that I don't know or understand." I gestured to the student who had been the most outspoken about how incomplete the story is. "Yes, the story is incomplete. But what story isn't?" I asked. We had a good few minutes of discussion after that before the bell wrang. 

Later that day I spoke to S., one of the students in that class, on the Land Day field trip. She said "I really loved what you said in class today - that our stories are incomplete." That was the first time a student had said that to me. It felt very good. 

Now, about Land Day: all eleventh graders who came to school got pick axes and hoes so old they looked like relics, which they were asked to use to plant saplings in holes in the sidewalk in El Bireh. We seemed to be planting where other trees had failed before these new ones, and I wondered if there's a watering system in place for the new arrivals. Even if they grow, it strikes me as a strange project. In the places where there is decent sidewalk in Ramallah, there are often trees planted right in the middle of them, which prevents pedestrians from being able to walk on them. One student pointed out that we should be picking up the litter that layered the surrounding lots. I had to agree.