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.