A Religious Experience

Reflections on Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"

To every man his little cross. Or, in this case, a mast. Hemingway can deny the allegory all he wants, but the allusions in The Old Man and the Sea thud like the old man’s tiller against the sharks’ heads: Santiago’s straw-hat cuts his forehead (pg. 46); his hands are injured by the line, and later, upon seeing more sharks, he utters a word—Ay—for which “there is no translation… and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood” (pg. 107); he carries the mast before and after the fishing expedition across his shoulder, falling six times on the return trip (pg. 26, pg. 121); the line weighs upon him across the shoulders as he waits for the marlin to grow hungry and tired (pg. 47); overcoming the marlin—leaving and returning to Cuba—takes three days; and the heavy weather is expected to last three days, i.e., he won’t be able to rise and fish again until then. And, of course, he has faith (pg.10-11) and he prays (pg. 65) and he suffers (pg. 65 etc.). I found Santiago’s Passion utterly exhilarating. He is all of us, striving, or rebelling,¹ against the inexorable. As he says mid-fight against the marlin, “I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures” (pg. 66).

The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich

The story is simple: Santiago, an old fisherman, is unlucky, and alas, at sea as in life, luck is paramount. It’s been 84 days since he’s had success. Manolin, his young companion and trainee since the age of five, has been forced by his parents to fish with others; he still supports Santiago however he can, but he is not with him this fateful day. Santiago encounters a tremendous marlin at sea, alone; the noble beast tugs Santiago in his little skiff far from Cuba’s shores. Eventually he overcomes the purple-streaked monster—it takes all of his tricks, as well as the very limits of his ailing aged strength—but on the return homeward he is beset by sharks. Despite his every effort—a harpoon, a makeshift spear, the tiller itself—Santiago is overcome, and all that remains of the marlin by the time he docks is the head, bones, and tail of the 18-foot long leviathan. As he laments upon seeing the first shark: “it might as well have been a dream” (pg. 101). Hemingway ends the tale with some tourists mistaking the bones for a shark—these bones and the nonsense said about them are all that attest to Santiago’s heroics—and the old man asleep with the boy watching over him. Santiago dreams about the lions on the coast of Africa that he saw as a boy.

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What frustrates me about Hemingway is how effortless he reads. It’s like he’s just walking. It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to be poignant, but he hits you right between the eyes anyway. At the height of his travails Santiago says to himself, after wishing the days’ events were merely a dream, "but man is not made for defeat… a man can be destroyed but not defeated" (pg. 103). How Sisyphean and absurd and true! He also muses earlier about how every fish, every experience to that point, was meaningless: “The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it” (pg. 66). How Aristotelian: one swallow does not the spring make, one success does not a man make. We must assert ourselves in the world perpetually; we exist only in the doing.

Autumn Sea by Gustave Courbet

I appreciate Hemingway's ability to surprise me. I had thought of only two options as I read: either the old man succeeds, or he fails. But he does both: he overcomes the historic marlin, and he loses it to the sharks. I didn't expect the sharks. I could feel his exhaustion as he clawed against the inevitable, hopeless but striving. He is every man at his inevitable terminus, alone and tired and delirious. Does his failure matter? Does the praise of his kinsmen account for his empty coffers? And what do the lions in Africa mean?

On that last question, I have at least the inkling of an idea: on a basic level, the lions on the beaches of Africa are a memory from Santiago’s childhood. It is a nostalgic keepsake, a warm and bright comfort in the twilight of his life. But there’s something more: Santiago speaks of the marlin in the same way the great white hunter Robert Wilson speaks of the old lion and the massive buffalo in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” published 16 years prior. There is a respect for the brave animal that contests to the end, mortal wound be damned. It’s a personification, though there’s a purity that the animals possess that humans do not, at least in Santiago’s view of the marlin. It is Santiago who brought “[his] treachery” to the great fish and forced him to fight against the old man’s “snares and traps and treacheries” (pg. 50). There’s a naturalistic belief that these powerful creatures, insofar as they exhibit a human bravery, are also bereft of the human capacity for vice. I wonder if the lions of Africa—infused as they are in Hemingway’s other works and archetypally with this masculine virtue—are meant here also to symbolize bravery and the like, consigned however to a dream for the old man whose body and life are deteriorating.

This idea of the animal as our brethren, innocent but brutish, is illustrated also with a memory: Santiago and Manolin had chanced upon a marlin couple on a previous fishing expedition. The male always lets the female eat first, per Santiago, and so the old man and the boy hooked the female marlin. They reeled her in and clubbed her. And the entire time they had her on the line until they had her aboard, the male marlin was swimming around her. Once she was aboard, the male marlin “jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed” (pg. 50). It’s a touching scene of almost human companionship, marked by the sadness of the fishermen: “that was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly” (pg. 50). This continues with the great marlin in the present, with Santiago even wishing to help his antagonist at one point: “I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it” (pg. 59). And, later: “there are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands. [My left hand] must uncramp. It is unworthy of it to be cramped” (pg. 64). The marlin is “my friend,” Santiago says, “but I must kill him” (pg. 75). Santiago is the pugilist, not the fighter or soldier: his opponent has his respect, augmented by his opponent’s virtues.

And there is some regret in the inevitable: “‘I’ll kill him though,’ he said. ‘In all his greatness and his glory.’ Although it is unjust, he thought” (pg. 66). And later, “he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worth of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity” (pg. 75). This sense of the fish’s nobility reaches a climax as their fight nears its end, the marlin not yet relenting:

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

Now you are getting confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head clear. Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought. (pg. 92)

The sense of nobility here commingles with regret and potentially delirium, though I’d contend that all of these thoughts are consistent with Santiago’s character throughout the story. These great beasts possess a human bravery unalloyed by human vices; they represent a noble pinnacle to which we can only aspire.

Fishermen at Sea by JMW Turner

But as elsewhere in Hemingway’s corpus, the concept of bravery and masculine virtue is still more complex. Consider this narration, after Santiago accepts two sardines from his young ward:

[Santiago] was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride. (pg. 13-14)

Manolin wishes to dote upon his elder, spurred by love and duty and pity. But this does not affect Santiago’s self-conception; he urges restraint and demonstrates confidence, but is also not above accepting help. “True pride” is something else.

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There is an entire essay to be written about just this relationship. The care Manolin shows the elder fisherman warms the heart. Consider this passage, on page 21, after the boy has brought him a container of food, cutlery, and beer:

“I’m ready [to eat] now,” the old man said. “I only needed time to wash.”

Where did you wash? the boy thought. The village water supply was two streets down the road. I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket.

“Your stew is excellent,” the old man said.

“Tell me about the baseball,” the boy asked him.

Manolin indulges the old man by not questioning him—is it for the sake of the old man’s pride? Merely a matter of respect? Or perhaps a recognition that his mind is beginning to deteriorate? I think it’s more likely a mix of the latter two, but it is ambiguous—and thinks of all the ways he still needs to help him, to anticipate his needs. He converses with him and has him talk about baseball, a joy for them both. And prior to this, Manolin asserts, “You’ll not fish without eating while I’m alive” (pg. 19): the boy pretending to be a man. The boy cries without shame—even in front of other men—upon finding Santiago asleep in his bed, his body ravaged by the many days at sea. Manolin cares for him, and says he will fish with him now, his parents be damned. “But we will fish together now for I still have much to learn,” Manolin says, though clearly his concern is not for himself. Santiago demurs—“I am not lucky. I am not lucky anymore” (pg. 125)—but relents before his adamant companion. Here we find a boy willing to sacrifice for his elder, who puts his own needs and best interests aside for the love and companionship of a friend, who loves and cares deeply and whose pride is not wounded by it. There’s a lesson here, perhaps, for the lost boys of today.

And perhaps the boy found his pride modelled in his elder companion. Consider this description of Santiago as he prepares for another day at sea after 84 failures:

[Santiago’s] hope and his confidence had never gone. But now they were freshening as when the breeze rises. (pg. 13)

The short description is redolent of John Donne’s reflections on his love for his wife Anne in “Love’s Growth” (I share here only the final two of four stanzas):

And yet no greater, but more eminent,

Love by the spring is grown;

As, in the firmament,

Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,

Gentle love-deeds, as blossoms on a bough,

From love’s awakened root do bud out now.

If, as water stirred more circles be

Produced by one, love such additions take,

Those, like so many spheres, but one heaven make,

For they are all concentric unto thee;

And though each spring do add to love new heat,

As princes do in time of action get

New taxes, and remit them not in peace,

No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.

The old man has never lost himself, despite his many losses and deprivations—a wife, food, his ward, the strength of his arms and legs. When he awakens after his ordeal, he and the boy plan what they’ll need for their next fishing expedition (pg. 125). There is an innate, unassailable nobility in this poor man’s bones, a confidence that may lull in winter like Donne’s love but never fails to warm in the spring sun, and I find it utterly ennobling.

1. Santiago is, in many but not all ways, an absurd hero: he continues to lift his boulder—his mast and skiff, perhaps—each day, whether he returns with a fish or not. He recognizes the capriciousness of the sea and of life, though, on the other hand, he also has faith (pg. 10-11), which keeps him from fully entering Camus’ desert.

And this isn’t a surprise. Camus loved Hemingway, and he wrote The Stranger in part modelled after his style. I also wonder if the French writer was influenced by more than just Hemingway’s style: in “Solder’s Home,” Hemingway gives us the story of a veteran deadened by his experiences at war. He brings his mother to tears when he thoughtlessly speaks the truth: he does not love her, or anyone. And he cannot pray.