"I feel fine. There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine." And these are the last lines of the famous story "Hills Like White Elephants," by Ernest Hemingway.
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What is odd about this five-page story is that from the dialogue we can imagine any number of stories: the man is married and is forcing his mistress to have an abortion to spare his wife; he is a bachelor and wants the abortion because he is worried about complicating his life; but it is also possible that he is unselfishly looking ahead to the problems a child would cause the girl; maybe-anything is imaginable-he is seriously ill and is concerned about leaving the girl on her own with a child; we can even imagine that the child's father is some other man whom the girl left to go off with this one, who is advising her to have the abortion but stands ready, should she refuse, to take on the father role himself. And the girl? She might have agreed to the abortion to satisfy her lover; or maybe she took the initiative herself but, as the day approaches, is losing her nerve, feels guilty, and is engaging in some last verbal resistance, directed more at her own conscience than at her partner. Indeed, one could go on forever inventing the situations that might lie behind the dialogue.
As for the nature of the characters, the choice is just as great: the man could be sensitive, loving, tender; he could be selfish, wily, hypocritical. The girl could be hypersensitive, subtle, deeply moral; she could also be capricious, affected, fond of making hysterical scenes.
The real motives behind their behavior are the more unclear as the dialogue carries no indication of how the lines are spoken: fast? slow? ironically, ten-
derly, mechanically, harshly, wearily? The man says: "You know I love you." The girl answers: "I know." But what does that "I know" mean? Does she reallv feel sure of the man's love? Or is she speaking ironically? And what does that irony mean? That the girl doesn't believe in his love? Or that this man's love no longer matters to her?
Apart from the dialogue, the story consists of only a few necessary descriptions; they are as scant as stage directions. Only one motif escapes this rule of maximum economy: the one of the white hills that stretch to the horizon: it returns several times, accompanied by a metaphor (more exactly: simile), the onlv one in the story. Hemingway was no lover of metaphors. Also, this one is not the narrator's, but the girl's; it is she who says, as she gazes at the hills: "They look like white elephants."
Swallowing his beer, the man answers: "I've never seen one."
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I might have," says the man. "Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything."
In these four lines of dialogue, the characters reveal the difference, indeed the opposition, between them: the man shows some reserve toward the girl's poetic invention ("I've never seen one"), she snaps right back, seeming to reproach him for a lack of poetic sensitivity ("you wouldn't have"), and the man (as if already familiar with this reproach and allergic to it) defends himself ("I might have").
Later, when the man assures the girl of his love, she says: "But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?"
"I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it."
So does this different attitude about metaphor at least distinguish between their characters? The girl subtle and poetic, the man literal-minded?
Well, all right, we could see the girl as more poetic than the man. But it's also possible to see her metaphor-find as mannerism, preciosity, affectation: wanting to be admired as original and imaginative, she shows off her little poetical flourishes. If that is the case, the ethical and emotional content of her remarks about the world that will no longer be theirs after the abortion can be attributed to her taste for lyrical exhibitionism rather than to the authentic despair of a woman giving up her motherhood.
No, there is nothing clear about whatever lies behind that simple and banal dialogue. Any man could say the same lines as this man, any woman the same as the girl. Whether a man loves a woman or not, whether he is lying or sincere, he would say the same thing. As though this dialogue were waiting here since the creation of the world to be delivered by countless couples, with no regard to their individual psychology.
Since they have nothing more to work out, it is impossible to make any moral judgment of these characters; as they sit in the train station, everything has already been definitively decided; they have already made their points a thousand times before; a thousand times already they have debated the arguments; now the old dispute (old discussion, old drama) shows only faintly through a conversation where nothing is at stake anymore, and words are just words.
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Even though the story is extremely abstract, describing a quasi-archetypal situation, it is also extremely concrete, attempting to capture the visual and aural surface of a situation, of the dialogue in particular.
Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one, I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two, but the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.
And not only is it lost but we do not even wonder at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are so dazzled by their potency that we don't realize how schematic and meager their content is.
When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it's happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.
We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that
they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present-the concreteness of the present-as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure., is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without knowing what we have lived.
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The need to resist the loss of the fleeting reality of the present arose for the novel, I think, only at a certain moment in its evolution. In Boccaccio the tale exemplifies the abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted: without concrete scenes, nearly without dialogue, a kind of summary, it is a narration that gives us the essence of an event, the causal sequence of a story. The novelists who came after Boccaccio were fine storytellers, but capturing the concreteness of the present moment was neither their issue nor their goal. They were telling a story, without necessarily imagining it in concrete scenes.
The scene becomes the basic element of the novel's composition (the locus of the novelists virtuosity) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The novels of Scott, of Balzac, of Dostoyevsky, are composed as a series of minutely described scenes with their setting, their dialogue, their action; anything not connected with this series of scenes, anything that is not scene, is considered and felt to be secondary, even superfluous. The novel is like a very rich film script.