Now, courage is not always an admirable attribute, for it can be used irresponsibly or stupidly, like the lunatics for whom using violence or exposing themselves to violence is a way of feeling manly, that is, superior to their victims, whom they can flatten with their fists or wipe out with a bullet. This contemptible version of courage, a product of the most retrograde macho tradition, was not completely foreign to Hemingway, and it appears at times in his tales, above all in his accounts of hunting in Africa and his peculiar conception of the art of bullfighting. But, in its other aspect, courage is not found in exhibitionism and physical display, it is a discreet, stoical way of confronting adversity, without giving up or falling into self pity, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, who endures in a quietly elegant way the physical tragedy that deprives him of love and sex, or like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls when faced by imminent death. Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea belongs to this noble lineage of brave men. He is a very humble man, very poor — he lives in a wretched shack and uses newspapers for bedding — and the butt of the village’s jokes. And he is also alone: he lost his wife many years earlier, and his only company since then has been his memories of the lions that he saw walking along the beaches in Africa at night from deck of the tramp steamer where he worked, some American baseball players like Joe DiMaggio, and Manolín the boy who used to go fishing with him and who now, due to family pressure, has to help another fisherman. For him, fishing is not as it was for Hemingway and many of his characters, a sport, a pastime, a way to win prizes or of proving themselves by facing up to the challenges of the deep, but a vital necessity, a job which — through great hardship and effort — keeps him from dying of hunger. This context makes Santiago’s struggle with the giant marlin extraordinarily human, as does the modesty and naturalness with which the old fisherman carries out his heroic deed: without boasting, without feeling a hero, like a man who is simply carrying out his duty.
There are many versions as to the origins of this story. According to Norberto Fuentes, who has made a detailed study of all the years that Hemingway spent in Cuba,26 Gregorio Fuentes, who was for many years the skipper of Hemingway’s boat, El Pilar, claimed to have given him the material for the story. Both would have witnessed a struggle similar to this that took place at the end of the forties, off the port of Cabañas, between a great fish and an old fisherman from Majorca. However, Fuentes also remarks that, according to some fishermen, Carlos Gutiérrez, Hemingway’s first skipper, was the model for the story, while others attribute it to a local fisherman, Anselmo Hernández. But in his biography of Hemingway, Charles Baker points out that the central part of the story — the fight between the old fisherman and a great fish — had already been sketched out in April 1936, in an article published by Hemingway in Esquire magazine. Whatever the true origins of the story, whether it was completely invented or recreated from some living testimony, it is clearly the case that the central theme of the tale had been in search of its author ever since he began to write his first stories, because it distils, like an essence purified of all extraneous contamination, the vision of the world that he had been fashioning throughout his work. And doubtless for that reason he wrote it with all his very considerable stylistic control and technical mastery. For the context of the story, Hemingway used his experience: his passion for fishing and his long acquaintance with the village and fishermen of Cojímar: the factory, the Perico bar, La Terraza, where the neighbours drink and talk. The text is permeated with Hemingway’s affection for, and identification with, the marine landscape and the men and women of the sea on the island of Cuba. The Old Man and the Sea pays them a great homage.
There is a turning point in the novel, a real qualitative leap, which turns Santiago’s adventure, first with the fish and later with the sharks, into a symbol of the Darwinian struggle for survival, of the human condition, forced to kill in order to survive, and of the unexpected reserves of valour and resistance that human beings possess, which can be summoned when their honour is at stake. This chivalric concept of honour — respect for oneself, blind observance of a self-imposed moral code — is what finally makes the fisherman Santiago commit himself, as he does in his fight with the fish, to a struggle that, at an indefinable moment, is no longer just one more episode in his daily struggle to earn a living, and becomes instead an ordeal, a test in which the dignity and pride of the old man are being measured. And he is very conscious of this ethical and metaphysical dimension to the struggle — during his long soliloquy he exclaims, ‘But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.’ At this point in the tale, the story is no longer just recounting the adventure of a fisherman with a biblical name, it is recounting the whole adventure of humankind, summed up in that odyssey without witnesses or prizes, where cruelty and valour, need and injustice, and force and inventiveness are intertwined, along with the mysterious design that maps out the fate of each individual.
For this remarkable transformation in the story to occur — the shift from the particular to a universal archetype — there has been a gradual build-up of emotions and sensations, of hints and allusions that gradually extend the horizons of the tale to a point of complete universality. It manages this shift through the skill with which the story is written and constructed. The omniscient narrator narrates from very close to the protagonist but often lets him take over the account, disappearing behind the thoughts, exclamations and monologues through which Santiago distracts himself from monotony or anguish as he waits for the invisible fish that is dragging his boat along to get tired and come up to the surface so that he can kill it. The narrator is always completely persuasive, both when he describes objectively what is happening from a point removed, or when he allows Santiago to relieve him of this task. He achieves this persuasive power through the coherence and simplicity of his language that seems — only seems, of course — to be that of a man as simple and intellectually limited as the old fisherman, and through displaying a prodigious knowledge of all the secrets of navigation and fishing in the waters of the Gulf, something that fits the personality of Santiago like a glove. This knowledge explains the prodigious skill that Santiago displays in his struggle with the fish that, in this story, represents brute force that is defeated by the seafaring ingenuity and art of the old man.
These technical details help to reinforce the realist effect of a story which is in fact more symbolic or mythical than realist, as do the few but effective images that are used to map concisely the life and character of Santiago: those lions on the African beaches, those games of baseball that brighten up his life and the extraordinary legend of the striker DiMaggio (who, like him, was the son of a fisherman). Apart from being very believable, all of this shows the narrowness and primitiveness of the fisherman’s life, which makes his achievement all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. For the person who, in The Old Man and the Sea, represents man at his best, in one of those exceptional circumstances in which, through his will and moral conscience, he manages to rise above his condition and rub shoulders with the mythological heroes and gods, is a wretched, barely literate old man who is treated as a joke by the village because of his age and lack of money. In a highly favourable review soon after the book was published, Faulkner stated that in this novel, Hemingway had ‘discovered God’.27 That is possible but, of course, unverifiable. But he also stated that the main theme of the story was ‘compassion’, and here he hit the mark. In this moving story, sentimentality is conspicuous by its absence; everything takes place with Spartan sobriety on Santiago’s small boat and in the ocean depths. And yet, from the first to the last line of the tale, a warmth and delicacy permeates everything that happens, reaching a climax in the final moments when, on the point of collapse through grief and exhaustion, old Santiago, stumbling and falling, drags the mast of his boat towards his shack through the sleeping village. What the reader feels in this moment is difficult to describe, as is always the case with the mysterious messages that great works convey. Perhaps, ‘mercy’, ‘compassion’, ‘humanity’, are the words that come closest to this feeling.