CLASS NOTES: The Snows of Kilimanjaro

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)

Hemingway’s motto: GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

Hemingway’s Style: THE ICEBERG PRINCIPLE

Hemingway’s Image: PAPA HEMINGWAY

NOTE 1: BACKGROUND

1. The influence of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) on American literature, especially upon the short story, has been great. His short stories are usually simple in style but full of pathos. He is a master of compressed prose and understated emotions. Most of his stories, such as “A Clean, Well-lighted Place,” “A Very Short Story” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” are brief vignettes of some violent emotion that finds expression in negation, anxiety or fear. Hemingway’s stoic sensibility is intricately woven in the highly realistic drama of life. His simple prose style has made him popular amongst the young and has also given rise to a lot of imitation.

2. Hemingway’s style, subject matter and life are all representative of modern American writing. He was no ivory tower aesthete but lived life fully. He hunted wild game in Africa, went for deep sea fishing, covered the two world wars in Europe and wrote about these experiences in his short stories and novels.  His motto in life was “grace under pressure,” and it became his value in life. He gives this value to his characters especially when faced with imminent death. His characters face emotional crises with tenacity and boldness. Often they lack the ability to compromise and defy the norms of society. They encounter life with gusto without pretense. His first persona Nick Adams sees a doctor at an American Indian camp deliver a baby with a jackknife. Watching this incident as a young boy Nick develops a tenacity of purpose never to give up. When Nick is wounded in Italy during WW I he rehabilitates himself physically and mentally by conducting knee exercises and returning to the Michigan north woods. The autobiographical novel expands the area of American literature.

3. Later in some of his mature short stories such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway makes both characters and situations more complex. Hemingway’s style in “Snows” is both intense and invigorating. He connects interior-monologue flashbacks with present-time narratives to show how Harry is dying of a gangrenous wound. The debilitating effect of his wife’s money on his creativity is intensified through the use of animal imagery especially the hyena and buzzard that are waiting to feed on his carcass.

NOTE 2: THE ICEBERG PRINCIPLE

1.      Hemingway attempts to show a sequence of events, an objective correlative, and an iceberg principle to evoke a specific emotion. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway suggested that a writer must “omit” things and the reader will understand the unstated—“The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” This technique might be called the minimalist approach where sentences are reduced to the barest minimum and paragraphs are kept short. For example in For Whom the Bell Tolls he writes: “He was dead and that was all.” However the writer must be always conscious of the omissions and make the reader sense the omitted parts through suggestions. If we take a look at the endings of three novels by Hemingway it is possible to see the iceberg principle in operation. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley plan a life together but we are never told that they will never be together. He just leaves the reader with the phrase “it is pretty to think” that they could have led a damned good life together.  In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry walks back to his hotel alone in the rain leaving behind his dead lover in the hospital. The reader does not know if walking in the rain represents freedom or devastation for Frederick. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan awaits his imminent death but we are just told that he felt his “heart beating” against the forest floor. Hemingway never explains the condition of his characters but leaves it to the intelligent reader to guess and understand.

NOTE 3: THE ICEBERG PRINCIPLE

1. Hemingway proposes two models for writing short stories. The first model is the model of omission where the actual story is left out from the short story such as “The Sea Change.” The second model contains exhaustive material that could be expanded into four novels such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”  However both models suggest a narrative technique where the writer leaves out the actual story from the short story. Hemingway creates a temporal conflict between the actual chronology of the story and the way that chronology is presented in the short story. He juxtaposes surface sequential narrative against submerged fragmentary storyline. He uses the subjective and fragmentary discourse of his characters to suggest to the reader what is left out.  

2. Hemingway presents an austere choice of words, school-like grammar, unvarnished descriptions, short declarative sentences and a language simple enough for the common reader to understand.  Hemingway follows Jane Austen in his penchant for understatement and economy. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “Hills Like White

3. Elephants" are examples of Hemingway's most pared-down style, in which he removes himself from the role of narrator. The stories are almost wholly composed of dialogue. One must engage him or herself in the narratives and ignite his or her imagination to understand the emotional core of each of these stories. Hemingway expects us to. In his short stories Hemingway was able to handle both style and structure with dexterity dealing with the most enduring themes in American literature—death, writing, machismo, and social alienation.

NOTE 4: IMPACT OF TWO WORLD WARS

1. Both, World Wars I and II unleashed unprecedented death and destruction on the world. In America, anger and resentment characterized a general reaction to these two global conflicts. Discontent and disillusionment prevailed in every walk of life. Individuals felt despair and anxiety about their situation. Society was completely ravaged by the two Wars. People sought escape routes to some sort of happiness that had proved elusive up to now. Young people who came of age in the years following World War I were alienated from society and suffered from a disjointed perspective of the world. They found the values of pre- and postwar American society deceptive and somewhat perverted. Rejecting standardized American values they became social exiles. Through their despair and loneliness they tried to redefine the world and reinvent their beliefs, dreams and hopes. These people were called the Lost Generation.  

THE LOST GENERATION

2. The term Lost Generation was coined in 1920 in Paris by Gertrude Stein who was a member of the expatriate circle in Paris. Initially the term meant nothing at all but gradually acquired meaning. It became a term of identification for U.S. and British expatriates who summarily rejected American and English conventions and readily adopted the more open and appealing life style of Left Bank Paris. Sitting in cafes along the Boulevard Montparnasse, Paris these people would talk, eat and watch crowds milling outside. The Lost Generation could not accept the pre-war belief in love, romanticism and prosperity. The war had destroyed both optimism and hope. Even the Great Boom of the 1920’s promising economic prosperity did not attract these people who saw in it corruption and insincerity. Unable to accept pre-war American values, distrusting postwar values, the Lost Generation became spiritually bankrupt and emotionally sterile. In order to escape the spiritual vacuum they sought refuge in pleasures of the body—alcohol and sex. Alcoholism and sexual promiscuity became two rampant diseases amongst bohemian expatriate American writers who reacted strongly against American consumerism. Since they could not believe in love or religion they chose sexual freedom and cynicism or moral indifference. Young people who came of age after World War II also underwent a similar process of disillusionment and reinvention. They were called the Beat Generation.

NOTE 5: SEARCH FOR IDENTITY

1.      Literature in America tried to answer the needs of the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation. For some it became possible through literature to search for a new identity and restructure a violated individualism. American writers, who themselves have suffered during the two World Wars, wrote from personal experience. Their semi-autobiographical novels had a ring of authenticity that immediately appealed to people disillusioned and abandoned by society. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) captured the alienation and detachment of the Lost Generation, while Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) highlighted the spiritual disorder of the Beat Generation.

2.     In a search for a stable identity, Hemingway often leads his characters into loss of identity. In “The Snows,” Harry shows symptoms of a loss of identity after his leg becomes gangrenous from a thorn prick in the African savannas. Harry loses his stable sense of self which is revealed through recurrent images of vultures and hyenas.  These scavengers haunt his memory and imagination and enter his reverie and hallucinations both as image and symbol. He feels frustrated and wants to destroy whatever little is left of his relationship with Helen.. He fails to realize the real reason of his anxiety. He wants to escape and yet remain in the place of his wounding. He does not understand the African reality quite. He underestimates the seriousness of his hurt in the wilderness which finally kills him. In the story “A Way You’ll Never Be,” Nick Adams also returns to the place of his wounding in Fossalta di Piava. But instead of understating his pain and overcoming it, he feels confused. Most characters in Hemingway’s stories attempt self-therapy in order to ease their anxiety but fail.  

NOTE 6:  RACE AND IDENTITY

1.      Hemingway is deeply engaged with issues of race and identity in the African content and tries to construct an American identity through this encounter. The use of the colonial context to construct identity makes Hemingway’s fiction both imperialistic and dominating in nature. While earlier criticism of Hemingway has focused on his machismo and misogyny, new critics have highlighted his sympathies with Africa, singling out his desire to become a member of the Wakamba tribe. However Hemingway did not understand the  Wakamba tribe  as well as he did the Ojibwa. Hemingway’s understanding of Africa is more of a tourist albeit and avid one.

2. There have been lots of books on Hemingway’s stories relating to father-son relationship, primitivism, lost wilderness and male initiation rites but few on race relations and white domination.  Nick Adams’ relationship to Native Americans is based on racial domination. Adams sees whiteness as both embattled and defensive amidst racial differences and tensions.  Ironically, in Hemingway, often white privilege turns self-destructive and defeatist   

NOTE 7: HEMINGWAY

1. Born in Oak Park, Illinois on 21^st July 1899, Hemingway spent most of his life as a Caucasian American expatriate. Living in a period of bewildering social change, he served as an ambulance crew volunteer in Italy during World War I where he was wounded. He used this experience to write A Farewell to Arms (1929), a tragic love-story of a young American deserter Fredric Henry and a British nurse Catherine Barkley who dies in childbirth in Switzerland. War, bull fighting, fishing and big game hunting are some of his common themes used by Hemingway; and they symbolize honor, primitivism, endurance and dignity. He was forever trying to distance himself from the strongly middle-class, church-going, Caucasian Christian background that he inherited as an American. Rejecting Christian salvation, Hemingway introduced individual endurance in the face of hardships and the reality of death. Most of his short stories deal with individuals trying to confront their fears and anxieties activated by old age, accident or abortion. He spent the last few years of his life in Cuba and then committed suicide. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. 

NOTE 8: SUMMARY OF THE SNOWS

1. The story was first published in August 1936 issue of Esquire and was written after his first savanna safari in Africa. Hemingway was so moved by his trip that he wanted to go back someday. A rich woman offered to finance him, his wife Pauline and herself. But Hemingway turned down her offer always wondering how it would have been he gone on the proposed trip. This was the origin of the story. Therefore it is possible to say that “The Snows” is a mixture of fact and fiction. The main character is based on his life—“someone who cannot sue me –that is me.” As his leg becomes gangrenous the protagonist goes in and out of consciousness, so does Hemingway’s prose. In his conscious moments Harry argues with his wife and expresses his resignation upon his impending death. During his dream-like state he offers insights into the reason of his choices and reveals his regrets and joys. These memories often tack Hemingway’s own progress as a writer.

2. “The Snows,” exposes the façade of love a middle-aged American couple, Harry and Helen, have created for themselves. An accident in Africa activates hidden anxieties about the past and present and reveals the predatory relationship of the couple. Both are on an African safari, perhaps on their way to the snow-covered Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa. They are here because they are looking for happiness. “Africa was where he was happiest in the good time of his life, so he had come out here to start again” (SOK, p. 60). Harry wants to “get back into training” here so that he could “work the fat off his soul” and become a real “fighter” (SOK, p. 60). Not everything about him has gone bad. He makes a new determination to succeed. But while trying to photograph a herd of water bucks a thorn scratches his knee which, due to lack of proper medical attention, becomes gangrenous.  Harry’s latent regret as writer and lover, surfaces when he faces imminent death. He fears that now that he is dying he will not be able to write about twenty excellent stories that he had been thinking about. In his dialogues with his physically attractive but aging wife Helen his emotional compromises, dreamy idealism and destructive ego surfaces.

NOTE 9: SUMMARY AND END

1. As Harry sees his fast approaching death he becomes nasty to her. Though he realizes that he must not turn into a snake “biting itself because its back is broken” but he cannot help it.  He loses all interest in things except drinking so that he can forget his immediate situation.. He blames her wealth for his inadequacy, failure and decadence. She is saddened by his cruel criticism of their relationship, but keeps up the pretense of loving him. Her love for him had been just self-sacrifice. Now she is pained to hear that he never loved her. But she seems optimistic that everything will turn out to be all right

in the end. Harry on the other hand resolves to take responsibility for the lies he has lived by “If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it” (SOK, p. 60). When the long-awaited plane finally arrives Harry’s struggles are over. As Harry flies in the Puss Moth to a hospital he dies.

NOTE 10: MOUNT KILIMANJARO

1. Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in the African continent located in northeast coast of Tanzania and has both breathtaking scenery and biodiversity. Tanzania was colonized by the British after WWII and became independent in 1961 and espoused a pan-African socialism under. Julius Nyerere (1922-1999). The work Kilimanjaro comes from the Swahili word kilima which means little mountain and Njaro which implies white or shining. Some people also think it means a mountain which defeats the bird, the leopard and the caravan.

2.  Right from the beginning the impacting relationship between the epigraph, the dialogical narrative and the self-reflexive prose becomes apparent to the reader. The epigraph impersonally places certain facts before the reader. Firstly, the Africans call the western summit of Mount Kilimanjaro the house of gods, perhaps implying that every living being must submit to its power. Secondly, the epigraph tells us that a mystery surrounds the carcass of a dead leopard discovered at the summit of the mountain. And finally the magnetic majesty of the snow-covered peak itself is placed before us. The epigraph is followed by the dialogical narrative that takes place at the base of the mountain. A temporary shelter has come up where African servants and a woman taking care of a dying man. This temporary shelter is a part of an uncivilized world inhabited by game animals. Here the dying man has to come to terms with himself. The self reflexive prose in italics helps us to understand the stories Harry wants to write, some of his childhood and adult life experiences and his ultimate regret at not having written anything in particular.  The five italicized sections integrated in the story intensify the emotive quality. However the third section from pages 67 to 69 is in the first person protagonist voice. The details here are sharp as Harry remembers his childhood, trout fishing in the Black Forest, Paris drunkards and Marie, his femme de menage. The epigraph, the dialogue and the italicized prose together create a richer complexity of thought and emotion.

NOTE 11: SYMBOLISM

1. It is hard to understand “The Snows” without analyzing the symbolism employed in the story. A symbol is an area of meaning in motion giving rise to many interpretations. Hemingway uses symbols to enlarge the meaning of his vision and make it psychologically complex. Harry’s (or Henry’s) name implies a person who is the “ruler of an enclosure.” He wants to reach the summit of his ambition but is entrapped in the enclosure of his egotism and sloth. Helen is his torch as her name suggests. She shows the way for him to struggle and realize his destiny by providing him a congenial atmosphere and sexual satisfaction. An immediate connection is established between the frozen carcass of a leopard on the western summit of Kilimanjaro and the predatory instinct of the hero moving away from his habitat. Helen regrets having come to Africa. She feels that if they had stayed on in Paris things would have been fine:

‘I wish we’d never come,’ the woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and biting her lip. ‘You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable (SOK, p. 55).’

2. But Africa is the dark mysterious continent, symbolizing the primordial and mysterious consciousness of man. Here man must confront his darkest fears and his deepest anxieties. Incapacitated by illness, isolated at the foot of Kilimanjaro and away from Western civilization, Harry and Helen must confront their fears and come to terms with them. Africa also symbolizes the untapped creative potential of a writer. The untapped creative potential and the imminence of death that would cut short the realization of the creative potential generate anxiety. Both Hemingway and Harry pursue the writer’s craft. And therefore, as some critics have pointed out the death of the hero in the story is also the death of the author.

NOTE 12:  HARRY AND HEMINGWAY

1. The strong identification between the author and the hero helps Hemingway to create Harry’s character from the inside. Hemingway enters the consciousness of the hero and reveals the latter’s darkest thoughts and compromises. Hemingway’s minute observation of nature helps him to develop a mood of sadness and show Harry’s regret in life. Hemingway’s self-absorbed, intense prose used to describe Harry’s subtle shift in moods changes when it comes to Helen. The prose becomes simpler. Hemingway feels greater empathy for Helen but does not reveal her complexity. We only see her as a self-sacrificing, emotionally dependent middle-aged woman—a provider of money and sex. Helen’s portrayal could also reflect Hemingway’s incomplete perception of women, his inability to understand them completely and his misogyny.

HELEN

2. Hemingway is good in his understanding of men who can stand alone but lacks knowledge about women. His interest is in Harry not Helen. Therefore Helen’s character is presented from the outside, sketchy and incomplete. But we do come to know that though she is positive and resolute, she is often given to bouts of loneliness and craving for freedom. Helen was a “good-looking woman”, with a “pleasant body” and “a great talent and appreciation for the bed” (SOK, p. 61). After her husband’s death she devoted herself to her “two just-grown children” but felt quite “frightened” and “alone” (SOK, p. 61). In order to escape loneliness she began to drink a lot, read books, shot game and reared horses. Then she took lovers but they bored her. She confessed that her husband “never bored her.” She was looking for someone who she could respect together with herself. Then she met Harry who she thought “did exactly what he wanted to” ‘SOK, p. 61). She respected his independence and fell in love with him building a “new life” with him. She saw him as “the most complete man” she had ever known (SOK, p. 72). She “loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession. But theirs was a somewhat mercenary relationship. Harry “did not love her at all” but lied about his feelings in order to gain her wealth and the security therefrom.

NOTE 13: HARRY

1. Harry knows he had never done anything in life. He has always lived as a parasite on women. He admits that each successive woman he had fallen in love with was richer than the pervious one till he came to Helen who was the richest. His entire life was summed up in the following sentence: “It was never what he had done, but always what he could do” (SOK, p. 60). Inaction, compromises and a dreamy idealism had made him thoroughly incompetent. Though he blamed Helen’s money and affection for destroying his creative impulse, he knew that his own decadent life style had destroyed his creativity:

He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook (SOK, p. 60).

He had become a mercenary. He had traded his talents and vitality for money and in doing so lost his creativity. Whatever little talent was left was lost in excessive drinking. Now that he was dying he became bitter about love—‘Love is dunghill … and I’m the cock that gets on it to crow” (SOK, p. 58).

2.      Harry was always frightened of physical pain. It led to both physical and emotional compromises and also conditioned his attitudes to love and death. “One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out … (SOK, p. 71). Since he felt he loved intensely and demanded too much and suffered because of it he gave up loving altogether. “He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out” (SOK, p. 64). His pretense of love was born out of a fear of pain arising out of unrequited love. “He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life, and when your affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money” (SOK, p. 61).

3. Harry was obsessed with death. But now that it was coming he felt tired and “angry” (SOK, p. 55) He found a slow death boring. He wanted it to be quick and painless. He was full of exasperation as he waited to die:

‘I’m getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.’

‘It’s a bore,’ he said out aloud.

‘What is, my dear?’

‘Anything you do too bloody long (SOK, p. 72).’

NOTE 14: IMAGES OF DEATH IN ‘THE SNOWS’

1. Harry sees death through four sharp images—as a bad smell, as a puff of wind, as a shapeless weight and as a slinking hyena. These images reflect his own fear of death. He becomes conscious of death three times. Each time his awareness of death is preceded by his sexual desire for Helen and appreciation of her sensuous beauty. The first time Harry senses the approach of death he is indulging in an erotic sexual fantasy about Helen. During this fantasy he realizes the immediacy of death.  “It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it” (SOK, p. 63). The “evil-smelling emptiness” comes with “a rush,” overwhelming him. Immediately it is linked to the slinking hyena. The second time it happens he is once more admiring her “good breasts,” her “useful thighs,” sensuous hands and pleasant smile. “This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall (SOK, p. 66). Harry senses death as an evil wind that snuffs out life. The image of the flames going tall obviously has an evil connotation—the presence of an evil spirit. The third time he senses death, Harry is once more watching Helen’s sleepy and “pleasantly lined face” (SOK, p. 72). She is sitting in a chair by the fire and presents a sensuous image of an aging though still desirable woman. Just then he smells death—“death had come and rested on the foot of the cot hand he could smell its breath” (SOK, p. 72). It has “no shape,” it “simply occupied space” (SOK, p. 72). It has a bad smell and sits as a heavy weight on his chest.

NOTE 15: NARCISSISM AND SELF-GRATIFICATION IN ‘THE SNOWS’

1. Sex without love is an extreme form of narcissism that Harry suffers from. Wanting her without loving her is a narcissistic self-gratification. Harry does not realize that beneath any erotic alterity lies the responsibility for the other. Eros never precedes responsibility (Levinas 1988 192). Before he can reach the summit, the House of Gods, he has to understand the dignity of the house of man—his own marriage. Before he can realize his own dignity he must accept the dignity of others, especially Helen and all the other women he had betrayed. Images of sex and death bring out the conflict between his self-gratifying ego and the erotic other.

 

2. When the plane climbs higher taking Harry, together with Helen, for medical treatment, Harry sees the “square top” of Mt. Kilimanjaro—“great, high and unbelievably white in the sun”(SOK, p. 74.). Harry understands that that’s “where he was going” (SOK, p. 74). An immediate connection is established between Harry, the leopard and the square top of Kilimanjaro. Once he accepts death and love he can reach the “House of God,” become one with his great vitality symbolized in the leopard and purify the darkness in his soul in the whiteness of the snow. The epigraph tells us that it is impossible to find out what the leopard was “seeking at that altitude” (SOK, p. 53). Harry too is “seeking” something—seeking love, creativity and purity. In confronting himself, facing death, overcoming his fears and inhibitions he has finally triumphed over the “catalogue” of his weaknesses (SOK, p. 60). He has left behind the obscene vultures and foul-smelling hyenas of his life and made friends with the leopard, the vital principle of his life. In dying he becomes fully alive.

NOTE

Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Immanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 1974; (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 192. Levinas wrote, “The sense of this alteration must indeed be clarified in its turn. But it was here important to underline the possibility of the libido in the more elementary and more rich signification of proximity, a possibility included in the unity of the face and the skin, even if only in the extreme turnings about of a face. Beneath the erotic alterity there is the alterity of the-one-for-the-other, responsibility before Eros.”