Lacanian Reading

Hemingway's "After the Storm": A Lacanian Reading
Ben Stoltzfus¹

"After the Storm" is ostensibly a "true story" told to Ernest Hemingway in 1928 by Eddie "Bra" Saunders, a Key West charter-boat captain, about a conch-fisherman's account of the sinking off the Florida Keys, in the late summer of 1919, of a Spanish steamer, the Valbanera.  The genesis of the story has been fully documented by Susan Beegel in her book Hemingway's Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples, in a chapter entitled "Just Skillful Reporting?  Fact and Fiction in 'After the Storm'" (69-88).  For the most part, however, commentators have paid little attention to the story, and there are no Freudian or Lacanian readings of it.
    The story begins on the waterfront with a fight between two men: the narrator and his assailant.  The aggressor is choking the narrator, but the latter manages to free himself by slashing the other man with a knife.  In the mistaken belief that he has killed his opponent, the narrator-fugitive hides out and with his skiff tries to salvage what he can from a sunken ship that has gone down in the storm.  The man dives repeatedly, first with a wrench, then with a grapple, in a vain attempt to break the porthole of a cabin in which he sees a woman with flowing hair and rings on her fingers.  Meanwhile, sea birds are feeding on pieces of flesh that rise to the surface from a hole in the ship's hull.  Unable to salvage anything, the narrator returns to shore where he is informed that the man with whom he had fought is not dead.  The storm resumes, and the narrator describes how and why the ship sank.  When he returns again to the sunken vessel, he discovers that she has been cleaned out by the Greeks.  The narrator, the ship, and the place itself have no names.  Mango Key, Sou'west Key and Eastern Harbor are identified, but they may be useful only to sailors familiar with the region.  For the general reader, since the Florida Keys are referred to, these names are vague enough to be almost anywhere.
    This deliberate vagueness gives the story a special aura that belies its realism.  Moreover, "It wasn't about anything" is the narrator's first utterance, and he goes on from there to describe events that are, at best, ambiguous.  He thinks he has killed a man, but he hasn't.  He tries to salvage something from the sunken ship, but he can't.  When he finally does return to the wreck, it is too late.  The narrator is misinformed, ill-equipped, and frustrated.  Nothing works, he has nothing, and he is left with nothing.  The reader, like the narrator, is left with a pervasive feeling of emptiness and failure.  The real tragedy is and should have been the sinking of the ship at sea and the loss of all life on board, but this event is anterior to the ones being described and is not the center of narrative focus.  The narrator describes the sinking in two pages only, as a flashback at the end of the story.  Nonetheless, the storm and the sinking grow in importance as the title of the story and the "nothing" of the opening sentence begin to cast their lengthening shadows across descriptions of events, that, on the surface, seem clear and uncomplicated.  But the original clarity, like the water in which the narrator-diver swims, becomes progressively opaque.
    What is going on? Are we seeing only one eighth of the iceberg?  Should we try to account for the seven-eighths which, like the sunken ship, are below the surface?  Is there an unverbalized metaphorical level that is about something? Can we perform a salvage operation on the story that will give us the riches that the Greeks retrieved but were beyond the grasp or ken of the narrator?  Can we "grapple" with the discourse in order to "wrench" meaning from a narrative in which these two words are used primarily as nouns?  Fortunately, Jacques Lacan's work serves as the basis for a theory of narration within the context of an unconscious discourse that provides insight and answers to these questions.  A Lacanian reading of "After the Storm" reveals a weave of metaphors whose meaning is veiled and whose connotations are repressed.
    According to Lacan every narrative ("After the Storm" is no exception), like Oedipus in search of his history and destiny, manifests desire.   In order to understand what  the function of desire is, we need to look briefly at the structure of the Oedipus complex.  As Sigmund Freud and Lacan define it, it is a blockage of a need that demands satisfaction.  In addition to the blocked and repressed desire for the mother, it postulates two fantasized or imaginary visions of death.  One is the father's death (imaginary murder), and the other is the subject's death (imaginary castration).  The Oedipus complex is eventually resolved through the child's identification with the father, and constitutes his superego.  According to Lacan, the resolution is made possible by means of the introjection of the father's Name, the non/nom du pére, which embodies the Law of incest prohibition and which, in time, also, constitutes a portion of the child's unconscious.  The father's No and Name is the first linguistic sign and symbol, and it coincides with the repression of sexuality, the beginnings of language, and the emergence of identity. The father's Name displaces the desire for the mother, in effect incorporating the child's assumption of his own death as a condition of his renunciation.  This replacement of desire is the symbolic castration and death of the self that is repressed, thereby constituting the unconscious.
    This triangulation is a critical moment for the child at a time when s/he accedes to language, confronts  the Imaginary in the mirror, during the so-called mirror phase, and sees this self as Other. This misrecognition of self is due to the mediating presence of the mother (desire) and the interference of the father (prohibition).  The ego is constituted as a fiction of sliding surfaces composed of the Imaginary (self), the Symbolic (father), and the Real.  Although Lacanians have some difficulty defining the Real , discourse or storytelling (like neurosis) is a metaphorical substitute for blocked desire.  Whatever the Real may be, narration is the manifestation of a primordial self that has been displaced and de-centered.  Thus, the father's Name, in addition to all subsequent signs and symbols, forms a chain of linguistic substitutions (metaphorical and metonymical) that are the signs and symbols of the child's renunciation.
    Lacan's analysis of narration begins with language and proceeds to rediscover the "discourse of the Other that is embedded in speech which, in "After the Storm," is the narrative.  The blockage of desire, along with its corollary, repression, produce a neurosis whose narrative symptoms are metaphorical.  In the production of narrative (the sailor's story of the fight, the hiding out, and the salvage), unconscious content is condensed as metaphor and displaced as metonymy.  These discoveries prompted Lacan to say that "the unconscious is structured as a language."  The narrative process embodies the same characteristics of Freud's dream-work, only differently.  It remains for the literary critic to determine how the manifest discourse veils the latent meaning, that is how the signifiers resolve simultaneously into manifest signifieds and latent referents.  If the dream is the ironic, although masked, mirror of the unconscious, fiction is its linguistic reflector.  Lacan's focus thus enables us to understand, as Robert Con Davis phrases it in his "Introduction" to Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, "how language in literary texts is constituted, buoyed up, permeated, and de-centered by the unconscious" (848).
    If we accept the premise that the unconscious is structured as a language, then all speech (every text) contains repressed material that manifests a never-ending dialog with the Other--that fictitious self made up of the melding of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.  The Symbolic is the Law, the father (le non/nom du pére), eventually all doxa.  The Imaginary is that displaced self that has to come to terms with the postponement of satisfaction, the repressed desire, the nurturing of discontent, in short, the maturation and acculturation that civilized adults claim to value.  In the context "After the Storm," like every narrative, is the melding of language and the unconscious.
    Moreover, Freud's interpretation of dreams enabled Lacan to show that the operations of the unconscious, encompassing the extremes of pictographic and linguistic analyses, are themselves a linguistic process.  Like the iconic nature of dreams, language and narration have a manifest and latent content.  In dreams condensation and displacement disguise the content of the unconscious in the same way that metaphor and metonymy veil the pulsive forces of the subject's (author's) desire whenever s/he uses language.
    Let us next apply Lacan's theory to Hemingway's "After the Storm."  If the summary at the beginning of this essay gives the story's manifest content, then the fight, the choking, the storm, the sea, the sunken vessel, the wrench, the grapple, and the fragmented bodies inside the wreck must all have latent value and meaning.  If so, they become the displaced and condensed mages of the author's unconscious.  On the manifest level they reveal impotence, death and desire.
    If we accept Lacan's premise that every narrative is a manifestation of the unconscious, then the metaphorical symptoms of its discourse reveal the workings of desire.  In a post-Freudian era the author's conscious manipulation of Freudian symbols may disrupt this process, and so, inevitably, the question arises, did Hemingway consciously imbue his text(s) with Freudian symbols or not?  Although his work after 1950, particularly The Garden of Eden, suggests a Freudian connection, I agree with Gerry Brenner who, in Concealments in Hemingway's Works, states that although "Hemingway was fixated upon his father," he "seems unconscious of how extensively father-son dynamics empowered his writing" (17).  This would also apply to Hemingway's relationship with his mother.  In any case the repressive forces of the Law that come into play during the "mirror phase" of the child's development relate to the incest taboo in society at large, whether the father is present or not, whether he is dominant or submissive, and it is the mother, by virtue of this societal taboo, who distances herself from the child.  It would be simplistic to assume that in Hemingway's case the repressive forces of the "mirror phase" were not at work or  that the father-mother roles were reversed as a result of his father's diffidence or his mother's dominance and abrasiveness, of which Hemingway was fully conscious.
    Although it is probable that Hemingway did read Freud sometime before he died, there is no evidence that I can find to suggest that Hemingway had read him before 1932, when he was writing "After the Storm."   Although "After the Storm" belongs to the mature period of his short story writing ("Fathers and Sons," "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio," "God Rest you Merry, Gentlemen"), when almost everything in Hemingway's craft was conscious and controlled, evidence for the deliberate use of Freud is lacking.  Even if he had read Freud, he would have concealed his symbols.  In the December 13, 1954, issue of Time magazine he compares the writing process to putting raisins in bread: "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in.  That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread.  Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better" (72).  Even if these symbolic omissions are deliberate, and there is no reason to think that they are since Michael S. Reynold's inventory of Hemingway's reading between 1910 and 1940 does not list any of Freud's works, the omissions function as unknowns.  They are concealed the way the discourse of the unconscious is concealed.  It is this concealment, whether conscious or not, that gives "After the Storm" its strange dreamlike aura.  The manifest content belies the latent content.
    It is perhaps worth noting that nonpsychoanalytic explorations of Hemingway's works can also point toward suppressed sexuality, the nada, the winner-take-nothing syndrome, and failure of love.  It should, therefore, be good news to everybody that a Lacanian exploration of metaphor and the metaphoric process of veiling confirms conclusions reached by other means.   Perhaps it is useful that a Lacanian reading, which claims to be more "scientific" in its approach to the creative process, should support readings that tend to be intuitive and impressionistic.
    Lacan's discourse of the Other thus makes it possible to list a series of equivalencies that structure the story's conscious and unconscious levels.  The storm that sank the ship, the fight, and the choking are metaphors for the primal scene.  Like Oedipus killing his father, Laius, on the road to Corinth, over "nothing" (a simple dispute over the right of way), the narrator's desire to kill his assailant over "nothing" is the symptom of anger and hostility directed at the Law.  "What the hell you want to choke me for?" says the narrator, adding, "I'd have killed him" (372).  The imagined death of the assailant precipitates the narrator's guilt and his hiding from the authorities.  It corresponds to the repression that occurs when the Law prohibits the child's desire for the mother.  The narrator's attempt to get at the woman floating in the ship that "looked a mile long under the water" (374) is the sign of this prohibition and symptom of desire.  The narrator's failure to pry the woman away from the ship, even in death, confirms the overriding Law of the Phallus. Failure is synonymous with castration and the perceived death of the self.
    In this story almost every detail reveals a latent meaning.  Moreover, because discourse veils the presence of the Other, that is, repressed desire, "innocent" nouns, references, and utterances take on special significance.  The sea upon which the narrator is sailing is alternately "as white as a lye barrel" and as "white as chalk" (372-73).  the homonymous connotations of the nouns "lye" and "chalk" easily refer to the deception and the veiling that are inherent in every narrative.  Fiction is a lie that somehow manages to write the truth on the surface of the sea where, metaphorically speaking, the conscious and unconscious worlds come together.
    For Lacan the act of writing posits the enticement of textuality, thereby acknowledging, unconsciously, the child's "wound" and alienation.  To produce a text, whatever its conscious modes and operations, is also to relive the process by which an affective charge--a cathexis--is released from its generating poles.  The writer, and eventually the reader, directs this charge, inbuing it with the Reality that both produces and attracts it.  Fiction (fantasy) thus, has the power to link the conscious and unconscious systems.  The writer's need to repeat, rather than simply remember, repressed material illustrates the need to reproduce and work through painful events from the past as if they were present.  Writing, like psychoanalysis, repeats the discontent of what never took place during the "time event" referred to as the primal scene.  The so-called fantasy of desire, incest, castration, death, and repression reenact not what took place, but what did not.  Nonetheless, it is this scene that is replayed and reenacted on the stage of discourse as the metaphorical actors put on their veils and perform their masked ritual.
    After the fight and "after the storm" are therefore synonymous.  The storm is a metaphor of shipwreck, actual as well as psychological.  Not only is the title a metaphor for tragedy and trauma, the story itself is a metaphor of repression, death, and desire: a death of the self, a death wish against the father (the Law), and desire for the mother.  Lacan maintains that in the aftermath of the splitting of the self during the so-called "mirror phase," misrecognition of one's identity is inevitable.  "You couldn't recognize the shore" (373) says the narrator in describing the storm's aftermath.  He is in his skiff on the white water looking toward a shoreline that is beyond recognition.  It is as though Hemingway were giving us an objective correlative of cleavage: "There was a big channel blown right out through the middle of the beach.  Trees and all blown out and a channel cut through and all the water white as chalk and everything on it; branches and whole trees and dead birds" (373).  psychologically it is a landscape of devastation in which the subject feels dead but is not dead because "inside the keys were all the pelicans in the world and all kinds of birds flying" (373).  For narrative purposes, and in order to carry the full weight of double impact, realistic descriptions and inner states of mind are fused: the visible and the invisible overlap.  The story describes a "real" hurricane and "real" events, but they are also the pretext for the unveiling of a portrait of the unconscious that confirms Lacanian theory with uncanny precision.
     The law of the hurricane is death to birds on the high seas, but "they must have gone inside there [the keys, that is, the unconscious--"the key" to the narrative] when they knew it was coming" (373).  We all carry with us the emotional storm of the primal scene when the child's desire is proscribed by the Law of the father: the choking episode may be read as the father's prohibition while the wrecked shoreline is the image of the subject's symbolic death. The mother-infant unit that constituted the child's sense of wholeness is split by the Phallus (the storm) during the mirror phase.  The big channel down the middle of the shore--a shore that that was once whole--is the visual equivalent of the repression that cleaves te self and produces the Other.  Hemingway's short story, like the workings of the unconscious mind, functions simultaneously on a realistic level of descriptive detail and on a symbolic level of covert desire.  the narrator may be out to salvage what he can from the wrecked ship of the self, but in the glaucous depths of his unconscious  lurk the images of failure.
     Pieces of flesh float to the surface from a hole in the hull of the sunken liner "way down below near the bottom" (374).  These pieces are like dream images that appear when the so-called censor is asleep and the opening between our conscious and unconscious worlds permits and exchange between the two.  Consciousness is above the surface where the birds feed on the pieces that float into view.  But "you couldn't tell what they were" (374).  You have to go below the surface to find out, and even then insight is not immediate.  Although, at first, with the aid of the water glass, the narrator can "see everything sharp and clear" (374), it is not until later that he finds out all the crew and passengers were dismembered by the exploding boilers when the water rushed in.
     The sunken liner plays a double and ambivalent role.  One the one hand it is the Phallus that is "a mile long" (374) and as big as the whole world" (373), and on the other hand it is a "she."  The narrator drifts over "her" (373), and when he uses the heavy grapple when trying to break the porthole, he "slides along the curved side of her" and has to let go lest he drown (375).  The liner is thus the combined symbol of the father-mother unit that excludes the child.  His "head felt cracked open" (375) from the depth and the exertion.  The narrator rests in his skiff and his nose stops bleeding and he looks up into the sky where he sees "a million birds" (375).  In spite of the birds that have died in the storm, many have survived, and so has he, but he was bleeding and he has choked, and he feels guilty even though he has killed no one.  
     One last time the narrator tries to break the porthole with the wrench lashed to a grains pole, put it is too light and too small and slips off and sinks into the quicksand below (376).  "I couldn't get into her" (374) says the narrator in words whose sexual connotations are unmistakable.  His instrument is not up to the task.  Either the wrench is too small or the grapple is too heavy.  His tools are inadequate.  He is impotent.  However, the reader can grapple with the text and wrench meaning from it, metaphorically, using the narrator's tools, provided s/he uses the water glass in order to decipher the letter of the ship's name--letters that lie below the surface.  Although the narrator-diver stands on them to buoy himself, he does not and cannot recognize "the letter of the unconscious," Lacan's euphemism for desire and the discourse of the Other.  "I stood on the bow of the liner with my bare feet on the letters of her name and my head just out" (375).  The narrator's feet are in touch with the letter(s) of the unconscious, even as he tries repeatedly but without success to break the porthole in order to get the rings from the woman's fingers.
     The name of the ship is "the letter of the unconscious," and this is the name that embodies Lacan's system.  His system gives us the tools with which to get at the latent meaning (and into the ship) that is embedded in quicksand and that only the Greeks could plunder.  They blew "her open and cleaned her out . . .  She carried gold and they got it all.  They stripped her clean" (376).  The very vagueness of the epithet "Greek" allows us to write Oedipus on the ship's prow because Oedipus symbolizes the conditions that are present during "the storm," when we run aground on the father's Law and into the quicksand of desire.  "Oedipus" in Greek means swollen foot, and it is the narrator's feet that are standing on the ship's name.
     In the last two pages of "After the Storm" (376-78), Hemingway's narrator provides plausible realistic details with which to explain the ship's sinking.  He describes her grounding and the treacherous effects of the quicksand.  We learn that whatever is rising to the surface from the hole in the vessel was caused by exploding boilers.  Except for an allusion to the captain and his mate who may or may not have been together on the bridge when they died, these details add little to the psychological impact of the narrative that precedes it.  They function as a denouement, whereas the "meat" of the story, so to speak, is to be found in the latent meaning of the fight, the choking, the attempted salvage, and the letters of the ship's name.
     In French, the word denouement can mean the undoing of a knot.  Noeud is the word for "knot" but, as Jane Gallop points out in her book Reading Lacan (156), noeud is also a crude name for "penis."  Since all discourse veils the Phallus, the real denouement in "After the Storm" depends on the reader's willingness to use the water glass in order to produce meaning by going beneath the surface of appearances.  The primal scene produces an emotional knot that must be untangled if we are to lead productive lives.  Writing fiction is a process of untangling the knot.  As a collaborator in the process the reader must engage in a recreative endeavor in order to break the porthole (metaphorically speaking) to get at the woman (again metaphorically speaking).  Since the narrator is unable to break the porthole and gain access to the woman, he cannot experience the bliss (jouissance) of incest, although he is happy that he has at least cracked the glass.
     "It is natural," says Lacan, "that everything would fall on Oedipus, since Oedipus embodies the central knot of speech" (S-II, 269).  If writers write because they have to, then a discourse that dramatizes the exteriorization of desire goes to the very heart of language.  It is a discourse within which the author reassembles the fragments of the self and projects them onto the mirror of fiction where we, in turn, recognize the author's metaphorical image of himself as the image of the Other.  Although fiction is a mirror that distorts, it is, nonetheless, a mirror of the self.  But this image, like the glass of the porthole, will forever remain cracked.  This discourse of the self, which is always a discourse of desire, seeks to retrieve the lost object, be it breast or mother.  Because language manifests the presence of the mother tongue, writing, in recovering an absence, tends to be incestuous.  Because the narrator's actions are directed toward retrieving the lost "mother," "After the Storm" asks to be read as a metaphor of desire.  
     Freud talks of dreams being structured as a rebus, and Lacan applies the same principle to fiction.  The gold is there for us to retrieve provided that we use the water glass as a window onto the unconscious.  The glass reveals the mother, the father, and the child all knotted together with the discursive weave.  A Lacanian reading of the narrator's repressed images reveals the story's latent content that comes into focus as metonymical structure and metaphorical discourse.  Like the narrator, we the readers are also buoyed up by the letters of the ship's name.  The difference, once we discern her origin, is in what we do with the knowledge.

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1. In New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, J. Benson, Ed.  Durham: Duke UP 1990. 48-57.