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Subversion of the In/Out Model in Understanding Hemingway Texts

[1] In Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Tennessee Williams’ 1980 ghost play about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway appears as a character who is anxious about his own gender and sexuality. While he lives up to his popular macho image, he also acknowledges another side of his character when he refers to “the other side of the coin” (261). In his conversation with Scott, the Hemingway in the play attributes his creation of various literary characters to his own gender duality. Scott, depicted more explicitly as a sexually vulnerable character, attempts to reveal Hemingway’s dual sexualities:

SCOTT: Ernest, you’ve always been able to be kind as well as cruel. Why, that night when I was so sick in Lyon—

HEMINGWAY: Not Lyon, after Lyon, at Chalton-sur—

SCOTT: Wherever’s—no matter. I was catching pneumonia. You cared for me with the tenderness of—

HEMINGWAY [cutting in quickly]: The night? (270)

Although Hemingway makes a hardboiled answer, he clearly remembers their intimate relationship “after Lyon.” In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway reports the trip to Lyon he made with Fitzgerald. This inspires Williams’ imagination for writing the dialogue between Hemingway and Fitzgerald in his play. In it, in their secret conversation that Hemingway calls a “mano-mano” (267), meaning “hand-to-hand” in Spanish, Hemingway and Scott together construct the gender and sexual identity of Williams’ homosexual “Hemingway.” Scott refers to Hemingway’s short story, “A Simple Enquiry,” in which a homosexual major suspects his orderly’s homosexuality. In reply to this, the Hemingway of this play tells another of his stories that involve homosexuality, which actually appears as an untitled story in Death in the Afternoon. As George Monteiro points out, the Hemingway in the play gives this story the title of another short story “The Sea Change”: “I’ve also written a story called ‘Sea Change’ about a couple, young man and older young man, on a ship sailing to Europe and—at first the younger man is shocked, or presents to be shocked, by the older one’s—attentions at night. However the sea change occurs and by the end of the voyage, the protesting one is more than reconciled to his patron’s attentions” (Williams, 271). “The Sea Change” is another Hemingway story that deals with homosexuality.

[2] It is not this paper’s question to ask whether Williams’ imagination has successfully subverted the widespread image of Hemingway as a heteromasculine hero in American literary history as well as in popular culture. Nor is it my interest to look for autobiographical facts about Hemingway that would confirm his homosexual desire for Scott Fitzgerald although, as Scott Donaldson suggests, some critics do suspect that desire. Rather, I would apply Michel Foucault’s study of sexual discourse to ask what in Hemingway’s text encourages Williams’ reading of Hemingway’s non-heterosexual desire. It is a question worth considering, because Williams is not the only person who “outs” Hemingway. In a conversation with Robert Jennings in 1968, more than ten years earlier than Williams’ play, Truman Capote calls Hemingway “the greatest old closet queen ever to come down the pike” (Inge, 166). By using the term “queen” for the man who he presumes “pretended to be a hearty, courageous person” (166), Capote intends to uncover Hemingway’s effeminate character behind the mask of hypermasculinity. Capote’s comment challenges the image of “Papa” that American culture has associated with Hemingway, and threatens the Hemingway readers who want to sustain Hemingway as their desirable masculine hero. For example, Leicester Hemingway declares his abhorrence of Capote (Brian, 187-88).

[3] Denis Brian presumes Capote’s harsh comment on Hemingway’s gender draws on his knowledge about the bisexual theme that appears in Hemingway’s manuscripts, which, after radical cutting and editing by Tom Jenks, are posthumously published in 1986 as The Garden of Eden. Whether Capote actually knows about the manuscripts or not, it is clear that Brian considers that the couple’s exchange of sexual roles inThe Garden of Eden could arouse not only Capote’s but also other people’s curiosity about what is concealed behind Hemingway’s hypermasculine heroism. As Jenks says, The Garden of Eden “shows a lot of the tenderness and vulnerability that was usually obscured by his [Hemingway’s] public image” (qtd. in McDowell). Needless to say, the publication of The Garden of Eden has accelerated the critical inclination to reconsider Hemingway’s gender and sexuality. As Susan F. Beegel puts it, “the posthumous Garden of Edenhas forced critics to confront for the first time themes of homosexuality, perversion, and androgyny present throughout Hemingway’s career in short stories like ‘Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,’ ‘A Simple Enquiry,’ ‘The Sea Change,’ and ‘The Mother of a Queen,’ widely available for at least 50 years” (11). Publication of The Garden of Eden also forces critics to confront the fact that their hardboiled Hemingway has actually spent “most of his time in this book writing about eating, love-making and sunbathing” “[i]nstead of describing bullfighting or big game hunting or fishing” (Kakutani, 28). Consequently, the book “has created,” Beegel writes, “a school of Hemingway criticism heavily indebted to Max Eastman’s savage 1934 review, ‘Bull in the Afternoon,’ where everything the author ever wrote about courage and pundonor becomes ‘a wearing of false hair on the chest’” (12).

[4] The post-Garden revisionist criticisms, therefore, tend to employ psychosexual approaches to analyze Hemingway, frequently through a biographical approach. The most prominent trend in the revisionist reading is the critical application of the concept of androgyny to Hemingway’s life and works. According to Debra A. Moddelmog, Mark Spilka’s Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny is the most well-known example of this trend, which includes studies of Gerald J. Kennedy, Robert Gajdusek, John Gaggin, and Michael Reynolds. Spilka uses Hemingway’s childhood twinning experience as critical leverage to explain his androgyny. Hemingway’s childhood memory of his mother who raised him and his sister Marcelline in twin girlish baby dresses remained in his memory as “a wounding condition” (Spilka, 3). This condition “could be overcome only through strenuous male activities, athletic and creative, as with his active or vicarious devotion to a variety of manly sports and his serious dedication to writing as to an athletic discipline” (Spilka, 3).

[5] However, most critics who use the androgyny model would not willingly agree with Capote’s figuration of Hemingway as “the greatest old closet queen” and Williams’ dramatization of a homosexual Hemingway. As Moddelmog puts it, “sexism and heterosexism are inherent in the paradigm of androgyny” (30). Introducing the anti-androgyny feminist argument of the 1970s that insists that androgyny “reinstated the stereotypes it sought to uproot,” Moddelmog points out that “most Hemingway critics who have used this [androgyny] model remain oblivious to its pitfalls” (31). Moreover, “androgyny neutralizes any sexual component of Hemingway’s upbringing and role-playing, and of his characters’ impulses. The concept of androgyny gives critics permission to avoid looking at Hemingway’s explorations of sexual identity. This license to ignore seems to explain, in part, why androgyny has become so popular with Hemingway critics: it permits them to turn away from the recurring rumor that Hemingway—or his male heroes—had homosexual ‘tendencies’” (32).

[6] Moddelmog’s critical insight into these critics’ desire to “suppress any implications of Hemingway’s non-heterosexual desires” (42) leads her to ask “what kind of Hemingway might be constructed if we approached him and his texts from a perspective that was not homophobic but quite the opposite: one that was willing, even eager, to explore the possible existence of ‘queer’ desires and their potential significance in Hemingway’s erotic makeup” (42-43). Williams and Capote might be the good examples of this approach on account of what Moddelmog calls “a desire to desire differently” (43).

[7] In her analysis of Hemingway’s works, Moddelmog finds homosexual desires in Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises and in Hemingway himself in his relationship with his forth wife, Mary. Moddelmog employs what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “universalizing” view of sexual definition, one that assumes homosexual desires in apparently heterosexual persons and object-choices. In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick argues that sexual definition falls into two contradictory views: the minoritizing view that approves “a distinct population of persons who ‘really are’ gay” and the universalizing view that assumes heterosexual persons and object-choices as “strongly marked by same-sex influences, and desires, and vice versa” (85). Moddelmog uses the universalizing model as her resistance to the traditional heteromasculinist readers of Hemingway. This resisting attitude is apparent in the tone that dominates her book, which aims to theorize “the faultlines of our sexual system, [. . .] by looking at a man who has become one of the most consistent and persistent icons of heteromasculinity in our age” (56).

[8] Moddelmog presents her reading of Hemingway as her Foucauldian reverse discourse which, as she quotes Foucault in saying, “speak[s] in its own behalf” (45). Because of her desire to find Hemingway’s “true” desire, however, her argument is intrigued with a conventional ontology of sexuality, so that she casts Hemingway’s “homosexuality” as an object of knowledge. In doing so, Moddelmog ignores the fact that Foucault presents The History of Sexuality as a history of sexual discourse rather than as a science of sexuality. By examining how power relates to the “will to knowledge” (Foucault, 12) of one’s sexuality, Foucault transforms sexuality from an object of knowledge to an effect of power. He conceptualizes the discourse of sexuality by analyzing how a power/knowledge apparatus installs the visible and invisible domain of sexuality in one’s public and private life, and how it inscribes sexuality on one’s body as one’s “truth” in its circulation of this domain through sexual discourse. As David M. Halperin puts it in Saint Foucault, “Foucault’s conceptual reorientation of sexuality [. . .] enables him effectively to displace conventional ontologies of the sexual and thereby to resist the preemptive claims of various modern expert knowledges, of positivist epistemologies that constitute sexuality as a (or as the) real thing, an objective natural phenomemon to be known by the mind” (41). Halperin explains Foucault’s political goal:

Foucault’s own discursive counterpractice seeks to remove sexuality from among the objects of knowledge and thereby to deauthorize those branches of expertise grounded in a scientific or quasi-scientific understanding of it; it also seeks to delegitimate those regulatory disciplines whose power acquires the guise of legitimate authority by basing itself on a privileged access to the “truth” of sexuality. By analyzing modern knowledge practices in terms of the strategies of power immanent in them, and by treating “sexuality” accordingly not as a determinate thing in itself but as a positivity produced by those knowledge practices and situated by their epistemic operations in the place of the real, Foucault politicizes both truth and the body: he reconstitutes knowledge and sexuality as sites of contestation, thereby opening up new opportunities for both scholarly and political intervention. (Saint Foucault, 41-42)

[9] Williams’ dramatization of a homosexual Hemingway, Capote’s allusion to Hemingway as “the greatest old closet queen,” and Moddelmog’s reading of Hemingway’s non-heterosexual desire all make claims that they “out” Hemingway by giving access to Hemingway’s “true” sexuality. However, desire itself is an unmarked, diverse entity, which does not call for any “truth.” If readers look for Hemingway’s homosexual desire in their readings, such readings may reflect their “will to knowledge,” which, integrated into an ontology of sexuality, sees sexuality as an object of knowledge to some degree. In the following interpretation of several works by Hemingway, I will not employ the binary opposition of homo/heterosexuality. I will also not use the in/out model in dealing with any of the characters that Hemingway creates. Instead, I will explore how the homosexual/political body emerges in Hemingway’s works, what mechanism is working in the construction of homosexual identity, and how Hemingway dramatizes that mechanism in his fiction. For this purpose, I will first discuss “A Simple Enquiry” and a short tale inDeath in the Afternoon as the texts in which one’s “will to knowledge” inscribes sexuality on the other’s body. I will then address how the homosexual “subject” emanates on its own behalf in his two “lesbian” texts, “The Sea Change” and The Garden of Eden and its unpublished manuscripts.

[10] In “A Simple Enquiry,” what happens between the major and his orderly Pinin is described quite ambiguously. When Pinin enters the major’s room, the major “lay with his head on the rucksack that he had stuffed with spare clothing to make a pillow” (251). The major asks him whether he has ever been in love and whether he is in love with a girl now. He answers he is in love with a girl. The major’s enquiry concerns Pinin’s sexuality.

Pinin looked at the floor. The major looked at his brown face, down and up him, and at his hands. Then he went on, not smiling, “And you don’t really want—” the major paused. Pinin looked at the floor. “That your great desire isn’t really—” Pinin looked at the floor. The major leaned his head back on the rucksack and smiled. He was really relieved: life in the army was too complicated. “You’re a good boy,” he said. “You’re a good boy, Pinin. But don’t be superior and be careful some one else doesn’t come along and take you.”

Pinin stood still beside the bunk. (251)

[11] Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes regard the story as a story of “[i]nitiation into homosexuality,” and suggest that “[w]hen the orderly’s replies are discouraging, the major gently dismisses him” (129). However, the different positions of the major’s head before and after the enquiry indicate that there must have been some physical action on the side of the major while Pinin is looking at the floor. When Pinin enters the room, the major is lying with his head on the rucksack, and in this crucial scene, in which the major is somehow “relieved”—whether physically or emotionally is unclear—, he leans his head back on the rucksack. Clearly, the major once sits up on the bunk while Pinin stands still beside him. Another notable point in the scene is that the major pauses during his first utterance and does not even terminate his sentence and his sentence does not make any sense (“And you don’t really want—,” “That your great desire isn’t really—”). Watching Pinin’s face, body and hands, he indulges himself in something that leads him to relief.

[12] The passage that follows the scene somehow suggests what happened between the major and Pinin:

“Don’t be afraid,” the major said. His hands were folded on the blankets. “I won’t touch you. You can go back to your platoon if you like. But you had better stay on as my servant. You’ve less chance of being killed.” (252)

As he makes clear, the major did not touch Pinin in their preceding conversation, and will not touch him in the future. If he had touched him, he would have added “again” or “any more” when he says “I won’t touch you.” Nevertheless, the major’s folded hands are suggestive of a certain erotic action. Sitting up on the bunk, watching Pinin’s body and seducing him in his excitement (“And you don’t really want—,” “That your great desire isn’t really—”), and without touching Pinin, the major has masturbated to orgasm. What is in his hands is probably semen in this reading.

[13] Although this kind of reading hedges the erotics of the dialogue and the silence, an identification of a physical action of a character does not forestall the enjoyment of interpreting the vagueness of the text. Hemingway’s indeterminacy does not have as much to do with action as it does with meaning. In his 1958 interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway says: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it underwater for every part that shows” (Bruccoli, 125). Because of this, Hemingway readers may often seek to read between the lines to see what is happening in the texts. However, an identification of an erotic action does not determine the character’s sexual identity. Therefore, my reading here does not mean to “out” either the major or the orderly. Rather, it aims at subverting the in/out model by describing how these characters find a sign of sexuality in other people’s physical behaviors, and how their finding draws on the in/out model. In other words, my reading is an examination of the process through which a character interprets another character’s sexual identity as inscribed in his or her body. For this purpose, therefore, my reading posits particular physical actions. However, I do not believe it is necessary to codify these actions and reactions in terms of sexual categories.

[14] Leaving the major in the room, Pinin “walked awkwardly across the room and out the door. Pinin was flushed and moved differently” (252). The sight of the major’s masturbation makes him erect, which causes his flush and accounts for his awkward way of walking. With these evidences, the major’s story concludes, “The little devil, he thought, I wonder if he lied to me” (252). “A Simple Enquiry” thus is not a story of gentle initiation into homosexuality as Comley and Scholes consider it to be. It is a story of sexual satisfaction on one side and sexual arousal on the other side. It is also a story of a power/knowledge apparatus in which the major takes advantage of his superiority in the military rank to exercise his will to “know” Pinin’s sexual experience. He has a power to read Pinin’s personal letters, summon him to his sleeping room, ask his sexual experience, and finally force him to stay and watch while he is masturbating. As a superior officer, he reminds Pinin of his power to control Pinin’s destiny in war. As Joseph Defalco argues, the homosexual major’s seduction is “a metaphor for the absolute danger inherent in war itself” (131). At the same time, his enquiry aims at the “truth” of Pinin’s sexuality and to elicit a confession from him. Finally, he comes to “know” Pinin’s “secret” sexuality and satisfies his “will to knowledge,” taking Pinin’s arousal as the confession of his homosexuality and furthermore, as his acceptance of the major’s homosexual desire toward him.

[15] A problem of interpretation emerges here: neither the major nor readers know the “true” meaning of Pinin’s physical reaction. One possible interpretation is that his erection is the sign of his identification with the major’s erect penis, which he takes as the symbol of the power that subjugates him, and his desire for that power. However, this interpretation proves itself “impossible” in Freudian psychoanalysis, because in the Freudian model, Diana Fuss suggests, “desire for one sex is always secured through identification with the other sex; to desire and to identify with the same person at the same time is, in this model, a theoretical impossibility” (11).  Judith Butler defines this model as heterosexism in Bodies That Matter: “The heterosexual logic that requires that identification and desire be mutually exclusive is one of the most reductive of heterosexism’s psychological instruments” (239). The major’s constructive interpretation of Pinin’s reaction does not stray from the heterosexual logic that Butler puts into question. He understands that Pinin’s identification with and his desire for the same gender is the evidence of his perversion: a homosexual desire. His interpretation is thus also the construction of Pinin’s sexual identity within his own discourse of knowledge. His enquiry, which defines Pinin’s sexual identity, also draws on the heterosexual logic that puts homo/heterosexualities in a binary opposition. When he asks Pinin if he has ever been in love with a girl, he assumes that the sexual object-choice is only made within the male/female binary system, which supports the homo/heterosexual binarism altogether: if Pinin does not have desire for a girl, he must be homosexual, or at most the object of male desire because, in Freudian psychoanalysis, the subject of desire is always already masculine.

[16] The enquiry scene also indicates the major’s sexual identity assuming there is such a thing. Remarking Pinin’s “great desire” in his excitement, the major exposes his own desire for Pinin by projecting it on to Pinin. This discloses his identification of his desire with the desire of the desired other, which determines hishomosexuality in the binary logic. His identification with and desire for Pinin also embody this Freudian theoretical “impossibility” that the heterocentric discourse acts upon. As to the major’s masturbatory satisfaction, the third-person narrator says, “life in the army was too complicated,” warning that the major’s sexual desire should not be confused with that of the sodomite. During the enquiry, the major does not practice sodomy, which is likely to happen to boys like Pinin in the same sex circumstances like the army or prison. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway himself mentions the possibility that a boy becomes a victim of sodomy when he is “in the company of tramps” (18). The major refers to this possibility by warning Pinin to “be careful someone else doesn’t come along and take you.” The narrator thus draws a distinction between homosexuality, which is a sexual identity, and sodomy, which is a sexual act (Foucault, 43; Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault”). The major’s erect penis and his succeeding ejaculation speak the “truth” of his sexuality as he endorses Pinin’s imaginary desire in his own masturbatory excitement.

[17] Nevertheless, the major’s exhibition of his penis is not taken as the confession of homosexuality in this story because Pinin does not have the power to “know” the major’s homosexuality. Looking at the floor while the major is masturbating, Pinin does not perceive the major’s speaking penis. The actual masturbation is not even depicted in the story: it is the underwater part of Hemingway’s iceberg theory. The major does not speak his own desire; instead, he mentions Pinin’s desire because he is the one who has the power to know someone else’s sexuality. The major’s homosexual body thus becomes invisible and homosexuality starts functioning as a fear when the major mentions his power to send Pinin to the front unless Pinin becomes his sexual servant. Thus in “A Simple Enquiry,” while Pinin’s homosexual body appears as an object of the other’s perception, the major’s homosexual subject becomes a fear, because the homosexual subject proves its theoretical impossibility.

[18] In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway also draws a distinction between sodomy and homosexuality in relation to identity and performance. Put in the conversation between the narrator and an old lady, the story is told to please the old lady, who gets bored with the narrator’s story about bullfights and asks for “true stories about those unfortunate people” (179)—in other words, “tales of the abnormal” (180). Thus the story is told, in Williams’ words, as “the other side of the coin” of the hardboiled storyteller. The narrator begins the story, which was once told to him by “a poor newspaperman, a fool, a friend of mine, and a garrulous and dull companion” (180). After the newspaperman is woken up by “a row going on the whole night in the room next to his at the hotel” (180), a young man knocks on his door. The young man’s hysterical attitude gives him “the impression that something horrible had been narrowly averted” (180). The young man’s friend comes and persuades him to go back to their room. The young man insists that he would rather kill himself than go back. However, after his friend gives him “some very sensible reassuring pleading” (181) and the newspaperman “advised them to cut it all out and get some sleep” (181), he goes back with his friend. In the middle of the night, the newspaperman hears a scream and the young man’s sobbing. The next morning, however, he sees them at breakfast “chatting together happily, and reading copies of the Paris New York Herald” (181-82). Later, the newspaperman points them out to the narrator, and the narrator frequently sees them together after that. It seems clear that this is a story of sodomy, first as a rape, and then by mutual consent. The newspaperman first thinks it “something funny” (181), then worries about the young man, and finally gets angry when his offer of help is rejected: he “thought he would call the desk and have them both thrown out of the hotel” (181). Although he says he “did not know what it was all about” (181), his attitude reflects his ridicule, disdain, and disgust at the sodomites: in other words, his homophobia.

[19] After the narrator tells the story, the old lady asks whether there is a “wow” (182) at the end. On her request, the narrator adds the “wow” climax: “The last time I saw the two they were sitting on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots, wearing well-tailored clothes, looking clean cut as ever, except that the younger of the two, the one who had said he would kill himself rather than go back in that room, had had his hair hennaed” (182). In the modern Western culture that Hemingway was accustomed to, men’s hennaed hair indicated their feminine promiscuity and attested their availability as objects of male desire. This “wow” climax is thus to satisfy the listener’s “will to knowledge” that sustains the establishment of the discourse of sexuality, through which the story of sodomy is transformed into the story of homosexuality guaranteed by the young man’s apparent gender transgression. The narrator’s point of view functions as the one who perceives, interprets, and acknowledges the young man’s sexuality, while the young man displays his newly acquired gender and sexual identity by having his hair hennaed. The young man’s homosexual body becomes visible when it is marked by (trans)gender.

[20] These perceptual and performative aspects of gender and sexual identities can be explained within the framework of recent criticisms of gender and sexuality. In Gender Trouble, Butler conceptualizes gender as “a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent constitution of meaning” (139). According to her, there is no “essence” to gender, and gender identity is understood as a “practice.” The notion that gender is performative is grounded on her deconstructive redeployment of sex and gender, which had previously been considered in opposition like nature and culture: “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (Gender Trouble, 7). The same logic can explain the relationship between desire and sexuality. Employing Foucault’s argument against Freud’s repression hypothesis of desire, Butler writes:

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault criticizes the repressive hypothesis for the presumption of an original desire (not “desire” in Lacan’s terms, butjouissance) that maintains ontological integrity and temporal priority with respect to the repressive law. This law, according to Foucault, subsequently silences or transmutes that desire into a secondary and inevitably dissatisfying form or expression (displacement). Foucault argues that the desire which is conceived as both original and repressed is the effect of the subjugating law itself. In consequence, the law produces the conceit of the repressed desire in order to rationalize its own self-amplifying strategies, and, rather than exercise a repressive function, the juridical law, here as elsewhere, ought to be reconceived as a discursive practice which is productive or generative—discursive in that it produces the linguistic fiction of repressed desire in order to maintain its own position as a teleological instrument. The desire in question takes on the meaning of “repressed” to the extent that the law constitutes its contextualizing frame; indeed, the law identifies and invigorates “repressed desire” as such, circulates the term, and, in effect, carves out the discursive space for the self-conscious and linguistically elaborated experience called “repressed desire.” (Gender Trouble, 65)

[21] If we substitute heterosexism for the juridical law in the quotation, the above discussion can also suggest that heterosexuality is also the discursive/cultural means by which “original desire” or “repressed desire” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. Namely, desire is always already homo/heterosexuality. This explains why identification with and desire for the same person becomes problematic in heterocentric discourse. Gender identification and sexual desire are the constitutive practices that are originally meant to maintain heterosexuality per se. Therefore, if sexual identity is determined by one’s object-choice for his or her “repressed desire,” such identity does not have its own essence, because object-choice is also a practice that differentiates one’s desire according to binary oppositions of gender and sexuality. Desire is not only “a series of displacements” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 65) but also, in its displacing nature, a performative act of object-choice, sexual pleasure and sexual identification.

[22] The body of the homosexual is also the visible and invisible toposof the performance of “perverse” desire. Sedgwick argues that the homosexual identity is constructed around the “closet,” a structure which circulates homosexuality in a matrix of secret/disclosure. In this matrix, when one is keeping his or her homosexuality in the closet, his or her body is not marked by the homo/heterosexual distinction, but when he or she comes out of the closet, his or her body becomes a visible homosexual body. Relating this “closetness” with speech acts, Sedgwick distinguishes between a speech act of silence and a speech act of coming out. In either case, however, homosexual identity calls for someone else’s perception of the homosexual body crystallized in and out of the closet.

[23] In both of the Hemingway stories I discussed above, shifts in point of views reveal the problem of perceiving homosexual bodies. InDeath in the Afternoon, Hemingway shifts the center of consciousness from the mind of the newspaperman to that of the narrator, who adds the “wow” climax in which the young homosexual man’s hennaed hair is perceived as a performative speech act of both gender and sexual identity. His homosexual body emerges from his gender performance in the “wow” climax. In the first half of the last paragraph of “A Simple Enquiry,” Hemingway shifts the center of consciousness to the adjutant when he describes Pinin walking awkwardly out of the major’s room: “Pinin went out, leaving the door open. The adjutant looked up at him as he walked awkwardly across the room and out the door. Pinin was flushed and moved differently than he had moved when he brought in the wood for the fire. The adjutant looked after him and smiled. Pinin came in with more wood for the stove” (252). Unlike the young man in Death in the Afternoon, Pinin’s erect penis does not perform; rather, it is a speech act of silence through which the major discovers Pinin’s sexual identity. His body with a flushed face and an awkward gait becomes the surface on which sexuality is to be inscribed through perception by others. When the point of view shifts back to the major, the major, perceiving Pinin’s flush, comes to doubt Pinin’s sexual identity: Pinin’s flushed face suggests homosexuality because of the major’s desire to see it as such. However, if we recognize it as evidence of homosexuality, we would fall into the same pitfall that the major falls into: conceiving any human behavior as defining the absolute “truth” about one’s sexuality. Shifting the center of consciousness from the major to the adjutant, and symbolically leaving the door open, Hemingway leaves the interpretation of Pinin’s reaction open to readers, and avoids attributing a fixed sexual identity to Pinin. Consequently, readers, as Gerry Brenner puts it, “end wondering, not knowing” (205).

[24] In both stories, the homosexual body reveals itself in the perception of others. It remains the object of the “will to knowledge” of those who perceive it. It is performed for the satisfaction of this “will to knowledge.” In Hemingway’s “lesbian” stories, on the contrary, protagonists confront their own sexual and gender transgressions. Describing the consciousness of those who experience these transgressions, Hemingway dramatizes these characters’ identity crises: in “The Sea Change,” Phil degrades himself into “vice,” and inThe Garden of Eden, David feels remorse for his sexual role change and Catherine goes insane because of her obsession with gender and sexual transgressions. These stories, especially The Garden of Eden, present the risks of the “will to knowledge” when it is about one’s own self.

[25] “The Sea Change” is a story in which Phil experiences separation from his girlfriend because she is going away with a lesbian. Although Hemingway also writes on the theme of women’s sexual transgression of homo/heterosexual boundaries in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “The Sea Change,” unlike “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” steps into the male protagonist’s consciousness and depicts the transformation of his sexual identity. As he discusses their relationship in a bar, Phil confronts his own “perversion” that he unconsciously had in their sexual practices. The girl asks, “You don’t think things we’ve had and done should make any difference in understanding?” (304) Phil mentions that what they did is “vice,” quoting Pope’s verse of which he remembers only a part: “Vice is a monster of such fearful mien, [. . .] that to be something or other needs but to be seen. Then we something, something, then embrace” (304). When he renames it “[p]erversion” (304), the girl, although refusing to call it either “vice” or “perversion,” reassures that what Phil names “perversion” is all they have done: “We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve known that. You’ve used it well enough” (304). Finally, he accepts the “perversion” as his own by letting the girl go with her lesbian lover. Regarding this perversion, it is worth noting that Sheldon Norman Grebstein points out Phil’s relationship with his girlfriend has been “as ‘corrupt’ as the homosexual affair to which the girl asks her lover’s consent” and the story implies “a general perversion of character” which “hints at the man’s degradation” (114). DeFalco reads the story as the story of Phil’s acceptance of his own “abnormality” (177). J. F. Kobler argues that Phil’s acceptance of his “vice” is his acceptance of his homosexuality while homosexuality “remains a vice” (323) for both the chacacter and Hemingway. Warren Bennett suggests that the story is about the crisis of Phil’s heterosexual identity in which he has “lost his sexual identity” (242).

[26] In his letter to Edmund Wilson on November 8, 1952, Hemingway mentions that he owes his writing of “The Sea Change” to the conversation with Gertrude Stein:

She talked to me once for three hours telling me why she was a lesbian, the mechanics of it, why the act did not disgust those who performed it [. . .] and why it was not degrading to either participant. Three hours is a long time with Gertrude crowding you and I was so sold on her theory that I went out that night and fucked a lesbian with magnificent results; ie we slept well afterwards. It was this knowledge, gained from G.S., that enabled me to write A Sea Change, which is a good story, with authority. (Selected Letters, 795)

[27] Hemingway introduces the same conversation with Stein in A Moveable Feast, but in A Moveable Feast, he does not claim to have had sexual relations with a lesbian that night. Instead, he comes home and tells his “newly acquired knowledge” (21) to Hadley, his first wife, and in the night “we [Hemingway and Hadley] were happy with our own knowledge we already had and other new knowledge we had acquired in the mountains” (21). It is not important to ask which is true, but his letter and A Moveable Feast both indicate that in his heterosexual activities Hemingway had practiced various sexual forms, some of which he had learned from outside normative heterosexual relationship.

[28] Either in the letter or in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway does not indicate what single act Stein mentions as an example of lesbian sexual practices. In his interpretation of “The Sea Change,” however, Bennett suggests that “the one logical sexual activity in which Phil and the girl could have engaged that would enable Phil in any way to ‘understand’ the girl’s lesbian urges would be cunnilingus” (232). We should not totally agree with Bennett’s argument because oral sex should not be taken as a prototype of lesbian love making. Yet, some descriptions of sexual behaviors in the manuscripts of Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden tell us that Hemingway has a certain sexual act in his mind when he describes a man becoming a girl’s girl in heterosexual sexual activities. In one of the sections eliminated from the posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream, Thomas Hudson’s wife asks him, “Now kiss me and be my girl.” Although the scene is ambiguous, Bennett introduces this scene as another example in which Hemingway dramatizes “[t]he practice of oral sex as a form of heterosexual sexual variety, and its effect on the male’s sense of sexual identity” (232). Even if Hemingway did not define these acts, it is safe to say that the idea of becoming a girl’s girl is both drawn from his idea of the “lesbian” sex and constructing his notion of “lesbianism.” In this sense, in “The Sea Change,” Hemingway assumes the girl’s preference of that certain sexual activity which, in Phil’s consciousness, characterizes her and his own “lesbianism.”

[29] When the girl mentions that she will come back to Phil in the future, her sexual transgression indicates her preference of a certain sexual act rather than a change in her object-choice. Her trespass between the homo/hetrosexual boundaries, therefore, obscures the distinction between homo and heterosexual sexual practices. Attributing her first experience of what Phil comes to understand as a “lesbian” sexual act to her heterosexual relations with Phil, then participating in it through her relationship with the lesbian lover, and finally relocating this act to her heterosexual relations once again, she deconstructs the distinction between heterosexual sexual practices and lesbian sexual practices.

[30] On the contrary, Phil seeks the “truth” of his sexuality and finds his sexual transformation in the mirror which reflects “quite a different-looking man” (305); his “lesbian” body depresses his masculinity. The girl’s preference for “lesbian” sex, which was merely one of the heterosexual sexual variation they had enjoyed until the girl declared her desire for another woman, now becomes the evidence of her homosexuality, and also proves Phil’s status as “the girl’s ‘first girl’” (Bennett, 236). In his consciousness, his heterosexual relationship with the girl turns out to have been the parody of a lesbian relationship, and lesbianism becomes the “original” of their parodic physical activities. Consequently, he re-identifies himself in despair with this “original” lesbian self, that is, a homosexual subject that depresses his masculinity. The manuscripts of “The Sea Change” support the interpretation of his transformation into a homosexual body after his male heterosexual body is dismissed. In the manuscripts, he orders what “punks” drink at the bar (in Hemingway’s larger texts, the word “punk” indicates a male prostitute), and the bartender says, “You have a fine tan” (K681). Here is another “wow” climax, as the center of the consciousness shifts to the consciousness of the bartender. The “wow” climax of “The Sea Change,” however, is not simply brought out as we have seen in “A Simple Enquiry” andDeath in the Afternoon. The ending of “The Sea Change” is a subtle “wow,” in which Phil perceives in the reflection of the mirror his homosexual body emerges marked with a suntan he got during the summer he spent with the girl who has now become a lesbian. The bartender unknowingly remarks upon Phil’s suntan, which for Phil, becomes a sign of his homosexuality. Phil’s “will to knowledge” discovers his own homosexual body, which brings about his gender identity crisis.

[31] The manuscripts of The Garden of Eden unfold another “sea change” story of Hemingway in which “pervert” bodies appear in and through the characters’ “will to knowledge.” As can be seen in the published version, the main plot of the manuscripts depicts the honeymoon couple’s experimental adventures in sex role exchange, gender transgression, twinning, hair cutting and dyeing, and aménage à trois—all of which are acted out by Catherine Bourne. In the opening chapter of the novel, Catherine has her hair cut to make it exactly as that of her husband, David, and carries out that night in May at le Grau du Roi the first sexual experiment in which she becomes a boy and David becomes a girl. In the manuscripts, as suggested by many critics, her change is inspired by Rodin’s bronze sculpture of lesbian lovers, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, which she saw in Paris in February (Spilka, 285-90; Comley and Scholes, 93-95; Burwell, 101-4; Moddelmog, 69-70). Persuading David to take part in the sexual role-playing, she mentions the sculpture and asks him to change “like in the sculpture” (K422.1/1, p. 20).  As their sexual experiment goes on, David, who rejects the change at first, also experiences a metamorphosis: “He knew now and it was like the statue.” (K422.1/1, p. 21). David, who is originally named Philip in The Garden of Eden manuscripts, is the other “Phil” of “The Sea Change.” Although he appears reluctant to accept Catherine as a boy by saying “no” every time she tries to become a boy, his “no” means actually “yes,” as Marita later puts it: “I love to hear you say no. It’s such a non-definite word the way you say it. It’s better than anybody’s yes” (K422.1/36, p. 5).

[32] Catherine’s other model for her metamorphosis is an African tribe, first, the Kanaka, and later, the Somali. Tanning the skin is the device that she uses for this racial transgression. When David asks her how much of a suntan she is going to get, she answers: “As dark as I can. We’ll have to see. I wish I had some Kanaka blood or some Indian blood, but then it probably wouldn’t mean anything. It’s the changeing[sic] that is as important as the dark. But I’m going to be so dark you won’t be able to stand it and you’ll be helpless. White women will always bore you” (K422.1/2, Chapter 4, p. 3). Coupled with her sexual experimentation, her tanning is the device for transgressing the boundaries of gender and race. The “tribal things” she acquires come to represent the myth of jouissance when David says to himself: “You must not let the [white taboos (crossed out)] things you must not say nor write because you are white and will go back there affect you at all and you must not deny or forget all the tribal things that are as important. The tribal things are more important really and you do not have to say them if you know them” (K422.1/23, p. 10).

[33] The racial transgression, only slightly mentioned in the depiction of Phil’s tanned face in “The Sea Change,” now becomes a major motif of sexual transgression:

She [Catherine] changes from a girl into a boy and back to a girl carelessly and happily and she enjoys corrupting me and I enjoy being corrupted. But she’s not corrupt and [maybe it is not corruption (crossed out)] who says it is corruption? I withdraw the word. Now we are going to be a special dark race of our own with our own pigmentation growing that way each day as some people would garden or plant and raise a crop [and we already have our own tribal customs (crossed out)]. The trouble with that is that it will not grow at night too. [. . .] It can only be made in the sun, in strong sun against the reflection of the sand and the sea. So we must have the sun to make this sea change. The sea change was made in the night and it grows in the night and the darkness that she wants and needs now grows in the sun. (K422.1/2, Chapter 4, p. 4)

With tanning and haircutting, Catherine inscribes the “sea change” on her body, from which the differently gendered and sexually transgressive “tribal” body emerges. As Phil perceives his “lesbian” body in the mirror at the bar, she apprehends her emerging “tribal” body in the reflection of the mirrors placed in many places in The Garden of Eden.

[34] In their reading of Nick Adam’s sexual fantasy in “Fathers and Sons,” Comley and Scholes write that “sexual truths, for Hemingway, lie not at the center of ‘standard’ heterosexual practice [. . .] but at the margins: in what the society of Hemingway’s parents would have called perversion or miscegenation. These motifs—sex across racial boundaries and sex that violates cultural taboos—are the warp and woof of sexuality in the Hemingway Text” (77-78). They also suggest that “[t]he truth David Bourne wants to find lies in Africa, an undiscovered country whose bourne he must reach in whatever way he can. Thus the narrative moves from transgression to transgression, metamorphosis to metamorphosis, closer and closer to Africa” (95). Again, Hemingway’s characters, both Catherine and David, seek the “truth” of sexuality, not only their own this time but sexuality per se, through various sexual enterprises of their own. And they seek it in Africa, the dark continent, the primitive “other” of Western civilization.

[35] E.L. Doctorow states that The Garden of Eden’s major achievement is Catherine Bourne: “Catherine in fact may be the most impressive of any woman character in Hemingway’s work.” Some critics follow him, praising Hemingway for his creation of Catherine, and most of them eagerly approve of the creativity of her sexual experiments. For example, Kathy Willingham, in her application of Hélène Cixous’s theory to her analysis of The Garden of Eden, considers Catherine an artist who writes with the body. Rose Marie Burwell argues that “Catherine’s return to androgyny becomes hercreative outlet” (100). However, although Catherine is undoubtedlyThe Garden of Eden’s major achievement and her creativity is not disputed by any other characters in the published novel, the manuscripts depict an array of sexual activities that involve gender, sexual and racial transgressions carried out by other characters. These are quite similar to Catherine’s experiments so that they raise questions about her originality. For instance, in the manuscripts, Catherine is not the only person who is inspired by Rodin’s sculpture:

With the other two it had started at the end of February. It had really started long before that but there had been no actual date, as there was for the day in May that Catherine had ridden up to Aigues Mortes and back to Le Grau de Roi, until this night and the following morning at the end of February in Paris. None of them remembered the actual dates of commitment and none of them remembered the dates on which they had first turned in off the rue de Varennes to the Hotel Biron with the beautiful gardens and gone into the museum where the changeings[sic] had started. One girl had forgotten that it had started there and, for her perhaps, it had not but she too had seen the bronze long before.

“Let’s think of something fun to do that we’ve never done that will be secret and wicked.[sic]” the girl had said. (422.1/3, p. 1)

[36] “The other two” are Nick and Barbara Sheldon, whose story is completely eliminated from the published novel. In the manuscripts, Nick and Barbara play “secret” and “wicked” sexual games which are quite similar to those played by David and Catherine. Like Catherine, Barbara asks Nick to have the same haircut as hers. Unlike David, Nick lets his hair grow long for five months “for a surprise and for a present” (K422.1/3, p. 14) for Barbara. Like Catherine, who enters into a lesbian relationship with Marita, Barbara declares her lesbian desire for Catherine: “You know no man ever looked at her [Catherine] that didn’t have an erection. I don’t know what women have but whatever it is I have it” (K422.1/5, p. 7). Not only does Barbara do things similar to those that Catherine does, she also begins to do them before Catherine does.

[37] After Catherine has left for Switzerland, Marita performs on David the same role-playing that Catherine started and even claims that she is a better performer: “I’m better than she is because I really am both [a boy and a girl]” (K422.1/36, p. 34). She also tries to transgress racial boundaries by calling herself an “African girl,” a “Sahib,” a “street arab,” and a “Mbulu girl” (K422.1/36, p. 4, 15, 25, 25). In the manuscripts, gender, sexual, and racial transgressions, namely, the “sea change,” are not Catherine’s exclusively, but a sexual variant that all the characters crave. It is when Marita starts imitating Catherine’s performance of the “sea change” that Catherine becomesthe “origin” of all the “tribal things”:

Poor Catherine and I owe her so much. [. . .] I’d never known until I read the part [of the narrative that David wrote for Catherine] about Madrid. No Catherine told me first. How could she have. How could she. He’d never have known if Catherine hadn’t done it to him. I mustn’t say corrupt but it’s just teasing and it is exciting to say. All the things are. No wonder it’s forbidden. We must have the same tribal things. We don’t have to go by any Hebrew laws or tabus[sic]. (K422.1/36, p.35)

[38] Catherine is not initially the “origin” of the “tribal things.” Her imagination comes up from different sources, starting from Rodin’s sculpture to David’s knowledge about African tribes, his desire for the “tribal things,” Barbara’s lesbian desire for Catherine, and “a beautiful Oklahoma oil Indian squaw” (K422.1/17, p. 23) whom David nearly married before. Catherine is creative only in combining them and inscribing them on her body. Like Marita, she is not the source but a performer of the myth of the “tribal things” in which she seeksjouissance, the “original” sexual pleasure.

[39] According to Carlos Baker, the manuscript of The Garden of Eden“was so repetitious that it seemed interminable” (qtd. in McDowell). In the published novel, most of the repetitions are cut by Jenks, who edited the book “not for any special audience, but for general readers” (Jenks, 30) and reduced the 200,000 word manuscripts to one third of the original length in his editing. The original manuscripts might be too long for “general readers” and the repetitions of the eating, love-making and hair cutting might be “interminable.” Actually, in the manuscripts, the “tribal things” motif loses its original impact and power because of the repetition, and any effort of the manuscript readers who try to find the origin of the “tribal things” myth is stymied. While the “tribal things” are performed as the “truth” of sexual pleasure again and again and again by Nick and Barbara, David and Catherine, and David and Marita, without mentioning how they originally began, their performance becomes what Butler calls “an imitation without an origin” (Gender Trouble, 138). Repetition is indeed Hemingway’s narrative technique here, a performative technique that (de)constructs the myth of the “tribal things,” a myth of jouissance, and the “truth” of sexuality, without any origin.

[40] In the provisional ending, David and Catherine are together at beach again, recalling their sexual adventures in Spain. They remember their trip to Africa differently:

[Catherine says,] [. . .] But we didn’t go to Africa. I remember that. We had the money to go wherever we wanted to so we didn’t go to Africa. It was too much like Spain.”

“We went to Africa.”

“No we didn’t.” (K422.6, p. 3)

Robert E. Fleming contends that Catherine forgets their trip to Africa because of “her mental illness” (268). However, here she is mentioning “Africa” metaphysically. They did go to Africa, but she could not find the “true” dark tribal Africa she expected there as the “origin” of the myth of the “tribal things.” Africa “was too much like Spain,” so they did not “really” go to “Africa.” The “true” Africa is Catherine’s fantasy, which she incarnated in her body through her performance of the “tribal things” within a discourse of a “will to knowledge” of the true sexual pleasure. The “true” Africa is not outside the discourse of “tribal things” but inside that discourse as its “constitutive outside” (Butler, Bodies That Matter, 3).

[41] In Williams’ play, Hemingway confronts the “knowledge” of his (homo)sexuality. He does not acknowledge it; rather, he retreats into his same old “closet” of the heteromasculine performance:

HEMINGWAY: Fuck it! Hadley, Hadley, call me, the game’s gone soft, can’t play it any longer![Offstage, a woman’s voice sings “Ma bionda.”]—That’s Miss Mary whom you never knew, a good, loving friend, and a hunting, fishing companion—at the end. We sang that song together the night before I chose to blast my brains out for no reason but the good and sufficient reason that my work was finished, strong, hard work, all done—no reason for me to continue. . . . What do you make of that, Scott?

[He hoarsely joins in Miss Mary’s song as he crosses off, roughly brushing aside the delicate silk ribbons of the pavilion drop. Pause.] (Williams, 272)

From inside the closet, he calls his homosexual behavior a “game.” At the same time, his excessively masculine performance on the stage gives the impression that his life-long performance of his heteromasculinity is also role-playing, which he chooses either to “continue” or, as when he mentions his actual suicide, to “finish.” Williams’ “will to knowledge” of Hemingway’s “real” sexuality in this ghost play thus constructs a “homosexual” body of Hemingway that intervenes in the excessively heteromasculine performance of his Hemingway. As Peter L. Hays puts it, Williams “projected his own homosexuality onto Scott and Ernest” (258) by making “Fitzgerald and Hemingway homosexuals like himself, thereby forming a bond with two of America’s canonical writers, bolstering his own image as a writer in the process” (253).

[42] The homosexual bodies in Hemingway’s text also emerge in the “will to knowledge” mechanism that causes to circulate the homo/heterosexual differentiation of human desire. Unlike Williams’ play, however, Hemingway’s work depicts not only those homosexual bodies but also the mechanism that perceives, acknowledges, and constructs these bodies. In “A Simple Enquiry,” Pinin’s body is perceived as a homosexual body by the major who searches for Pinin’s sexual “truth.” In the untitled story in Death in the Afternoon, the young man’s hennaed hair becomes a performative speech act, the mark of his gender transgression that enables his homosexual body to appear in the eyes of other people. In “The Sea Change,” Phil identifies his own homosexual body in the reflection of the mirror, and that body discharges his masculine identity. Finally, in the uncompleted manuscripts of The Garden of Eden, which Hemingway was working on towards the end of his literary career, Marita refers to the differently gendered, sexually transgressive “tribal” body of her own: “It’s not perversion. It’s variety” (K422.1/36, p. 5). Characters inThe Garden of Eden manuscripts repeatedly practice sexual variety, and with its repetition, they discard the normative distinction between heterosexual sexual practices and homosexual sexual practices. Hemingway’s attitude toward the homosexual subject transforms over the course of his career as a writer. While in the short stories discussed, the homosexuality brings fears for some and identity crises to others, in The Garden of Eden manuscripts, Hemingway ventures to write in a reverse discourse. This discourse discharges the “will to knowledge” and dismisses the “truth” of sexuality in his dramatized struggles for and against the inscription of sexuality on human bodies.

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