“One of the great examples of a book that you probably shouldn’t read in school. I would’ve hated this if I had to read it 20 years ago.
I loved it. It’s got a lot to teach writers too. Which I’m pretty sure I’m the first person to say.
This old man is like the Rocky of this fishing community. He’s washed up, a bum. But he goes out anyway. Because, as he says, “[the world is] a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
And because it’s Hemingway, I want to get all literary and shit and talk about masculinity in this book.
I think Hemingway has a bad rap when it comes to masculinity. Because in this book, I think masculinity is represented as a very different thing than you’d think if you listened to the plot summary. Is the idea of man versus fish a masculine thing? Perhaps even stupidly male? Totes. Totally. Totestally.
But it’s also ignoring most of the book.
For example, the young boy in the book, who represents the beginnings of masculinity. He defies his family by helping the old man, a very manly act. He’s also a fisherman, and he’s having much better luck than the old man. He’s more “virile” in terms of fishing prowess. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about literary criticism, everything is stand-in for sex or a sex organ. You thought that was a lamp? HA!
The boy also cries several times. He plays a caretaker role. He convinces the old man to swallow his pride and take a small amount of charity.
Then there’s the titular old man. That “titular” word always sounds like something that would be on the cover of Girls Gone Wild, inside a yellow balloon with those electric shock edges.
The old man does do something monumentally stupid in order to bring in a big fish. But I don’t know if I feel like it’s a masculinity thing.
For starters, motherfucker’s broke. As hell. A big fish can mean survival. Let’s just start there, with the fact being that his survival depends on his fishing ability. He’s not some weekend warrior with bass stickers on his Tacoma, and he doesn’t seem to consider himself extraordinary as a fisherman whatsoever.
But more interesting than that are the parts where the old man goes vertical and talks about other parts of his life.
He talks about a time when he hooked a fish, and its mate circled and swam around it until the fish was pulled in the boat. He talks about this with tenderness. It was the best part of the book, but it could only exist because things have been fairly mundane up to know, very mechanical. Then you get this big burst of heart, and you can feel the book turn.
He talks about an arm wrestling phase of his life, SO MANLY! And it ends not with a big defeat or emasculation or anything like that. It ends for practical reasons. He thinks it’s not good for his hand, and he needs his hand for fishing.
I think this choice represents a good masculinity. A masculinity that says shows of physical power are not important. The rewards are almost non-existant. A man wants to be healthy. A man wants to use whatever gifts he might have in a productive way, not to best another man.
Oh, and then there’s the fish.
The man has a totally non-combative relationship with the fish. Which sounds weird because he stabs it in the heart, but hear me out.
He loves the fish. He recognizes the fish’s value. And he realizes that he’s made a terrible mistake to kill this fish so far from land as getting it back to shore is going to be a huge problem.
As the fish becomes destroyed, the man becomes very regretful.
If anything, this is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of masculinity. Take help when it’s offered. Don’t waste your strength trying to defeat other men. Men can cry. Animals deserve respect.
It’s also a cautionary tale about masculinity in that old men will still make very male mistakes. Experience does not inoculate the man against doing stupid shit when he should know better.
I think it’s easy to know a little about Hemingway and to say that this is like the more literary version of a Time Allen stand-up set or something. Just grunting and manliness all over the place.
And there is a lot of grunting and manliness. But the manliness is of a variety that’s deserving of a more careful read than it gets here and there.
Most readers will probably see what they want to see in this book, the way they’ll mostly see what they want to see in any book. If we don’t like a book, we look for objective reasons why. Masculinity is an easy one in this case.
It’s too easy. And I don’t think it’s entirely correct.
The only way I see this as an endorsement of masculinity is if we assume the intent is to read this story and think, “This poor old man. No money, his body is failing him. He’s hardly a man at all, and in this act, this is proven to him. This fills me with sorrow.” Or, alternatively, if we see the old man’s idolizing of masculinity, like the case of Joe DiMaggio, and assume that the old man speaks FOR the book as opposed to speaking IN the book.
What I see is the presentation of a variety of masculinites, through the boy, and several different phases the man passes in and out of, and none of them result in happiness. The boy is unhappy because he has to go against his family and align with the old man. He’s sad for the old man because he can see he’s in pain. The old man is unhappy because his masculine pride means he lives in a shack, he quit arm wrestling and still has hand problems anyway. Basically, all his masculine paths have never led to happiness. Joe DiMaggio is in pain. The fish stayed with its mate until the end, but that end came regardless. The fish was too stupid to stop anything from happening, and all he could do was circle and be there until the end.
I guess, in so many words, I’m kinda calling bullshit on the reading that there is an issue of negative masculine stereotypes in this book.
[editor’s note: this review received a B- from an English professor. He said that while there was a sound central premise, “we don’t use the word ‘motherfucker’ in serious literary criticism, ESPECIALLY not run together as one word. Also, the end just sort of happened, and then you tacked on this weird meta thing that doesn’t really work]”