Identity and Exploitation in Percival Everett's Erasure

Perhaps the best way to conceive of cultural criticism—certainly a diverse and flourishing critical approach—is as an examination of culture under capitalism. As this perhaps suggests, cultural criticism was originally an outgrowth of Marxist criticism. It is important that we establish what “culture” means to cultural critics. Often, the term “culture” is used in reference to what cultural critics recognize as the socially-established “high” culture, which, in the Western world, has traditionally been comprised of such things as opera, orchestral music, canonical literature, ballet, etc. When cultural critics refer to “culture” they refer to something much less narrow (and much less socioeconomically restrictive). “For cultural critics,” Lois Tyson says, “culture is a process, not a product; it is a lived experience, not a fixed definition” (296). Further, Tyson reminds us that a culture is not merely created by individuals, nor does a culture produce those individuals. Instead, culture, according to cultural critics, both shapes and is shaped by the individuals within that culture. Certain theorist, such as Theodor Adorno, have focused particularly on this concept of culture as both influenced by and an influence on individuals. Adorno’s conclusions about culture under capitalism have never been particularly optimistic. “Rigid institutionalization” he says, “transforms modern mass culture into a medium of undreamed of psychological control” (Television and the patterns of mass culture, 495).

This idea of culture as a means of dominance is pursued in depth in a book authored by Adorno and Max Horkheimer, their 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment. To Horkheimer and Adorno, “mass culture” is not a spontaneous production of the masses. Rather, it is a an industry controlled by those who own the means of media production, an industry whose goal, aside from profit, is to maintain and perpetuate the ideologies which allow those in power to thrive. In this way, Horkheimer and Adorno conceive of culture in Marxist terms: it is a way for the ruling class to maintain the status quo, to maintain control and to keep things the way they are. Further, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, cultural productions have lost the possibility of innovation. “Under monopoly capitalism,” they maintain, “all mass culture is identical. . .” (1242). That is, what seems to be innovation, is merely a regurgitated version of what the culture industry knows sells. “[T]here is an agreement--or at least the determination--of all executive authorities,” they continue, “not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves” (1243).

Of course, as theorists such as Sut Jhally have noted, we use media to define our selves and our place within our communities. The media is crucial in shaping our notions of gender, race, sexuality, socioeconomic class, etc. In this way, the modern culture industry is not merely losing its drive for innovation, it is limiting the ways in which individuals conceive of themselves. As a rule, those who control the means media production--books, film, television, and the like--are unlikely to produce anything which does not maintain their dominance. In this way, the ideologies the come through in mass media, are largely the ideologies of those who control the media. Surely this has a profound effect on our approach to literature. It both casts a shadow of doubt on the authenticity of media, and offers an opportunity to resist such domination. Here, we will examine the ways in which one novel--Percival Everett’s Erasure,--acts both as a critique of the kind of culture industry described by Horkheimer and Adorno, and as an attempt at resistance to such a cultural system, a system in which identities are bought, sold and prescribed through the mainstream media, a culture in which authentic identities are erased and replaced by identities fully constructed by the ideologies of those who control the media.

Percival Everett’s Erasure is, undoubtedly, a novel very much concerned with identity from the first page to the last. I do not believe it is at all a stretch to say that it is a preoccupation with identity that undergirds and animates the entire story the novel’s narrator, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, has to tell us. “My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction,” he tells us sentences into the novel (1). It is instantly clear that Monk has no intention of merely allowing his character to unfold as his story does. Nor is his first concern with letting the reader know what his story is. His primary concern, here and all elsewhere, is with who he is. As we will see, he is very much concerned—for good reason—with maintaining a complex, individual identity. He is immediately unsatisfied with such a brief, simple description of who he is as the one above. He continues, telling us he is also “a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker” (1). It is not until the second paragraph that Monk reveals what he seems to view as the most problematic component of his identity. “I have brown skin,” he says, “curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves, and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race” (1). It is very important to note here that Monk does not necessarily say that he is black. On his list of things he is—writer, brother, fisherman—“black” does not appear. He admits only that society tells him he is black. This work of society telling an individual who they are (and who they should be) is certainly something to which we will have much cause to return as we proceed.

Monk, upon disclosing that he is what society calls black, feels that the reader will inevitably assume certain things about him—those things that society tells us are associated with being black. Monk tells us that he is not good at basketball (there goes that stereotype), what kind of music he listens to (no rap), that he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, that he is good at math, and that he can’t dance. Further, he explains that he did not grow up in the rural south or the inner city, and that he comes from a family of fairly wealthy doctors. Of course all of this stands in opposition to what society and the mainstream media call “black.” At this point, it becomes clear that this is no angst-filled coming-of-age story in which he narrator discovers who he is. Indeed, as will become clear, Monk’s struggle with identity is not solely, or even primarily, internal. His is an external struggle to maintain his complicated, individual identity within a culture that tells him not only that he is black, but what it means to be black.

“The line is, you’re not black enough,” Monk’s agent, Yul, tells Monk when his new novel is rejected for the seventeenth time. Monk is the author of dense, postmodern retellings of ancient Greek texts. At conferences he delivers verbose presentations on such theoreticians as Roland Barthes. We get no sense that Monk is resentful of black society (at least no more than he is of non-black society) nor ashamed of being black himself, but we do certainly sense that being black is not a major concern of his in his writing. As one reviewer comments: “one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience” (2). Of course Monk is likewise lost to understand what his work has to do with the African American experience. When he enters a Borders bookstore he is “irate” at finding his books in the African American Studies section. “I found a section called African American studies,” he tells us, “and there . . . were four of my books including my Persians of which the only thing ostensibly African American was my jacket photograph” (28). Clearly this illustrates the kind of resistance American readers feel toward works of this nature by an African American man. Since African American’s began publishing in America around the late 18th century, capturing and exploring the “African American experience” has been an important part of African American literature. The writers who first come to mind when one mentions “African American literature”— Wheatley, Morrison, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, Hurston, Walker, and of course, others—have traditionally been concerned with the experience of being black in a white society. I certainly do not intend to argue the validity or importance of such a concern in African American writing. What is important to note here is that, given such a tradition in African American letters, a writer like Monk, who does not write about the African American experience, is met with confusion, as in the case of the reviewer above, or with hostility, as in the case of Hockney Hoover, who asks Yul “who wants to read this shit?” (42). That is, readers expect black writers to write about being black (and as we will see, they expect “being black” to appear a certain way).

Of course, given such reader expectations, writers who meet those expectations are inevitably more commercially successful and profitable for publishers. In discussing the unpublishability of his most recent novel with Yul, Monk asks, “What, do I have to have my characters comb their afros and be called niggers for these people?” (43). Yul is, presumably, not an artist himself. He is an agent, of course, a business man. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he responds. At this point in their conversation, Yul refers to a current book by Juanita Mae Jenkins, a best-seller called We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. Jenkin’s novel is written in a very “black” vernacular and concerns a young girl who is a prostitute, her drug addict mother, and her basketball-playing brother. As one reviewer notes, “the real strength of the work is its haunting verisimilitude” (39-40). The book is wildly successful, at least in a commercial sense. The paper back rights alone go for five hundred thousand, Yul tells monk, and the movie rights go for three million, Monk’s sister says. The nation loves this book. Monk, though, definitely does not. “She’s a hack,” he tells Yul. He continues: “She’s not even a hack. A hack can actually write a little bit” (43). “Yeah, it’s shit. I know that,” Yul agrees, “but it sells. This is a business, Thelonious.” Monk, as the novel continues, becomes ever more aware of the nature of such a business.

After being rejected so many times, and being told repeatedly that his writing “isn’t black enough,” Monk writes a novel, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, in which he adopts an authorial personae similar to that of Juanita Mae Jenkins, the kind of personae American consumers have come to expect and celebrate from a black writer. The novel, titled initially My Pafology, and later changed simply to Fuck, is written as a parody, a veritable middle finger to the publishing industry. Monk certainly does not expect the novel to be met with such incredible enthusiasm in academic and popular circles alike. It is an instant success, achieving a notoriety surpassing that of the novel Monk so despises: Juanita Mae Jenkins’ We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. Monk receives quite a substantial advance from Random House for the novel and an even greater sum from the studio that buys the film rights to the novel.

Here it will be instructive to turn our attention to an aspect of Everett’s novel we have heretofore not discussed. The novel is surely quite non-traditional structurally. Of course the novel in the form of a journal has been done many times, but Everett’s (or perhaps Monk’s) insertion of episodes that seem, at least initially, unrelated to the rest of the story is not only innovative, but incredibly revealing. Often these insertions take the form of a presumably fictitious (and of Monk’s invention) dialogue between two people, usually artists. I will not here attempt a discussion of all the work these insertions do in the novel. For our present purposes I will focus on one such dialogue.


Immediately preceding the scene in the novel in which we meet Wiley Morgenstein, the film executive buying the film rights to My Pafology, the following brief dialogue appears:
D.W. Griffith: I like your book very much.
Richard Wright: Thank you. (193)
Richard Wright, of course, is a black American author who—unlike monk, at least at the beginning of the novel—is usually considered to focus, in his fiction, on the black experience. D.W. Griffith was also concerned with African American’s in his work, though we can assume, I think, that Wright would perhaps have more to say to Griffith than “Thank you.” Griffith, a pioneer of early American film, is best known for his 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, in which “blacks are portrayed,” according to Sut Jhally, “as irresponsible drunken buffoons, and as out of control, lust-filled rapists of white women” (Dreamworlds). The film has been infamous since its release for its overt support of white supremacy and the Klu Klux Klan, and, as Jhally is right to point out, its terribly inaccurate depiction of African Americans. Nevertheless, the film was a major success, and Griffith, a white man, got rich off of selling the white public an image of African Americans that was compatible with the hegemonic ideologies of the time. In this way, the joke above (and I think we can consider it a joke) is on Wright, not Griffith.

It is important that this dialogue comes right before Wiley Morgenstein—the film producer buying the rights to Monk’s parody/ novel My Pafology—appears poolside, smoking a cigar and contemplating the commercial value of the novel. Morgenstein says to the man with him, “they go to movies now, these people. There’s an itch and I plan to scratch it” (193). Of course the question arises of who “these people” are. The answer seems simple enough: the same people who bought Griffith’s film, the same people who buy We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and, whether he likes it or not, the same people who buy Monk’s (or Leigh’s) novel. This dialogue between Griffith and Wright is a window, I think, into one of the main (if not the main) concerns of the novel. Interpreted this way, it also seems to invite a comparison between Griffith’s film and the two novels within Erasure: We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and My Pafology. Surely Monk would agree that The Birth of a Nation is very racist. He also seems to think that books like Jenkins’, and even his own book, if taken seriously, are racist. Films such as Griffiths, and novels like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto and My Pafology, Monk seems to think, do not actually portray the “reality” of the black experience—“Have you ever known anybody who talks like they do in that book?” Monk asks his almost-lover Marilyn when he sees Jenkins’ novel on her nightstand. Rather, Monk seems to think these works (regardless of the race of their ostensible author) merely regurgitate and perpetuate the racist ideologies of the dominant consumer class in America for the financial benefit of the publishers and movie producers.

In his film Dreamworlds, Sut Jhally undertakes an intelligent and illuminating analysis of music videos, focusing mainly on the effect of music videos on our cultures conception of femininity and masculinity. “[W]hile black men in mainstream rap and hip-hop videos are largely presented as violent, savage, criminal, and drunken folk, interested in molesting and insulting any female that happens to be around,” Jhally says, “we have to remember that these representations do not reflect the reality of African American masculinity, but how someone has chosen to represent it at this point in history.” Jhally, at this point, connects the current way in which mainstream media portrays African Americans to a long tradition of similar portrayal, beginning, on video, at least, with D.W. Griffith. “[J]ust as it was a powerful white man who created and controlled these images [i.e. those in Griffith’s Film] as an argument for white supremacy,” Jhally continues, “we have to focus our attention on these contemporary images of a threatening and out of control black masculinity on the role played by the largely white men who control our current media empires. We have to ask, what function do the racist and sexist images in hip-hop and rap perform for the corporations who control our media culture?” Of course the relation of this quote to Monk’s experience in Erasure is obvious. Jhally focuses almost entirely on music videos in his study, but his insights are relevant to other forms of media as well. Like in music videos, much of the contemporary literature about African Americans does not present a “real” depiction of the African American experience. Instead, novels such as Juanita Mae Jenkins’ present a particularly narrow image of African American life. Though, as Wiley Morgenstein has surely noticed, this image of African American life is the image that sells. In this way, it is not African American’s themselves who decide how best to portray their own experience, but those who control the mainstream media. Even though African American’s are the author’s of texts concerning African American experience, the distribution of such texts has historically been—and remains today—dependant on the predominantly white controllers of American mainstream media. This is not to argue that all white people are not concerned with fairly portraying African American’s and their culture, but it would be naïve for us to ignore the fact that some white men have, and continue, to portray African American’s unfairly for profit.

I do not wish to analogize Jhally’s argument concerning the mainstream media’s depiction of women with my own argument concerning the mainstream media’s depiction of African Americans too explicitly. Though it would be obtuse to suggest too strong of a link between the story of women in American and that of African American’s, some parallels can be found. Jhally argues that girls and women in America are constantly presented with a very specific way of viewing femininity. “This way of understanding themselves and their bodies,” Jhally says, “traps them inside a sexual imaginary not of their own making, where they are presented only as sexual beings whose main function is to be pleasing to men.” That is, women in contemporary America much too often do not discover or create their own identities, but, tragically, adopt the identity constructed by the (mostly male) controllers of mainstream media. This concept is very present in Everett’s Erasure, though with respect to African Americans. As the novel illustrates, this system of media-created identity is a self-perpetuating one. Since the mainstream media fixes in societies mind what it means to be “black,” a black artist like Monk is forced to buy into this image of blackness if they wish to succeed. Of course their adoption of such an identity adds only to the normalization of that very identity “not of their own making.” The result of all of this, with Monk at the end of the novel as our perfect example, is the “erasure” of authentic identity, and the adoption of a commodified, culturally produced and largely artificial identity which serves to justify and perpetuate the very forces which work to exploit that identity.

Silence and the South in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel plagued by silence. Its narrator, Huck, is victim to a terror which is never explicitly revealed. Throughout the novel, he is split between a world of boyish delight and freedom—in which the days “slid[e] along so quiet and smooth and lovely” (118)—and a world of dread, characterized by a vague awareness of something that “can’t make itself understood” and that causes Huck to reflect that he “most wished [he] was dead” (13). Huck’s is a dread that is never named, though, as we will see, the cause of his own cognitive dissonance seems to be rooted in another doubleness: that of the South. Twain’s South is simultaneously presented as a pastoral world, free from the trappings of the more fully industrialized North, and as a world of inescapable cruelty, greed, and hypocrisy. Huck’s fractured, almost schizophrenic state of mind is the result of inhabiting a fractured, two-faced, American South. In this way, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about something that is never overtly mentioned, but that is always present in the background, like the “wind . . . trying to whisper something” (13). Surely one of those things “whispering” in the background throughout the novel is the institution of slavery, and its seeming incompatibility with another very important institution in the South: Christianity.

Neither Huck nor any other character in the novel is a blatant critic of either of these two institutions (even Jim, the runaway slave, doesn’t seem entirely convinced that he ought not to have a dollar amount assigned to his life). This lack of overt criticism of Southern life and culture on the part of the novel’s characters is only appropriate, though, and seems to reflect a long tradition of silence in the American South, and in America more generally. Luckily, Twain is not so hesitant as his characters. Huck may not be fully conscious of it, but throughout the novel, he has a habit of presenting the reader with episodes or situations that are rife with irony, and of revealing, if unwittingly, some possible sources of his unnamed dread.

Let’s consider one very instructive example: Huck’s description of Tom Sawyer’s Uncle Silas, who believes that Huck is his own nephew Tom. “He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see,” Huck says, “But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too” (218-19). Huck continues, informing us that Silas has, on his plantation, a church which he “built . . . himself and at his own expense.” Further, Huck comments on the commonality of such a practice, noting that “[t]here was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South.” Huck presents Uncle Silas as simply a “preacher-farmer,” and in doing so, necessarily presents him as a slave-owner-preacher. This is not the first episode Huck offers the reader in which slavery and religion are juxtaposed. We ought to recall an instance in Chapter I in which Huck tells us that the widow Douglas “fetched the niggers in and had prayers” (13). Immediately after she does this, Huck “tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use.” Indeed, it seems to be an awareness (if only an unconscious awareness) of the incompatibility of slavery and religion that depresses Huck so.

Huck pegging Silas as “the innocentest, best old soul” he has ever seen is howlingly ironic. He may be innocent enough to not suspect Huck as an imposter, but certainly not so innocent as to have no part in the enslavement of a race of people, a practice surely incompatible with the Christian ethics he preaches. Huck’s claim that Silas built his church by himself and “at his own expense” is equally ironic. Just as we can be sure that Silas the farmer does considerably less farming than his slaves, we can assume that Silas the preacher had much less to do with the actual building of his church than did his slaves.

Huck’s final note that there are “plenty other farmer-preachers like that . . . down South” is an important one, as it rather explicitly extends the passage beyond a mere description of one plantation owner and into a statement about the American South more generally. Undoubtedly, the institutions of Christianity and slavery have been immensely important in the history of the South; it is perhaps impossible to imagine the course of American history without them. And like the first Europeans who came to the Americas, the inhabitants of Twain’s South (Huck included) are reluctant, perhaps even unable, to articulate the disparity between Christianity and slavery. Both are inescapable realities of the South, yet they are entirely at odds. They are inseparable yet irreconcilable. Huck’s split state of mind may represent an awareness of this Southern dilemma, but even he, at the end of the novel, does nothing but run away.

The Rights of Man and American Revolutionary Literature

Any attempt to understand the literature of a certain time and place by identifying a single “spirit of the times” is naïve and inevitably misleading. It is this type of oversimplification that gives rise, at least in part, to the rather strict system of genrefication that has come to organize the texts we read. Of course the processes of genrefication and generalization serve to help us make sense of a seemingly endless pool of literature, and decide what even qualifies as literature. Making sense of literature by generalizing and simplifying, however, often blinds a reader to the complex interaction of personal and cultural ideologies that help shape any given text. To develop this in a more concrete way, let’s consider the literature produced in American during what may be called the revolutionary era. Even a cursory glance at some of the literature of this time seems to reveal the general “spirit of the times”: a preoccupation with the natural rights of man, a heightened concern with the institution of slavery. Indeed, the “spirit of the times” seems summed up by the very act that formally began the era we are here concerned with: America’s declaration of independence from Britain. Yet any attempt to understand the literature of this period as unified by the spirit of independence serves to obscure as much as to instruct. Although, as we will see, certain themes and concerns seem central to a great deal of the literature of the American revolutionary era, merely recognizing these themes and concerns will only get us so far in our attempt to understand the literature produced during this era. Once we recognize these themes, we must examine the ways in which they are used within a given text, and what the various ways in which common themes are employed reveal about the cultural context in which the texts were produced. Here I aim to examine the literature of the American revolutionary era not through generalization (though of course some generalization is perhaps inevitable) but through complication. I will consider four writers—Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, and Philip Freneau. As we will see, the writing of all of these authors is animated by a concern with the rights of man and a consciousness of the injustices of slavery. These authors, though, seem to employ these concerns in different ways; it will be instructive to identify and examine such differences.

Let’s begin with two works that we can consider together because of various thematic and strategic similarities: Paine’s Common Sense and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it is difficult to miss the influence the former seems to have had on the latter. Both texts follow a similar structure: each is, basically, a list of the negative aspects of Britain’s “long and violent abuse of power” over the American colonies, culminating in a call for separation from Britain (Paine, 630). In a sense, Jefferson’s work can be viewed, perhaps, as a response to Paine’s: Common Sense calls for independence; the Declaration, of course, declares such independence. “A government of our own is our natural right,” Paine says (636). Perhaps today this seems a completely noncontroversial assertion, but in 1776, this would have been a fairly radical thought in much of the world. Although Paine seems to feel this claim is a given, it stands in direct opposition to a much older ideology of the western world: the “natural” right of a king to rule. Indeed, a model of power such as the Great Chain of Being suggests that man does not have a natural right to his own government. Instead, he is placed in a hierarchy, situated above women and all other creatures, but clearly below the king and God. In asserting man’s right to a government of his own, Paine turns the older western concept of “the universal order of things” on its side, so to speak (636). That is, he seems to argue in favor of a horizontal power structure. One man’s subjugations to another, Paine seems to say, is unnatural.

Of course the presence of such ideas is unmistakable in the Declaration, in which Jefferson appeals to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God”—perhaps the same laws of nature to which Paine refers (652). “We hold these truths to be self evident:” Jefferson memorably writes, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” etc. (652). It is important that Jefferson establishes these natural rights of man early in the Declaration, as the remainder of the text is basically a catalog of the ways in which Britain has violated these rights of man. As such charges accrue, the rhetoric intensifies, culminating in one final charge against the King (though this charge would be removed before the publication of the Declaration). “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” Jefferson says, “violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere” (655). Of course, Jefferson here refers to Britain’s practice of enslaving Africans. Clearly, this is intended to be the climax of Jefferson’s argument, though the fact of its eventual deletion and Jefferson’s own involvement with (and apparent support for) the institution of slavery should tip us off to the strategic purpose of this passage. Surely, indicting the king for starting and continuing the practice of slavery in the Americas is intended to operate metaphorically. After all, the Declaration does not produce a call for abolition, but for freedom from British rule. When Jefferson reminds the reader of the king’s injustices toward “the persons of a distant people,” he also refers to the white colonists. This indictment seems to act as a warning to the people of the American colonies. Since the king has enslaved the people of one country—Africa—he is more than capable of enslaving that of another: America (though of course not a country yet).

Though both Paine and Jefferson seem very adamant about the injustices of depriving any individual of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” their ideologies of natural rights and independence are inextricable from the pervading cultural ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy. Though they seem to call for independence, their patriarchal and euro-centric worldviews dictate that they are simply calling for independence of the white man from other white men. The question of the “equality” of such others as the woman or the African would not even be popularly addressed for quite some time, let alone answered.

Perhaps it seems only inevitable that the themes of natural rights and slavery would appear in the writing of Phillis Wheatley—a black woman and former slave—but, as we have seen, the ways in which these themes are dealt with are almost never as simple as we might expect. For a case in point, let’s consider Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought From Africa to America.” These deceptively straightforward eight lines contain a surprising depth of meaning. “’Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,” Wheatley begins. Taken literally, the beginning of this poem presents a surprising view of slavery from the point of view of an African slave. The speaker seems to have completely sold out to the white supremacist and Christian ideologies that served to perpetuate the institution of slavery. To call being made a slave “mercy” seems cowardly on the part of the speaker, and simply false. But a more careful reading of the poem reveals a contrary view. “Some view our sable race with scornful eye” she continues, “’Their color is a diabolic die.’ / Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refined, and join the angelic train” (5-8). A very surface reading of these lines seems to support our initial feeling that the speaker is merely buying into the ideologies of her captor. A more careful reading, however, reveals this poem as quite radical. First, we should consider the speaker’s word choice. She calls her race the “sable race.” This is a curious and instructive detail that seems to suggest a purpose contrary to merely aligning oneself with the dominant ideologies of the white man. Sable, though it refers to black, has a positive connotation, and suggests a celebration of the blackness it refers to. The two final lines of the poem are particularly instructive. By employing the imperative “remember,” the speaker adopts a superior, commanding tone, a very bold tone for a slave to adopt indeed. Further, by associating Negroes with Cain, the speaker seems to remind the reader (presumably the white reader, since most blacks were not readers at all) that blacks are children of Adam and Eve, too, and thus protected by God. Also, the structure of the second to last line is ambiguous. Is she reminding Christians that Negroes “May be refined?” Or is she claiming that both Christians and Negroes may be refined? Either way, the poem culminates on a note of equality. Though the Negro has the inferior position in life, both have the opportunity in the afterlife to “join the angelic train.”
Though Wheatley’s poetry seems to lack the passion and frankness of latter African American writers, such as Langston Hughes or Malcolm X, she can certainly be viewed as a seed of a long and important tradition of African American literature, and her strategy adopted in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” reveals a lot about the culture in which it was produce. Firstly, we can assume that any poem that more frankly condemned the institution of white supremacy over blacks probably would not have been published in the first place. The very necessity of Wheatley’s subtlety reveals how extremely powerful and pervasive the ideologies that perpetuated slavery were. Furthermore, the instances of shame and self-hate in the poem (no matter how sarcastic or ironic) reveal the way in which personal ideologies are filtered through cultural ideologies. Even though we can read Wheatley’s poetry as condemning the ideologies that have served to perpetuate slavery, these very ideologies permeate and animate the author’s writing.

Philip Freneau’s hatred of slavery is apparent in his poem “To Sir Toby.” “If there exists a hell—the case is clear—,” he begins, “Sir Toby’s slaves enjoy that portion here” (1-2). Indeed, the body of the poem is simple enough. Freneau compares the condition of Sir Toby’s slaves in Jamaica to that of hell itself. It certainly seems, then, that Freneau’s poem is a genuine condemnation of the practice of slavery. What is curious to note though, is that Freneau writes about a British plantation in Jamaica, even though he had ample contact with Slavery in the states. When we consider some events of his life, we perhaps suspect Freneau of being more anti-British than anti-slavery. Like Jefferson, Freneau largely ignores the issue of America’s involvement in the slave trade. That these writers seem so passionate about the injustices of slavery without acknowledging such injustice in their own back yard, so to speak, certainly gives us cause to consider some ulterior purpose in choosing as a subject the institution of slavery. As we have seen, Jefferson employed the issue of slavery in a metaphorical sense, deflecting any “blame” for slavery from America and onto the British. Similarly, Freneau seems to be using the issue of slavery as a means of condemning the British. When we consider the fact that Freneau was, in 1780, captured by a British ship and treated cruelly (as recounted in his poem “The British Prison Ship”) we suspect that anti-British sentiments have, for Freneau, primacy over anti-slavery sentiments. This is not to accuse Freneau of total insincerity. Rather, it is to reveal the complex way in which the issue of slavery animates his poetry.

As the foregoing illustrates, the writing of the American revolutionary era cannot, and should not, be understood as merely unified by a concern for independence and the rights of man. Like all literature, the texts we have considered were not produced within a vacuum. Rather, they were produced within a specific cultural context, and a careful consideration of the texts bespeaks the complex ways in which various ideologies are filtered through one another as a text is produced. Of course, certain topics are bound to appear in the literature of an era, but it is the multiplicity of ways in which these topics are dealt with that allows us to understand the cultural context in which the literature was produced.

No name poems #1, 2, and 3

1
Nothing has changed.
The dogs a little fatter,
Is all.

2
In the patch of soil
Below the catalpa,
There's a broken terracotta pot
Buried in snow.

3
At the top of the stairs,
I left directions for you to
Find your way to the bottom;
It's really simple
All you do
Is just keep going
And don't stop until you're there.

Grocery store for eggs Saturday night

Saturday night and Sarah Jaine and I have nothing to do tomorrow except go swimming at my parent's house in the suburbs. It is my intention to make us breakfast tomorrow morning. Since I already have waffle mix, I intend to make us waffle tomorrow morning. I have no eggs though.

I check weather dot com to make sure that it isn't going to start raining the moment I am half-way (0.2 miles) to the grocery store. The website gives me no reason to believe I will be caught in a rain shower. Further, it informs me that temperatures are "slightly below average," which is a real selling point, as it has been hot as shit in Cincinnati forever (approximately three weeks).

Outside it is slightly cooler than I expected. My street smells exactly as it always smells, dirty and smoky. Except when it rains. Then, it smells like rain. It is a very short distance to the Kroger at 1 W Corry St. Down my own street and left up the hill, past two men in wheelchairs, one without legs, the other drinking a can of of Pepsi. At the cross walk a group of boys maybe 14 years old yelling to a girl "How old is you?" She says she is 17 and one boy breaks off from the pack to ask more questions from a far. I do not hear any of the other questions, nor does the girl seem to. Down the weird covered alley between the Walgreen's and Kroger. Some 20 feet in front of me standing slightly contorted in the green-yellow, bug-swarmed light a man lectures, gesticulating wildly, what to me is nothing. Just blank space in front of him. I become aware that I am slightly nervous. I hope he does not find in me an audience. I realize I hope he does not become violent. I very quickly decide if I would run or not. And I consider how foolish I would look to any standers by if I ran away. When I pass him he says "Hey, hows it going?"

The grocery store is always crowded at surprising times. Tonight mostly older women buying their ordinary groceries: plastic-wrapped packages of ground beef, 2% milk, chips, Big K cola, white bread, frozen pizzas- and guys about my age-ish buying cheap beer in bright blue 24 packs. I came only for eggs, but I got paid on Friday and decided to treat myself to something. For a while now my staples have been the cheapest, healthiest for the price, things I can make into a variety of meals: black beans, cheese, tortilla chips, pasta and tomatoes. I want something sweet. I walk down the "Health Foods" aisles (all both of them) looking left, then right, hoping to find the best tag in the place: "Manager Special." The best for me personally, yet one of the saddest things about this Kroger is that the Organic and "Health" food sells so poorly-either because it is too expensive or because it looks gross as hell-that, more often than not, something will be on sale for a ridiculous price, just to get it out of the store. No good manager specials tonight. Just some organic milk that will expired in two hours and some organic yogurt, the carton of which reports a expiration date that past about a month ago. Some dairy-free organic "ice cream" is super on sale though. I grab the vanilla and close the frosted freezer door. Than I put it back and get the Neapolitan. Because, say I get tired of Vanilla? Fucking right, there's strawberry and chocolate in there too. Done.

So, I get my organic, cage free eggs (despite my skepticism about how legit they are) and my dairy-free Neapolitan. My total is about 7 dollars. That would by exactly seven large bags of Kroger brand chips, about seven cartons of Kroger brand eggs (have you seen those videos of chicken farmers literally throwing chickens into cramped cages? Those kind of eggs)roughly 32 rolls of Kroger Value brand toilet paper (which I do use) or something like 105 slices of Kroger Value brand white bread.

I walk around the other side of the building on my way home, as the aforementioned alleyway I find generally creepy. There is a lot of traffic and I consider whether or not I am wasting my Saturday night. I do not pursue this thought for very long. I find the right key to my security gate under the lamp post. Some one moved into the apartment below ours today and I expect to see him outside for some reason. He is not outside. The ice cream substitute I bought isn't even that good.

"I am not here now, and I miss you": Written Messages and Indexical Reference

Both indexicals and written inscription pose interesting problems to philosophers of language. In this paper I am concerned with two things. Firstly I will explore an issue philosophers often neglect, that is, the differences between spoken or verbal utterances and written inscriptions. Secondly, and related to the previous issue, I will be concerned with indexicals, especially written instances of indexicals. All of this will stem from an examination of how the utterance “I am not here now” may be uttered truly. In the end, I will arrive upon a theory of how to evaluate written messages which proves to be particularly useful in instances of messages containing indexical.

Predelli, at the start of his paper “I am not here now,” briefly outlines a theory of how to evaluate sentences containing indexicals that is basically Kaplan's. Without wading through the complexities of the argument that Kaplan makes in his paper “Demonstratives,” let us put forth Kaplan's general view as pertains to our present purpose thusly: The content that an utterance u of expression e expresses is the content that the character of e yields when we “plug in” the context that pertains to the utterance u. If we simplify and apply this to a relevant example, that is, an expression containing an indexical—such as “I am not here now”—we see that, to Kaplan, “now” refers to t in a situation s if and only if s is the situation in which “now” is uttered, and t is the time of s.

We find that Kaplan's line of reasoning supports our intuitive assumptions about indexicals. If we take the utterance “I am not here now” and evaluate it along Kaplan's line of reasoning, we arrive at the conclusion that the indexicals “I,” “here,” and “now” refer, respectively, to the utterer, the place of utterance, and the time of utterance. It seems to follow from this that “I am not here now” may never be uttered truly, for logical reasons. But, as many have noted, we can find true instances of “I am not here now,” such as written messages. Kaplan's theory does not account for this problem. Predelli and others have offered their own solutions to the problems that written messages pose to the way we usually evaluate sentences containing indexicals. In the first portion of this paper I intend to first discuss some of these solutions and why they are insufficient, then to offer my own solution to this problem.

In his aforementioned paper, Predelli first considers a theory of Sidelle's. According to Sidelle, past theories have failed in solving the problem we are presently concerned with because they confuse what the referents of the indexicals in a given expression actually are. Sidelle claims that, in the case of the written message “I am not here now,” the indexicals “I,” here,” and “now” refer, respectively, to the encoder, the place of decoding, and the time of decoding. When one writes a message, Sidelle claims, one is actually deferring an utterance. That is, one is preparing to make an utterance at a later time. This utterance, which occurs at a later time, Sidelle calls the “genuine” utterance. Predelli challenges Sidelle's theory by offering the following scenario: Jones, expecting his wife home at six o'clock, writes a note at four o'clock which says “I am not here now,” with the intention of informing Mrs. Jones that he is away from home at six o'clock. However, Mrs. Jones is late arriving home, and does not read the message until ten o'clock. In this case, Predelli claims, “now” does not refer to the time of decoding, but must refer to the intended time of decoding. Indeed, Predelli spends the latter half of his paper expounding his belief that what is most important in evaluating written instances of sentences containing indexicals is the utterer's intention.

“Written and recorded messages,” Predelli concludes, “are to be evaluated with respect to the intended context of interpretation, which need not coincide with the context of utterance.” This conclusion is certainly unacceptable. If we follow Predelli's line of reasoning, we arrive at the outrageous conclusion that the referent of an utterance of “now” is whatever the utterer intends it to be. We simply cannot allow for a theory of reference to permit this kind of arbitrary assignation. If I were to put on my door the message “I am not here now” with the intention of my roommate seeing it at three o'clock, but she does not see it until five o'clock, the message is as true—if I am still not at home—at five o'clock as it was at three o'clock, because “now” does not refer to my intended context of interpretation. Any theory that suggests that for any utterance of u, u refers to whatever the utterer intends u to refer to must be rejected, as it makes language, in the end, arbitrary. We will have cause to return to the matter of utterer intention later. First, though, let us approach this problem a different way.

For reasons that will become clear, out of the above theories, Sidelle's gets us the furthest in our understanding of written instances of sentences containing indexicals. But his theory, like Kaplan's and Predelli's, fails, in part, because it fails to consider fully the differences between verbal utterances and written inscriptions. Written inscriptions are different than verbal utterances in that written inscriptions have the unique quality of existing over time. Verbal utterances occur at an isolated point in time. It is easy to conclude that when one verbally utters “I am not here now,” “now” refers to the time of utterance. Written inscriptions, however, do not exist only at an isolated point in time. But let us examine another aspect of verbal utterances and written inscriptions before we further explore the differences between the two.

It is uncontroversial that the specific referents of indexicals vary depending on the context or situation in which they are uttered. Furthermore, for each utterance of a sentence containing indexicals—and even those that do not—there is a set of possible contexts in which the utterance is true. By virtue of having uttered “I am not here now,” one establishes the set of possible contexts in which the utterance is true. That is, those contexts in which the referent of “I” is not at the referent of “here” at the referent of “now.” The set of possible contexts in which an utterance is true, can be found in the syntax of the utterance, and is often not necessarily specific. Establishing the set of contexts in which “I am not here now” is true, does not actually tell us much, such as, what the reference of words are. It simply tells us that, regardless of what “I” refers to, it must not be at whatever “here” refers to at whatever “now” refers to. The sentence “I am not here now” may never be verbally uttered truly—and let us ignore instances of quotation or imitation—because the actual context in which it is uttered is never a part of the set of contexts in which the utterance is true.

Written inscriptions differ from verbal utterances in the following way: written inscriptions have an initial utterance, that is, when they are initially written, but they are then uttered continually until they are physically destroyed; the inscriptions themselves become proxy utterers. When one writes “I am not here now” it is initially false, as the referent of “I” is at the referent of “here” in order to write the note in the first place. But, when one does write this, one establishes the set of possible contexts in which it is true. When one leaves the message, the referent of “I” is still the initial utterer, the referent of “here” is the place of utterance, and the referent of “now” is the time of utterance. When we consider that a note, as a sort of proxy utterer, continually utters the sentence of the initial utterance, we see that the place of utterance is the place of the note, and the time of utterance constantly varies. Note that above I did not say that the note constantly utters the initial utterance, but that the note constantly utters the sentence of which the initial utterance is a token. This is an important distinction, and perhaps not obvious nor intuitive. Of course, the syntax of the written message does not change. But, the note utters not the same utterance continually, but a constant “stream” of new utterance. Of course when the referents of the words of an utterance change, a different proposition is expressed, and thus is a different utterance. As we saw, “now,” in this case, refers to the time of utterance and time is constantly variable. So, we see that the note utters a different utterance each instant, as the referent of “now” constantly changes, and thus a new proposition is expressed by the utterance which is distinct from that expressed by the previous utterance. This leads to the perhaps noncontroversial yet still important claim that one utterance expresses exactly one proposition or none at all (such as in cases where utterances contain words with no referents). This is a claim I will have cause to defend more as I further develop my argument.

So far, we have considered a theory of how to evaluate written messages which seems to deal with the problems posed by indexicals better than the alternatives offered by Kaplan, Predelli, and Sidelle. Kaplan's theory was insufficient because it fails to recognize contexts of utterances in which the actual human body is absent at time of utterance. Predelli's theory which claims that utterer intention determines reference of indexicals carries some very unattractive implications and I have illustrated thus far—and will illustrate further later on—that intention does not have anything to do with indexical reference at all. Sidelle's idea of utterance deferral was a step in the right direction but is ultimately not sufficient in explaining written instances of indexicals, such as “I am not here now.” My examination of this single sentence has lead to a theory which presently seems more appealing than those just mentioned. My development of this theory has led us to some general statements about language which will be important in the remainder of this paper: firstly, utterer intention does not determine (nor even influence) indexical reference, and, secondly, one utterance expresses no more than one proposition. But it seems my working theory of written messages—and all of its implications—ought to be tested more rigorously in order to make sure it is a considerable theory and not just a clever way to explain the sentence “I am not here now.” I intend to devote the rest of this paper to a more in-depth exploration of my theory of the evaluation of written inscriptions (especially written inscriptions containing indexicals). I will begin this exploration with an attempt to explain other instances of written inscriptions containing indexicals within the framework I have heretofore established.

Consider the sentence “I miss you.” Of course “I miss you” does not pose the exact problem “I am not here now” did. In our consideration of “I am not here now” we first had to determine how it is possible to even utter the sentence truthfully at all. We may by-pass this first step in considering “I miss you.” Regardless, we ought to be able to evaluate the sentence along the same lines as the one in the first part of this paper. This requires us to do several things, as we have seen. To evaluate the truth value of an utterance of “I miss you,” we must first do two things: 1) determine what the set of possible contexts in which the utterance is true is, then 2) determine if the actual context is part of the set of possible contexts in which it is true. Before we even consider some examples, we can determine what the set of possible contexts in which utterances of the sentence “I miss you” is: all of those in which the referent of “I” has the relation of missing the referent of “you.” Of course when we consider actual examples of utterances of this sentence, we will need to decide what the referents of “I” and “you” are.

Consider that Smith is going out of town and expects he will miss his partner, who is staying home for the weekend. On Friday, Smith is at home getting ready to leave for the airport and his partner is still at work and will not be home until later that evening. Smith, before walking out of the door writes the message “I miss you,” on a piece of paper and leaves it on the counter top. Now let's say that Smith's mother decides she is going to surprise her son by coming to his house for the weekend. She shows up, not knowing that Smith is going out of town, and of course no one is home. She does, however, see the note on the counter, and she is touched. She thinks, for whatever reason, that her son must have known she was coming, and so left her the note, anticipating not being at home when she arrived. So Smith’s mother stays for the weekend with Smiths partner and when Smith finally comes home his mother shows him the note and says “do you miss me? Is this true?” Consider that Smith does happen to miss his mother, whom he never gets a chance to see, surely he would say something like “Well, I actually didn't intend for you to read that note, I didn't know you were coming, but yes it is true, I do miss you.” Of course the claim I am trying to get at right away is that utterer intention does not determine indexical reference in this case, just as it did not in the case we considered in the first part of this paper. In this scenario, and others we will examine, the referent of “you” turns out to be the decoder, or reader, of the utterance. Of course an utterer often does have in mind something he intends for “you” to refer to when he writes the message “I miss you,” and the note is usually false unless the utterer’s intended referent of “you” is the one doing the decoding. So it is tempting to conclude that the referent of “you” is determined by utterer intention. But this is untrue. It is merely coincidence that the utterance is usually false unless the decoder is the utterers intended referent of “you.” Of course when Smith's mother shows him the note and asks him “Is this true?” he would not say “No,” and scribble a new note that says “I miss you,” and, giving the new note to her—the one he intended for her to read—say “But this is.”

When Smith first wrote the note “I miss you” he began a “stream” of constant utterance. That is, there was an initial utterance—when Smith first wrote the note—but then the note itself became a proxy utterer for Smith, continually uttering tokens of the sentence “I miss you.” As we saw with “I am not here now,” the note does not continually utter the same utterance, but, because referents of indexicals are variable, and this variability causes variation in the proposition expressed by an utterance, the note, all though the syntax does not change, sometimes utters a different utterance. “I miss you” differs from “I am not here now” in the following way: the proposition expressed by “I am not here now” is continually variable, as the referent of “now” is continually variable. Each new instant, the note that says “I am not here now” utters an utterance distinct from the previous one and expresses a proposition distinct from the previous one. “I miss you” is not quite as variable. Rather, the referents “I” and “you” are not as continually variable as such an indexical as “now.” We saw in the above scenario that the referent of “you” happens to be the decoder of the note. So, the note depends on a reader to change the proposition that is expresses. Each time the note is read by a new person, the referent of “you” changes and thus the proposition expressed changes. If we consider the note when no one is reading it (and I am not sure we really need to) we see that when no one is reading it, it fails to express a proposition at all, as one of the words, “you,” has no reference.

Let us consider another scenario which varies slightly from the first one we looked at. As before, Smith is going out of town and leaves a note for his partner that says “I miss you.” Again, Smith's mother decides to drop in for a surprise visit but finds nobody there, so she makes herself at home until Smith's partner arrives. It just so happens that Smith's mother does not notice the note on the counter before Smith's partner comes home. When he does come home though, Smith's mother comes into the kitchen to greet him and they both see the note at the exact same time. Per what we have already illustrated, the note, when read by Smith's partner expresses the proposition “I miss you” where the referent of “you” is he, Smith's partner. When Smith’s mother reads the note the proposition it expresses is “I miss you” where the referent of “you” is she, Smith's mother. This seems to perhaps conflict with one of the conclusions we arrived upon in our consideration of “I am not here now,” that is, that one utterance may express one proposition. In this current scenario, a single utterance seems to express two propositions at the same time. Surely if one utterance did express two propositions at the same time, it would create some holes in my present argument. This is not what occurs in the scenario in which Smith's mother and Smith's partner read the same note at the same time though. The very act of one reading the note “I miss you” creates a new utterance of the sentence written on the piece of paper. When one reads the note, the referent of the word “you” changes. This is difficult to come to terms with perhaps because we are not used to thinking of syntactically identical utterances occurring in almost identical contexts as separate utterances. We can think of this in the following way: When Smith's partner reads the note (at exactly the same time as Smith's mother) the utterance the note makes is this “I miss you1” and the utterance the note makes when Smith's mother reads it is “I miss you2.” This is not to initiate some ontological debate about what entities are actually present in the syntax, but to show that change of reference entails a change of utterance. And though human utterers seem not to be able to make two separate utterances instantaneously, we have no reason to hold that notes, as proxy utterers cannot do so.

So it seems the framework I developed in the first part of this paper is not merely a clever way of explaining written instances of “I am not here now” but succeeds in explaining other similar instances of written indexicals. Our methodology has remained useful: In evaluating written inscriptions, we must determine two things: what the set of possible contexts in which the utterance(s) that the inscription makes is true is, and whether or not the actual context is part of that set. My theory of written inscriptions as proxy utters has proved useful in explaining how the methodology above succeeds completely in cases of written inscriptions that contain indexicals. Further, this methodology also allows us to preserve the general conclusions we have arrived upon about language, specifically, that one utterance may express one proposition, and that utterer intention is irrelevant to indexical reference.

Establishing Context: Reader Participation in Hemingway's “Marriage Group” Stories

Neither Hemingway the author nor his characters frequently confront head-on what they seem to consider difficult, if not absolutely terrifying, about life. Avoidance and repression are certainly recurring themes in the author's fiction. When characters do not, or are unable to avoid confrontations with what is in Hemingway the quintessence of life—suffering, failure, meaninglessness—the consequences can be traumatizing. Young Nick Adams, in “Indian Camp,” witnesses the ugliness and suffering with which people enter and leave this world. Though after seeing the pain of the woman giving birth Nick's “curiosity” dissipates and he tries to look away, in the end, he still gets “a good view” of the Indian man who cuts his own throat. Similarly, in the intertexual vignette of Chapter II of In Our Time, a young girl watches a woman give birth. Both Nick and the girl are confronted with their unattractive destinies as humans: painful childbirth for the girl and inevitable death for both of them, and, as the narrator comments in the intertexual vignette, they are both “scared sick looking at it.” Because of the traumatic nature of such terrific realizations, characters in Hemingway more often prefer to deal with life as the older Nick Adams does in “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II”: they recognize the presence of the swamp yet decide there is plenty of time to fish that swamp later, though the reader is usually given no reason to believe that the character will ever face whatever they are repressing.

Though we certainly can not treat Hemingway the author as we do his characters, we surely can see how the themes discussed heretofore may relate to the author's style, and how this style works to reinforce these themes. Like many of his characters, Hemingway often opts not to deal explicitly with certain things in some of his fiction. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes his theory that “you could omit anything if you knew you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (75). We can see this theory being employed, effectively, in Hemingway's so-called “Marriage Group” stories: “Out of Season,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “A Canary For One.” Here I aim to explore Hemingway's use of intentional omission in the first three of these stories, and the effect of this technique. I will use a discussion of “Hills Like White Elephants” as a way of exploring Hemingway's use of omission in general, then we will look at how a similar process is used in “Cat in the Rain” and “Out of Season.”

“Hills Like White Elephants” is an extraordinary artistic achievement, and it is what Hemingway decides to omit from the story that gives it much of its meaning. Essentially, it is a story about an abortion in which all direct mention of abortion is omitted. As we will see, though, it would be over-simple for us to conclude that direct mention of abortion is the only or most important thing omitted from the story. To understand what is omitted from the “Hills Like White Elephants,” we must briefly examine what I argue is the most important word in the story: “it.” Grammatically, “it” is a demonstrative, and, like all demonstratives, the referent of “it” is context-relative. Without a clear context, demonstratives like “it” refer to nothing, or rather, could refer to many things. This clear context is precisely what Hemingway omits from the story. Of course the author provides a situational or spatial context for the reader, but the conversation the couple has is neither explained nor placed clearly within the context of a larger discussion. To establish this context, and to realize that the couple is indeed talking about an abortion, the reader his- or herself must do a few things. First, a knowledge of Hemingway's works and a cursory biographical knowledge will get the reader far way in filling in what is omitted from the story. Childbirth and anxiety related to childbirth is a recurrent theme in Hemingway, and the author, in his own life, was undeniably at least unsure about the ideas of childbirth and parenthood, if not positively resentful of them. But neither a knowledge of the author's oeuvre nor the author's life is necessary in order for the reader to participate with the story in a way that reveals its full meaning. What is explicitly omitted from the story can be inferred from what is present in the text. It is not difficult, actually, to conclude from the man’s comments that whatever they are talking about is “really and awfully simple operation,” and is “just to let the air in,” that what is being discussed is an abortion (212). Yet the reader surely has no reason to be certain that an abortion is being discussed based solely on these comments. The idea that the operation mentioned in an abortion gains strength when we note certain things within the text.

First, and perhaps most obviously, we should note the repetition of pairs of things in the story, and the word two: the station is situated “between two lines of rails,” the couple order two beers, which are brought in “two glasses,” with “two felt pads,” they get “two Anis del Toro,” the girl takes hold of “two of the strings of beads” hanging from the doorway, they have “two heavy bags.” This repetition—as is common in Hemingway—is intentional and serves a specific purpose. We are constantly reminded that there are two and only two people present, and as we being to piece together the larger context of the conversation, it becomes clear that the mean at least seems to think three would be too many. Secondly, we can look to Hemingway's use of the description of the landscape –another common technique the author employs—for clues about the situation and the “thoughts” of characters. In the story, the girl stands up and walks away from the man, and we are told she looks at the land. The imagery here, the “fields of grain and trees along the bank of the Ebro,” ought to make the reader think of fertility, and we can infer that perhaps the girl herself is thinking of her own fertility as she looks at these things, especially in light of other stories, such as “Cat in the Rain.”
Once the reader notices these things, and others, a second reading of the story is definitely needed and is very rewarding. Now that a possible context for the conversation has been established by the reader, one realizes just how crucial to the story the word “it” is. The word is used in the story too frequently for us to examine every instance in depth here, but it is instructive to look briefly at the versatility of this word in the story. Toward the beginning of the story, when the girl asks the man what is painted on the bead curtain, he answers, “anis del toro. It's a drink.” The girl responds by asking “Could we try it?” Of course this is a reasonable response to the man's statement, but, too, it seems as if the girl has actually changed the subject, and is asking if they could try having the baby. Later the girl says rather enigmatically, “once they take it away, you never get it back.” If we assume “it” refers here to a child, this becomes a very meaningful and resonate sentence. Much of the story can, and I think should, be read in this way. “Hills Like White Elephants” is a great example of the kind of attention Hemmingway gives to each word in a story, and a perfect illustration of the effectiveness of his theory of omission.

“Cat in the Rain” is certainly a story about which, upon initially reading it, the reader will “feel something more than they understood.” The reader can “feel” there is something more to the American wife's attachment to the titular cat, but it is not immediately clear why. Again, the reader must participate with the text to fill in what has been left out by the author. As in “Hills Like White Elephants,” what seems to be left out of “Cat in the Rain” is mention of pregnancy. Keeping in mind how important the landscape often is in Hemingway, the reader is first clued into the subject matter of the story upon noting all of the fertile imagery in the opening paragraph. But perhaps more important is the repetition of the image of the woman at a window looking at these symbols of fertility. This image occurs three times in a three-page story. This image is appropriate given the stories theme of enclosure and entrapment, but it also points us to what may be going on in the woman's thoughts, that is, her looking at the fertile landscape may be correlated to her thinking about her own fertility. Perhaps the most obvious, if not most important, instance of omission is the story is signaled to the reader when the woman comes back into the hotel without finding the cat, and the narrator tells us that “something felt very small and tight inside the girl” (130). This sentence could be read to reinforce the already well established theme of enclosure but it is a rather curious sentence and not a stretch for one to infer that the “something” may be a child, and what the couple is really talking about in the story is pregnancy.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway claims that what is omitted from “Out of Season” is Peduzzi's suicide at the end of the story. Even though this ending does seem to fit the story, the reader has no access at all to this ending within the text itself. This is something one does not “feel” about the story unless told by the author himself that this was omitted. For this reason, we can be at least somewhat skeptical of what the author says about this story. Rather, this story is quite similar to “Hills Like White Elephants” in that what seems to be left out is a clear context in which to place the conversation that occurs between a woman and a man. The first indication the reader gets that something important has been omitted from the story is the wife's “sullen” attitude. Later, offering his wife a drink, the young gentleman says to her, “maybe it'll make you feel better” (136). Later still the young gentleman apologizes—though one senses half-heartedly—for the way he talked at lunch. No more is said about the conversation at lunch or about why the wife may be feeling so “rotten.” Many argue that what is omitted from this story is pregnancy and abortion. I think this story lacks adequate textual evidence to come to this conclusion for certain, but the possibility is certainly present. The story is saturated with “muddy” and dirty imagery: the “muddy drinks,” the “rusty bobsleds,” the river “brown and muddy,” and the “dump heap” to the right of the river. These images do evoke the idea of abortion, but could easily point to the wasted state of the relationship.

Hemingway's practice of intentional omission is only appropriate given the themes of avoidance and repression is much of his fiction. As we see often in his stories, things must be dealt with delicately, if not evasively, lest we become overwhelmed by reality, as Nick Adams does in “A Way You'll Never Be.” But the author's technique is not only appropriate but very effective. This technique forces the reader to actively participate in filling in parts of the narrative, involving the reader critically and emotionally in the story.