Re-reading Hemingway's story Hills like White Elephants (published in Transition in 1927), I could not avoid the melancholy reflection that today it's as if Hemingway had never lived. (Literary fiction has generally reverted to nineteenth century rhetoric and copiousness). Hemingway himself is not forgotten, of course, but he is insufficiently appreciated as a modernist.
The story consists mostly of dialogue. A man and a woman are waiting at a Spanish railway station. The man seems to be trying to persuade the woman to have an abortion - though in such elliptical terms that you have to read the piece carefully and more than once even to become aware of this possibility. (In 1927, you couldn't even mention abortion in fiction, let alone discuss it openly). Reference is made near the beginning of the story, and then again later on, to a distant range of hills, which the woman has compared in appearance to a herd of white elephants. The story ends inconclusively.
The view from the railway station that gives the story its title has inevitably been regarded as a symbol, and subjected to elaborate and (to my mind) unconvincing analyses. Here are some samples. 'That she perceives the hills as being like white elephants can be her taste of her drink being described as liquorice.' 'The implication is that, just as Jig [the woman] thinks the hills in the distant look like white elephants, the American views the couple's unborn child as an approaching obstacle.' 'The symbolism of the hills and the big white elephant can be thought of as the swollen breasts and big abdomen of a pregnant woman.' 'The reference to the white elephants may also bear a connection to the baby as a valuable possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness.' In short, you can read into it whatever you like, disqualifying it as a symbol of anything. I want to propose, in contrast, that in this story, and in some others that I shall discuss, Hemingway is not a symbolist but a playful cheat. This brings us to the concept of the MacGuffin.
It is most often cited in connection with the films of Alfred Hitchcock. "Where's the MacGuffin?" he would ask, when a screenwriter was pitching a story to him. He meant a plot device that drives or gives shape to the narrative, but which in the end may turn out to have little or no importance, or not even make sense at all. In Notorious (1946), a group of expatriate Nazis has been prospecting for uranium in Brazil. The samples of uranium ore are hidden inside champagne bottles in the wine-cellar of Alex Sebastian, a prominent member of the group. The bottles become the focus of a near-farcical series of incidents, without which the plot would not amount to much more than 'expatriate Nazis in Brazil'. Yet a little reflection reveals the absurdity of hiding the ore inside champagne bottles. In plant-pots, maybe, or in sacks of fertiliser in a garden shed. And what are the Nazis going to do with the uranium? (The Third Reich has fallen). But connecting it with a glamorous, luxury-lifestyle enables Hitchcock to develop the plot in a way that holds the audience's attention and generates suspense. But the MacGuffin is not uncommon in literature also. In Henry James' story The Figure in the Carpet, a distinguished novelist, Hugh Vereker, confides to the narrator that a single theme, or general tendency, pervades his work, 'like a complex figure in a Persian carpet', but that the critics have all missed it. However, he declines to say what it is. For the remainder of the story, it becomes the object of pursuit of the other characters, who either die or clam up when asked about it. This story also ends inconclusively, leaving the reader with the impression that James has been toying with him in much the same way as Vereker toyed with the unnamed narrator.
Consider what Hemingway's story would have been, unbookended by the image of hills that look like white elephants - or as the woman later remarks, don't really look much like white elephants. A stretch of enigmatic dialogue, hardly a story at all. Put as simplistically as that, it makes the story sound deceitful. But literature is not life, and deceit can be an authentic literary device. Besides, there is, or was, a three-tier readership for literature of this kind, an arrangement that mimics the social order. The vulgar taste is for plots; the educated middle-class have nothing against plots, but like to feel that they are reading something significant, represented by the presence of symbols; the cognoscenti have nothing against plots, and nothing against symbols (though aware of their falsity), but above all admire the deftness with which the writer handles his material. It was advantageous for Hemingway to produce stories such as Hills like White Elephants that appealed to all three constituencies. These stories were also a magazine commodity, written when Hemingway was living in Paris between the Wars. At that time, there were innumerable general interest magazines published in the USA, and many of them included at least one short story. The exchange rate between the dollar and the franc was so favourable that by selling a story every month, Hemingway was able to support himself and his family in the modest circumstances of a 5th Arrondissement apartment - a life that he celebrated in his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. Another of the stories that Hemingway published around this time was the much better known (it was made into a film in 1952) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936).
In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the snow-capped mountain functions as a MacGuffin so large that it almost qualifies as a Big Dumb Object. At a bush camp in a remote region of East Africa, a writer is dying of a gangrenous leg. He seems unwilling to avail himself of any chance of getting medical help, as though expiating a guilt that he is unable to express. In his last, delirious, hours, he comes to understand (and regret) that he has wasted his life on commercial ephemera instead of creating works of enduring value - works that would not have brought him fame or wealth, at least not in his lifetime, but which would have brought him fulfilment. In a brief foreword to the story, Hemingway himself offers the reader a symbolical analysis. "Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude." But this analysis attempts to sneak falsity past the reader. The leopard has aspired to something beyond its nature, and there is something noble about its fate. This is far from the fate of the writer in the story, who has betrayed his natural talents. What Hemingway has really been up to is to enclose the writer's predicament in a structural device that stands as a detached commentary on it. The mountain is eternal, his life is transient. And this how he transmutes the base metal of self-pity into art.
My final example is The Sea Change (1931). This story follows the same pattern as Hills like White Elephants. Again, the story consists mostly of dialogue, and again a man and a woman are talking, this time in a Paris bar. The woman seems to have had an affair, not with another man, but with another woman, so that again we have a forbidden topic (lesbian love) discussed in elliptical terms. The woman departs, leaving their future relations unresolved. The MacGuffin is here represented by a barman. Until about halfway through, the couple and the barman are the only people in the bar. Then two other men enter and order drinks. We also get a snatch of the barman's stream of consciousness. At the end, the man goes up to the counter to pay both bills (his own and the woman's). He insists that he is now 'a different man' (he has suffered a sea change), with which, after some prompting, the barman concurs. I need hardly say that everything beside the central conversation is pure bluff, pretending to the reader that it provides a mysterious key to the significance of the story, which it patently does not. Here then, we see the MacGuffin in its purest form, providing the illusion of a plot when a plot is lacking, and the deceptive symbol needed to turn the monthly trick with a sophisticated but gullible readership.
It may seem to you that, despite what I have said to the contrary several times, I am accusing Hemingway of something - perhaps of lack of integrity or seriousness. In fact, such stories as the three that I have analysed give me personally all the more pleasure for knowing that I don't have to try to read meaning into what I recognise as something of deceptive importance, something whose audacity lies in its artistry rather than its symbolism. I have even tried to make use of the MacGuffin myself, though without conspicuous success. I hope in due course to post one of these attempts, so that you can judge the matter for yourself.
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