The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
–Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”
Aging and diminishment are not synonymous. There are hundreds of books and essays about aging, which surely involves diminishment; very few about diminishment per se. And yet diminishment afflicts millions of people of all ages who suffer from a wide range of degenerative diseases, who endure declining capacities due to traumatic injuries, and who lose jobs, friends, family members, and communities of support. Moreover, more recent life span research has emphasized the positive aspects of later life, such as advantages in emotional well- being. Though we tend to think of diminishment as purely physical, it is just as often social, economic, and psychological. Even so, diminishment is perhaps best explored in the lives of the elderly, since its many types are both more visible and more common as people age.
At the same time, complete conflation of aging and diminishment has led to some serious misunderstandings of both processes and has blinded us to some of the most vitally important literary works that diagnose and dramatize diminishment in such a way so as to provide vivid and wise examples of how best to cope with it. For example, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, interpreted by many critics over the years since its 1952 publication as a novel celebrating the courage of the elderly in the face of adversity, is actually a quite different achievement altogether. Though its title character is an old man, the novel really imbues its readers with an almost visceral comprehension of diminishment in all its forms and thereby pertains to human beings of all ages
Both literary critics and the general reading public were quick to regard Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as an extended exploration of how to age heroically. Stanley Cooperman’s seminal essay of 1965, “Hemingway and Old Age: Santiago as Priest of Time,” set both the terms and the tone for all subsequent reflections on Hemingway’s novel as a book about courage in the face of mortality. For example, Robert C. Evans in the leading critical essay in his authoritative anthology of critical essays on The Old Man and the Sea elaborated on Cooperman’s work before situating the novel within the broader cultural conversation about old age in the 1940s and 1950’s. And like most writers before and after, Evans emphasized the heroic overcoming of the limitations of old age as summarized in the most widely quoted passage of the book, “A man may be destroyed but not defeated.”
The narrative consistently undercuts such misinterpretations. It invites readers to construe the story as a conventional epic quest: hero sets out alone, finds the object of the quest, vanquishes adversary, returns home. And Santiago, the old man, exhibits most of the standard virtues of the epic hero: courage, resourcefulness, intelligence. Craft and guile. However, the “hero” is old and frail, not a man at the peak of his powers. He regrets having gone out alone, having refused the fervent requests of the boy Manolin, his lone remaining companion, to accompany him, as he usually did. He is unsure of his virtues, especially endurance. His body betrays him. He is impoverished and dependent, far from self-sufficient. And he is a man who has “attained humility,” not among the epic virtues.
These several striking departures from the epic tradition should enable us to see that this is a novel about diminishment, not about conquest. The major action of the book, contrary to almost all of the readings of it, is not the battle with the giant marlin but the gradual, painful, protracted consumption of that splendid trophy by a succession of bloody shark attacks. By the time the first shark comes to feast on the marlin that Santiago has lashed to his skiff, he has long since come to first admire, then to befriend, and finally to identify completely with the marlin. The two have become tied together as one on the sea and in the hero’s mind and heart. Thus, the inexorable and violent shredding of the marlin’s flesh dramatizes in an excruciating and unforgettable way, both in the novel and in the later 1958 film version of it, the hero’s regressive loss of his own identity.
Santiago’s diminishment began long before the action of the story. His wife died long ago, and he commemorates her death by keeping a small shrine, including her photograph, in his one-room abode. His friends have abandoned him, regarding him as an object of pity. He has become economically diminished, catching fewer and fewer fish, and utterly dependent for food on the silent largesse of others, though he cannot admit this to himself. He has one faithful companion who brings him his food, watches over him, indulges his self-deceptions of his independence, and accompanies him on his fishing expeditions. Yet at the outset of the action, Santiago refuses to take him along any longer, thereby severing his last tie to community. Thus, Santiago’s first decisive action in the novel completes his social diminishment. He sets out alone, and he will die alone.
Once launched and at sea, the old man feels and often bemoans all of his declining powers. His eyes are not as keen and strong as they once were, so he cannot endure the glare of the sun off the waters and is prone to hallucinations. His mind wanders, sometimes perilously. He becomes disoriented, unsure at times of his location and his bearings. All of these and other forms of physical diminishment become especially obvious and significant once he has hooked the 1,500-pound marlin. His hands are perhaps the most delicate and important of his sensory organs. Indeed, he can discern exactly what the great fish is doing, even thinking, simply by the subtle pressures and movements of the rope that he is holding that reaches hundreds of feet to the hook in the marlin’s jaw. And yet these very hands betray him as they repeatedly cramp at crucial moments in the struggle with his enormous adversary.
These physical diminishments, along with all of those other diminishments that have gone before, then become compressed and amplified in the symbolic shark attacks. The old man knows that they are coming. And when they come, he fights them off with all of his remaining strength, largely by bashing them with his oar. And they come in relentless waves, many kinds of sharks, suggesting many kinds of diminishment. By the time the winds carry the old man back to his port of embarkation, the great marlin has been reduced to a naked skeleton of one bone running the length of the fish, leaving bewildered visitors to the town to wonder the next morning exactly what it is.
Though the stupendous and successful effort to land the marlin inspires awe and admiration, the shark attacks are the more memorable and significant part of the novel. I lecture in a program at the retirement community where I live that features community readings of short novels that also have film versions. When I offered my thoughts about The Old Man and the Sea, the audience, whose average age is around 82, found that the shark attacks represented exactly what they felt about their lives. As a result, something happened that has never happened to me before in some fifty years of teaching. The text found its way into the ordinary everyday discourse of the readers. Whenever someone’s loved one dies, whenever someone falls, whenever someone is diagnosed with cancer, the widespread response here in our community is, “another shark attack!”
If this were all the novel had to offer, it would be very bleak indeed. But as my audience saw, The Old Man and the Sea provides many examples of how to contend with diminishment with nobility and wisdom. The old man, for example, comes to acknowledge his dependence rather than deny it. Again and again, he laments his leaving the boy behind even as he comes to realize all of the ways in which he has been dependent upon him. The old man also comes to see for the first time that it is better to make do with what one has than to lament what one has lost. He forgets to bring some needed resources onto the boat and loses others in the course of fighting the fish. He initially feels angry frustration over these losses but quickly comes to realize that his very survival depends upon making the best of and being grateful for what he still has at hand.
Learning to live with limitations instead of denying them, focusing on remaining strengths and capacities rather than on those that are lost, acknowledging vulnerability and dependence upon others, and resisting the inevitable while realizing that it is finally inevitable are all represented in the novel as salutary ways of contending with those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Yet some ways of contending with the adversities of diminishment are not so life-giving, even as they are quite understandable and very widespread. The Old Man and the Sea dramatizes these as well.
In order to discern these latter and less fruitful strategies, readers must recognize that their own perspective on the action is superior to the protagonist’s. The old man’s major strategy for dealing with failure and diminishment is to blame himself for them. “I went out too far” becomes almost a refrain spoken by the old man as an explanation for what took place at sea, especially for the dismemberment of the marlin. Many have accepted this explanation with admiration, believing it to be a noble recognition by the old man of his responsibility for what happened to him and to his catch. Others have insisted that the old man has named his own tragic flaw, a kind of hubris leading to over-reaching and to a failure to recognize limits, both geographical and physical.
Discerning readers know better. The old man did not sail out too far. He went out a little ways beyond other boats to reach a current where he knew he might catch a big fish. And then the 1500-pound fish took him out too far over the course of two whole days. Too far northeast of the north coast of Cuba. Too far to be able to avoid shark attacks through a quick return home. And what brought the old man home was not his own cunning or strength. What brought him home were the favorable winds. He was all along, in his going out and his coming in, firmly in the hands of natural forces he could not control. He had nothing to feel guilty about, even though guilt was what he felt most strongly.
But why this convicted feeling of guilt? Simply because, as Elaine Pagels put it in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, “we would rather feel guilty than helpless.” This profound insight she drew from a theological dispute between St. Augustine and Julian of Eclanum in the fifth century AD. So the matter here goes well beyond strategies for coping with diminishment to fundamental moral, psychological, and theological issues. In brief, guilt at least preserves a sense of agency. We could have and should have done otherwise. We were capable, active, but mistaken. Helplessness, by contrast, acknowledges lack of agency and a resulting need for help: it denies capability and acknowledges dependence. Santiago’s guilt is a kind of failure to admit weakness. It is the last gasp of resistance to diminishment or at least to a full acknowledgement of it.
The old man returns late at night, exhausted, when the town is empty of life. He rolls up the sail onto the mast and carries it on his shoulders up the hill to his abode. It is the conclusion of his own passion story. Though he dies (whether he dies or not remains ambiguous), guilt-ridden, he also dies at peace largely due to the discoveries he made on his journey. He dies dreaming of the lions playing on the coast of Africa, returning to his youthful days, as he has returned so often in his dreams. Lions. Not a single great-maned and dominating king of beasts. So though he dies alone, he dies dreaming of community. And community may be an effective remedy for a depressing sense of diminishment.
But not perhaps a lasting remedy. Acknowledgement that the human condition is better figured as a passion narrative than as an epic adventure can restore a sense of meaning and significance to a life that might otherwise seem hopelessly pointless. Hemingway wrote this story when he was in the midst of multiple disappointments and doubts about his health, his writing, his addictions, and the overall meaning of his life. In The Old Man and the Sea, he retrieved images and ideas that he inherited from his Catholic upbringing to suggest that suffering in the midst of abandonment and failure is basic to a truly human life, a life most fully represented by Jesus of Nazareth, who died with a sense that he had been abandoned by God. As Santiago climbs his own Calvary up the hill to his home at the end of the novel and falls beneath the weight of his cross (the mast across his shoulders with its furled up sail), the old fisherman with the saintly name becomes an emblem of the theology of the cross: what the world sees as defeat, God sees as victory.
On this reading and the understanding of diminishment it offers, one might well reverse the oft-quoted maxim for which the book is remembered. NOT “a man may be destroyed but he can never be defeated, but rather “a man may be defeated but he can never be destroyed.”
