The Radiance of Objects in Place

Abstract

Godfrey details the rootedness of Hemingway’s characters in their material environments. Many of his literary geographies are actually “entangled territories,” to use Stacy Alaimo’s phrase, of “material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” energies (3). The work of humanist geographers, alongside the work of critics who are part of a recent material turn in literary and cultural studies, is the framework Godfrey uses here to show that Hemingway rarely upheld the binaries “human” and “natural” in his writing. Instead, Hemingway dissolves the distinctions between “nature” and “culture” or between “human” and “natural,” often doing so by emphasizing the concrete, sensory connections he and his characters have to objects in their various environments. Often that connectedness involves characters reading books (some of Hemingway’s favorite material objects) in a particular place, as if geography were constructed in part by the very act of reading.

[O]nly very rarely now, as by mistake, does a thing speak to me, granting and giving without demanding that I reproduce it equivalently and significantly in myself. The Spanish landscape (the last I experienced to the utmost)—Toledo—drove this attitude of mine to its extreme: since there the external thing itself—tower, hill, bridge—already possessed the incredible, unsurpassable intensity of the inner equivalents through which one might have been able to represent it. External world and vision everywhere coincided as it were in the object; in each a whole inner world was displayed…

—Ranier Maria Rilke, letter to Ellen Delp, October 27, 1915

The taxi rounded the statue of the inventor of the semaphore engaged in doing same, and turned up the Boulevard Raspail, and I sat back to let that part of the ride pass. The Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding. It was like a certain stretch on the P.L.M. between Fontainebleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey.

—Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises, 1926