The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ernest Hemingway · a novella in one unbroken narrative · Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952 · scored on Hemingway’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Sea tale as parable; the realist idiom of the code hero carried into fable, with no key supplied
Mythos
The man against the great creature of the sea, with a descent, an ordeal of three days and a return bearing only the proof; master and disciple; the lions as a dream of lost strength; the Passion, applied at the close
Phase
From the eighty-four days without a fish, through a voyage out alone, the strike, the nights on the line, the kill on the third day and the sharks, to the return and a short coda ashore
Presentation
Fiction; one continuous narrative without chapters or numbered parts, in the third person held close to the old man, much of the middle carried by his speech aloud to himself, the fish, the birds and his own hand
Register
The plain sentence joined by “and”, plain nouns and repetition; the exact names and motions of the craft; the old man’s speech as Spanish heard through English
Scale
One old man, one skiff, one fish and one sea, with the village at either end
Governing Proposition
An old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a fish goes out alone in his skiff, hooks a marlin longer than the skiff, holds it on a hand line through the nights until he kills it, and loses it to the sharks on the way home, bringing back only the skeleton, which strangers at a café cannot read. The wager of the novella is that the plain style, exact to the craft of fishing and to nothing else, can carry a fable of near-scriptural shape without ceasing to be plain, and can show that the excess which wins the fish is the excess which loses it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” The first sentence sets the man, the place, the trade and the trouble in one breath, and the book never leaves them. The boy who fished with him has been taken from him by his parents. The old man is poor. The second paragraph closes on his sail, which looked like “the flag of permanent defeat”, and the trouble has been stated before anything has happened.
Ashore there is the shack, the borrowed food and the talk of the fishermen, the newspapers and the baseball, and “the great DiMaggio” and his bone spur. The boy is his disciple, and age is handing itself to youth. When the old man sleeps he dreams of lions playing on a beach in Africa. He is named Santiago, for the fisherman apostle, and the book will call him the old man.
The novella was first printed whole in one issue of Life, on 1 September 1952, and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York the same month. It came after the poor reception of Across the River and Into the Trees (1950). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was named in the citation of Hemingway’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. It is one continuous narrative, with no chapters and no numbered parts, told in the third person held close to the old man, and the reader is never let off the water while he is on it.
Movement II
He goes out alone. The craft is set down exactly: the baits at their depths, the lines with their coils and reserves, the way a fish is felt through the hand before anything is seen. The hours of patience before the strike are not a delay. The struggle to come is a test of duration, and the book makes the reader keep the hours with him.
When the fish takes the bait it is only a weight on a line, felt and not seen. With no one in the skiff, the old man speaks aloud: to himself, to the fish, to the birds, to his own cramping hand. He wishes the boy were with him, and wishes it again. A man who has no one to speak to speaks to everything, and his speech, written as Spanish heard through English, carries much of the middle of the book.
Then the fish shows itself. It rises out of the sea at a length the old man has never seen, longer than his skiff. The hours in which it was only a weight have prepared the leap, and the leap changes the scale of everything after it: this is no longer a catch but a contest with a creature of the deep, the oldest of the sea’s stories, from Jonah to Moby-Dick, told as a fishing trip.
Movement III
The nights on the water are cold and wide. The old man sits with the line across his back under the stars, and the sea is lit with phosphorescence. His left hand cramps, and he speaks to it. He eats tuna raw, and drinks from his water bottle. He talks to the fish as to a brother, and he means it: he loves what he is trying to kill, and he is kin to it.
To hold on, he remembers. He thinks of the hand-wrestling at Casablanca. He thinks of DiMaggio and the bone spur. He thinks of the lions on the beach. The memories are few, and each will come back at the end. Some of the talk of baseball and of the boy returns more often than it needs to, and the book’s plainness bears the repetition less well than it bears the hours.
On the third day he kills the fish. The harpoon is driven down, and the fish lifts high out of the water before it dies. He lashes it alongside the skiff and turns for home. The killing is not undone by the love, and the love is not undone by the killing. That is the first half of what the book knows.
Movement IV
The blood goes into the water. First comes a single mako, the dentuso. Then come the shovel-nosed galanos, and the meat is torn off in pieces. The book does not hurry them. The loss has to be slow to mean anything, and it is paced as exactly as the struggle was.
In the middle of it he says the sentence the book is remembered by: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” It is a maxim that holds, and it is spoken aloud by the man it describes. Much of what the book means is said rather than found, and part of what it gives is a mood of dignity under loss rather than a condition that can be stated and tested.
The other half of what it knows is harder, and it comes as a question. Asked by himself what beat him, the old man answers: “I went out too far.” The excess that won the fish is the excess that lost it. Whether it is his glory or his fault, the book does not settle, and that refusal is the deepest thing in it.
Movement V
He comes into the village with the skeleton lashed alongside. He shoulders the mast up the hill, and sleeps face down with his palms up. Earlier his cry was likened to the sound of a man feeling a nail driven through his hands. The Passion is laid over the last pages and pressed on the reader, and it is the one pattern in the book that is applied rather than built.
Then the point of view leaves him. Tourists at a café see the great spine and take it for a shark’s. The deed has been done, and no one present can read it. The form that kept the reader on the water with the old man now sets the reader among those who were not there, and the gap between the deed and its witness becomes the book’s last subject.
The last sentence goes back to him: “The old man was dreaming about the lions.” The lions are the young strength he no longer has, and the skeleton is the deed that no one can read; both are what the work leaves behind it. One law has run from the first sentence to this one: a man is measured by how he does his work to the end, and the sea gives and takes by the same law that governs him.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing to cut. The book is one action, and each part is required by it. The opening ashore sets the eighty-four days, the boy taken from the old man by his parents, and his poverty. The voyage needs its hours of patience before the strike, because the struggle is a test of duration. The sharks must come in sequence, first the single mako, the dentuso, then the shovel-nosed galanos, because the loss has to be slow to mean anything; and the coda must show the skeleton seen by people who cannot read it. The memories are few, the hand-wrestling at Casablanca and the lions on the African beach, and each returns at the end. What holds it below the top is repetition inside the monologue: the wish for the boy recurs past the point where it adds, and “the great DiMaggio” and his bone spur are returned to more often than the argument requires.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and in large part it holds: the value of a life of work lies in the work done to the end, which loss cannot take back; the hunter loves and is kin to what he kills, and the love does not undo the killing; and age is a strength measured against its own decline. The book also discloses the cost of its own ethic, which keeps it from being a mere code. Asked by himself what beat him, the old man answers “I went out too far”, and the excess that won the fish is the excess that lost it. Held a tenth below the bar on two charges. The central finding is spoken aloud, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated”, so that much of the meaning is told rather than found; and part of what the book gives is a mood of stoic dignity more than an articulated condition. The poverty of the village and the economy of the catch are present only as ground.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height and frequency both, across a short book. The first leap of the marlin, the fish rising out of the sea at a length the old man has never seen, longer than his skiff, is a summit, and it is prepared by hours in which the fish is only a weight on a line. The nights on the water are a second register, cold and wide: the stars, the phosphorescence, the old man alone with the line across his back, talking to the fish as to a brother. The kill, the harpoon driven down and the fish lifting high out of the water before it dies, is the third. Then the descent, elevation of the dreadful kind: the blood in the water, the sharks, the meat torn off in pieces. The last sentence lifts once more. Held below the higher figures because the height is lyric and single-voiced, within the scale of a novella, and some elevated passages lean on repetition for their swell.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built from a fishing trip. The struggle of a man against a great creature of the sea is among the oldest of patterns, from Jonah and Leviathan to Moby-Dick, and here it bears the whole structure: a descent into the deep, an ordeal of three days, a victory, and a return home with nothing but the proof of the contest. The old man and the boy carry a second pattern, master and disciple, age handing itself to youth; the lions on the beach are the dream of a lost strength, and close the book. The fisherman is named Santiago, for the fisherman apostle. The particular stays particular throughout: the baits at their depths, the cramped left hand, the water bottle, the tuna eaten raw. Held off the top because the third pattern, the Passion, is applied more than built: the cry likened to a man feeling a nail driven through his hands, the mast shouldered up the hill, the body laid out with palms up, all in the last pages and insisted on.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the sea tale of Melville, Conrad and Crane’s “The Open Boat”, the naturalist story of a man against nature in Jack London, and above all Hemingway’s own prose, the style of omission he had made in the 1920s. The turn is real but bounded: the realist idiom of the code hero carried into fable, a story exact on its surface to the craft of fishing while its whole shape is a parable, with no key supplied; and the old man’s speech written as Spanish heard through English. The stake was real for its author, after the poor reception of Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and printing the whole book in one issue of a magazine was a wager of a kind. But a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve. The instrument was Hemingway’s own and long established, and the book returns to it and purifies it rather than departing from it. The axis stands lowest of the eleven that count.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A novel would give the old man a past in scenes, a society and a plot; this book knows him as a man alone with a task, and its single unbroken action, without chapters, is the shape of the ordeal: no cut lets the reader rest when the old man cannot. The close third person, speaking much of the time through the old man’s words aloud to the fish, the birds and his own hand, is the instrument of solitude: a man who has no one to speak to speaks to everything. The coda is the second instrument. The point of view leaves him, and tourists at a café take the great spine for a shark’s, so that the form enacts the gap between the deed and its witness. Held off the top because the parable form and the third person are inherited, and in the long middle the form carries the endurance more than it adds to the knowledge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence first. Seventy-four years of reading have yielded a real variety: the Christian allegory, the naturalist contest, the existential fable of effort affirmed without meaning, the biographical reading in which the marlin is the work and the sharks the critics, the ecological reading of a man who loves what he destroys. The text sustains these without settling among them, and “I went out too far” stays open: whether the excess is the old man’s glory or his fault. Against that, much of the meaning lies on the surface by the book’s design. A reader takes most of what it holds on a first reading, and return yields a refinement of the same meanings more than new ones. The criticism has been large, but has often turned on whether the book is sentimental rather than on what it keeps holding. Held well below the novels of the summit, and a little below its fame.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The field is American fiction of the 1950s, and the English-language novel beside it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the plain style made for the war and the café could carry a fable of near-scriptural shape without losing its plainness, and it fixed the short novel of solitary endurance as a form. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised possibility; the style that moved the field was the style of the 1920s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the whole book in one issue of Life, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction of 1953, and the Nobel Prize of 1954, whose citation named it; a school text across much of the world for seventy years; John Sturges’s film with Spencer Tracy (1958) and Aleksandr Petrov’s animated film (1999). What holds it in the low eights is that the reach is cultural more than literary: the American novel of the decade went to Bellow, Salinger, Nabokov and Kerouac, and no school can be shown to have turned on this book.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-four years, and it is weighed as seventy-four years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence has been continuous and very wide: in print throughout, read in schools in the United States and well beyond, translated, and filmed twice. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment. A Cuban fishing village, a skiff and a hand line are fixed to their time only as setting, and the baseball of 1950 is furniture. It is held a tenth below the widest figure because a large part of its presence is popularity and assignment, which are presence and not proof of permanence, and because its critical standing has cooled more than its readership. A survival of seven decades does not stand level with the centuries.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence joined by “and”, building a rhythm out of plain nouns and repetition, so that the length of the ordeal is felt in the length of the clauses. The opening sentence sets the man, the place, the trade and the trouble in one breath, and the second paragraph closes on a sail that looked like “the flag of permanent defeat”. The knowledge of the craft is exact and made into narrative: the lines at their depths, the coils and reserves, the way a fish is felt through the hand. The pacing of the sharks is a feat of control. Three charges hold it below the top: the mannerism hardens in places into self-imitation; the old man’s speech, Spanish rendered literally, can stiffen; and the scenes with the boy and the Passion figures of the end are pressed toward sentiment.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the whole: a man is measured by how he does his work to the end, and the sea gives and takes by the same law that governs him. Take the two most distant elements, the lions playing on the African beach, which the old man dreams of in the first part and the last, and the tourists who take the skeleton for a shark’s. They obey the same law: the young strength he no longer has and the deed that no one present can read are both what the work leaves behind it. The voice, the plain diction and the code run unbroken from the first sentence to the last, and the turn to the café in the coda is held inside them. Held at this figure because the range is narrow: one man, one sea, three days, one register; and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a novella holds. The natural order, fully: the sea, the fish, the birds, the turtles, the sharks, the weather and the stars, all known by a man who lives in them. Labour, as the whole matter of the book. Age and the body: the cramped hand, the cut palms, the failing strength. Consciousness, in the old man’s speech to himself. The sacred, in the prayers he promises and the Passion figures. Poverty and the village, in the shack, the borrowed food and the fishermen’s talk. Popular culture, in DiMaggio and the newspapers. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is absent or only glimpsed: the state, history, the family (the boy’s parents appear only as an order obeyed), sex and the life of the town. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Inevitable and The Made at 8.8. Seventy-four years of continuous and very wide presence, with the text whole and its surface barely fixed to its moment; one action in which almost nothing can be cut, the sharks coming in sequence because the loss must be slow; and the plain sentence joined by “and”, exact to the craft, in which the length of the ordeal is felt in the length of the clauses.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the natural order and labour held at full strength, with age, consciousness, the sacred and the village joined to them, but the state, history, the family, sex and the life of the town absent or glimpsed. Next above it, The Swerve at 7.8: a return to and purification of Hemingway’s own proven instrument, which is not a departure. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.1: a meaning laid largely on the surface by design, which return refines more than it renews.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.8, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 three tenths short, and The Swerve at 7.8 seven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.4, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, first printed whole in one issue of Life on 1 September 1952 and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in September 1952; scored as the novella as published in book form in 1952. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening sentence, the sail likened to “the flag of permanent defeat”, “the great DiMaggio”, the two sentences the old man speaks of defeat and of going out too far, and the last sentence. The two films, John Sturges’s (1958) and Aleksandr Petrov’s (1999), are not part of the work. The share of dialogue, the length of the sentences and the rate of repetition are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the counts of words and pages, the exact clock of the three days, the name of the village and the wording of the Nobel citation, are not given. Citations are by episode; the book has no chapters.