Hemingway, “To Have and Have Not” and the Rule of Nastiness
Reading Hemingway gives the feeling of being tossed around in the waves of the sea. That’s so true for “To Have and Have Not”.
Hemingway shows up in “To Have and Have Not” (1937) many facets of human beings. Out of them, one struck me: the relationship between nastiness and not understanding.
At the very beginning of “To Have and Have Not” this sentence enlightened me:
The one thing he hadn’t understood right had made him nasty.
No matter which character that sentence refers to or any further details that you’ll discover by reading and enjoying the novel. What’s crucial here is the relationship between nastiness and not understanding.
Harry Morgan, the main character, is the hero who is the most tossed around in the waves of the sea. Waves of nastiness, indeed.
Harry is the reader’s gaze on this sea.
Understanding is luxury
Understanding is about being open to including something different from what we are in our standpoint.
Including different standpoints means having many choices.
All characters in “To Have and Have Not” are far away from having a choice. So Harry. They all fight to survive, indeed. For them, understanding is a luxury they can’t afford. The luxury of having a choice.
Instead, Harry and all humans around him just act. So they betray, they shoot, they kill. All that doesn’t matter, because understanding doesn’t matter.
There’s no judgment — judgments are always useless, as they categorize without the aim of understanding — in finding out that poverty, as the status of having no choice, is a powerful push toward nastiness.
Hemingway can make the reader feel all that.
No choice leads to nastiness
The point is well described in the third part of the novel:
I don’t want to fool with it but what choice have I got? They don’t give you any choice now.
When people have no choice, the option of including the good of other people in their decisions simply does not exist. The only choice is to survive no matter others survive.
That’s how Harry feels, even before thinking. And he thinks accordingly with that feeling. In this order.
When it comes to survival, the focus is on the single person who wants to survive. There’s no time for understanding, there’s just the need to catch up on any possible resource, even if that means stealing or killing or any bad action against other people.
Here we are: nastiness arises.
Discovering myself: conclusion
At the end of “To Have and Have Not” I felt sad, discombobulated, and comforted at the same time.
Sad because human beings despise understanding, and this contempt is often necessary to survive.
Discombobulated by the sadness of the inevitability of the chaos that human feeling involves.
Comforted, paradoxically, because in some way Hemingway’s novel makes me feel at home. In the human home. That means that I can find nastiness in myself too. I do all my best to keep trapped that nastiness somewhere inside me, in the jail of the understanding. But it’s there. Always.
That’s the eternal struggle between understanding and being nasty.
