The Embodiment of Iceberg Theory In The Old Man and the Sea
...nd there are many tricks.” We have thought here of the tricks of the trade that the old fisherman will soon use to compensate for his waning physical strength in his struggle against the Marlin, tricks that years of experience have taught him: the products of disciplined attention to a craft for him is also a passion. We have known ,too, that in Hemingway the word “strange” almost always refers to something defying conventional understanding, a mystery of nature.. But when the boy asks him if he is strong enough for a big fish, Santiago’s mind is still partly on how he had managed to preserve his eyesight during his year of turtling. Allusions like the one to the remora trick are early indications of Santiago’s human fallibility, put there to guide us away from seeing him as an icon rather than the convincing, imitable exemplar that he is. We have wondered that why the narrative presents eighty-four as the particular number of days Santiago has gone without a fish, so that the voyage he is about to undertake is his eighty-five attempt. Those numbers have a much more literal and topical frame of reference. They refer to the pennant race the two discuss both before and after Manolin interrupts their conversation to go for bait and food for Santiago. And it will be instructive. Yet the numerical concordances are ancillary to a more objectively verifiable “tip of the iceberg” identifying DiMaggio’s performance in Washington as the single event that confirms Santiago’s faith in both DiMaggio and himself. Before we explore in detail Santiago’s reaction to this game, then, we should observe how the event is obliquely specified by references to two other Yankee games on days immediately following. To consider further the event Santiago “happily” cites to confirm his faith that “the Yankee cannot lose,” DiMoaggi’s Sunday game was spectacular: a single event suitably matching in magnitude Santiago’s outsize accomplishment, soon to follow. But what matters most for the novel is that when DiMaggio came alive his personal contributions led his team to win six of its eight games that week, and emerge in first place a half-game ahead of the Tigers, prepared to grind its way to an eventual pennant. Not until the end of the novel, when Santiago wakes up Saturday morning after his own extraordinary performance and reads, “the newspapers of the [days] that [he] was gone” (September 13-15), will he himself learn more details of his aging fellow champion’s resurgence at bat. And the new resurgence by DiMaggio gives Santiago confidence in his next day at sea, or in an inevitable day of success soon after that --even without the numerical concordances he conceives. The numerical consonances with DiMaggio’s record make up one of several “informed” illusions Baker, Hemingway: The writer as Artist 273) or ritualized fictions Santiago relies upon, not because he believes in the literal content of the fictions, but because he does believe in a cause that requires him to act without hope of material success. And because he is both proud and humble enough to believe that human beings cannot act without hope of material reward, he finds way of behaving as if he will succeed where he most knows he cannot. As DiMaggio’s team “cannot lose” in its struggle, then, neither will Santiago’s team. Santiago’s eighty-five day at sea, ending his slump with his record result, will in reality gain something precious, if not a materially tangible trophy, for the team he champions-the human species. For we will find that in his struggle with the great marlin Santiago reaffirms once again, as he has so often before, humanity’s necessary connection with nature’s order. In portraying the roles of Santiago and DiMaggio in the survival of their groups, therefore, Hemingway stresses in both cases the reliance of the many upon the one. This is a theme not only reinforcing the novel’s occasional comparison of Santiago to Christ, but also commenting on the relation of all human champions to society. In addition to the roles of the two champions there is a large similarity between the Yankees’ overall struggle against the resolute Tigers team of 1950 and the old man’s entire struggle against the great marlin and the shark.. It is ...