Hills, Herons, Metaphor
A reflection on the power of metaphor and a well-know Hemingway story.
Metaphorical expression and understanding draw upon our innate ability to connect imagery to thought by juxtaposing one thing to another and—almost magically—witnessing meaning appear. It is an essential dynamic of the human psyche, whether we acknowledge it or not with the more logical part of our brain. The analogical runs much deeper. While the first human (or perhaps proto-human) made sounds, later cave art and likely other long-lost representational expressions to correlate the thing out there with something else in our minds—thus giving birth to language—the first artists worked to trace the dynamics of the metaphorical that the human mind can’t help but experience.
So even in our normative language we give simple names to things that rely heavily on the metaphorical: the leg of a table, the face of a clock, the arm of a chair…. And some, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argue that even our most mundane expressions rely on signs that point toward something else, the deepest communication occurring at the “intersections of words”—leading him to ultimately, and jarringly, proclaim that “all language is silence.” Particularly striking to me is that many of his claims are themselves richly metaphoric and figurative: “language is the worn coin in the hand…language is like working on the wrong side of a tapestry….” See my post on Merleau-Ponty for more on his take on how language functions.
The best language artists (writers) draw upon the unique, open-ended power of the metaphorical.
In a favorite story of mine, though one that is often anthologized largely because of a far-too-simple reading of its meaning, “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway demonstrates the power of metaphor/artistic understanding and how associative meaning extends well beyond the far less complex simile whose formulaic “x is like y” leaves us still wholly within a rational mindset. Metaphoric expression/understanding is both more emphatic and far less reductive (you can’t ever quite come up with an equivalent logical statement).
In the story (and I encourage you to click here and take a few extra minutes to read its 3 pages of mostly dialogue, even if you are familiar with it), a young woman turns toward metaphor/art as a way to contend with and understand an overwhelming situation much more deeply.
She and her male partner sit in the shade at a train junction restaurant in Spain waiting to make a connection and seemingly engaged in small talk—which we will soon discover is anything but small (and by story’s end, one should come away with the sense that every single thing in this very short story is pulsing with metaphorical meaning, that everything in the story is, in a sense, pregnant with meaning).
As you will know if you’ve read the story carefully, or read what has been said or written about it, the woman is pregnant, and the story’s central tension arises as the man works to use logic and reason to try to convince her to have an abortion. Many a teacher or online lit-guide often stops short here having “solved the puzzle” of what kind of “operation” they are discussing. The better understanding of the story, however, arises once you go on to address how narrow minded and un-empathetic the man is and how, contrastingly, the woman consistently uses a wholly different mode of expression throughout.
Notice, too, that Hemingway certainly isn’t praising the masculine, macho dynamic here; and I would argue that this story actually represents more of the norm in this regard throughout his art (though surely not in his life), where female characters are consistently wiser, more mature, more nuanced and balanced than their male counterparts.
Strikingly, the title of the story is itself a simile, and a quotation of something the woman says in the story, something that at first seems throw away—simply a good way of describing the unique appearance of the white hills of the Ebro valley in Spain. The man’s response to her description is telling, and it sparks something that runs much deeper in the woman. To her “they look like white elephants,” he replies, “I’ve never seen one,” to which she replies “You wouldn’t have,” followed by his, “I might have. Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”
The man’s first response, “I’ve never seen one,” shows just how grounded he is in the world of logical expression, even as he demonstrates how limited his imagination is. Of course he should be able to understand the simile as a good way to describe what the hills look like without ever actually having seen a white elephant. Her “you wouldn’t have” is equally telling. She responds to his hyper-logical comment with one that is much more nuanced—perhaps “saying” something more like, “your inability to use your imagination helps me understand you more fully.” And the accusatory tone of her reply only pushes the man to double down on his logical take to the imagistic and descriptive: “I might have. Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.” This response reveals how single-mindedly focused he is on things that need to be proved (like getting an abortion), even as he fails to understand the moral and emotional complexities of the situation.
And then comes the line that always takes my breath away, her claim that “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” After the man’s double-dose of logic, she goes all in, revising her fist description into one that is no longer a simile but pure metaphor (and hence even farther beyond the man’s capacity to comprehend). The hills ARE white elephants, so much so that they even have “skin” themselves. What begins as a mundane bit of idle chit-chat suddenly becomes a transformative moment for the woman as she is awakening into understanding just how poignant and complex—and essential—what she’s seeing and then putting into words really are. She moves to the edge of the platform and notes the lush landscape along the river basin, the barren, dry landscape beyond that. She takes hold of the bead curtain, holding it, connecting with it tactually, probing, asking what it says in Spanish. She wants to know what things say, what things mean—unlike the man who wants to convince her of one action that will, in his mind, simplify their lives.
Throughout, the woman, like a good reader, investigates and notices and attempts to clarify and ultimately to know what the potential meanings of things are, even the smallest of things—like that single bead she takes hold of, while the man stays rigidly focused on his argument, repeating over and over again the same thing—that the operation is “perfectly simple.” What he fails to see, and what it seems the woman sees so clearly she threatens to scream if he says it again, is that those words also describe him and his logically restrictive perspective. He is being perfectly simple, a phrase that also invites us to consider its opposite, “perfectly complex,” which surely describes the woman’s view, and the communicative nature of art/metaphor itself.
In a sense, she is the author of the very story we are reading and that she is in the midst of. The title and almost all of the story’s imagery are clearly focused through her perspective, a perspective that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, a perfectly complex web of metaphorical expressiveness:
They are at a “junction” in their lives, awaiting a decision, to take the next train…
She notes they were between “two lines of rails,” lines that never touch, perhaps addressing the division of the man’s cold logic and her emotive, complex and artistic awareness.
The “lush” juxtaposed to the “barren” landscapes, side by side, with the white hills beyond all speak to the choices she faces—the lush river valley connecting with the alive-child growing inside of her, the barren landscape addressing the possibility of terminating the pregnancy, “barren” a word that also is directly correlated with not having children.
These self-same images also speak to the lush complexity of metaphor versus the barren, harsh light of logical expression.
And more complex still…pregnancy speaks to the nature of metaphor itself, where one meaning lives inside another. She is pregnant in more ways than one….
The most common “symbol” addressed in the story are the hills, and you will find much discussion of how they “stand for” the woman—that they give the appearance of pregnancy, that white elephants suggests a “white elephant sale,” as in something that is of little value and disposable (a telling critique of the man’s perspective). And while these dynamics are certainly at play in the metaphor, ignoring the other dimensions, especially those that highlight the very nature of metaphorical expression itself, neglects a significant aspect of the story’s meaning.
For me, the story is most deeply “about” the different modes of expression human beings use to understand the world and themselves. Just as the woman cannot speak Spanish, the man cannot speak the language the woman is speaking, the language she needs to speak if she is to understand in full what she is experiencing and what is to be done about it. Yes, I think she keeps the baby. I also think she is discovering that she and the man are not compatible—and she may well be discovering that she herself is an artist. Another take on the story is to think of this encounter as going on deep in Hemingway’s own psyche, a dialogue between the different parts of his brain—the one logical and cold-hearted, the other deeply sensitive and artistic, seeing the world in richly metaphorical terms.
And for me in these times of strange, distorted logic and mono-dimensional thinking—and overtly wrong-headed thinking—in which I’ve found it increasingly hard to write or to feel anything but outrage, turning to art has proven essential. Just as the woman who faces an uncertain future takes hold of things and asks what they “say,” I am grateful that I can at least still find great comfort in reading, playing guitar, taking photographs….
So, I venture into a nearby swamp with a camera, a few lenses and make this image—
and it helps somehow—the way it sprung to life on my computer when I cropped in to just the simplest of elements, dead tree, great blue heron standing atop its disheveled nest, dark swamp bushes—the way the white bark of the tree pushes down into the darks of the grasses—that the heron has its back to me, that its nest is so untidy, just the vaguest of dark slashes the same dark grays, perhaps actual strands of the twigs below—the nest of life—the living thing feeling safe in such a stark, leaf bare place….
I thought none of that when I saw the heron, when it turned its back to me near its nest in a dead tree, but I also may well have felt and acted on all of that and on other things I have not—I cannot—find a way to place with logic alone, drawing solely upon the elemental, essential, lush mystery of metaphor.
If you want to hear a lot more about “Hills Like White Elephants,” have a listen to my podcast on that story here.
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