What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

The famous Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea is one of those works of literature that most everyone has heard of, even those who haven’t read it. Despite its brevity—127 pages in the well-spaced edition I am sending you—it’s had a lasting effect on English literature, as has Hemingway’s work in general. I’d say that his short stories, gathered in the collections In Our Time, Men without Women and Winner Take Nothing, among others, are his greatest achievement—and above all, the story Big Two-Hearted River—but his novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are more widely read.

The greatness of Hemingway lies not so much in what he said as how he said it. He took the English language and wrote it in a way that no one had written it before. If you compare Hemingway, who was born in 1899, and Henry James, who died in 1916, that overlap of seventeen years seems astonishing, so contrasting are their styles. With James, the portrayal of truth, verisimilitude, realism, whatever you want to call it, is achieved by a baroque abundance of language. Hemingway’s style is the exact opposite. He stripped the language of ornamentation, prescribing adjectives and adverbs to his prose the way a careful doctor would prescribe pills to a hypochondriac. The result was prose of revolutionary terseness, with a cadence, vigour and elemental simplicity that bring to mind a much older text: the Bible.

That combination is not fortuitous. Hemingway was well versed in biblical language and imagery and The Old Man and the Sea can be read as a Christian allegory, though I wouldn’t call it a religious work, certainly not in the way the book I sent you two weeks ago, Gilead, is. Rather, Hemingway uses Christ’s passage on earth in a secular way to explore the meaning of human suffering. “Grace under pressure” was the  formulation Hemingway offered when he was asked what he meant by “guts” in describing the grit shown by many of his characters. Another way of putting that would be the achieving of victory through defeat, which matches more deeply, I think, the Christ-like odyssey of Santiago, the old man of the title. For concerning Christ, that was the Apostle Paul’s momentous insight (some would call it God’s gift): the possibility of triumph, of salvation, in the very midst of ruination. It’s a message, a belief, that transforms the human experience entirely. Career failures, family disasters, accidents, disease, old age—these human experiences that might otherwise be tragically final instead become threshold events. 

As I was thinking about Santiago and his epic encounter with the great marlin, I wondered whether there was any political dimension to his story. I came to the conclusion that there isn’t. In politics, victory comes through victory and defeat only brings defeat. The message of Hemingway’s poor Cuban fisherman is purely personal, addressing the individual in each one of us and not the roles we might take on. Despite its vast exterior setting, The Old Man and the Sea is an intimate work of the soul. And so I wish upon you what I wish upon all of us: that our return from the high seas be as dignified as Santiago’s.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

Reply:

Pending…