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fied with arrIvmg at a satisfactory idea of his existence. Goethe once
stated that anyone who merely increased his knowledge without at the
same time showing him what to do with it poisoned his life. Only to
think is to feel one's powerlessness, and that is why Hemingway himself,
and his heroes as well, are in extreme need of movement. They are re–
sisting the passivity and impotence that result from the prevalence of
thought.
Imagination, like the intellectual process, is also a danger to Hem–
ingway. Mr. Young has approached this problem of the imagination
with
great insight. "Cowardice ... ," Hemingway has written "is almost
always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagin–
ation." Of course the Hemingway characters with the too many hel–
mets full of brains they have seen, the mothers holding dead babies, the
mules drowning in the Greek harbor, the terrifying corpses, the horrible
wounds and traumas they themselves have received, and suffering from
insomnia and nightmare as they do, have plenty of reason to dread the
imagination, particularly if the imagination instead of going before
them to prepare for them the kind of experience they can bear to
have returns always to the memory of its great crises. The happiness
that Hemingway courts is often the happiness that comes of the sus–
pension of memory. In a story like "Big Two-Hearted River" the hero
feels "good" because his behavior is governed not by thought and im–
agination but by some mechanism or center in the body on which we
can depend but which we generally distrust. This Mr. Young correctly
sees not as anti-intellectualism but on the contrary as a need for liber–
ation from dominance of the mind which only a man who has thought
much is likely to feel.
Attempts at psychoanalytic interpretation are generally rather feeble
in
studies of this kind, but Mr. Young, going at it circumspectly and
making no pretense of "cracking the case," has found some very relevant
and illuminating observations on traumas like Hemingway's in Freud's
Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
and in Otto Fenichel's
Psychoanalytic
Theory of Neurosis.
Trauma, Fenichel explains, is characterized by "un–
mastered amounts of excitation." To master these excitations which
"flood"
him,
the patient resorts to "a complicated system of bindings
and primitive discharges." "And these new ways of adaptation," says
Mr.
Young, paraphrasing Fenichel, "have certain consequences, for as
a result of the necessary concentration on the crucial task of mastering
the
'excitation,' many of the 'higher functions' must go by the board.
The personality is necessarily retrenched, and therefore to some degree
impoverished, for the purpose of controlling the fear. For this phenom-
