a process of association in which you thought, or felt (since this really works as much at the visceral as at
the intellectual level): rain-life-birth-promise-restoration-fertility-continuity. What, you don’t always run
that cycle when rain and new life are on the table? If you begin to read like an English professor, you will.
But then there’s Hemingway. At the end of A Farewell to Arms his hero, Frederic Henry, having just
experienced the death of his lover, Catherine Barkley, and her baby during childbirth, distraught, walks
out into the rain. None of those expectations we just listed are going to prevail; in fact, quite the opposite.
It might help to know Hemingway’s background in World War I, during which the novel is set, or his
earlier life experiences, or his psychology and worldview, or the difficulty of writing this passage (he
rewrote the last page twenty-six times, he said) in order to make sense of this scene. Most of all, we
need to know that it’s ironic. Like most of his generation, Hemingway learned irony early, then met it
firsthand in the war as he watched youth meet death on a daily basis. His book is ironic from its first
words. Literally. His title is taken from a sixteenth-century poem by George Peele, “A Farewell,” about
soldiers rallying enthusiastically to the call to war, the first two words of which are “To arms!” By
conjoining these two in one seamless phrase, Hemingway makes a title as nearly opposite Peele’s rousing
meaning as it’s possible to get. That ironic stance pervades the novel right up to the end, where mother
and child, rather than existing for each other, as experience has taught us to expect, slay each other, the
infant strangled by the umbilical cord, the mother dead after a series of hemorrhages. Frederic Henry
walks out into rain in a season that is still winter but comes on the heels of a false spring. There’s nothing
p. 238cleansing or rejuvenating about the whole thing. That’s irony—take our expectations and upend
them, make them work against us.
You can pretty much do this with anything. Spring comes and the wasteland doesn’t even notice. Your
heroine is murdered at dinner with the villain, during a toast in her honor no less. The Christ figure causes
the destruction of others while he survives very nicely. Your character crashes his car into a billboard but
is unhurt because his seat belt functions as designed. Then, before he can get it off, the billboard teeters,
topples, and crushes him. Its message? Seat belts save lives.
Is the billboard the same as those other instances of irony?
Sure, why not? It’s a sign that’s used in a way other than the intended one. So are the others. What is a
sign? It’s something that signifies a message. The thing that’s doing the signifying, call it the signifier,
that’s stable. The message, on the other hand, the thing being signified (and we’ll call that the signified),
that’s up for grabs. The signifier, in other words, while being fairly stable itself, doesn’t have to be used in
the planned way. Its meaning can be deflected from the expected meaning.
Here’s an instance. G. K. Chesterton, a mystery writer and contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle, has a
story, “The Arrow of Heaven” (1926), in which a man is killed by an arrow. Of the cause of death there
is never a flicker of doubt. That’s too bad, since it sets up an insoluble problem: no one could have shot
him but God. The victim is in a high tower with higher windows, so there is no way for a straight shot
except from heaven. Father Brown, Chesterton’s little hero/detective/priest, studies the matter a while,
listening to all the stories, including one intended to misdirect him about how those Indian swamis could
throw a knife from an impossible distance and kill a man, so maybe they worked their magic in this case
with an arrow. This story immediately reveals the solution: no divine bow, but a murderer in the room
p. 239with the victim. If a knife, which is intended for close use, can be thrown, then an arrow can be
used to stab. Everyone except Father Brown makes the error of assuming that the arrow can only mean
one thing. Our expectations about the arrow, like those of the characters in the story, point us in one
direction, but Chesterton deflects the meaning away from those expectations. Mysteries, like irony, make
great use of deflection. The arrow itself is stable; arrows are arrows. The uses to which arrows can be
put and the meanings we attach to them, however, are not so stable.
Well, the seat belt billboard is an arrow. So are the deadly dinner, the failed Christ figure, Hemingway’s