Hemingway's Black Pig (A Farewell to Arms)
Antoine Blanche
Farewell to Arms. Very early on, Lieutenant Rinaldi taunts the priest
with "The Black Pig": a very unholy book if the priest's reaction is
anything to go by.
Is The Black Pig a genuine work of literature or merely from the depths of
Hemingway's imagination? I can't find a reference to it anywhere
(Wikipedia, Britannica, Amazon, etc.), not even when the title
is translated to Italian.
I wish I'd bought the Everyman copy now. The notes, text summary and
appendices would surely have covered this.
(Include a warning and spoiler space if a discussion of A Farewell to Arms
is required and I'll read the posts when I've finished the book.)
--
Antoine Blanche
Et in Arcadia Ego
Peter Krynicki
> I've just (in the past hour) read the first five chapters of Hemingway's A
> Farewell to Arms. Very early on, Lieutenant Rinaldi taunts the priest
> with "The Black Pig": a very unholy book if the priest's reaction is
> anything to go by.
>
> Is The Black Pig a genuine work of literature or merely from the depths of
> Hemingway's imagination? I can't find a reference to it anywhere
> (Wikipedia, Britannica, Amazon, etc.), not even when the title
> is translated to Italian.
>
You need to ask on an Italian-type neswgroup. It is a very little-know
but real work of Italian literature. Suppodely very anti-church or
anti-priest.
As you read the novel, try to think of it aas being narratrd by
Frederic Henry some time after all of the events have tyaken place,
and as a kind of his confession. This will make more of the pacing of
the novel understandable. Remember, the retreat of Caporetto took
place in 1917 (this "anchors" the novel), the novel starts in 1915
("In the late summer of *that* year we...") , and ends about 1918.
hth
Pjk
Antoine Blanche
//
>> Is The Black Pig a genuine work of literature or merely from the depths
>> of Hemingway's imagination? I can't find a reference to it anywhere
>> (Wikipedia, Britannica, Amazon, etc.), not even when the title is
>> translated to Italian.
>>
>>
> You need to ask on an Italian-type neswgroup. It is a very little-know but
> real work of Italian literature. Suppodely very anti-church or
> anti-priest.
Thanks Peter. I'll do that.
> As you read the novel, try to think of it aas being narratrd by Frederic
> Henry some time after all of the events have tyaken place, and as a kind
> of his confession.
Aha. I did, of course, realise it was being narrated by Mr Henry, just
not that it was a confession. I was reading it like a journal. Probably
because the illustration on my copy shows a soldier writing one.
> This will make more of the pacing of the novel
understandable. Remember,
> the retreat of Caporetto took place in 1917 (this "anchors" the novel),
> the novel starts in 1915 ("In the late summer of *that* year we...") ,
> and ends about 1918.
Sounds like something else I've been doing right is researching the times,
places & events at Wikipedia, Britannica, etc. Thanks again. :)
Peter Krynicki
It would be helpful if you can find a copy of Mike Reynolds' first
book, Hemingway's First War, The Writing of a Farewell To Arms. And
another thing to think about is why he chose Caporetto (the Twelfth
Battle of the Isonzo) as the battle to use rather than any other.
Thanks
Pjk
Peter Krynicki
Antoine Blanche
//
>> times, places & events at Wikipedia, Britannica, etc. Thanks again. :)
>
>
> It would be helpful if you can find a copy of Mike Reynolds' first book,
> Hemingway's First War, The Writing of a Farewell To Arms. And another
> thing to think about is why he chose Caporetto (the Twelfth Battle of the
> Isonzo) as the battle to use rather than any other.
I've read it now btw, and I'm not sure I've been so hungry for WWI
literature since I read Other Paths to Glory (Anthony Price). Not sure
why he chose Caporetto (I guess I'll have to research) but I'm glad I
picked up on so many existential symbols - later research proving
they were quite accurately interpreted. Was Hemingway an existentialist?
With regards to the original question about The Black Pig, I'll quote
a post by Enzo Michelangeli (<40061329$1...@newsgate.hknet.com>)just for the
sake of concluding the thread:
It looks like a lot of readers of "Farewell to Arms" were intrigued by
that reference. "Il Maiale Nero" is a novel written by Umberto Notari in
the early 20th Century.
His most famous book is the first he published in 1904, "Quelle signore"
("Those ladies"), about the world of prostitution: it earned him a
prosecution for obscenity resulting in a fine, but the book was reprinted
and by 1920 had sold more than half million copies.
Eventually Notari ended up as a fascist, founding the Milanese newspaper
"L'Ambrosiano" in 1922, and was appointed to the very institutional
"Accademia d'Italia": just like another firebrand-turned-reactionary, the
initiator of the Italian Futuristic movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
who, as a young, used to call for burning academies down...
Enzo
I speak a little Italian so I wouldn't have minded torturing myself with
Il Maiale Nero. I'm finding it very difficult to locate a copy though.
Peter Krynicki
> On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 09:07:04 -0800, Peter Krynicki wrote:
> //
> >> Sounds like something else I've been doing right is researching the
> >> times, places & events at Wikipedia, Britannica, etc. Thanks again. :)
> >
> >
> > It would be helpful if you can find a copy of Mike Reynolds' first book,
> > Hemingway's First War, The Writing of a Farewell To Arms. And another
> > thing to think about is why he chose Caporetto (the Twelfth Battle of the
> > Isonzo) as the battle to use rather than any other.
>
> I've read it now btw, and I'm not sure I've been so hungry for WWI
> literature since I read Other Paths to Glory (Anthony Price). Not sure
> why he chose Caporetto (I guess I'll have to research) but I'm glad I
> picked up on so many existential symbols - later research proving
> they were quite accurately interpreted. Was Hemingway an existentialist?
>
all intents and purposes, they declaresd a "separate peace," much lke
Henry.
Most critics want to see hints of Existentialism in A Clean
Well-Lighted Place with its emphasis on "nada," but there is an entire
book which examines Hemingways as a kind of pre-Existentialist, John
Killinger's Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism.
I've copied out what Killenger says about A Farewell to Arms...
1. "This is a study of the fictional world of Ernest Hemingway as it
is related to the world view of Existentialism. properly speaking,
Hemingway is not an Existentialist, for there has been no known liason
between him and the existentialsists, niether personally nor
intellectually, and neither has ever formally recognized a kinship to
the other.
2. In A Farewell to Arms there is this celebrated passage. "There were
many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names
of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain
dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say
and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor,
courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages,
the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments
and the dates."
This is existential sentiment, emphasizing the real kinship between
the philosophy of existance and the science of phenomenology; value is
only in living, not in abstractions, and concrete places and people
are meaningful because we determine our selves in relation to the
things around us. Glory, honor, courage and sanctity are conceptions
of a "complicated" ethics.
Sartre has said that the writer's is to cure the "sick" language that
is incommunicative. Iris Murdoch, in attempting to answer what the
sickness of the language really is, says it is the fact that we can no
longer take language for granted as a medium of communication. "Its
transparancy has gone. We are like people who for a long time looked
out of a window without noticing the glass - and then one day began to
notice this too. Hemingway also feals this way. Our time demands a
simple prose. with an Eliot-like emphasis on semntics."
There are two interesting books which treat the effects of the Great
war on literature itself. Modris Ekstein's The Rite of Spring, and
Samuel Hynes' The First War and English Culture. Don't get too caught
up in this stuff as there is no end to it, as far as I can see.
Thankls
Pjk
