
Hemingway: To Have and Have Not
Yale professor Wai Chee Dimock leads this session of her course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, focused on Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not. She traces its origins as a series of short stories published in Cosmopolitan and Esquire before being stitched into a novel, and reads it against Hemingway's Havana years. The heart of her argument concerns Hemingway's habit of sorting characters into taxonomic 'types' by race, class, and sexuality, and how his shifting narrative perspective turns even protagonist Harry Morgan into just another classifiable specimen. Dimock walks through Morgan's verbal tic of saying 'some,' draws out symmetries between Morgan and the novel's other racial types, and closes on Hemingway's treatment of cojones as a marker of masculinity. Along the way she complicates the neat 'have' versus 'have not' dualism the title promises. Recorded for Open Yale Courses in Fall 2011, the lecture is dense with close textual reading and carries a warning for graphic language.