Articles & Essays Book Reviews Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Volume 13 Number 3, December 2012

___________________________________________________________________

Writing as Fishing: Conceptual Metaphor and “Resonance” in a Story by Hemingway and a Poem by Wordsworth[1]

By

Burton Melnick

Bibliographical note:  References to the canonical versions of Hemingway short stories are to Hemingway, 1938.  References to “Resolution and Independence” are to Wordsworth, 1983, “Resolution and Independence.”  References to the Bible are to the Authorized Version. 

I.

There is a kind of literary work that seems to be invested with greater significance than is immediately apparent, though nothing in the actual text indicates what its latent significance might be.  In some cases this sort of work provokes extremely plausible intuitive interpretations even if the text does not, strictly speaking, demand them.  In other cases readers and critics can only acknowledge a sense of hidden import without proposing any further explanation.  My premise is that conceptual metaphor analysis can shed light on the functioning of such texts, which I call “resonant” (a word used here simply as a tag for the type of text just described).

This article examines Hemingway’s bi‑partite story “Big Two‑Hearted River” and Wordsworth’s poem “Resolution and Independence,” attempting to show that the same unstated conceptual metaphor underlies both works.  Dealing with metaphor, the article necessarily makes interpretations, but as far as literary interpretation goes, it makes no totalizing claims.  Though critics have proposed various interpretations of both of the works I discuss, very possibly any univocal interpretation of either of them is inadequate.  At the same time, both works can be read and appreciated without any metaphorical interpretation at all.  In fact, despite the interpretive work I do, I am not mainly interested here in interpretation as such, at least not in the kind of interpretation that a reader consciously makes of a literary text.  I am interested, rather, in working out how the same conceptual metaphor (actually, we will see, two related metaphors) helps, more or less unconsciously, to invest both of these differing works with their sense of latent significance.

 “Big Two‑Hearted River” is generally considered one of Hemingway’s most powerful stories.  Initially its power resides in its vivid evocation of a solitary fishing trip taken by its protagonist, Nick Adams.  But the story also seems to shimmer with hidden significance.  On account of this sense of mysterious, unstated import a number of critics have seen two parallel levels in the story:  a literal level and a metaphorical one.  The literal, manifest story narrates the events of the actual fishing trip.  But if those events are taken to correspond metaphorically to events within Nick’s psyche, then the story can also be read as figuring an inner, psychological drama.  In 1991 Robert Paul Lamb suggested that that inner drama has to do with the creative process and the act of writing—that what Nick (a writer) is really fishing for are stories.  Lamb’s article makes no use of conceptual metaphor theory, however, which in 1991 was a young, relatively unknown discipline.

The present article will consider “Big Two‑Hearted River” with the help of conceptual metaphor theory—which, among other things, allows us to ground metaphorical readings of fiction elsewhere than in simple intuition.  I hope, first of all, to be able to analyze the working of the metaphors that Lamb has pointed out more closely and more systematically than has yet been done (without claiming, however, that they provide a definitive interpretation of the story).  I hope also to show how the presence of conceptual metaphor helps to create the phenomenon that I call resonance.  And I will also use conceptual metaphor theory to facilitate the making of connections:  between this work and other works that use the same metaphors, and between the conceptual metaphors underpinning this work and other related metaphors.

In the first instance the conceptual metaphor I will be dealing with is the mind is a body of water.[2]  This aquatic metaphor (which includes rivers as well as fully enclosed bodies of water) underlies a great deal of our discourse about the mind on part of laymen and psychologists alike.  Widespread in modern literature, it expresses something about our intuitive perception of mind, and may help, as I will suggest, to imbue our perception of mind with Christian associations and Christian feeling.  Nevertheless, it has not up to now been explicitly acknowledged as a conceptual metaphor, though it is in fact an “entailment”[3] of the commonly recognized conceptualization of mind as a physical space (Barnden, 1997).  Indeed, it has received little explicit attention of any kind—although the variant of the metaphor that emphasizes flow, as in “stream of consciousness,” has been discussed more often (see, for example, Sánchez-Vizcaíno, 2005) than the one that emphasizes depth.

Concerning the depth variant of the metaphor one very well-known text does exist, however.  In his famous account of the English character and its relation to English literature, E. M. Forster explicitly (though incompletely) sets out the metaphor of the mind as a body of water with a surface and varying depths:

People talk of the mysterious East, but the West also is mysterious.  It has depths that do not reveal themselves at the first gaze.  We know what the sea looks like from a distance:  it is of one colour, and level, and obviously cannot contain such creatures as fish.  But if we look into the sea over the edge of a boat, we see a dozen colours, and depth below depth, and fish swimming in them.  That sea is the English character—apparently imperturbable and even.  The depths and the colours are the English romanticism and the English sensitiveness—we do not expect to find such things, but they exist.  And—to continue my metaphor—the fish are the English emotions, which are always trying to get up to the surface, but don't quite know how.  For the most part we see them moving far below, distorted and obscure.  Now and then they succeed and we exclaim, "Why, the Englishman has emotions!  he actually can feel!"  And occasionally we see that beautiful creature the flying fish, which rises out of the water altogether into the air and the sunlight.  English literature is a flying fish.  It is a sample of the life that goes on day after day beneath the surface; it is a proof that beauty and emotion exist in the salt, inhospitable sea.  (Forster, 1953,17).

The metaphor seems not to need any further analysis.  Like the sea, the mind has a surface, which is directly visible; below its surface, the mind, like the sea, has depths. (Hence we speak of "depth psychology."  Hence a psychoanalyst may suggest that a candidate's training analysis will "go deeper" than her personal analysis.).  In both cases—in both the "source" and the "target" domains—the depths are less easily visible and less easily accessible than the surface.  In the depths of the sea (or of a lake or pond or even river) there reside living creatures, which may be of great value and beauty, although, to add a point that Forster does not make, they may also be repulsive or frightening.  In Forster's rather restrictive mapping of the metaphor these living creatures correspond in the target domain (mind) to emotions—to feelings.  In fact, however, in psychology and especially perhaps in psychoanalysis, they correspond more generally to mental phenomena: not only feelings, but also desires and wishes and fears and memories.  On occasion these submarine creatures—Forster's flying fish—make themselves visible without any outside intervention.  So too, in the target domain, do certain mental phenomena sometimes rise of themselves from the depths.  But there is another, related aspect of the source domain that Forster neglects.  For an important human activity consists of fishing—i.e, of intentionally and sometimes laboriously retrieving subaqueous creatures, bringing them to the surface, and making use of them.  Fishing can be vital—and, as we will see, this fact can carry great symbolic significance—on account of its ability to provide sustenance.

In the target domain, that of the mind or psyche, fishing corresponds to the attempt to retrieve feelings, memories, and the like from the region of the mind that is normally not visible and that is not immediately accessible.[4]  Such a metaphor is used frequently in psychoanalysis (though Freud himself usually preferred an archeological, subterranean metaphor to express the concept of retrieving psychic phenomena from the depths of the unconscious, and images of digging up buried memories or feelings remain common).  But the trope is not restricted to psychoanalysis.  Academic psychologists use it too, as in the following two quotations from a highly technical article on analogical learning.  The author first explains that "gaining access to long‑term memory is a bit like fishing: The learner can bait the hook—that is, set up the working memory probe—as he or she chooses, but once the line is thrown into the water it is impossible to predict exactly which fish will bite" (Gentner, 1989, 231).  Two pages later, she adds,

[. . .] I suspect that some parts of the system will always remain outside direct volitional control.  To return to the fishing analogy, we can learn to bait the hook better, and once the fish bites we can learn better skills for landing it, identifying it, and deciding whether to kept it or throw it back.  But no matter how accurate the preaccess and postaccess processes, there is always uncertainty in the access itself.  When we throw the hook into the current, we cannot determine exactly which fish will bite. (Gentner, 1989, 233)

Indeed, perhaps on account of the influence of psychoanalysis, images of fishing are sometimes used even in everyday life to express an effort to recall forgotten memories—we might "plumb the depths" of our memory in an attempt to "fish up" some forgotten information.  But the most interesting examples of piscatorial images to symbolize the retrieval of psychic material from the depths of consciousness probably come from literature—and have to do with the creation of literature.

Already in Forster's essay the fish that emerge from the water have more than a practical value.  They are "beautiful," but under the water they are visible only in a "distorted and obscure" way.  For us to perceive their full beauty they must emerge "into the air and the sunlight."  In Forster's conceit, in other words, the emergence of a fish out of the water has an aesthetic function—it is after all English literature that the flying fish symbolize.  Now, in Forster's version of the metaphor, the flying fish (i.e, works of literature) emerge spontaneously out of the depths.  More often, however, it is the activity of fishing—catching fish through cleverness and patience, and drawing them out of the water by dint of force and will—that is used to symbolize the psychological effort needed to bring a literary work into existence.  Consider, for example, these lines by Virginia Woolf:

[. . .] I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance.  I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours she never dips into the inkpot.  The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water.  She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being.  Now came the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men.  The line raced through the girl’s fingers.  Her imagination had rushed away.  It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber.  And then there was a smash.  There was an explosion.  There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard.  (Woolf, 1966, 287)

Among the entailments of the mind is a body of water, in other words, is a subordinate conceptual metaphor, writing is fishing.  Though in the illustrations given above I have sought out explicit examples, both metaphors usually function implicitly.  Indeed, as we will see, when writing is fishing appears in a literary work, it can help to make the work reverberate with a sense of powerful but unstated and apparently indefinable significance.

II.

"Big Two‑Hearted River” consists of two parts, the first setting the scene for Nick Adams’s fishing trip, the second describing the actual fishing.  In "Big Two‑Hearted River: I" Nick Adams gets off a train at a town that has been utterly destroyed by fire.  In the midst of the desolation, he walks over to a bridge and looks down at the trout visible in the river below.  The "big trout," which he doesn't at first see, are "at the bottom of the pool."  Then, his heavy pack on his back, he walks out of the town, feeling that "he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs" (308).  At first he hikes through country that has been "burned over and changed" (309), to the point where even the grasshoppers have "all turned black from living in the burned-over land" (and Nick wonders "how long they would stay that way" [310]).

Before very long the burned country ends.  Late in the day, Nick reaches a meadow with the river flowing at its edge.  He looks "down the river at the trout rising [. . .] to insects come from the swamp on the other side of the stream when the sun went down" (312).  On some high ground overlooking the meadow he carefully makes camp, and

was happy as he crawled inside the tent.  He had not been unhappy all day.  [. . .]  He was settled.  Nothing could touch him.  It was a good place to camp.  He was there, in the good place.  He was in his home where he had made it. (313)

Very hungry, he cooks and eats supper, exclaiming, "Chrise, [. . .] Geezus Chrise" (314) after the first spoonful.  Then, as he makes and drinks his coffee, he remembers anecdotes from an earlier fishing trip.  He notes that "his mind was starting to work," but he knows that "he could choke it because he was tired enough" (316).  He smokes a cigarette and gets into bed, noticing in the last paragraph of the story that in the still night the "swamp was perfectly quiet" (316).  Finally, he

shut his eyes.  He was sleepy.  He felt sleep coming.  He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep (316)

The beauty of the story lies initially in the vividness with which all of Nick's sensations are reported to us.  Though there is little dramatic action in the story, it is so crowded with detail that in the Modern Library edition it runs to nine and a half pages.  We are told precisely what Nick sees, smells, tastes, feels, and hears (or doesn't hear, since the predominant auditory image of the story is silence).  Vicariously we experience the hard day's trip, the meticulous making of camp, the (re)discovery of the solitary landscape, and, finally, the satisfaction of being in the "good place," and of settling there into restful oblivion.  But there is more to the story than an evocation of the elemental rhythms of life in the outdoors.

With the sentence early in the story about Nick's having left various "needs," including the "need for thinking," behind him, with the resonant sentence near the end of the story that at present "[n]othing could touch him," with Nick's incipient uneasiness when his mind begins to "work" and his relief at the thought that he will be able to "choke" it—and more generally with the childishness of some of his interior (or, sometimes, voiced) monologue and his extremely sensitive reactions to his environment—we  are given hints of some kind of inner torment that makes Nick's escape into the "good place" especially necessary and meaningful, not to say therapeutic, for him.  Just what this torment consists of we do not know. But certainly, as Kenneth Lynn puts it, “dark thoughts of some sort are lurking on the margins of [Nick’s] consciousness” (103).  The two "Big Two‑Hearted River" stories come at the very end of a collection, In Our Time, devoted mainly—both in its fifteen short stories and even more so in the purportedly non‑fictional vignettes that interlard them—to violence, trauma, and loss.  Eight of its stories and one of the vignettes specifically give Nick as their protagonist, and he may well be the protagonist of a ninth story, whose protagonist is not named.  By the end of the volume, we have learned that in his experience of World War I and in his personal life Nick himself has both witnessed and experienced violence, trauma, and loss.  We know that he has been wounded physically, [5] and we would expect him to suffer from psychic wounds too.  And in fact Hemingway's story "A Way You'll Never Be," from a collection published eight years after In Our Time, confirms that Nick's wound, apparently to the head, damaged him mentally and led to his being "certified as nutty" (505).[6] 

Now, if Nick's journey to the "good place" is to be seen as an attempt to escape from his psychic wounds, then the writing's insistence on certain details of the environment becomes especially meaningful.  Significantly, the stress that the early part of the story lays on the blackening for some time to come of even the grasshoppers who live in the countryside—goes beyond mere naturalistic detail.  Sheldon Norman Grebstein proposes that "the burned-over land which Nick crosses on his way toward the river can be equated with his war-scorched nerves" (1973, 20).  It is difficult to read the story without a sense that, whatever else it does, the desolation of the landscape mirrors or expresses something in Nick, whose experiences have, metaphorically, laid waste to his psyche as the fire has laid waste to the town and the land.  Given that sense, Nick’s wondering how long it will take the blackened grasshoppers to recover their color implicitly raises the question of how long it will take for Nick's own conscious thoughts and feelings to return to normal.

There is a further indication that the landscape in this story may have a symbolic function.  The last paragraph of the story is devoted mainly to Nick's killing a mosquito.  Though Nick has taken pains to protect his tent from mosquitoes by sealing off the entry with cheese‑cloth, one mosquito has nevertheless made its way into the tent, disturbing the tranquility and peace of mind that Nick has labored to attain.  In the silence of the night Nick, already “between the blankets” (316), hears its hum.  He sits up, lights a match, and destroys the mosquito in its flame.  Only then does he sleep.  Now, presumably, the mosquito comes from the swamp—which, as the text specifically indicates, breeds insects.  And there is, in that last paragraph, just before Nick hears the mosquito, a rather odd mention of the swamp.  The paragraph begins

Out through the front of the tent he watched the flow of the fire, when the night wind blew on it.  It was a quiet night.  The swamp was perfectly quiet.  Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. (316, emphasis added)

But what is the point of the sentence I have italicized?  Would the story be any different without that sentence?  And why, if the sentence does add something to the story, is it important that the swamp is quiet?  Wouldn’t it have been more natural to say that the river was quiet, or that everything was quiet?  Why the sudden stress on the swamp?

That the swamp, like the burnt out landscape (indeed, like the river itself) has symbolic force is made almost inescapably clear in "Big Two-Hearted River: II."  Here Nick awakes, cooks and eats breakfast, collects grasshoppers for bait, carefully prepares his gear, wades into the river, and fishes.  He catches a small trout, which he puts back into the water, hooks an enormous trout which he is unable to land (though the experience is a very great thrill), catches a big trout, loses another when his line snags in some overhanging branches, then catches a second big trout.

In describing Nick's fishing, the narration develops an association—tied to the particular context but rich in symbolic overtones—that was already present in “Big Two-Hearted River: I”:  the connection between, on the one hand, big, desirable trout and, on the other, depth and darkness.  Nick’s first catch is a “small one” (322), which he drops back into the water.  Though “certain” he can catch other small trout “in the shallows,” he “did not want them.”  Knowing that “[t]here would be no big trout in the shallows this time of day” (323), he walks downstream and casts into the “fast, dark water” (323‑24) just ahead of the “smooth dammed‑back flood of water above the logs” (p. 323).  This deeper water is “smooth and dark”—and, we are reminded, it is closer to the swamp (323).  In it Nick hooks a trout bigger than any he has ever seen, or, he thinks, ever heard of.   This big one gets away, and the “thrill” of having it on his line is “too much,” leaving Nick feeling “vaguely, a little sick” (324).  As Nick is recovering, he imagines the fish he has lost “somewhere on the bottom, holding himself steady over the gravel, far down below the light” (324).  Afterwards, fairly easily, Nick catches a big trout. Though he himself is standing at this point in a relatively shallow part of the water, he hooks the trout by casting his bait into “one of the deep channels” (326) that the “flow of the current” (326) had “cut in the shallow bed of the stream” (325).  Having landed his “one good trout” (326), Nick thinks about how, later in the day, the trout in the river would move to the shallows along the edges of the stream, which would then be in shadow, and how, “[w]hen the sun was down they all moved out into the current” (327).   At that point, when the trout had come out of the depths and the shadows, “you were liable to strike a big trout anywhere in the current.  But in fact, because of the “blinding” reflection of the sun, “[i]t was almost impossible to fish then”(327, emphasis added).  The solution is to fish upstream, but fishing upstream once again raises the issue of depth:  “you had to wallow against the current and in a deep place, the water piled up on you.  It was no fun to fish upstream with this much current” (327).

But these thoughts of Nick’s are looking ahead.  In the present, Nick watches “the bank for deep holes” (327).  He sees one near a tree.  Though he is reluctant to fish that hole for fear that his line will be caught in the branches, he overcomes his reluctance because the hole “looked deep” (327).  He does hook a big trout, and, as he feared, loses it when his line catches.  Next he catches and lands a second big trout from inside the darkness of a hollow log situated at a place where “[t]he water was deepening” (327).  It is now lunchtime.  Nick eats his sandwiches and smokes a cigarette.  He has been moving downstream, and has nearly reached the swamp.  But rather than enter the swamp he ends his fishing for the day.

Nick did not want to go in there now.  He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them.  In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic.  In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure.  Nick did not want it.  He did not want to go down the stream any farther today. (329)

So Nick cleans his fish, and begins the trek up to the high ground where he has made his camp.  As he looks back he can see the river, just showing through the trees.  "There were plenty of days coming," the story ends, "when he could fish the swamp."  That final sentence seems to carry some particular resonance, as if the "swamp"—the very last word in the story—were meant to have special significance.  This feeling is reinforced by the title of the story.  "Big Two‑Hearted River" implicitly invites us to draw a distinction between the clear, fast-flowing river itself that Nick initially fishes, and the dark, stagnant, "tragic" swamp that he is not yet ready to enter.  In an article that pays particularly close and perceptive attention to the symbolic overtones in these two stories, Sheridan Baker suggests that the “Big Two-Hearted River is life‑and-death itself.”  If that is so, then “the swamp represents the darkness of death, of unknowing and the unknown.”  It is “the biggest mystery of life, and [. . .] to be a man Nick must face it” (1975, 154).

Though I want to phrase his idea differently, Baker is not wrong.  The swamp certainly has a great deal to do with death and darkness and the unknown.  Nevertheless, while it is frightening, the swamp does not present much of a direct physical threat to Nick.  It is a psychological threat more than a physical one.  On one level, Nick’s fishing trip, which requires him to be alone with himself, is a kind of self-confrontation.  If the mind is a body of water, then the waters Nick fishes in are, on a metaphorical level, the waters of his own mind.  And if this is so, then the swamp would represent, among other things, the darker side of Nick’s own psyche, something like his unconscious.  It will contain “tragic” fears and wishes (including, perhaps, death wishes) and memories, including memories of trauma.  It is indeed “unknown” and “a mystery,” and it is true that “to be a man Nick must face it.”  In both “Big Two-Hearted River” stories, however, Nick has stopped short of facing it.  At the end of "Big Two-Hearted River: I" Nick has had to "choke" the working of his mind, and in order to settle down to sleep has had to kill a mosquito come in all likelihood from the swamp  At the end of “Big Two‑Hearted River: II” he stops short of going into the swamp because it would be too “tragic,” although the swamp is precisely where his morning’s activity has been leading him.  Though he does seem resolved to fish the swamp another day, his resolution faintly echoes Saint Augustine’s prayer that the Lord grant him chastity “but not yet!”

Baker perceives, more or less intuitively, the identity between mind and body of water, making it very clear that the “recurring references to Nick’s head [. . .] combine with our almost inevitable notion that consciousness is a stream,” so that “Nick’s venture into the powerful deep river suggests a venture into his own consciousness” (1975, 152).  The river is clear, powerful, flowing, cold, and invigorating.  It varies in depth, and contains deep, dark pools of its own.  It abounds in trout, of all sizes, ranging from those so small that they are beneath desiring to “the biggest one” Nick “ever heard of” (325).  If the swamp represents the darker, hidden, essentially unconscious side of Nick’s psyche, the river would seem to represent the conscious workings of his sensibility:  complex, strong, at times profound, and at times—when it flows (or “works”) too swiftly—frightening.  This is in fact a fairly common distinction.  Rivers, which flow, are more often associated with the workings of consciousness, whereas lakes and ponds are more often associated with the unconscious.[7]  If this interpretation is valid (partial though it is), then the fish that Nick is out to catch stand for memories and feelings of his own, which lurk below the surface of his consciousness.  Catching them means that he has mastered them—that he is stronger than they are—and can use them for pleasure and sustenance.  There is probably some connection here with Nick’s writing.

Not that fishing is simply to be equated with writing.  On the contrary, we have already been given an explicit signal (in the line about Nick’s having “left [. . .] behind [. . .] the need to write” [308]), that on a literal level one of the purposes of Nick’s fishing trip is to allow him to escape from writing.  But on a metaphoric level, it seems to me, Nick’s fishing does suggest an attempt at retrieving and mastering memories and feelings—and it may well be that those memories and feelings are meant to serve as material for his writing (which presumably provides him with a feeling of satisfaction as well as with material and psychological sustenance).  Such an interpretation would be borne out by the stress laid, in a much later story of Hemingway’s, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” on the memories of the dying writer and, especially, on the guilt he feels for never having turned them into stories, although he considers that to have been his “duty” (164).  The main point here, however, has to do with the mind is a body of water and writing is fishing.  If those two conceptual metaphors exist, it is because in some key respects the act of fishing closely resembles that of writing.  Given that, for Nick the two activities will be inevitably, though no doubt unconsciously, associated.  On this unconscious level, the trout may represent memories and feelings that will serve as the material for stories, or they may represent the stories themselves.  In either case, it is, as I see it, this close yet unstated parallel between fishing and writing (and the self-confrontation that is inseparable from writing) that gives to the description of fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River: II” its overtones of mysterious, almost numinous significance. 

Interestingly, in Hemingway’s original draft, that parallel is hinted at quasi‑explicitly.  In that version Nick never catches a second big trout.  Once he has caught the first one, the focus of the story shifts to Nick’s thoughts, eventually to his thoughts about writing and art.  “He wanted to write,” Nick thinks, “like Cezanne painted” (Hemingway 1972, 239).  Shortly afterwards we are told, “He knew just how Cezanne would paint this stretch of river”(240).  This moment gives rise to a remarkable identification between the experience that Nick is actually living and the work of art into which he intends to transform it: 

Nick, seeing how Cezanne would do the stretch of river and the swamp, stood up and stepped down into the stream.  The water was cold and actual.  He waded across the stream, moving in the picture. (240, emphasis added)

Nick lives the “actual” moment, but, intending to render it into art (literary art in his case), he sees it as a “picture,” even as he moves inside it.

This incipient transformation of experience into art is, significantly, the prelude to Nick’s releasing the one large trout that he has caught.  Now that Nick’s mental and emotional investment has moved elsewhere, the fish has become just a fish, “too big to eat” (240) and of no further interest.  Nick, suddenly “in a hurry” (240) to return to camp, is on to something more important and more literary:  “He was holding something in his head.  He wanted to get back to camp and get to work” (240).  After stopping momentarily to help a stricken rabbit he encounters on the path, “[h]e went on up the trail to the camp” (241).  The incident with the rabbit perhaps resonates with faint symbolic overtones having to do with recovery from affliction.  Then, the last sentence of this version of the story reiterates, “He was holding something in his head” (241).  Nick, that is to say, returns from his day’s fishing empty‑handed.  But—if fishing and writing are symbolically identified—Nick’s fishing was successful nevertheless.  Instead of holding a fish in his hands or his trout sack, Nick is holding in his head the mental sketch of the story we have just read.[8]

Summing up the story’s original ending, which records so many of Nick’s thoughts about art and writing and writers, Gertrude Stein famously commented, “Hemingway, remarks are not literature” (Stein 1998, 875).  By eliminating Nick’s thoughts on writing and art, Hemingway created a more powerful and more moving work.  Among other things, the story as revised allows the metaphorical association between fishing and writing to operate without being made in any way explicit. Perhaps more than anything else, this paradox—the presence of strong symbolic overtones and the absence of anything signaling them—gives the story its “hauntingly enigmatic” quality (Lynn, 1987, caption to photo #10).[9]

III.

The “Big Two-Hearted River” stories are not the only works of literature to which the conceptual metaphor writing is fishing adds an aura of unspoken significance.[10]  Much of the force of The Old Man and the Sea, for instance, comes from the unstated presence of the writing is fishing metaphor, which, among other things, creates a kind of implicit identification between Santiago the fisherman and Hemingway himself.  “Santiago’s perseverance in bringing home his great fish,” as Gerry Brenner says, pointing to just one aspect of that parallel, “clearly mirrors Hemingway’s wish to restore his flagging reputation” (1991, 98).  To turn, however, to an author very different from Hemingway, Wordsworth’s poem “Resolution and Independence” provides another particularly illuminating example of how the writing is fishing metaphor can function with considerable force even when (or perhaps especially because) it functions only tacitly and implicitly.

In “Resolution and Independence” Wordsworth is walking on a moor one fine joyous morning.  Though initially “happy as a Boy” (l. 18), he is suddenly—and apparently inexplicably—overcome by a fit of anxiety about the future, fearing that “there may come . . . /Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty” (ll. 34-35).  He thinks of Chatterton and Burns, whom he later calls “mighty Poets in their misery dead” (l. 123), and famously concludes, “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;  / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness” (ll. 48-49).  What takes him out of this mood, or at least gives him the fortitude to bear it, is an encounter with a poor leech-gatherer.

Explicitly wondering “whether it were by peculiar grace, / A leading from above, a something given” (ll. 50-51), Wordsworth first +of all suggests that there may have been something providential, even perhaps supernatural, about his meeting with the leech-gatherer.  And by describing the leech‑gatherer in terms that make him into a wonder of nature, Wordsworth presents him as a kind of mythic creature, capable of bearing considerable symbolic weight.  To begin with, the leech-gatherer is preternaturally old.  He seems to be “the oldest Man . . . that ever wore grey hairs” (l. 56), and he is bent so double that, as Wordsworth describes him, his feet and head have actually come together or are at least on the point of doing so (ll. 72-73).  He is compared to a huge boulder of unknown origin sitting mysteriously on the peak of a mountain, provoking wonder as to “By what means it could thither come, and whence” (l. 67) and also appearing to be, in contradiction to the laws of nature, “a thing endued with sense” (l. 68, emphasis added).  The boulder (and therefore, at one remove, the old man) is further compared to “a Sea-beast crawl’d forth” from the ocean (l. 69).  In addition, just as the rock to which he is compared appears to be at once animate and inanimate, the leech-gatherer himself appears to be both awake and asleep, both alive and dead (ll. 71‑72).  Ultimately, Wordsworth comes to perceive the encounter with the leech‑gatherer as a kind of vision or visitation:

And the whole Body of the man did seem

Like one whom I had met with in a dream;

Or like a Man from some far region sent;

To give me human strength, and strong admonishment. (ll. 116-19)

The poem concludes with Wordsworth apparently resolved to use the memory of the leech‑gatherer as a bulwark against any future attacks of anxiety or depression:  “‘God,’ said I, ‘be my help and stay secure; / I’ll think of the Leech‑gatherer on the lonely moor’” (ll. 146‑47).

The “strength” and “admonishment” that the old man gives appear to come from the example he provides of bearing up to distressing circumstances—most notably to poverty—with dignity, resolution, and inner strength.  His work is “hazardous and wearisome,” and he endures “many hardships,” roaming “from Pond to Pond [. . .], from moor to moor, / Housing, with God’s good help, by choice or chance” (ll. 108-11).  Nevertheless, through his labors he earns “an honest maintenance” (l. 112), and though the leeches that he once could find “on every side” have at present “dwindled long by slow decay” (ll. 131-32), he resolutely carries on.  “Yet still I persevere,” he says, “and find them where I may” (l. 133).  For all the hardship of his situation, he speaks to Wordsworth “[c]hearfully [. . .], with demeanour kind,” and in a “stately” manner (ll. 141‑43), and the contrast between his fortitude and equanimity and Wordsworth’s own anxiety inspires Wordsworth to take a new attitude towards himself and his fears:  “I could have laugh’d myself to scorn, to find / In that decrepit Man so firm a mind” (ll. 144-45).

In and of itself—if the leech‑gatherer represents no more than someone who cheerfully endures the material diminishments of old age that Wordsworth fears—the encounter with the leech-gatherer might appear relatively trivial or insignificant.  What makes it significant is the quasi-mystical importance that Wordsworth ascribes to the old man.  In “Resolution and Independence,” as W. W. Robson writes, “Wordsworth chooses an episode which would seem, abstractly described, to be of small transmissible significance.  His success lies in convincing us of the significance he found in it” (1955, 117).  It is true that not all readers have felt that Wordsworth does succeed.  Lewis Carroll, for example, wrote a famous parody of “Resolution and Independence” and included it, reworked, in Alice in Wonderland.  Its pointed bathos implies that for Carroll the leech-gatherer is simply too slight and homely a figure to bear the ponderous symbolic weight with which “Resolution and Independence” invests him.  Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s poem has by and large been more admired than not.  Presumably, for most readers the figure of the leech-gatherer does manage to carry an especially heavy symbolic charge.  What, then, is there in the poem that allows him to do so?

My answer to that question is that the leech-gatherer is able to resonate so symbolically on account of the writing is fishing metaphor, which grounds the more explicit hints in the poem that the old man is to be seen, symbolically, as a poet, with whom Wordsworth himself identifies.

Obviously, “Resolution and Independence” is based on the contrast between the resolute leech‑gatherer and the despondent Wordsworth.  But no contrast is possible without some kind of underlying similarity or parallelism.  Paul Hamilton, Richard Eldridge, and Charles Rzepka have all pointed out that “Resolution and Independence” ultimately depends on the recognition of some kind of “kinship” (Hamilton, 1986, 131) between Wordsworth and the old man, on Wordsworth’s realization “that the old man and he are alike” (Eldridge, 1986, 289).  Hamilton mentions (1986, 132) and Rzepka stresses (1986, 90 and 96) that the leech-gatherer is in fact tacitly perceived and presented “as an image of the poet” (Rzepka, 1986, 90).  This particular symbolic role—the leech-gatherer as poet—is never made explicit, but it is hinted at in, for one thing, the stress that the poem lays on the old man’s remarkable gifts of expression:

His words came feebly, from a feeble chest,

Yet each in solemn order follow’d each,

With something of a lofty utterance drest;

Choice word, and measured phrase; above the reach

Of ordinary men; a stately speech!  (ll. 99-103, emphasis added)

We have already seen, furthermore, that the leech-gatherer is perceived as having other-worldly, quasi‑vatic qualities.  Unsurprisingly, he delivers his speech with “a fire about his eyes” (l. 98),[11] as if alight with poetic inspiration. 

What allows all of these hints to coalesce into a full-blown if unstated identification of the leech-gatherer as, symbolically, a poet like Wordsworth himself is the tacit operation of the writing is fishing metaphor.  Leeches, to be sure, are not, strictly speaking, fish, and the old man’s method of gathering them is, in its technical details, probably different from most forms of fishing.  Structurally, nevertheless, the activity of leech-gathering is essentially the same as fishing, consisting of retrieving sustenance-giving creatures from below the surface of the water “where they abide” (l. 130).  While it may seem odd to refer to the leeches as “sustenance‑giving” (since they are not food for human beings), the poem emphasizes that they materially sustain the old man—he “live[s]” (l. 126) by gathering them.  It is also relevant—perhaps especially relevant—that, as Cheryl Wanko recalls (1989), the leeches will ultimately be used for their power to heal.

Little is said about the actual technique of leech-gathering in “Resolution and Independence,” but that little may contain some hints about how Wordsworth conceived of the creative process.  As we see him in this poem, the old man initially stands, “alone” (l. 60), apparently in a trance-like state, by the edge of a body of water.  The process of gathering begins when he stirs the water—something mentioned twice in the poem (l. 86, l. 129).  Then, he “fixedly did look / Upon the muddy water, which he conned, / As if he had been reading in a book” (ll. 86-88).  Via the writing is fishing metaphor, this process would represent something like a particularly active and attentive form of introspection—and such a reading would be consistent with the use that Wordsworth makes of water imagery elsewhere, especially in The Prelude, where water, though potentially deceptive (because its surface may only mirror what is above it, including the observer himself), often symbolizes something like the interface between the individual soul and some kind of universal metaphysical essence.[12]

What happens next in the process of leech-gathering is not stated.  One common method of gathering leeches was to wade into the water and simply allow the leeches to attach themselves to one’s bare legs (Malassis, 9).  That procedure would certainly be “wearisome” and possibly “hazardous” (l. 108).  It would also have some interesting symbolic overtones—to capture your healing and sustenance-giving prey (or, in the target domain, some kind of mental phenomenon that will lead to the creation of a poem), you need first to let the prey feed on you.  But presumably that particular method is better-suited to a time when leeches are abundant.  In the poem the scarcity of leeches and the stress that the text lays on how attentively the leech‑gatherer watches the pond once he has stirred it up may suggest that the old man is obliged to catch the leeches in some more active way, gathering them up with a net, perhaps, or a basket or bag, or possibly even with his bare hands.  It is conceivable that in his youth the leech-gatherer used the first, bare-legged technique but that in the present he needs to resort to one of the more active methods.

In any case, that contrast—between the past, when leeches were abundant and easy to catch, and the present, when they are scarce—is essential.  I have been arguing that if retrieving subaqueous creatures like leeches symbolizes the work of the writer in going into his own psyche and finding there material or inspiration to sustain his own poetic creation, then Wordsworth must in some deep sense identify with the leech-gatherer.  Now, if that is so, the leech-gatherer may well have revealed the underlying cause of Wordsworth’s despondent thoughts.  The obvious point of the poem is that the old man resolutely persists in his work, even though it has become harder and harder to find leeches, which have “dwindled” with the passage of time.  His situation—yet again through the tacit (and perhaps unconscious) operation of the writing is fishing metaphor—would thus mirror that of the poet, for whom, the first flush of youth having passed, inspiration comes with greater and greater difficulty.  Indeed, we know that at the time he wrote this poem Wordsworth was concerned with the waning of that inner responsiveness to nature which had served as the inspiration for so much of his poetry.  And the collection in which “Resolution and Independence” was published concludes with the Immortality Ode, a poem that progresses from a lament that “The things which I have seen I now can see no more” (Wordsworth, 1983, “Ode,” l. 9) to a final, leech-gatherer-like resolution that

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind[.]  (ll. 180-83)

Here, then, as in “Big Two‑Hearted River,” the two metaphors the mind is a body of water and writing is fishing add a further dimension to the text.  To be sure, as I have already pointed out, neither Wordsworth’s poem nor Hemingway’s story requires a metaphorical reading.  Even when read without any symbolic interpretations at all except those that are made explicit in the texts, both “Big Two-Hearted River” and “Resolution and Independence” are powerful works, comprehensible and complete in themselves.  It would be a mistake to read either work essentially as allegory—a genre in which the literal narrative plays a consistently subordinate role, existing principally so as to evoke symbolic meaning.  It is clear nevertheless that the mind is a body of water and writing is fishing function significantly in both works.  Normally, however, readers (“naïve” readers, to be perfectly precise) have no conscious awareness of the presence of those metaphors or, a fortiori, of their functioning.  The text thus acquires a quality of mysterious, unspoken, faintly oracular significance.  But this process is in itself mysterious.  How can readers be affected by metaphors of which they have no awareness?

IV.

In response to some remarks of George Lakoff’s about Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” Reuven Tsur has discussed the type of literary text that seems to call for metaphorical interpretation even though it contains no explicit signals that it is to be read metaphorically.  About “The Road Not Taken” Tsur suggests (2008, 579) that what alerts the reader to a need for a metaphorical interpretation is the violation of certain Gricean conversational maxims.  Something of the sort (which might be more appropriately analyzed in terms of relevance theory) occurs with “Big Two-Hearted River,” where Hemingway’s language often implies greater significance than is justified by the information actually conveyed.[13]  My account of the story in Section II of this essay points out, for example, that the attention paid to the blackened, desolate, “burned over” (309) countryside at the beginning of the story implies some significance in that desolation—even though on a literal, narrative level, the desolation of the landscape that Nick first walks through has no importance at all.  Similarly, my analysis makes a great deal of the sentence about the swamp’s being “perfectly quiet” (316).  That sentence in fact adds very little information to the previous sentence, “It was a quiet night” (316)—and the little information it does add has, once again, no apparent relevance to the narrative.  The very title of the story, furthermore, implies a significance that has no relevance to the actual narrative.  (Hemingway admitted to having chosen his title “because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry” [qtd. in C. Baker, 1969, 163].)[14]  Or take the description, at the end of “Big Two-Hearted River: II,” of fishing in the swamp as “tragic” (329).  The epithet, repeated in two successive sentences, is a little too grand for the simple experience of fishing in “half light” and “fast deep water” (329).  Its repetition helps to charge the final sentence of the story, "There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp" (330), with an unexplained portentousness.  This technique—using language that implies a significance not rooted in the actual events of the story—creates a sense in the reader that there must be significance elsewhere than in the actual narrative.  Nevertheless, the text “does not overtly signal that [it] is to be taken metaphorically” (Lakoff , 1993, 238 qtd. in Tsur, 2008, 578), and the target domain of the operative conceptual metaphors remains unmentioned.  The result is that although the reader feels that there is significance elsewhere than in the narrative, she is given practically no clues as to where it resides (nor, of course, as to what it may be).  The story becomes “hauntingly enigmatic.”

Something along the same lines occurs in “Resolution and Independence,” in which the leech gatherer is invested, both implicitly and explicitly, with greater significance than is warranted by the overt narrative.  The techniques with which Wordsworth brings this about differ from Hemingway’s, the major difference being Wordsworth’s tendency to be explicit rather than implicit in attributing significance.  As my discussion of “Resolution and Independence” shows, he attributes significance to the leech‑gatherer most frequently through bald, largely unexplained statement, as well as through explicit imagery.  Style (in particular register) does come into play, however.  For while Wordsworth makes use mainly of simple, everyday, middle-register diction, instances of more pretentious, more “poetic” language are frequent.  These include a full-blown heroic simile (“As a huge Stone is sometimes seen to lie . . .”) at the beginning of the tenth stanza, but usually they consist of poetic inversions, most often in clauses with “he” (referring to the leech-gatherer) as subject:  “he the Pond / stirred” (ll. 84‑85), “Such as grave Livers do in Scotland use” (l. 104), “he other matter blended” (l. 141) and so on.  The style and diction of the poem thus help—implicitly—to establish the weightiness of the subject matter, and in doing so, they reinforce the poem’s explicit attribution of significance to the leech‑gatherer.

For that attribution of significance we have been given the beginnings of an explanation.  But the explanation—the poverty of the leech‑gatherer (something that Wordsworth explicitly fears) and his dignity and resolution in accepting the hardships of his lot—does not fully justify the aura of quasi-numinous importance that, in Wordsworth’s account, surrounds the leech‑gatherer.  Nor does it explain the unaccounted for depression that has come upon Wordsworth at the beginning of the poem.  Unanswered questions thus remain, though the sense of mystery is less than in “Big Two‑Hearted River.”  “Resolution and Independence,” we might say, is not quite “hauntingly enigmatic,” but it is, nevertheless, puzzling.

This attribution, implicit or explicit, of greater significance to the events of a narrative than are fully accounted for by a literal reading of the text is, I would suggest, the first step in creating the phenomenon of resonance.  (The more implicit the attribution, the greater the temptation on the part of the reader to resort to metaphorical interpretation, as in the Frost poem that Tsur and Lakoff have discussed.)  But this in itself does not suffice.  Imagine writing a narrative and investing it, using techniques similar either to Hemingway’s or to Wordsworth’s, with thoroughly unwarranted significance.  The result will be ludicrous.  Indeed, this is precisely how Lewis Carroll’s parody of “Resolution and Independence” functions:

And now if e’er by chance I put

My fingers into glue,

Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot

Into a left-hand shoe;

Or if a statement I aver

Of which I am not sure,

I think of that strange wanderer

Upon the lonely moor. (1939, 729-30)

If the text is to be resonant rather than risible, it is necessary for the reader to feel that a satisfactory explanation is available—even if he does not know what it is—for the significance that is attributed to the events of the narrative.  I have been trying to show that in both “Big Two–Hearted River” and “Resolution and Independence” such an explanation is available, through the operation of the conceptual metaphor the mind is a body of water and its entailment writing is fishing.

The operation of these metaphors is, like most cognitive processes, more or less unconscious.  Can we suppose, then, that the readers of “Big Two‑Hearted River” and “Resolution and Independence” are unconsciously aware of the two conceptual metaphors I have been discussing? [15]

We can, even in spite of the apparent oxymoron.  Conceptual metaphors normally function unconsciously, and like syntax and vocabulary, they are part of the language.  Knowing a language—in particular if it is your mother tongue—means knowing (most of) its conceptual metaphors.  But you do not necessarily know that you know them.  Let me give an analogy.  If you know English, you would not use the word “knowledge” in the plural, even though you may not be able to explain why.  You know, in some sense, that “knowledge” is an uncountable noun, but you may not know that you know it.  Or, to take a different analogy, if you were reading a book and came across a fairly technical word which you had encountered before but which you were incapable of defining, you might choose not to look the word up, feeling that you had a perfectly adequate understanding of the sentence in which it appeared.  Indeed, you might even be able to use the word yourself more or less correctly.  In an important sense, then, you would know the word, though you lacked any meta‑knowledge of it.  Similarly, in the case of conceptual metaphor, most English‑speakers would probably feel that the expression “in the depths of the mind” sounds right, whereas (except in very special contexts) “in the iciness of the mind” does not.  They would, in other words, be familiar with the conceptual metaphor the mind is a body of water without necessarily having any meta‑linguistic realization that they are.  There is nothing extraordinary about this.  We learn conceptual metaphors the way we learn most of our vocabulary, by being so frequently exposed to them that we internalize them.  And we are not necessarily aware of the process.

Hence, if

(1) a text manages to convey a sense of unexplained import, and

(2) an explanation of that sense is available through conceptual metaphor,[16]

then the typical reader (being aware, though probably unconsciously, of the existence of the relevant conceptual metaphor) will perceive the text as a resonant one.  He may or may not feel impelled to seek an explicit metaphorical interpretation.  If so impelled, he may or may not find one.  But however the reader reacts to it, the actual phenomenon that I’ve been calling resonance will be present whenever the two conditions I have just defined are met.

 V.

Our unconscious awareness of the conceptual metaphors relevant to a resonant text may also open onto further cultural associations (which may be themselves analyzable in terms of conceptual metaphor).  Probably our awareness of these further associations will also be unconscious or semi‑conscious.  In both “Big Two-Hearted River” and “Resolution and Independence,” the resonance of the text—in particular the sense of numinous import attached to fish and fishing—is augmented by the reader’s awareness, conscious or not, of the New Testament associations of fish and fishing.

We acquire our knowledge of cultural associations in the same way that we acquire our knowledge of conceptual metaphors—by being frequently exposed to them to the point where we internalize them.  Typically the process is unconscious, but the possibility is not ruled out of conscious or semi-conscious awareness.  Those who know the Bible will consciously recognize Biblical associations when they appear in other contexts.  But any reader who knows English well will have been so frequently exposed to Biblical associations at second (or third or fourth) hand, that she will have some unconscious awareness of them even if she has never read the Bible, even if she knows nothing or next to nothing about Christianity.

One case in point is the reception of Barack Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame in May, 2009 about finding “a way to live together as one human family” (“Obama’s Commencement Address”).  At the end of the speech, Obama tells an anecdote about President Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Commission, which consisted of “men of such different backgrounds and beliefs” that agreement among them was difficult.  But the path to agreement was opened when, at a lakeside retreat of Notre Dame’s in Wisconsin, the president of Notre Dame discovered that all the members of the committee shared a hobby—“they were all fishermen” —and took them out for a twilight fishing trip.  In the penultimate paragraph of his address, Obama exhorts his audience to “[r]emember that in the end, in some way we are all fishermen.”  He has made no overt allusion to the Bible, has not even suggested that he is making an allusion to anything but the anecdote he has just told about a literal fishing trip.  Even so, his words resonate with Biblical significance.   He was, of course, was speaking at a religious university, and might have expected some Biblical knowledge on the part of his immediate audience.  But it is revealing that the press reports of the speech quoted the line about our all being fishermen without explanation.  Journalists simply took it for granted that readers would get it.

What, then, are the precise Biblical associations of fish and fishing, and how do those associations relate to “Big Two‑Hearted River” and “Resolution and Independence”?

The fish as a sacred symbol has a long pre-Christian history, and scholars are uncertain whether the line drawing of a fish that served as a symbol of Christ in the early Church resulted from or inspired the acrostic in which the first letters of the Greek words for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior” spell out the Greek word for “fish” (Quasten, 2003).  But whatever its historical origins, the Christian symbolism of the fish appeals in fact to a series to Biblical references to fish based on Jesus’s Galilean origins and the role played in the Gospels by the Lake of Galilee, where fishing was an important activity.  To begin with, Jesus’s first disciples were fishermen, and in Matthew (4.19) and Mark (1.17) he recruits Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew by telling them that he will make them “fishers of men.”  A similar story is given by Luke (5.10), in which Jesus tells Simon “henceforth thou shalt catch men.”  Though nothing in the immediate context requires “fishers of men” to be read as “fishers of souls,” such a reading becomes almost unavoidable with the development of Christianity as a religion, and helps to strengthen the spiritual associations of fishing (and the overtones of salvation in “Big Two-Hearted River” and “Resolution and Independence”).  Even more importantly, however, throughout the Gospels fish are referred to along with bread and wine as one of the three basic, life-sustaining foodstuffs.  One clear example is the pointed rhetorical question that Jesus asks in the Sermon on the Mount: “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will give him a stone? / Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent” (Matthew 7.9-10.  See also Luke 11.11).

In addition, a miracle concerning the multiplication of loaves and fishes appears six times in the Gospels (two of the Evangelists narrating it as two separate miracles).  One of these six instances has particular relevance to the overtones of writing is fishing.  Jesus frequently lays stress on the opposition between two worlds:  this world, which is material and temporal and therefore transient, and “the kingdom of heaven,” which is spiritual and eternal.  One of the most direct expressions of this opposition comes, in John’s gospel, as the direct aftermath of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.  The day after the event Jesus tells the crowd (“meat,” of course, meaning simply “food”), “Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled. / Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life” (6.26-27, emphasis added).  In the elaboration that follows, which bears strong Eucharistic overtones, Jesus focuses on the bread rather than on the fish, but it is clear that the image of food —most typically in the form of bread or fish or wine—stands both for immediate material sustenance and, more importantly, for enduring spiritual sustenance.

This motif, bread and fish as representing spiritual sustenance, is picked up again practically at the end of The Gospel according to Saint John, in the narration of the final appearance of the risen Jesus to his disciples.  Peter and six other disciples have fished all night long and caught nothing.  In the morning Jesus appears and tells them where to cast their net.  Following his instructions, they catch one hundred fifty-three “great fishes” (21.11).  Upon coming to land, they find a fire with “fish laid thereon, and bread” (21.9).  Jesus invites them to dine.  He “cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise” (21.13).  After the meal Jesus three times asks Peter, “lovest thou me.”  Peter responds affirmatively all three times.  To Peter’s first response Jesus replies, “Feed my lambs,” and to his second and third responses he replies, “Feed my sheep” (21.15-17).  Clearly this is a kind of parable, “lambs” and “sheep” meaning something like “those who follow me” and “feed” (particularly in the light of Jesus’s previous comments on “that meat which endureth unto everlasting life”) meaning something like “provide spiritual sustenance.”   At the very conclusion of the gospels food, in the form of bread and fish, symbolizes spiritual sustenance.

To summarize, then, resonance arises when two conditions are met.  First, greater significance is attributed to the events of a narrative than those events warrant in and of themselves.  Second, whether or not the reader is consciously aware of it, some explanation is available for the significance thus attributed.  In “Big Two‑Hearted River” and “Resolution and Independence” that explanation is provided by the conceptual metaphors the mind is a body of water and writing is fishing.  In both texts, moreover, the symbolic import proceeding from those two conceptual metaphors is reinforced—tacitly and with most readers unconsciously—by the Christian associations of fish.  These associations increase the aura of numinousness that surrounds fish and fishing, and, more specifically, strengthen the identification of fish with spiritual sustenance.  Via the mind is a body of water and writing is fishing Nick Adams’s fish suggest stories that Nick will write or is writing.  The Christian associations add the suggestion that, spiritually, those stories will nourish and sustain Nick—as indeed the text of “Big Two-Hearted River” implies with its hints that Nick’s fishing trip involves some kind of therapy for him.  Similarly, in “Resolution and Independence” the tacit presence of Christian symbolism deepens our sense that the act of humbly gathering leeches (an act associated, via writing is fishing, with the humble creation of poems) affords a sort of heaven-sent spiritual sustenance—a feeling that concords perfectly with the concluding statement of the poem, “‘God […] be my help and stay secure; / I’ll think of the Leech‑gatherer on the lonely moor’” (ll. 146-47).  The reader may have no conscious awareness of how the conceptual metaphors and their Christian associations influence him.  But if he knows English, they influence him nevertheless.

 Works Cited

Baker, Carlos, 1969, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, London: Collins.

Baker, Sheridan, 1975, “Hemingway’s Two-hearted River.”  In Jackson J. Benson (ed.), The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, 150-159, Durham, NC: Duke UP.

Barnden, John.  (1997).  “Description of Metaphor: Mind as Physical Space,” ATT-Meta Project Databank.  Retrieved March 26, 2012 from http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jab/ATT-Meta/Databank/Metaphor-Descriptions/mind-AS-physical-space.html

Brenner, Gerry, 1991, The Old Man and the Sea: Story of a Common Man, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies 80, New York: Twayne.

Carroll, Lewis, 1939, “Upon the Lonely Moor,” The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, 727‑730, London: Nonesuch Press.

Curtis, Jared (ed.), 1983, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800‑1807 by William Wordsworth, The Cornell Wordsworth, Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Eldridge, Richard, 1986, “Self-Understanding and Community in Wordsworth’s Poetry,” Philosophy and Literature 10, 273-94.

 Forster, E[dward]. M[organ], 1953 “Notes on the English Character,” Abinger Harvest, 11-24,  London: Edward Arnold.

Gentner, Dedre, 1989, “The mechanisms of analogical learning.”  In Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, 199-241, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, 1973, Hemingway’s Craft, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP and London: Feffer & Simmons.

Hamilton, Paul, 1986, Wordsworth, Harvester New Readings, Brighton: Harvester.

Hemingway, Ernest, 1938, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-Nine Stories and the Play The Fifth Column, New York: Modern Library-Random House.

Hemingway, Ernest, 1964, A Moveable Feast.  New York: Scribner’s.

Hemingway, Ernest, 1972, “On writing,” The Nick Adams Stories, 233‑241, New York: Scribner’s.

Lakoff, George, 1993, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.”  In Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 2d ed., 202-251, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Lamb, Robert Paul, 1991, “Fishing for Stories: What ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ Is Really About,” Modern Fiction Studies 37, 161-181.

Lynn, Kenneth S., 1987, Hemingway, New York: Simon and Schuster.

Malassis, Sylvain, “Les Sangsues.”  Retrieved March 29, 2012, from  http://www.sangsue.ch/Dateien/sangsue_ordre_pharmacien.pdf

Melnick, Burton A., 1997, “Metaphor and the Theory of Libidinal Development, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 78, 997‑1016.

Melnick, Burton A., 2008, “The Writer as Fisherman: Hemingway and Wordsworth.”  In Frederico Pereira (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis: Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis, Helsinki (Finland), June 28 - July 3, 2006, 143-148, Lisbon: Istituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada.

“Obama’s Commencement Address at Notre Dame,” 2009, New York Times, May 17, 2009.  Retrieved March 28, 2012 from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/us/politics/17text-obama.html?pagewanted=all

Quasten, J., 2003, “Fish, Symbolism of,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (2d ed., Vol. 5, 746-748), Detroit: Gale.

Robson, W. W., 1955, “Wordsworth: Resolution and Independence.”  In John Wain (ed.), Interpretations: Essays on Twelve English Poems, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.    Rpt. In Graham McMaster (ed.), 1972, William Wordsworth: A Critical Anthology, 421‑432, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Rzepka, Charles J., 1986, The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Sánchez-Vizcaíno, María Jesús López, 2007,  “The Waters of the Mind: Rhetorical Patterns of Fluidity in Woolf, William James, Bergson and Freud,” Psyart: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts.  Retrieved March 28, 2012, from http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/jess_lpez_snchez_vizcano-the_waters_of_the_mind_rhetorical_patter

Smith, B.J., 1982, “‘Big Two-Hearted River:’ The Artist and the Art,” Studies in Short Fiction 19, 129-132.

Stein, Gertrude, 1998, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.  In Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (eds.), Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903‑1932, 653-913, New York: Library of America.

Tsur, Reuven, 2008, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics, 2d ed., Cambridge, UK and Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press.

Wanko, Cheryl, 1989, “Leechcraft: Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence,’” English

Language Notes 24, 58-62.

Woolf, Virginia, 1966, “Professions for Women,” Collected Essays, Vol. 2, 284‑289, London: Hogarth Press.

Wordsworth, William, 1983, “Ode.”  In Jared Curtis (ed.), Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800‑1807 by William Wordsworth, The Cornell Wordsworth, 271‑777, Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Wordsworth, William, 1983, “Resolution and Independence.”  In Jared Curtis (ed.), Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800‑1807 by William Wordsworth, The Cornell Wordsworth, 123‑129, Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Wordsworth, William, 1991, The Prelude.  In Mark Reed (ed.) The Prelude by William Wordsworth, Vol. 1, The Cornell Wordsworth.  Ithaca: Cornell UP.