Historical Context

Hemingway’s Folk

Many things account for the rural or small town Spanish characters and scenery of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” First, as an expatriate artist living on the continent in the 1920s, Hemingway developed a passion for Spain. He was a lifelong fan of Spanish popular traditions. He enjoyed the festivals, and he keenly appreciated the bullfight. He went to Spain often to fish in the countryside, and so he came to know its plainer people.

In addition to this familiarity with Spain’s rural peoples, ‘plain folk’ (e.g. waiters in small towns) provide an escape from the effete, or anything resonant of “civilization” which Hemingway scrupulously wishes to avoid in his art. This is so because the disaster that was WWI was a founding event and trauma in Hemingway’s life. His most admired novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), takes place around a Spanish popular festival and is about a wounded WWI veteran who is terribly in love but who has been made impotent by war injuries. This character’s situation is highly symbolic. He is the sterile scion of a disastrous past, which is like saying that civilization has progressed so far only to have progressed not at all. It is no wonder that Hemingway turns to folk. If civilization and progress has wrought such ugliness and pain, then where better to turn than to those whom progress has seemed to pass by or touched less?

Everybody’s Folk

The folk, as in the peasantry or working class of European cultures, were a population of keen historical import and significance during the teens, 20s and 30s. They were so for various reasons, the most important of which, however, boils down to the reformism of the time. The first three decades of the west are characterized by reformist mass political movements. The excesses of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution were curtailed thanks to workers’ demonstrations fueled by socialist and communist ideologies. This striving for more equal or fair treatment extended to women, who gained the vote at this time. Immediately post-WWI, New York City saw the first twentieth-century race movement, the African-American Harlem Renaissance (1919-1935). Given how rights movements entail the basic argument and principle of each person’s equal worth, regardless of race, status, or gender, the ideal of equality was touted frequently. Everyone, down to the simplest or uneducated man or woman is of equal worth, the argument goes, and in order to prove and support this, fiction writers everywhere turned to the folk for material. The desire to extend democracy and correct persistent social inequalities is mirrored in the aesthetics and subject of Hemingway’s story. Hemingway’s prosaic little story stresses the foundational sameness and dignity of all human beings.

Europe, Theater of War

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” was written at the start of the 1930s, a decade, it turns out, that would be as fraught as the one that preceded it. During the 1920s, most people were trying to come to terms with two major events. First, WWI, which killed and mutilated millions of young men, wiping out an entire male European generation and, second, the first wave of what we now call technology. Telephones and automobiles, for example, were becoming widely used and available. The 1930s, after the post-War trauma of the 1920s, delivered nothing other than the second major European war of the twentieth-century, World War II. This conflict grew out of the rise of European fascism. The fascist troops of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were beaten down during WWII, but fascism triumphed in Hemingway’s beloved Spain in 1939 when Francisco Franco’s rebel forces overcame the government.

Compare & Contrast

• • 1920s: WWI is a notorious war. There was no clear villainous enemy, as in the fascists of WWII. It was terribly inefficient. It was considered then how the Viet Nam war is considered today, a fight that used soldiers sorely and trau-matically. It ate up young men with all the efficiency of a giant thresher. The term “shell shock” was invented to name the hysteria and psychosis that the war induced in so many of the soldiers.
  1990s: Countries like the U.S. which have technologically sophisticated warheads are now able to conduct “limited” wars. In contrast to WWI, the recent U.S. and European fighting against Serbia was conducted entirely from the air. Things and not people were the primary targets.
• 1930s: The Spain of Hemingway’s story suffered a great deal during the 1930s. The country, moving to more fully democratic rule, had elected a new government around the time Hemingway was writing “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” This latest election was ignored by the armies of Francisco Franco. Funded by fellow fascists Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy, Franco’s troops overcame the legitimate government in a bloody Civil War which lasted from 1936-39. The Spanish Civil War was a popular cause internationally. The world reacted most anxiously to the growth of fascism, and the defending Spanish Loyalist armies drew to their ranks an international group of soldier-sympathizers, many of whom were American men and women (“The Abe Lincoln Brigade”). Hemingway went to Spain to cover the war for the U.S. press (and an attachment with the woman and fellow journalist who would become his third wife was consolidated at this place and time).
  1990s: A strong memory of Franco has not yet faded from Spanish memory. His forces were not subdued, and he was a dictator of this country until 1975. Franco’s death was, on the whole, exuberantly and widely welcomed, and the country became, fairly quickly, a typical continental nation. The European nations, on the whole, are prosperous in comparison to the rest of the world, despite persistent high levels of unemployment. The most pressing situation for Europe at present is the European Economic Union (EEU), in which the nations of Europe will share a single currency called the “Euro.” The Euro has been brought into circulation, and will become the sole currency of this group of nations on January 1, 2001.
• 1920s: The 1920s in the U.S. are known as the Roaring Twenties. They roared because the U.S. emerged, somewhat to its own surprise even, as a new superpower after WWI. It had sold plenty of armaments to Europe, and most of war-torn Europe was in its financial debt. America was not only rich, it was also culturally vibrant. Women had just gotten the vote in England and the U.S., and the French fashion genius Coco Chanel revolutionized women’s fashion. Flappers cut their hair and wore simple shifts that left them free to dance all night, and the new technology was awesome to contemplate: Phonographs, radios, planes, telephones and automobiles.
  1990s: The U.S. is still a so-called superpower, but in a much tighter global context. Technology has now delivered the computer and the internet, the latter facilitating this aforementioned global interconnectedness. And this, perhaps, is what seems really new, politically and economically, technologically and communicationally: for all of the U.S.’s wealth and power, there is the sense now that transnational financial ties are such that what happens in remote global markets can substantially affect U.S. fortunes. In effect, the need to be apprised of these wide-ranging global connections and relations is now a requirement, and the internet and other advanced communications networks are delivering this information.