Addressing Modernity from the Woods: Utopian Counter-Discourses in "Big Two-Hearted River"

ABSTRACT:Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two Hearted River" creates a utopian space for reimagining multiple senses of time, space, and embodiment. The story is not a mere escape into the woods to nourish the soul of the main character, Nick Adams. The text throughout keeps an eye on the structural forces (advanced technologies, techniques for controlling selves and collectives) homogenizing behavior, reductively streamlining concepts of place, objects, time, and bodies. The story carefully creates a counter-discourse (alternative structures), the aims of which are to facilitate embodiment (a human scale) and the possibility of engaging with forms of time and space that elude the processes of industrialization. Hemingway, through his open-ended style and increasingly embodied character, Nick, explores the possibility of relating to the world in a non-dominating, mindful way. The quality of consciousness mapped out are meant to be carried back to a modernist culture as a kind of revolution. Nick, then, is not a self so much as a revolutionary method.