Therapeutic Potential of Prayer in the Narrative Structure of Ernest Hemingway’s Short Prose

Abstract

The article analyzes the therapeutic potential of prayer and the hierophanic imagery matrix employed in the narrative structure of Ernest Hemingway’s short prose (1899–1961). The relevance of the study is stipulated by the focus of contemporary literary studies on crisis states and post-traumatic forms of literary activities (testimony) resulting from a radical shift in the episteme caused by war. The analysis covers the texts with a pronounced religious component, in particular those that contain a transitive plot, a sacred imagological matrix, elements of biblical personospheres, or even implied fragments of confession, life, or prayer, since such texts are capable of facilitating a cathartic effect and enabling the recipient to rediscover a transcendent center. This has determined the choice of an appropriate analytical perspective – namely, the application of Mircea Eliade’s methodology of the “camouflage of the sacred”, which relies on describing the ways in which transcendent reality is implicitly embedded in the profane and presupposes that the recipient possesses experience in symbolic interpretation necessary for identifying hierophanies in a desacralized world. In this respect, the spiritual (religious) experience of artists who were participants in combat acquires particular significance. Drawing on the works of Mary Claire Kendall, Alaimo O’Donnell, and Ali Zaidi, the article examines the influence of existential dimensions of faith (Catholicism) on the life and work of E. Hemingway, who repeatedly reinterprets sacred motifs within a (post-)secular context. The study is based on an analysis of the hermeneutic, receptive, and narrative potential of prayer and hierophanies in examples of his war-related short prose – “A Very Short Story”, “Soldier’s Home”, and “Now I Lay Me” – included in the collections “In Our Time” (1925) and “Men Without Women” (1927). The article also emphasizes the function of the sacred topos as a space of temporary protection from the traumatic reality of war. It regards Christian symbolism of labor, prayer, and the Kingdom of God, which reveals an existential rupture between the generation of parents (bearers of traditional religious values) and children whose ontological frameworks were destroyed by war. The motif of fishing is singled out as the one recoding the natural image of the fish into a hierophanic register and activates, in the consciousness of a competent recipient, biblical connotations of ichthyan archetypes and images of the apostles as “fishers of men” for the Kingdom of God (Peter and Andrew). The analyzed patterns of personal and communal prayer carry different functional meanings in terms of the cathartic-compensatory potential of the sacred. We conclude that prayer appears as: an act of living faith and a form of inner salvation; a means of self-soothing and controlling traumatic experience; an opportunity to experience the transcendent in a liminal situation; a “glimmer” that models a space of safety and stable support; and a mechanism capable of neutralizing war trauma. However, the effectiveness of prayer as healing is determined primarily by the individual’s inner demand – while in a state of existential crisis – for dialogue with God.