Jig on the Border: The World and Time of the Simile

Hemingway's story 'Hills Like White Elephants' is filled with twosomes. Indeed, the title itself presents a pair: 'Hills' like 'White Elephants.' It is a natural temptation, when confronted with such couplings, to choose one or the other: either the Hills or the White Elephants. This temptation passes something crucial by, though--namely, the 'like.' This paper argues--through a healthy dose of psychoanalysis--that in this story Hemingway is attempting to heed these in-between third terms, of which the simile is one, to tarry with them, and to refrain from choosing one of the pair over the other. KEYWORDS: Simile, Lacan, Psychoanalysis
'For all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts tangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.' --George Eliot, Middlemarch In an essay published over sixty [...]