In a 2009 essay entitled “Emergence. Post-human Narrative,” Steve Tomasula asked whether, to depict the world of today, optical metaphors aligning visual and narrative techniques of the previous century grounded in what he calls an “epistemology of the window,” (2) that structurally places the single individual centerstage and establish its conceptual horizon within the limits of the “Human Scale” of events, knowledge, and perception, are sufficient. Once narrative shifts its objects of interest toward phenomena of grander or lesser scale than the individual and engages broader material and informational systems, he claims, new scales of visual or diagrammatic representation are necessary, through which meaning can emerge from fiction’s entanglement with media technologies and the material world outside the printed page. Individual viewpoints tend to shift toward collective ratios, and human observation tends to be replaced by technical media that distribute authorial traces across data points and through patterns, rather than through a central consciousness. Instead of unfolding plots, stories that are not organized by the individual point of view move statistically or procedurally and provide the conditions for narrative emergence on coordinates that are thoroughly post- or a-humanist, as they may involve complex calculations, data analysis, indirect meshing and manipulation of data, recursive computation programs, and multimodal remixing, among other techniques. Adolph Northern’s 1851 portrait of Napoleon retreating from the Russian Campaign and Joseph Minard’s 1869 graphic representation of the entire history of the Campaign are then used by Tomasula to exemplify the logic of such narrative shifts. In the difference between the tragic plot expressed though the painting’s focus on an individual figure surrounded by supporting, faceless characters in the distance and the flow map of Napoleon’s losses across the entire Campaign, we familiarize with an early example of data visualization grounded in numbers, rather than in individual consciousness. The significance of this transition, Tomasula points out, is that it generates data patterns that produce alternative, “emergent” (2009, 17) forms of narrative knowledge and narrative structures, while simultaneously contracting “humanist ideas of self,” by rescaling them to the point at which they become “less relevant metaphors than a map of the Internet” (8).

Building on Tomasula’s multiple discussions of what he calls the “inherently self-reflexive” nature of narrative (New Materialist 117)—a condition which foregrounds fiction’s entanglement with the material world, the technologies that make narrative possible, and the epistemological affordances of emergent storyworlds—this essay examines the short story “A Farewell to Kilimanjaro”(1993), Tomasula’s rewriting of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”(1936). Framing both stories in the long history of modernism’s relation with the media, I analyze how Hemingway’s view of literature as embedded in media ecology is addressed by Tomasula’s theory of fiction—one that structurally incorporates and reflects on the materiality of storytelling (Tomasula 2014). This proposition implies a methodological, ideological, and thematic alignment with modernism’s foundational claim that literature is primarily a media phenomenon whose object is not “the world” but the conditions under which the world is observed, mediated, and narrated.¹ In so doing, I argue, Tomasula’s story updates for the media-saturated, 21st-century environment the idea of (post)modernist literature as a frame for thought, implying second-order observation—a concept already present, albeit only as an intuition and never made explicit, in Hemingway’s text. In stories like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway explored the paradoxical condition of literature in the emergent media system of his time, revealed its highly specialized function within that system, and supplied elements for deconstructing realist hermeneutic readings of his fiction.²

Tomasula’s claim that the new technical knowledge of the late 19^th and early 20^th century scaled down humanist ideas of the self, relegating them to a level of knowledge less relevant than a map or a diagram, or, by extension, a generative algorithm. This shift marks a parallel movement from humanist to technical knowledge. On the one hand, it metabolizes the displacement of the author as the origin and guarantor of meaning in favor of the primacy of linguistic, discursive, and institutional structures as advanced by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Tomasula acknowledges their critiques as foundational to his own work and to the broader discourse of post-humanist thought.³ On the other hand, it echoes media theorist Friedrick Kittler’s observation about the humanist limits of the Freudian apparatus. “Freud’s materialism,” Kittler claims, “reasoned only as far as the information machines of his era—no more, no less” (132). Kittler’s observation about the epistemo-technical conditions of emergence of the unconscious brings into focus the relation between technical media and knowledge forms. It recalls the displacement of humanist hermeneutics by those media in the early stages of literary modernism, helping us navigate the conceptual distance separating Hemingway’s “Kilimanjaro” from Tomasula’s “Farewell to Kilimanjaro.”

Modernist scholars have firmly established the close interrelationship between modernist literature and medial forms, showing how, after 1900, literary works were deeply entwined with specific media technologies while also actively participating in the formation of a new media discourse;⁴ literature responded to the epistemic pressure of media “situation,” to borrow a conceptual term from Stephan Heidenreich (2015) by maximizing its own, medium-specific difference from other communication forms. This process took shape not because literature represented the mass media (although it also did, as much avant-garde literature testifies), but because it incorporated and reflected upon the logic of the media as its own condition of world-making. Modernist literature maximized its self-reflexive apparatus by underscoring “new” experimental techniques—fragmentation, stream of consciousness, brazen use of irony, multiple perspectives, allusion, ellipsis, temporal distortions, unconventional grammar and syntax, references to mass culture, etc.—that sharpened the narrative focus on literature’s own operations and, at the same time, exposed literature’s “entanglements” with the world (to use Tomasula’s expression) as increasingly more indirect, abstract, and self-made. Kittler explains how the discourse network (Aufschreibesystem) of 1800, that is, “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (DN 369), was structured by alphabetic writing, literary pedagogy, and hermeneutic subjectivity, whereas the network of 1900 emerged with what he calls technical media: the phonograph, film, and typewriter. These new technologies displaced writing as a general medium and reconfigured discourse as no longer a hermeneutic activity based on the interpretation of signs, but as a technical process based on the transmission and reception of signals and on the separation of sound, image, and text into distinct channels of mechanical inscription. With the emergence of the 1900 discourse network, the technical media took over the material inscription of the world by recording sensory perception on inscription surfaces. In parallel, literature self-consciously differentiated its own highly specialized communication from general writing.

From a genealogical perspective, then, the proto post-humanist idea of meaning as something separated from the signal and cutting across conscious and unconscious processes as well as across thought and communication first became an explicit concern of modernist aesthetics. When writing appeared as a medium capable “of storing only writing, no more, no less” (GFT 36), it ceased to operate as a general medium, and literature emerged as a domain of second-order operations binding narrative universes to specific observational devices foregrounded in much modernist narrative, from Henry James’ “house of many windows” to John Dos Passos’ “camera eye.” No longer presenting to readers a trace of the material world outside the page in “the surrogate sensuality of handwriting” (GFT 36), literature stabilized its own function in presenting “forms that refer to other forms, not to the world” (Luhmann ASS, 45).

Written in 1936, Hemingway’s “Kilimanjaro” registers the end of the monopoly of writing as a “a surrogate of unstorable [i.e., acoustical and optical] data flow” (Kittler, GFT 39). It builds on a feeling that we may call “the end of writing” and “the death of the author” in the sense that it conveys a sense of loss for writing’s capacity to embody and evoke a sensory domain external to the typescript, expressing, not without nostalgia, the intuition that “the dream of a real, visible, or audible world arising from the words [was] over” (GFT 44), and that the dis-union of life and art, experience and sign would not be amended by any idealized individual act. Time was over. As a story primarily about writing vis-á-vis memory, time, and technique, in conditions of impending death, the text’s own separation of meaning and signal — of lived experience and narrative articulation — suggests a self-conscious statement about the possibilities and limits of narrative within the discourse network of 1900. The protagonist is unable to deliver his reminiscences in narrative form and will die without leaving behind a recorded trace of his supposedly crucial, life-turning moments, raising questions about the relation between aesthetics, experience, and the medium.

Taking up the questions Hemingway raised in a contemporary setting, Tomasula’s “Farewell” focuses on how the separation of signal and sign functions within what we might call a new discourse network of digital media. ⁵ The transition from Hemingway to Tomasula marks a shift from the inscription of experience through the discrete recording media discussed by Kittler to the network of signal recombination and processing operated by digital systems. In this later configuration, media no longer primarily record the world as analog traces of past presence; instead, computational systems model, simulate, and calculate states of the world in ways increasingly decoupled from human perception. Experience, in this sense, is no longer stored as memory but operationalized as data in continuous flow — predicted, optimized, and continuously reconfigured. While “Kilimanjaro” still assumed human access to media outputs, temporal linearity, and media that recorded and intervened in reality, “Farewell” implies a self-organized and computational, non-subjective regime of operations that re-unifies by convergence into a continuous flow of data the separation of sign and signal initiated by the early technical media. This early story in Tomasula’s writing career actually provides a first glimpse into the author’s persistent engagement with developing narratives that trace (and preserve) the last, residual cultural language of analog media in the process of being superseded by digital discourse networks, and in this light we can see how “Farewell” charts the shift from the 20^th century discourse of the “Death of the Author” to contemporary procedural, algorithmic authorship.

1. Narrative

Tomasula’s theoretical insights about post-humanist narrative in the contemporary media condition (2009, 2014, 2018, 2023) are put to work and performed in his 2015 collection of short stories, Once Human, that includes “Farewell” and addresses the unstable conception of the human generated within disciplinary discourses, at the interface of human functions and prosthetic technologies and through social and institutional practices in time and across cultures. The collection consistently addresses the question of which narrative best conveys the transition from humanist storytelling to its “post.” Written between the late nineties and the first decade of the 21^st century, the nine pieces offer a sample of the themes the author explores more thoroughly in his novels, and showcase his typical multi-layered, polysemic narratives in which literature, visual art, design, specialized scientific and disciplinary knowledge collaborate in the effort to thematize, incorporate, and mark a break in the communication data in the world it brings forth.

“Farewell to Kilimanjaro” weaves together Hemingway’s “Kilimanjaro,” references to A Farewell to Arms (1929), and to Hemingway’s own language, but it also evokes T. J. Clark’s classic study, Modernism: Farewell to an Idea — at least to the extent in which it bids farewell to the idea that modern life could be shaped, challenged, or redeemed through aesthetic means (another humanist fantasy discounted by the epilogue of “Farewell”). While never discussing Hemingway, Clark’s study can be seen as a meditation on the themes of his famous story, as death, failure, perseverance, failed heroism, redemption, and purity bring together the two works. In Clark’s study, these values are addressed negatively and dialectically in what can be called an autopsy of modernism’s moral vocabulary. In Hemingway’s story, Harry’s symbolically unfruitful death can also be seen as an autopsy of modernist narrative.

Situated after Hemingway, after T. J. Clark and after Kittler, Tomasula’s “Farewell” performs, rather than describes, modernist narrative’s autopsy. The story reimagines the end of Ernest Hemingway’s life—not as a suicide in 1961, but as an old man slowly dying after intestinal cancer treatment in an Arizona care facility called Kilimanjaro for the Aged, Inc., a brand of Time Warner, Inc. Reduced to their name initials, the protagonists are E., now elderly and infirm, tended to by C., a nurse who is also his lover. Just like their dialogue, their relationship is a replica of Harry and Helen’s in Hemingway’s “Kilimanjaro” but is transposed into a different social and mediascape. Mediascape is key, as Tomasula’s “remixing” here indexes a shift in the dominant technical media around which the narrative is organized: writing to television to digital mapping and back to cartography and to what looks like a programmatic version of a typewriter, a likely allegory of a general purpose calculator (or God, the ultimate calculator) writing America (and by implication knowledge, history, time) into history from its Columbian beginning—all the above meshed in E.’s thoughts and language without distinction.

Confined to a wheelchair, E. spends his time watching television accompanied by the unsettling noise of his colostomy bag. Just like the original Harry lays on his cot with his gangrenous leg, observing hyenas and vultures awaiting his corpse, E., disgusted by the noise and smells of his body, turns his gaze to the window, where vultures squat in the parking lot and circle above, casting ominous shadows, while “Circus of Celebrities” plays on the TV, endlessly on. As he drifts in and out of wake, E. dreams fragments of his past that could have become his life or his writing, his life and words meshing or overlapping with the broadcast lives and sentences coming from the nearby TV and with Hemingway’s ur-text. When death comes, E. fantasizes it in a way that duplicates Harry’s, and the same happens with the final fantasy of being rescued by flight, only this time E. imagines being taken to the Mayo Clinic. The pilot is the same Compton borrowed from Hemingway, and the journey includes flying over the western housing lot, then Paramount Studios, and the Studio of MTV, Taco Bell and other iconized commercial installments, and a detour across the central plains, Illinois, East Coast, over the signs of once symbolic places in Hemingway’s life and in the history of American Literature. Google maps and other cartographic images help the reader locate the symbolic spaces, in an imaginary overview that surveys points of meaning signaled by a blend of toponyms and quotations, written signs that are not literature, distributed across American literary history, all the way to its beginning, synthetized by the image of a streamlined typewriter out of which what looks like Columbus Journal of his first voyage gets typed.

Recombining Hemingway’s early version of the death of the individual, male author, Tomasula’s story incorporates Harry’s original fragments: his imagined alternatives and the stories he could have written become, in “Farewell,” E.’s own fragmented memories, interrupted and meshed with the language of TV shows. This point is crucial, because it binds Harry’s “regret” — the codeword for the failure of writing — to media forms. In “Kilimanjaro,” Harry regrets not having written his memories into fiction, but his remorse arrives only when it’s too late to do anything. His regret has often been interpreted as a moral failure: he wasted his talent, compromised his integrity, betrayed his calling.⁶ Yet, Harry did not fail to live; he failed to convert his experience into a form that could be adequately narrated. His regret is actually framed not as a moral snag, but as a technical failure, for his never-to-be-written stories are the ghostly manifestations of the waning technology they document, of the demise of writing as a general medium.

In this respect, Harry’s compositional crisis appears as a symptom of the epistemological shock that, according to Kittler, literature registered with the advent of technical devices, which did not just add new channels of representation, but bypassed meaning altogether.⁷ Recording the real physically, as signal rather than sign — light waves on film, sound vibrations etched into wax —, these media captured what had previously been inaccessible to writing: noise, contingency, the body, movement, time itself. Depending on interpretation, narration, and symbolization, literature suddenly found itself competing with media that could store reality without asking what it meant. At the same time, literature’s reflexive nature reacted to this breakthrough indirectly, through fragmented narration, montage, disorientation, an obsession with identity, memory, trauma, technical metaphors, and all those signs of language breaking under pressure. To adopt a contemporary metaphor, one could say that literature made the crisis of writing vis-á-vis technical media thinkable by intensifying aesthetic strategies that worked as the metadata of that crisis. Seen in this context, Harry’s failure to work through and “complete” his reminiscences into a story works as an allegory of the shock of literature had to process in the emergence of other forms of inscription in the age of media. Between Harry and his writing, between his talent and his capacity to make a living “with something else instead of a pen or a pencil” (8) stands the typewriter, an apparatus that, according to Kittler, “tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word” (GFT 198), ushering in the post of humanist literature.

This presence is implied in the reference to “dictation” made twice by Harry when, drifting in and out of his dreams, he snaps to Helen: “You can’t take dictation, can you?” (50). The separation of voice and typewriting that Harry’s question about “dictation” presupposes signals a step toward the transformation of writing as a function of media technology, one that also equates authors as operators of the apparatus that facilitates inscription without governing it and strips meaning from its human source. Dictation, in this context, is a codeword, a metadata for what reduces writing to a mere instrument of communication, annihilating human individuality and the romantic idea of the author:

You could dictate that, but you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the women, always drunk on wine and bad mare; and the children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Cafe’ des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above (51).

The place of this statement is all the more relevant, as it appears in the third memory-fragment in italics, one that — according to critics — is the most important element in the narrative fabric. (Harding 2011) In “Kilimanjaro,” the italicized memory fragments do not function as conventional flashbacks that either explain the character’s motivation or advance the plot. Instead, they appear as involuntary lapses, un-framed and un-integrated information that surfaces in Harry’s present unconsciousness. They interrupt the present-tense narration of Harry’s dying body, breaking the data flow of experience from the past to the present: “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well” (41); “he had never written about Paris” (52); “that was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?” (53), etc. But it is precisely because his memories remain excessive, useless, outside the control of Harry’s mental and operational activity, let alone his communication, that they are so relevant to the story’s philosophical point, which is not about Harry’s elaboration of his memories, but about the technical failure to do so through writing. Symbolically un-integrated, experience persists in Harry’s life as a fragment, a residue, surplus that cannot be reorganized by art into meaningful content because writing can no longer claim privileged access to truth, memory, the real, or transcendence. What it can do instead is stage the experience of displacement — of being outpaced by machines that see, hear, inscribe, and, like typewriters, produce writing more efficiently than humans. This failure, however, continues to be meaningful to readers, because modernist literature remains the medium that still tries to make sense of a world where sense impressions can be technically recorded or stored as signals fundamentally extraneous to what signs mean hermeneutically, and this persistence turns it into the archive of the techno-epistemic shock of 1900 discourse media.

From the condition of our digital condition, Tomasula exposes the de-differentiation of 1900 discourse media into the uninterrupted flow of data, information, and noise prompted by digitalization, even as he underscores the transition from the mechanical to the digital age by foregrounding television as the dominant media of choice. In his story, E.’s narrative presence is inseparable from a continuous televisual soundscape. Not only are his memories mediated, but his very enunciative position is embedded in ambient broadcast noise. Television fragments, commercial idioms, and cultural clich├⌐s permeate the textual surface so thoroughly that E. never fully emerges from this signal field — not even when he is engaged in dialogue with C.: his speech remains acoustically and structurally meshed with the background hum of media flow:

The ‘guest’ on the talk show had taken to quarreling among themselves. “I’ll tell you this,” a G.I. shouted at the artist who wanted public funding to make a life-size church out of garbage, “in my parish you’re a dog!” The audience howled. Some broke into a barking chant as if they were at a football game. The ‘host’ tried to get in a word of reason — but not too hard, E. noted. As in politics and all other spheres, the medium of howls had become the message […] (255)

E.’s life is ostensibly looped into a cloud of sounds, language, genre, technomedicine, and screen: he “doubted he would recognize the world outside the home even if he could get back at it” (253). The boundaries between TV stream and interior monologue have collapsed: “Speaking now to the audience in his head, E. said, ‘I am not trying to hide it.’ He was on stage, a ‘guest’ in the hot seat of ‘Everything Dysfunctional’ with today’s topic being authors guilty of he-mannish posturing, practicing what they criticize in others, propagating artistic movements long after their causes had been spent, sterility, cowardice, banality, bull in the afternoon” (258).

While for Harry a writer is someone who must remain true to life, E.’s structural condition calls into question the very meaning of the expression “true life” as well as the notion of authorship in a world in which the self is no longer a unified center from which stories emerge, but a feedback looping circuit of numbers, signs, and material fragments. Even death does not break that flow; it is narrativized before it happens by the opening hospital scene, which marks the dying body as already mediated in space and over-coded through medical language, institutional procedures, and medical objects. When E. drifts into reverie, thou, the register shifts from televisual noise to self-reflexive, high-modernist citationism. His meditation on Gertrude, James, Flaubert, and the recycled injunction to “Make it New!” (265) unfolds as a stratification of literary inheritance, culminating in the recognition that all writing is sedimented — “a compost of forgotten books back to the Garden.” None of these moments can restore narrative coherence or authorial authenticity — or even affect. They register instead as another order of mediation: literary memory functions as a cultural signal no less than television chatter does. Whether saturated by broadcast noise or immersed in modernist self-referentiality, E.’s consciousness never achieves an unmediated interiority. His subjectivity emerges only within overlapping televisual, informational, institutional and literary circuits of transmission, and is rendered by a narrative that employs visual and verbal collage to reveal, as Tomasula put it, “the inter-weave of our technologies, our societies, our language use, and our sense of self” (The New Materialism 121) as they emerge from these clouds of feedback loops while also allowing “material objects to be part of the narrative.” (121) Even the nostalgia expressed by the three pages long, unconscious “summa” of 20^th century knowledge “all exhausted and gone” (281) surfaces briefly as a signal that rapidly turns into a bore.

2. Kilimanjaro

In both Hemingway’s and Tomasula’s stories, Mount Kilimanjaro appears in the “false rescue” ending and in the opening epigraph, where it is given a strikingly impersonal, encyclopedic definition. In Hemingway, the definition is set apart in italics from the rest of the narrative (just like Harry’s regretful memories):

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

In Tomasula, the scientific description of Kilimanjaro is treated almost as a paratext: it appears on a separate page, positioned above the story’s title and superimposed on the printed background of a purple/white-toned map of the Kilimanjaro region. The unusual color choice is one of Tomasula’s typical visual strategies, meant to render, in printable form, a sense of the different materialities registered by the narrative. As he put it in a comment that we can extend to “Farewell:” “While the literal material […] is actually only paper and ink, I’ve tried to use these materials along with layout, images, and design to index a variety of material cultures (Materialities 126).⁸ The contrast between text and visual, or text and paratext, in the short story also inscribes a disjunction between sensory channels, interrupting the flow of narrative data while at the same time suggesting disruption and interruption of standard reading protocols.

The epigraphic definition of Kilimanjaro in Hemingway can be read as the trace of a discourse network rather than as a neutral statement of fact. As scientific discourse is not a statement of fact but an effect of inscription technologies and storage systems, it belongs to the discourse of natural history: it measures, names, and classifies without reference to lived experience, and provides an apt juxtaposition to the literary narrative, a fundamentally different mode of meaning production. The contrast serves as self-referential, internal commentary on the gap between science as a mode of knowledge that appears complete, stabilized, and indifferent to human contingency, and literary narrative, a domain concerned precisely with incompletion, loss, and unrealized meaning.

This distinction is reintroduced within the story as Harry reflects on the stories he never wrote. As we have seen, his regret marks the gap between experience and narration, shining by contrast against the assertiveness of the opening definition, which acts as a negative mirror for Harry’s unwritten work. The story thus incorporates an internal observation about the difference between discourses: scientific knowledge stabilizes the world through naming and measurement, while literary narration remains constitutively open, deferred, vulnerable to interruption, and terminal. This opposition is one of the strategies for self-reflection that modernist fiction maximizes: the story knows it is not natural history, and marks that knowledge through contrast.

However, the narrative re-entry of this difference remains semantic and affective rather than medial. Hemingway’s narrative observes the difference between scientific and fictional discourses, but it does not inquire into why this difference exists or how it is technically produced. The authority of the scientific definition is presupposed rather than historicized, and so its embeddedness in colonial procedures. The medial conditions of this discourse are only suggested but never made explicit, while the limit of literary narration sharpens as death approaches: Harry cannot transform the remainder of his experience (including death) into a story. Only the third-person narrator continues to observe the scene and to narrate it by observing or implying other points of observation (Helen, readers). The distinction between natural history and fiction thus re-enters the narrative as a lived and felt asymmetry — one discourse completes itself, the other fails — but the conditions that make such completion possible remain opaque.

“Farewell” intervenes in his configuration by quoting Hemingway’s definition verbatim and remixing it into a hyper-multi-mediated narrativity. The sentence no longer functions as a neutral point of reference, but as a media artifact — a piece of inherited discourse whose authority is no longer self-evident. By repeating the definition in a contemporary, media-saturated narrative environment, Tomasula turns it into an object of second-order observation. The distinction between natural history and fiction is no longer merely enacted; it is thematized as historical, technological, and epistemological and transformed into the material of new narratives. Scientific description is treated as the product of a specific discourse regime, now placed alongside other inscription systems: archives, machines, and writing technologies such as the television, the computer, typewriter, and other utterances/fragments in the communication flow actualized by a new digital discourse network.

What Hemingway treats as a stable semantic contrast, Tomasula exposes as a function of changing inscription technologies and discourse networks. The typewriter magnified in the closing pages of “Farewell” completes the re-entry: it materializes the symbolic order as a technical condition rather than an abstract system of meaning, folding it back into a narrative that presupposes multiple media signals and emergent signification. The difference between natural history and fiction was, for Hemingway, a problem of meaning culminating in silence/death, but Tomasula reflects on that same difference as a media-historical problem, processing the limits of narrative not through affect, but through formal incorporation of the conditions that produce the distinction itself. The cold definition of Kilimanjaro thus becomes, across the two texts, a hinge between modernist awareness of narrative limits and posthuman, media-savvy second-order observation: the condition for the “emergence” in “narrative emergence” to emerge.

This shift also reframes the question of transcendence. Despite being called “the House of God,” Kilimanjaro in Hemingway does not ultimately guarantee redemption. Transcendence appears not as metaphysical ascent but as narration. The body dies on the cot; meaning rises only insofar as it is narratable, readable, storable. Symbolic survival depends on mediation. The necessity of the double ending—one affirming bodily death, the other offering a narrative ascent—stages precisely this gap between material finitude and textual continuation. Unable to resolve the contradiction, Hemingway dramatizes it; Tomasula incorporates it as a condition of narrative self-reflexivity and emergence, inscribing modernist transcendence as a media effect: redemption exists only in and through the technical conditions that allow stories to be told and preserved.

3. Modernist Technique, Media Theory, Second Order Observation

The autobiographical fragments in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” are so structurally and thematically decisive that they have come to stand almost metonymically for the story itself. Like other “second order” narrative techniques typical of modernist literature, fragmentation does not simply represent incoherent thoughts, characters, or identities, but inscribes as a reflection on media itself and breaks the fantasy of narrative unity and coherence. In “Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway’s use of fragmentation, together with his signature minimalism obtained by what he notoriously called the “iceberg theory of narrative,”⁹ marks the epistemological threshold of his writing, indicating that his narrative is also an inquiry into mediation itself: a laboratory for observing observations. The idea of modernist literature as a laboratory for observing how literature describes its engagements with the world implies, in turn, an understanding of modernism as primarily a theory of observation that describes its formal innovations not necessarily as signs of existential alienation or shattered identity, but as indications that observation itself has become unstable, mediated, and contingent.

Niklas Luhmann’s description of second-order observation and re-entry developed within his social systems theory provides a useful vocabulary for understanding this shift, even when applied retrospectively. Observation, in Luhmann’s account, is not phenomenological and does not mirror reality. It produces distinctions that make reality communicable. Second-order observation observes those distinctions themselves in time and space (1990; 1994). Modernist narrative, I contend, anticipates this logic formally, staging the contingency and self-referentiality of perception long before they were theorized as such, and it does so only because of its relation to media history. Under technical media conditions, literature becomes a media system among others—one that increasingly turns its attention inward, toward its own conditions of possibility.

Luhmann’s distinction between first- and second-order observation clarifies what is historically new about modernist narrative. First-order observation installs its own environment by narratively organizing events into plots, assigning perspectives to characters, and stabilizing meaning through narration (whether omniscient, authoritative, unreliable, limited, or multi-perspectival). Observation, to simplify, is plot: instrumental and unexamined. Second-order observation is fabula: it disrupts this transparency by rendering observation itself observable and shifting narrative attention, as Tomasula puts it, from “what happened” to “how and what someone thought they thought (2014, 3). This shift reorganizes narrative form at every level: focalization becomes unstable, chronology fragments, and plot yields to epistemological recursion.

In “Kilimanjaro,” this strategy is pushed to its limits. The protagonist’s regret — that he never transformed his experience into literature — reveals a retroactive re-entry of the distinction between life and literary form into the narrative itself. Unlike Luhmann’s second-order observation, which recursively observes distinctions within a system while preserving operational closure, Hemingway’s story allows that distinction to be felt as affective loss at the point of narrative closure. Death terminates the possibility of further formal operations, turning what was a virtual narrative environment into irretrievable loss, but that loss is felt by a third person narrator who observes Harry and Helen’s loss and by readers, recursively reiterating that feeling. This is a critical limit case even for the iceberg logic: death exceeds the narrative’s capacity to assimilate it, but narration continues by incorporating death as affect through a brilliant use of the double ending.

Similarly, the oscillation between sparse third-person narration and italicized interior monologue functions as a form of stream of consciousness that mimics the fragmentation and discontinuity of modern media environments, where memory, perception, and narrative coherence are interrupted and rearranged by the indirect pressure of technical media. The story’s ironic structure — particularly the gap between the protagonist’s self-dramatizing reflections and the stark physical reality of his dying body — exposes the instability of narrative authority and the unreliability of self-representation in a culture antagonized by competing technologies. Furthermore, the text’s dense allusions to war, journalism, popular magazines such as Town and Country and Spur, bohemian Paris, and colonial Africa operate as archival fragments, assembling Harry’s (and Helen’s) identities from circulating cultural signs. By staging memory as a montage of unrealized stories and mediated experiences, Hemingway transforms the short story into a self-conscious reflection on writing itself, revealing how modern narrativity is constructed through, and ultimately undone by, the media forms that promise to preserve it.¹⁰

Writing under entirely “post” conditions, Tomasula exposes how digital reproduction, algorithmic circulation, and informational excess have rendered mediation ambient. What modernism struggled to make visible is now infrastructural. Here, second-order observation no longer produces a critical distance, because observation itself has been automated, and the position for “critical distance” has been annihilated. Surveillance systems, tracking, data analytics, and recursive media loops observe on our behalf — as the TV, the Google map, the institutional planimetry, and the data exchange between body and surveillance exemplify. Reflexivity cannot disrupt transparency because it is built into the system. Without being a parody of “Kilimanjaro,” “Farewell” circulates Hemingway’s story as image, reference, and meme. Tomasula’s text observes Hemingway observing observation (the scientific description of Kilimanjaro, for instance; the fragments and their relation to writing; the double ending), but does so in a media ecology where symbols circulate as signals, morphed into a continuous flow of information/noise. “Farewell” opens with a quotation of the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms morphed into a TV commercial:

[…] The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and [we said good-bye to white —]

”— hair forever with Grecian Formula 409!,” blared a commercial, ten times louder than the volume of the show […] ¹¹(252-253).

The story’s recursive structure — its loops, citations, self-commentary — enacts second-order observation without remainder. What once produced epistemological shock now produces informational redundancy. So, the question is no longer what Kilimanjaro, its white peak, the leopard carcass, or the dying author mean, but what it means that they circulate at all. Tomasula radicalizes modernism’s second-order logic in order to show that, when literature internalizes its mediatic nature, transcendence collapses, and not because modernism failed, but because its insights have become structurally unavoidable. The story asks what remains for literature when observation itself has been absorbed by technical media — when there is no longer a first order left to observe, only endlessly observing systems observing themselves. These systems, to use Kittler’s words, “abandon us on their way to nameless high commands,” leaving to us “only hindsight, […] and that means stories” (29). Not a new reflexivity, but a reckoning with the limits and possibilities of reflexivity itself.

Consistent with his new-materialist theory of narrativity, Tomasula’s story foregrounds the entanglement of materiality, media, and narrative form itself and highlights how form, medium, and material conditions are co-constitutive of meaning. The display of typographic experimentation, collage, and patterns deconstructs authorial authority, effectively transforming Hemingway’s narrative into a space where writing, tools, media, and readers are nodes in the process of meaning-making. The story becomes a performative restaging of both Hemingway’s media insights and Tomasula’s own media theory. Unlike Hemingway’s “Kilimanjaro,” which reflexively contains the media pressures of his era within absence and restraint, Tomasula’s new materialism incorporates the materiality and tools of its own making into form itself. Whereas Hemingway’s fictional discipline sidesteps explicit theorization of media conditions and allows the reader to feel the limit of narrative at the edge of death, Tomasula designs the narrative to observe and process that limit as a function of media systems.

But literature’s distinctive power emerges precisely in making visible the media in “discourse media” and the architecture they subtend (Tomasula, “Tools” 2014), revealing their role in the emergence of post humanist stories that, to some extent, are always characterized by a poetics of recombination and loops characterized by: “malleability, ease of recombination, dependence on the image, interactivity, infinite linkage and therefore indeterminacy, dispersal of Origins, of Author/Authority, its grounding in pattern rather than presence, and material-informational entities” (“Visualization” #45). This poetics performs political work insofar as: “at a time when the materials of writing are under unprecedented change,” and “the means and materials of language embodiment are often weaponized against us, making them visible seems more important than ever” (Tomasula 2023, 125). These emergent posthuman narratives make us more familiar with new manner of seeing “coming from, and handing back our world” (Tomasula 2009, 18), but they are also charged with the strange affect bound to observing meaning as an emergent property of media systems that only intersect, but do not depend on, individual consciousness, instructed as they are — to paraphrase Kittler — to make their own distinctions by computating recursion to a scale that leaves us behind, alone with our stories.

Works cited

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Clark, Timothy J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from the History of Modernism. Yale University Press, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 278—293 [1967].

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 307-330.

Dussinger, Gloria R. “‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: Harry’s Second Chance.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 5, 1967, pp. 54-59.

Evans, Oliver. “‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: A Revaluation.” PMLA 76.5, 1961, pp. 601-607.

Feng, Wei. “Gangster Cinema on a Vaudeville Stage: George’s Mediated Perception of Reality in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers"" The CEA Critic, vol. 85, no. 1, March 2023, pp. 14-30.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 113—138.

Gordon, Caroline, and Allen Tate. “‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: Commentary.” In Hemingway’s African Stories: The Stories, Their Sources, Their Critics. Howell, John M. Scribner’s, 1969, pp. 142-144.

Harding, Jennifer Riddle. “He Had Never Written a Word of That: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’.” The Hemingway Review, vol. 30, no. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 21-35.

Harris, Oliver. “Ham and Eggs and Hermeneutics: Re-reading Hemingway’s “The Killers.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 40, no. 2 (Winter 2017), pp. 41-59.

Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. Scribner, 1932.

Hemingway, Ernest. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, P.F. Collier and Son, 1938 (1936).

Heidenreich, Stefan. “The Situation after Media,” in Media After Kittler, edited by Eleni Ikoniadou and Scott Wilson, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015, pp. 135-154.

Kittler, Fredrick. “The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays, edited with introduction by John Johnston, translated by Stefanie Harries, Overseas Publishers Association, 1997, pp. 130-146.

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Footnotes

1. Heather Love’s book Cybernetic Modernism also engages with some of the topics of this essay. However, her study is specifically interested to retrace “a cultural pre-history to techno-scientific cybernetics” in works by Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. ↩

2. I am thinking of short stories such as “The Killers” (1927) and “A Banal Story” (1926), but also of novels such as A Farewell to Arms, which show an acute awareness of the function of textual narrative vis-├á-vis other forms of technical recording, storage and replaying experience. Even Hemingway’s notorious “iceberg theory,” I think, should be addressed as a┬ámedia-specific strategy┬áfor literary communication under historical pressure. Harris (2017) and Fey (2023) address the problematic nature of reading Hemingway’s “The Killers” through the lens of classical interpretations of the short story. Both critics raise important observations about the relation between Hemingway and the media, but Fey focuses on the vaudeville as the subtext of “The Killers,” while Harris points out (rightly, in my view) that “criticism” (especially of the realist paradigm that has been so long dominant in Hemingway’s criticism) has not yet discovered what to do with it,” (42) and sets to an interpretation that reads back Hemingway’s experience of WWI as the rebus on which “The Killers” hinges. ↩

3. A discussion on the relevance of the structuralist and post-structuralist works of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and on Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the epistemological concept of “the author” and on post-humanist thought more broadly, is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. However, we should recall that, by challenging the idea of a self-present, autonomous subject and the coupling of meaning and intentionality, these thinkers opened the way for understanding meaning, identity, and action as distributed across systems that include not only language and discourse, but also technological and non-human actors. (Barthes, 1967 [1977]; Foucault, 1969 [1977]; Derrida (1976; 1978; 1982 [1967]) ↩

4. I am thinking here of key works in modernist studies such as David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Blackwell, 2007); Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 2002); Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford University Press, 2010); Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Wutz, Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (University of Alabama Press, 2009); Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (Columbia University Press, 2010). ↩

5. Kittler never defined “2000 Discourse Network”, let alone a “Digital Discourse Network”. However, he discussed the intensification of signal emission and receptivity that digital surveillance systems require and the need to navigate the age of disinformation through what he called “hermeneutics,” an interpretive practice for navigating the space that such intensification opened between human and machinic intelligence. On this, see Slater (2023) and Heidenreich (2015). ↩

6. For a synthetic overview of the story reception history, see Harding (2011). ↩

7. To return to another story by Hemingway, “What is this all about?” is the leitmotif question in “The Killers”. ↩

8. In the page composition, the map is rotated and enlarged. https://www.kilimanjaro-experience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Kilimanjaro_shira_web-rebranded.png ↩

9. As is well known, Hemingway discussed the “iceberg theory” of fiction in Death in the Afternoon (1936) explicitly, but he had developed his writing method long before then. ↩

10. We should perhaps notice that Harry’s gangrene is a secondary effect of the couple’s desire to take a picture of wild animals. ↩

11. My red for original white. ↩