Introduction
Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, remains, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “a romance and a guidebook.” It also became, in the words of critic Sibbie O’Sullivan, “a modern-day courtesy book on how to behave in the waste land Europe had become after the Great War.” The Sun Also Rises successfully portrays its characters as survivors of a “lost generation.” In addition, the novel was the most modern an American author had yet produced, and the ease with which it could be read endeared it to many. But for all its apparent simplicity, the novel’s innovation lay in its ironic style that interjected complex themes without being didactic. Generally, the novel is considered to be Hemingway’s most satisfying work.
The material for the novel resulted from a journey Hemingway made with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and several friends to Pamplona, Spain, in 1925. Among them was Lady Duff Twysden, a beautiful socialite with whom Hemingway was in love (the inspiration for the novel’s Lady Brett Ashley). There was also a Jewish novelist and boxer named Harold Loeb (source of Robert Cohn) whom Hemingway threatened after learning that he and Lady Duff had had an affair. Lady Duff’s companion was a bankrupt Briton (like Mike Campbell). The trip ended poorly when Lady Duff and her companion left their bills unpaid. The ending of the novel is only slightly more tragic, yet it recovers those precious values which make life livable in a war-wearied world: friendship, stoicism, and natural grace.
A Definition of Modernism
The most basic meaning of the term modern is that which is contemporary or characteristic of the present moment in time. In traditional literary discussions of twentieth-century literature, the term modern has frequently been (miss)used more or less synonymously with the terms modernist and modernism, and even then in a rather narrow range of meanings of what might count as modernist thought and writing. We see this, for example, in Harmon and Holman’s A Handbook to Literature, where they define modern according to the negative connotations passed down by some of the canonical writers of the period:
For much of its history, "modern" has meant something bad. . . . It is not so much a chronological designation as one suggestive of a loosely defined congeries of characteristics. Much twentieth-century literature is not "modern" in the common sense, as much that is contemporary is not. . . . In a broad sense modern is applied to writing marked by a strong and conscious break with tradition. It employs a distinctive kind of imagination that insists on having its general frame of reference within itself. It thus practices the solipsism of which Allen Tate accused the modern mind: It believes that we create the world in the act of perceiving it. Modern implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss, and despair. It rejects not only history but also the society of whose fabrication history is a record. It rejects traditional values and assumptions, and it rejects equally the rhetoric by which they were sanctioned and communicated. It elevates the individual and the inward over the social and the outward, and it prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious. The psychologies of Freud and Jung have been seminal in the modern movement in literature. In many respects it is a reaction against REALISM and NATURALISM and the scientific postulates on which they rest. Although by no means can all modern writers by termed philosophical existentialists, EXISTENTIALISM has created a schema within which much of the modern temper can see a reflection of its attitudes and assumptions. The modern revels in a dense and often unordered actuality as opposed to the practical and systematic, and in exploring that actuality as it exists in the mind of the writer it has been richly experimental. (325-26)
This definition of modern/modernism stems in part from a traditional (and I think limited) reading of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. By that, I don’t mean to suggest that this definition isn’t helpful, or that I don’t find The Waste Land a richly compelling modernist text. (First published in 1922 and edited by Ezra Pound, Eliot’s The Waste Land is perhaps the most famous modernist poem—a long, fragmentary poem which, according to Cary Nelson, should be read as both a "revolutionary, code-shattering text, the poem primarily responsible for making disjunctive collage central to the modern literary sensibility," and as a "conservative, even reactionary, [formalist] text, one that evokes the multiplicity of modern life only to condemn it and urge on us some reformulation of an earlier faith" (Repression and Recovery 239-240).) Rather, my objection to the narrow sense of modernism as defined by Harmon and Holman is against the way that that definition was disseminated by academic critics and teachers from the 1940s through the 1960s, who took this generally conservative reading of a very few modernist texts and proceeded to delineate a modernist canon around those terms, defining retrospectively the whole modernist period as a brief flowering of philosophical angst and formal experimentalism between the end of World War I and the Great Depression.
With the rise of literary theory and revisionist literary history in the 1980s, new generations of literary critics have been rethinking the terms modern and modernism. They have sought to rethink the negative, disparaging tone and cultural conservatism adopted towards modernity and mass culture in canonical modernist literature and literary criticism. And this has largely been achieved by revisiting much of the literature from 1910 to 1945 which had previously been excluded from the traditional modernist canon—works by "New Negro" or "Harlem Renaissance" novelists such as Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, as well as works by women and working class novelists such as Anzia Yezierska, Fielding Burke, Mike Gold, and Jack Conroy, just to name a few. Not all modernist works (that is, works engaging the conditions of twentieth-century modern life) were written in radically disjunctive experimental styles, and not all modernist works express a personal, moral alienation towards the state of modern, urban industrial existence. In fact, much of the work produced from the 1910s through the 1930s that is socially or aesthetically revolutionary expressed a conflicted ambivalence towards modern mass society and its failure to live up to the promises of the American Dream, and many works expressed the opposite of alienation: a utopian belief that it is the world of modern technology and mass culture that will make possible the ushering in of new societies capable of achieving unimaginable social, cultural and philosophical heights.
The term modernity, more recent critics now suggest, should be used to distinguish between the historical, cultural, economic and political conditions of the time and modernism, which signifies the literary and aesthetic representations of (or responses to) those historical conditions. Modernity defined in this way becomes the historical and cultural conditions of possibility that make modernism both necessary and possible in the first place. One way to think about it would be to say that the mass availability and rising popularity of the automobile from the 1910s through the 1920s is a condition of modernity, whereas car metaphors and the use of the automobile as a symbol of mechanical reproduction frequently appear as tropes in modernist writing. If, however, you allow that authors and artists (like everyone else) must to some degree be the product of the historical and cultural conditions of their own times, then you can see that this distinction between modernity and modernism is partly a rhetorical abstraction full of inevitable slippages and gray areas.
Nevertheless, distinguishing between modernity and modernism can be a productive starting place. Take the character of Brett in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Critics tend to agree that Brett is Hemingway’s representation of a "modern woman." But what specifically is it in the text that signifies her as such? To what conditions of "new woman" modernity does the text explicitly allude through her character? Or are some of those conditions only present as narrative subtexts unconsciously reflected through her outward character traits? And finally, what attitude towards those conditions of modernity does the text (not necessarily Jake the narrator) express through its treatment of Brett? If these questions sound too complicated or obscure, wait till we get to the opening scenes of the novel and we’ll work to clarify them when we look at the textual details describing Brett's entrance as a character. If these questions sound too obvious and straightforward, I would suggest that they are not. The way The Sun Also Rises represents modernity is symbolically complex and what this text ultimately says about the various modernities it invokes may turn out to be quite contradictory. But that can also be a good thing. For, in deciding how we as readers respond to Hemingway’s modernist narratives, we may become more self conscious regarding our own value judgments about our times and our modernity—which, if Richard Powers is correct, is very much the grandchild (or perhaps the time-warped twin) of their modernities in the Futurist moment of 1914.
As with other literary periods or movements (the Renaissance, Romanticism, etc), "Modernism" is a not only a construction but it is also a site for various contested meanings and interpretations. The notion of modernism is forged out of a multiplicity of cultural and historical phenomena (science, music, fine art, etc--see Butler on interrelations) with perhaps the only common base being a rupture with previous ways of "seeing," or "knowing." It is at bottom an epistemological question--how do we get to "know" the world, or how do we construct our reality--how best do we represent reality? These are perennial questions, but from around the beginning of our century there was what could be termed a crisis in representation and this led to variegated experimentation in the arts in the hope of rendering "reality" in a mode more compatible with the "times" and its new understanding of human nature (this is the main thrust of Woolf's essay). There is also during this period scientific discoveries such as the relativity of "truth" and the findings of Freud, both of which have repercussions, however mediated, on artistic form and content: experiment in point of view and a greater concern with subjective processes. But there is another side to modernism (which might be differentiated from modernist: that is to say, another way to look at a text's implication within modernism other than the purely formalist paradigm, the criterion of experimentalism which finds its zenith in the idea of the avant-garde. (see Concept of Modernism xerox) We can look as well at how a text is implicated in social modernity, how, without necessarily making radical experiments in form, nevertheless concerns itself with the crises inherent in modernity. We can now perhaps begin to reveal the plurality of the title of our investigation in English 179. For our purposes (and why not construct our own notion of modernism) it is best to read this period (from 1910 to about 1930) as being marked by a dual (if not at times dialectical) textual production: on the one hand, texts that respond to modern life with radical experiments in representation, and on the other hand, those which can be read as fictional counterparts to the crises in modern society. The texts on our list, although not specifically chosen with these criteria in mind, do nevertheless offer a spectrum of approaches to the narrativization of modern life. You may want to revise or take a stand with regard to these comments, arguing, for example, that another term is needed for those texts which do not experiment formally with narrative, but whatever that term is it certainly cannot be "modern," because some of the writers Woolf talks about in "Modern Fiction" (Galsworthy, Bennett, etc) were/are modern writers but, in Woolf's opinion, were not engaging in the "stuff" of contemporary life.
Characteristics of Modernism in Literature
• a lack of concern with conventional morality (Woolf, Joyce)
• modern characters constantly contradict themselves; they are guided by irrational betrayals through plots in which nothing very much happens (Woolf, Hemingway)
• a focus on the inner lives of characters and their felt responses to experience (Woolf)
• a lack of concern with chronology (not immediately evident in these stories)
• a disjointed, terse, telegraphic style (Hemingway)
• a sense of radical newness, of the apocalyptic and of destruction and desolation (Hemingway)
• a feeling of alienation (Hemingway)
• motives that are hinted at rather than explicitly explained (Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway)
• symbolism (e.g. Woolf’s animal imagery, Hemingway’s machines)
• shocking themes (Joyce)
Modernism in Visual
Art
In 1913, an exhibition of art works
reflecting the rise of modernism was held at The Armory in New York City. 1250
works were exhibited, and while the event was considered shocking and scandalous
(it did, after all, stand on its head the traditional ideas of what art is), it
also ushered modern art into the world of valid, “serious” work (the purchase of
Cézanne's Hill of the Poor by the Metropolitan Museum of Art signaled an
integration of modernism into official art channels).
Hemingway Biography
Hemingway grew up in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park, the son of a physician father and a musically inclined mother. He accepted the community's conservative universe, and nothing in his youth marked him for a writer whose cynicism and sexual frankness would be the source of dismay for many Oak Parkers. Among the most dismayed were his parents. When his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was due for discussion at her book club, his mother absented herself, unable to bear the shame of it all.
For his part, Hemingway became alienated from both his parents, seeing his mother as overbearing and his father as weak. Those judgments eventually formed the basis of "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," his devastatingly negative portrayal of a marriage.
The Hemingways spent large portions of every summer at their cottage on Walloon Lake in Michigan. There, young Ernest learned early the joys of hunting and fishing. On his third birthday, his father took him fishing for the first time. The expedition proved hugely successful. "He knows when he gets a bite," his mother reported afterward, "and lands them all himself." But the Michigan summers gave Hemingway something beyond his lifelong love of field and stream. Out of his memories of Walloon would come the settings and characters for some of his finest short stories.
The estimation of Hemingway in his high-school yearbook was "None are to be found more clever than Ernie." The observation reflected the respect he had earned for his abilities both in academics and in such extracurricular endeavors as his editorship of the school newspaper. The next logical step following graduation seemed to be college. Hemingway, however, was having none of that. Anxious to be independent, he decided instead to go to Kansas City, Missouri, and become a reporter for the Kansas City Star.
In 1917, the Kansas City Star was among the best newspapers in the country. Its staff boasted many bright and talented writers, and Hemingway's exposure to the intellectual interests of these reporters broadened his own perspectives substantially. Their influence doubtless also fed his nascent aspirations to write fiction. As one Star veteran recalled years later, just about every reporter during Hemingway's tenure on the paper harbored dreams of writing a novel.
In the spring of 1917, the United States became an active participant in World War I, and massive recruitment of American soldiers began. Hemingway wanted to enlist, but between parental objections and an eye condition that would probably have precluded his acceptance, he never tried. Still, he was determined to be part of the war. By early May 1918, he was in New York waiting to sail for Italy as a member of the Red Cross ambulance corps.
His stint with the ambulance corps proved brief, however. On July 8, shortly after midnight, Hemingway was in the frontlines distributing coffee, candy, and postcards to soldiers. Suddenly, an Austrian trench mortar arced down, spewing its metal shards in all directions. Among the wounded was Hemingway, who sat out the rest of the war as a convalescent.
Among the nurses attending to Hemingway following his battle injuries was an American named Agnes von Kurowsky. Before long he was in love with her. More than six years his senior, Kurowsky kept him at arm's length for awhile, but eventually she succumbed to his ebullient charm. Nevertheless, Kurowsky's feelings for Hemingway were never as deep as his attachment to her, and she broke off the relationship in a letter not long after he returned home.
But Hemingway never forgot this romance, and Kurowsky later became a primary model for the heroine in his novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms.
After returning from World War I, Hemingway worked for awhile as a reporter for the Toronto Star and later as a writer for a magazine put out by the Chicago-based Cooperative Society of America. Two new acquaintances made in the fall of 1920, however, led to a radical shift in direction. One of the fomenters of change was a young woman named Hadley Richardson; the other was writer Sherwood Anderson. While his relationship with Hadley led to marriage, Anderson was the one who convinced him that the best place to start pursuing his ambition to write fiction was Paris. So it was that in the fall of 1921 Hemingway was preparing to sail to France with his new wife.
Eight years his senior, Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, proved unreservedly supportive of his writing aspirations, and it was her income from a trust that enabled him to pursue his literary ambitions in Paris. Although their marriage lasted less than six years, he always regarded her with warmth and gratitude. Hadley returned the compliment, feeling that were it not for his adventurous spirit, her life would have been far more dull and narrow.
When the Hemingways arrived in Paris, they were in good shape financially. Hadley's trust could be expected to yield an annual income in excess of $3,000, and Ernest's agreement to write stories for the Toronto Star promised to add to that figure substantially. At the current rates for Paris housing, they could thus afford a decent place to live. Yet when they went apartment-hunting, they settled on a two-room, fourth-floor walk-up in the oldest part of the Paris Left Bank, costing about eighteen dollars a month. The neighborhood was charmless, with no good restaurants or shopping, and the plumbing and heating were primitive. But the newlyweds indulged themselves in other ways. Immediately after moving into their apartment, they left for a three-week skiing holiday in Switzerland.
Among the most momentous relationships that Hemingway formed during his first months in Paris was his friendship with the avant-garde art collector and experimental modernist writer Gertrude Stein. In contrast to so many who found Stein's prose incomprehensible, Hemingway respected her professional expertise, and he readily accepted her as a mentor. From her he learned much about the rhythm of words and the power of repetition and unembellished direct statement. The friendship, however, had soured by late 1926, and the final chapter in the Hemingway-Stein relationship is a tale of pot-shots fired at each other in their writings.
Ezra Pound was a poet by profession, but he was a generous adviser by instinct, and many a writer, among them T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, benefited from his artistic counsel, encouragement, and editing. Pound met Hemingway early in 1922 and quickly took him on as a protégé. From Pound, Hemingway learned "to distrust adjectives" and received valuable guidance in how to compress his words into precise images. Many years later, Hemingway called Pound "a sort of saint" and said he was "the man I liked and trusted the most as critic."
When Hemingway first met F. Scott Fitzgerald in Paris in the spring of 1925, Fitzgerald had just published The Great Gatsby, and was at the height of his reputation as one of America's leading young writers. Even before they began to talk, Fitzgerald was prepared to like Hemingway, for he had seen in our time and admired it greatly. On the strength of that volume, he had, in fact, recommended its author "as the real thing" to his own editor, Max Perkins, at Charles Scribner's Sons, and thanks partly to his urging, the prestigious Scribner's finally took Hemingway on as one of its writers in 1926.
The daughter of a wealthy Arkansas landowner and banker, Pauline Pfeiffer found Hemingway too coarse for her taste when she first met him in early 1925, and Hemingway was much more taken with Pauline's sister than with her. Pauline's friendship with Hemingway's wife Hadley, however, threw them together and ultimately became a subterfuge for pursuing their own relationship. By early 1926, their initial indifference had turned into strong mutual attraction, and at year's end, with his divorce from Hadley in the works, the two were planning to be married.
Pauline was unflagging in her efforts to cater to Hemingway's wants. But eventually her ministrations were not enough to prevent the disintegration of their marriage in the late 1930s.
In 1923, Hemingway saw his first bullfight in Spain. He was so taken with this ancient blood sport that he soon returned to witness one of the bullfights that highlighted the annual fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona. By the time the festival was over, bullfighting was one of the passions of his life, and his third visit to the Pamplona festival in 1925 became the inspiration for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Ever eager to test his courage, Hemingway himself frequently participated in morning sessions at Pamplona where amateur matadors could take on bulls with padded horns. Here, he can be seen (right of center, in white pants and dark sweater) confronting a charging bull.
Fired with the fictional possibilities that he saw during his visit to the Pamplona bullfights in 1925, Hemingway started translating them into a novel soon after leaving the Spanish town. Within roughly two months, the first draft of what would eventually be titled The Sun Also Rises was done. Although this work is a classic today, one reviewer charged, at its publication in 1926, that Hemingway was hiding his talents "under a bushel of sensationalism and triviality." Many others, however, disagreed. One critic claimed that its "lean, hard narrative prose" put a good deal of "literary English to shame," and yet another noted that the novel contained the best dialogue to be found in contemporary fiction.
Drawn heavily from Hemingway's own experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I, A Farewell to Arms cast its author in a new light. Until its publication in 1929, Hemingway had been seen as a talented writer with great promise. Now, in the wake of reviews trafficking heavily in superlatives, he was a widely acknowledged master of modern prose. After reading Farewell, his friend, poet Archibald MacLeish, wrote: "I am afraid you are not only a fine writer which I have always known but something a lot more than that & it scares me."
In late 1936, the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) asked Hemingway to report on the Spanish Civil War, which had broken out between the Loyalist defenders of the current republican regime and a conservative fascist coalition. The money was good; he had strong sympathy for the Loyalist cause; and being in the thick of war appealed to his appetite for adventure. It was, in short, an offer Hemingway could not refuse. Over the next two years, he would go to Spain three times as NANA's man at the front. In the process, he added a new ingredient to his public celebrity. Besides being an innovative man of letters, bullfighting aficionado, and expert outdoor sportsman, he was now the knowing war correspondent.
In late December 1937, correspondent Hemingway was observing the Loyalists' drive to take the nearby town of Teruel. Also on hand was the Hungarian-born photographer Robert Capa, who was just beginning to make his reputation as one of the great war photographers of this century. Capa saw in Hemingway a promising commercial opportunity, and he was soon focusing his lens on the writer with an eye to marketing the results as a photo story.
The series of pictures began with shots of Hemingway in his hotel room in Valencia, making preparations to report on Teruel. It then progressed to the battlefront, where Capa captured him studying his notes, talking to Loyalist soldiers, and seeking respite from a brutal winter cold around a fire. Among the more striking images was this one showing Hemingway sprawled in the grass, helping a Loyalist to unjam his rifle. The picture spoke volumes about Hemingway's approach to war reporting. Never content to be strictly an observer, he liked being part of the action, and the more directly involved in combat he was the more exhilarated he became.
In late 1936, Ernest Hemingway met writer Martha Gellhorn. She was blond, pretty, and successful, and Hemingway was immensely attracted to her. By early the next year, she had joined him in Spain, where he was covering the Civil War, and there the relationship blossomed into a full-blown affair. In late 1940, soon after his divorce from his second wife, Pauline, became final, he married Gellhorn.
Unlike Pauline, Gellhorn was not willing to dedicate herself almost entirely to catering to Hemingway's wants. That unwillingness created difficulties practically from the start, and by the time Gellhorn divorced him in 1945, the marriage was long over.
As Hemingway filed his news stories on the Spanish Civil War, he was also stowing away memories of the conflict for use in his fiction, and by early 1939, he was drawing on them to create the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Published the following year, the work was a best-seller from the outset, and more than one critic discussed its merits almost as if it was already a classic. One reviewer called it "the fullest, deepest, truest" book that Hemingway had ever written and predicted that it would eventually rank among "the major novels in American literature."
In late 1933, Hemingway arrived in East Africa with his wife Pauline and Key West friend Charles Thompson to begin a hunting safari. The chief aim of this venture was pleasure. Nevertheless, literary concerns were never entirely out of his mind, and the safari inspired two of Hemingway's finest short stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."
Hemingway's passion for hunting and fishing ran as deeply as his passion for writing, and although his literary endeavors were the main source of his fame, his celebrity rested as well on his reputation as an avid outdoor sportsman. By the mid-1930s, he was, in fact, on his way to becoming the best-known fisherman in America. He was also becoming a pacesetter in developing new and more aggressive techniques in deep-sea fishing, which, according to one expert, ultimately transformed the sport.
When the United States entered World War II in late 1941, Hemingway's lifelong relish for things military made involvement in the conflict inevitable. Initially, that involvement took the form of a short-lived adventure into intelligence work and patrolling for German U-boats in waters near his home in Cuba. Ultimately, however, he decided to get closer to the real war. By May 1944, he was on his way to covering Allied operations in Europe for Collier's magazine.
Correspondents and soldiers alike enjoyed Hemingway's company during World War II, but none more so than Colonel "Buck" Lanham, commanding officer of the Fourth Infantry Division's Twenty-Second Regiment. Here, Lanham is seen with Hemingway in late September 1944. The Twenty-Second had a few days earlier been part of a successful drive to penetrate Germany's border defenses, the so-called Siegfried Line, and in the photograph the two are examining a deserted piece of artillery used in those defenses.
Lanham's affection for Hemingway almost seemed like hero-worship sometimes. Writing of a dinner shared near the frontlines, he wrote that "Hemingway, presiding at the head of the table, might have been a fatherly Mars delighting in the happiness of his brood."
Hemingway's marriage to Martha Gellhorn had difficulties from its outset in 1940, and its dissolution became certain when he met Mary Welsh, a member of Time's European staff, shortly after he arrived in England to begin covering World War II. Among Welsh's most alluring qualities was a willingness to flatter and cater to him.
The couple's wartime courtship almost ended in Paris when, in a fit of jealousy over Welsh's estranged husband, a well-lubricated Hemingway shot up a hotel toilet bowl. When Hemingway left Europe early in 1945, however, he and Welsh were planning to be married.
Central in Hemingway’s life was Adriana Ivancich, member of an aristocratic Venetian family. From the moment he met this young girl during his Italian stay in 1948, he was smitten, and for several years he carried on a platonic flirtation. The advent of Adriana marked the end of a dry spell in Hemingway's writing, and their relationship became the basis for the May-December romance portrayed in Across the River and into the Trees. Adriana also seems to have had a part in the making of one of Hemingway's masterpieces, The Old Man and the Sea; it was her stay with the Hemingways in late 1950 that provided the energizing lift that the writer apparently needed to begin this tale.
Hemingway's confidence in his own work was sometimes misplaced, but not in the case of The Old Man and the Sea. Life magazine published the novella in toto in a single issue, and within forty-eight hours, all 5.3 million copies were snapped up. Interestingly enough, the Life publication did not lessen demand for the work in hardcover, and for six months it remained on the best-sellers' list. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, was The Old Man and the Sea's rapid acceptance into the canon of American classics.
Hemingway had by the early 1950s become a celebrity of the first rank. As one
Hemingway student has put it: "He once made news because of what he did; now he
made news because of who he was." One indication of the truth of that statement
was Look magazine's offer in 1953 to defray $15,000 of the expenses
for Hemingway's forthcoming African safari if it could send a photographer
along. For 3,500 words from Hemingway to run with the resulting pictures, it
threw in $10,000 more. The deal was hard to refuse. When Hemingway's safari set
out on September 1, 1953, Look's photographer Earl Theisen was on
hand to record it. And there was much to record of Hemingway on his 1953 safari.
Drinking heavily, he took up with a native girl under the eyes of his own wife;
he shaved his head in the name of "going native"; and, dyeing his clothes a
rusty color to match the hue favored among the local Masai people, he went
hunting with a spear.
The early 1950s yielded a number of noteworthy honors for Hemingway. In May 1953, The Old Man and the Sea earned him the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The following spring, the American Academy of Arts and Letters bestowed on him its prestigious Medal of Merit. Then, in October 1954, word came to him in Cuba that he had won the Nobel Prize in literature. Hemingway had often professed disdain for that ultimate honor, but when it came his way, there was no doubt that he was pleased. Claiming ill health, he said he could not go to Sweden to receive the award. Instead, the Swedish ambassador to Cuba came to his home outside of Havana to present him with the Nobel medal and citation.
On July 21, 1959, Hemingway turned sixty, and to mark that watershed, his wife Mary threw an elaborate party at the spacious home of a millionaire friend who was serving as their host during their stay in Spain. Hemingway enjoyed himself immensely, but the celebration produced some indications that all was not well with him. Among them was a nasty flash of ill temper directed at his frontline pal from World War II, General "Buck" Lanham. Having come from Washington for the party, he left Spain certain that Hemingway was a very troubled man.
Hemingway's stability did not improve over the next few years, and on July 2, 1961, following several rounds of electroshock therapy, he killed himself at his home in Idaho.
The Hemingway Code Hero
Hemingway defined the Code Hero as a “man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful.”
The Code Hero measures himself by how well he handles the difficult situations that life throws at him. In the end the Code Hero will lose because we are all mortal, but the true measure is how a person faces death.
The Code Hero believes in nothing. Along with this, there is no after life.
The Code Hero is typically an individualist and free-willed. Although he believes in the ideals of courage and honor he has his own set of morals and principles based on his beliefs in honor, courage and endurance. A code hero never shows emotions; showing emotions and having a commitmnet to women shows weakness. Qualities such as bravery, adventurousness, and travel also define the code hero.
A final trait of the code hero is his dislike of the dark. It symbolizes death and is a source of fear for him. The rite of manhood for the code hero is facing death. However, once he faces death bravely and becomes a man he must continue the struggle and constantly prove himself to retain his manhood.
Dr. Gerald Lucas: Hemingway's Code
Perhaps
more explicitly than Fitzgerald’s, many of Hemingway’s heroes search for a code
— values that give their lives meaning. The artists of modernism turned inward
to find the truth since the external world was one of chaos. As a result, truth
becomes relativistic, subjective, and personal, lacking absolutes. This
fluctuating reality becomes the basis of a modernist interpretation of the
universe: the construction of reality based upon an individualistic and
provisional interpretation of internal values. Hemingway’s “A Clean,
Well-Lighted Place” takes a psychological approach to existence, illustrating a
mature “Hemingway hero” who has developed an approach to life that helps him get
though the day.
With the absence of an epistemological explanation of the universe, the older waiter in “Place” has developed an ontological position that helps him survive. The darkness for the older waiter and his deaf customer represents nada, or nothing: “It was a nothing that [the old waiter] knew too well” (291). This nothing is the existential awareness of the void — something all too prevalent when one is alone in his autumn years and the lights are off. The younger waiter treats the deaf customer with an unsympathetic derision — a sign of existential innocence.
The older waiter attempts to function as the younger waiter’s reality instructor, without much success. Indeed, implies the younger waiter, what does he know about the void: he has “youth, confidence, and a job” — not to mention a wife to go home to (290). By implication, the older waiter has only a job while the old patron has nothing. The younger waiter will have to learn this difficult lesson on his own since now he only wants sleep and not a lesson: “Stop talking nonsense and lock up” (290). What the naive waiter dismisses as nonsense composes a difficult reality for the older waiter. Yet, in a attempt to survive, he has developed a code comprised of compassion and grace under pressure that offers his life meaning.
Dignity is maintained through cleanliness and composure. Even though the old patron is drunk when he leaves the café, the old waiter remarks to himself: “a very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity” (291). The waiter knows how difficult this dignity is to maintain, so his compassion for the old man shows his empathy and understanding: “Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café” (290). He realizes through his own experience with nada the importance of a clean, well-lighted place in the fight against the void.
This position for living represents the mature values of the Hemingway hero. In an effort to maintain human dignity in the face of the wasteland, Hemingway shows compassion and empathy in the absence of religious or epistemological understanding. Why is not as important as how when all that one sees in the dark is nada.
Essay- Jakes Barnes: A Hemingway Code Hero?
The portrayal of heroism is an essential aspect of literature, and every writer delineates his heroes through their ability to triumph over adversity. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) consistently defined and distinguished his heroes through an echoing set of characteristics that form a characteristic “Hemingway Code Hero.” A Code Hero is one that distinguishes himself by his ability to demonstrate grace under pressure, to adhere to a strong set of personal values and, most importantly, to live life to the fullest. In Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), the protagonist Jakes Barnes serves as a controversial example of a Code Hero. Jake fits into the category of a Hemingway Code Hero because he embodies the most significant characteristics of a quintessential Code Hero: he demonstrates his manhood through the ability to endure pain with dignity, he imposes order upon his chaotic world through personal values, and he attempts to enjoy the simple pleasures of life to add meaning to his existence.
Hemingway characterized the Code Hero as “a man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage, and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful” (Dwiggins). The most essential characteristic of a Code Hero is the capacity to exemplify grace under pressure, and Hemingway continually placed his characters into unfortunate, and often tragic, situations to test their ability to survive. Hemingway’s primary focus was therefore on the strained individual and his response to adversity. He measured and evaluated his characters by their ability not only to overcome the severe crises of life, but also to do so with dignity and perseverance (Gurko 228). Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is assigned the dangerous task of destroying a bridge in fascist enemy territory during the Spanish Civil War. Like all Code Heroes, Robert improves his environment by fulfilling his duty to the best of his knowledge and skill, though often at his own expense. Ultimately, it is the hero’s task to survive by any means possible, yet only a Code Hero has the capacity to emerge from the experience stoically in order to set a societal example.
The Hemingway Code Hero embodies the personal values of honor, bravery and responsibility, in an effort to impose stability and morality into his disordered existence. Because Hemingway’s struggles are generally within the mind and life of the hero, the hero’s motivation lies in survival rather than public acclaim or societal improvement. Leo Gurko states, “Their behavior is a reaction to the moral emptiness of the universe, an emptiness that they feel compelled to fill by their own special efforts” (236). Characters leave their mark various ways, for instance, in A Farwell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the protagonists valiantly risk their lives to save their companions. The hero’s values are strictly personal; while he lives meticulously by his code of morality, he does not forcefully impose his values upon others. He then indirectly brightens and improves their existence by living his life by the code of morality.
Lastly, another distinguishing quality of the classic Code Hero is the capacity to truly live life to the fullest by embracing every opportunity and experience. The hero does not submissively watch life pass him by; he is extremely active and often enjoys the sensuous pleasures of drinking, eating, and dancing (Dahiya 90). In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway illustrates the lust for living sensuously by describing the unmistakable hero of the novel, Pedro, “with a big glass of cognac in his hand, sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare shoulders, at a table full of drinks” (Hemingway 180-181). More important than the end result, however, is the character’s effort to enjoy life in spite of his struggle. The hero must have the capacity to serve his duty by living honorably and morally without sacrificing his personal pleasure. The successful execution of this balancing act is the mark of a true Code Hero.
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway illustrates the hero’s daunting struggle for survival in the face of destruction and moral desolation. Jake, rendered handicapped from World War I, has a close relationship with the “lost generation”: the scarred, aimless and morally bankrupt war survivors. Hemingway clearly distinguishes Jake from his peers by his exemplification of the attributes and values of a Code Hero: intense stoicism, morality, and activity.
Jake suffers acutely from his war injury, yet his ability to display unfailing grace under pressure illustrates his fortitude. In the opening action of the novel, the protagonist is clearly already at a disadvantage, both physically and emotionally. An Italian general alludes to the severity of his sacrifice with his solemn recognition, “you… have given more than your life” (Hemingway 39). Jake’s disability prevents him from ever consummating his love with Brett Ashley in their hopeless relationship, yet he must agonizingly witness the promiscuity of the woman he loves on a daily basis. Gurko emphasizes Jake’s suffering by stating, “Burdened by a handicap that would crush most men, he bears it stoically” (57). Rather than exploiting his injury and relying on it as a crutch, Jake realistically accepts his situation and heroically attempts to overcome it. While his peers hide under the façade of contentment by escaping from reality, Jake embraces it as the only constant in his life. He clings to the brutal truth with desperation; thus achieving a sense of self-knowledge. Hemingway illustrates Jake’s forgone illusions in the final passage of the novel:
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (Hemingway 251)
Brett still idealistically dreams of a relationship with Jake by living in a fantasy world, but Jake’s response to her delusion reveals his grasp on the bitter truth. While it would certainly be easier for Jake to exist in an illusion where a relationship with Brett is plausible, Jake bravely accepts reality in order to free both Brett and himself from the trappings of fantasy. Even in the face of a physical disability and an emotionally sterile existence, Jake’s perseverance allows him to emerge stoically as a Code Hero by surviving the struggles of everyday life.
Jake’s relentless adherence to the ethical code that he sets for himself not only differentiates him from his morally bankrupt companions, but also sets the standard for others to follow. Among his peers, Jake is notably the only character to display both the responsibility and the commitment of a steady job, and he deeply values financial justice. Abiding by the concept of the “morality of compensation,” Jake characterizes financial debt as a moral failure, so he competently provides for both himself and his friends (Dahiya 73-74). In addition, as in many Hemingway novels, Jake’s continual effort and dedication add to his credibility. Gurko explains, “Living or trying to live with supreme skill is a moral action, and the moral choice lies between doing something indifferently or doing it well” (63). Jake reliably follows through with every action and demonstrates skill in his profession, though many times his effort exceeds the final outcome. Furthermore, in terms of his society, Jake’s adherence to his values of honor and competence influences Brett to her first selfless and moral act. In this, Hemingway demonstrates Jake’s heroic inspiration to those around him.
Finally, Jake’s admirable effort to overcome his disability so as to truly embrace life exemplifies his commitment to the Hemingway code of action as a means of attaining honor. While Jake cannot participate in the fiesta of Pamplona, he is a passionate aficionado: a true lover of bullfighting. While his aficion does not bring him the public acclaim equal to that of a bullfighter, its authenticity and purity provides identical satisfaction and honor under the Hemingway code (Gurko 58). Jake seems happy only when the fiesta is in full swing, when he can become swept up in the eating, drinking, action and excitement of the moment. Because his injury limits the satisfaction that he can experience, Jake savors and enjoys every opportunity to increase his “selective pleasure” (Gurko 62). Even when Jake cannot personally experience a situation, he serves as a catalyst who introduces pleasure into the lives of others. In spite of the mounting obstacles, Jake’s unyielding hunger for life reveals a celebration of life that spreads joy to those around him.
Pointing to Jake’s emasculation as a sign of weakness, some critics argue that Pedro Romero is the sole embodiment of the Code Hero in The Sun Also Rises. While his undeniable bravery and prowess classify Pedro as a hero, his existence does not prevent another, hidden character to also personify the Code Hero. Jake certainly cannot compete with Pedro’s overwhelming masculinity; however, his injury serves as a manifestation of the hardship and misfortune that Jake must overcome. Leo Gurko asserts that, while both Pedro and Jake embody “grace under pressure,” Pedro’s comes with ease, while Jake’s relative grace under severe pressure carries significant verification of heroism (64).
In his novels, Hemigway plots the hero against daunting odds to test the strength of his character. In the face of harsh reality and adversity, only those with the ability to bear their burden stoically can emerge successfully. The capacity to demonstrate grace under pressure, to adhere to a personal moral code, and to embrace every opportunity to its full potential are the vital characteristics that typify a Code Hero. Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises relentlessly strives to set the societal standard through his stoicism, morality, and action; therefore, his exemplification of these qualities characterizes him as a true Hemingway Code Hero.
Ideas to consider:
Consumership:
All the characters are consumers of something:
Brett consumes men, Bill and Mike consume alcohol, Robert Cohn consumes himself, in a sense, in the gradual dismantling of his manhood. Robert ostensibly possesses all the traits of a “man,” yet in reality these are sham. He is aboxer, but he cannot rely on brutality without asking for forgiveness. He is a writer, yet he cannot produce after his initial work. He falls in love with a woman who immascualtes him, and he makes himself pathetic. In fact, Cohn is fuzzy. There are no absolutes, and so his tory is not finished for the reader.
Emasculation:
Jake Barnes is in reality emasculated, but, perhaps because he is thus insulated from Brett’s destructive nature, he is ironically the most manly in the novel. He is the code hero, and he is the moral center. It is Jake’s story that is completed for the reader, and it is only Jake at the end who rises above Brett.
Morals and Morality
Reflecting on his friends and especially on Robert Cohn, who is becoming a major annoyance, Jake reflects on his moral code, “That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality.” Jake is more interested in his own concerns and, secondarily, Brett’s. Cohn was fortunate enough to have a holiday with Brett but he is not smart enough to accept that it meant nothing. Because Cohn cannot create his own version of the group’s code, he becomes the subject of persecution. Jake is bothered by it but he is more disgusted when he knowingly violates the code of aficionado by setting up Brett with Romero. This disrupts his friendship with Montoya and with Cohn. Respect is betrayed and lost. The garbage that is visible at the end of the fiesta only compounds his self-disgust. However, instead of leading to an epiphany he simply decides to develop his own code of style more thoroughly. That style is a hard-boiled self-centeredness.
Brett is lost throughout the novel. She is disgusted with herself and those around her, especially Jake—through no fault of his own. The only moment she exerts herself in terms of morality is to get rid of Romero. Throughout the novel, Brett defies conventional morality by having short, meaningless affairs. Because of her self-centeredness and unhappiness, she is unable to stop this self-destructive behavior and is often passive to events. The affairs are meant to escape her unsatisfactory relationship with Jake, whom she truly loves but who is unable to physically consummate their relationship.
Meaning of Life
The theme of life’s meaning turns from the question of essence, “what it was all about,” to existence, “how to live in it.” However, the reason for this polarity is the inability of the main characters to rise above that mediocrity. They must reject the life of the hero as impossible for themselves. “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.” To which Cohn replies, “I am not interested in bullfighters. That’s an abnormal life.” Cohn’s idea of life is romantic—a life of literary fame and adventure with a beautiful mistress who happens to have a title. But the group despises Cohn’s notions and Brett finally judges that he is “not one of us.” Instead, the key to life is a development of one’s ability to wisely utilize the full worth of one’s money. This can take many forms but only Jake, the Count, and to a certain extent Bill Gorton, are able to do this. Brett, and especially Mike Campbell (who is ever an “undischarged bankrupt”), will never be happy even if they become rich because they are incapable of utilizing money well.
Bill relies on exchange value and use. When he first enters the narrative he wishes to buy Jake a stuffed dog, “Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.” Bill’s philosophy is to use money to buy moments as well as to show one’s stature. His motto is “Never be daunted.” Possibilities for bliss, such as a pub or a bottle, must be utilized to their full potential.
Jake, meanwhile, is developing a more sophisticated attitude full of tabulating expenses which keeps his mind off his main problem of impotence. “I paid my way into things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in.” Then he adds that he might change his mind in five years. In other words, “the lost generation” can get their kicks by a wise expenditure of money (even if they are not rich) until a semblance of reality has been reconstructed and the war is in the past. A possible future philosophy is hinted at when Jake reads Turgenieff and knows he will remember what he reads as if it was his experience. That is, Turgenieff writes truthfully about experience in a way Hemingway agreed with. “That was another good thing you paid for and then had.” But payment here is the effort of reading literature which you can then use to recover from war.
Related to this theme is the concept of the loss of ontological ground.
Historical Background
When Hemingway went to Paris in 1921, he experienced a culture shock. Gertrude
Stein’s phrase “lost generation” referred to the prevalent attitude of the day.
The phrase came into usage because “all maps were useless and . . . they had to
explore a new-found land for themselves—this generation was lost” (Mizener 122).
In essence, these people could accept nothing about current attitudes.
They wanted to begin over through experience to work out a code of conduct to live by and respect. Members of the Jazz Age included painters, writers, rioters, artists, and the idle rich all living decadent lives. These people were American expatriates who had come to Paris as a haven for creativity and Bohemian lifestyles.
Actually, many were escaping conservative American attitudes. After World War I, politicians seemed untrustworthy, and Prohibition was politically popular. There was an upsurge of fundamentalist ministers, book and movie censorship, and groups like the KKK. Paris streets, in contrast, were filled with silent movie stars, beautiful people, and lots of liquor.
Days of cars, installment loans, and refrigerators had changed women’s roles, too. They now sported short skirts, sheer dresses, bobbed hair, and lipstick. Instead of binding their waists, they now bound their breasts. This was the first generation of women to drink, smoke, dance wildly, and deal with marital problems by divorce.
Paris provided those quick divorces and diversions for this “lost generation.” Writers of the time had “energy and optimism” (Mizener, 122). They were idealists who scorned conservative, American attitudes. They were dissatisfied with their own country and preferred to live elsewhere. It is said all writers eventually passed through Paris because the European world allowed them “to discover the possibilities in themselves as Americans” (Mizener, 124).
Narrative
The first-person narration of Jake Barnes is sometimes referred to as a “roman à clef.” A roman à clef is a story understandable only to those who have a “key” for deciphering the real persons and places behind the story. The story of Jake Barnes resembles the real events of the summer of 1925 in the life of Hemingway and his friends. Still there is enough difference that no “key” is needed for understanding. That is to say, the novel stands on its own whether or not the reader knows on whom the character Lady Brett Ashley is based. In addition, Jake Barnes is not Hemingway because in real life Hemingway was married when he went to Pamplona. Jake is a blending of several real people as well as a fruition of Hemingway’s theoretic code-hero. There is enough similarity for comparisons but the novel is in no way an autobiographical event. It is a story attempting to speak truths to the present generation.
Dialogue
Hemingway’s dependence on dialogue is just one mark of his modernity. Henry
James, for example, felt dialogue was the climax of a scene and was to be used
sparingly. Hemingway creates whole scenes solely from dialogue. However,
Hemingway’s dialogue made the story an easy and fast read with effects similar
to news writing. The author seems to disappear as the narrator allows his
contact with others to balance out the story. It becomes a group conversation
rather than a narration. Hemingway’s ability with this feature delighted many
critics. Conrad Aiken remarked, “More than any other talk I can call to mind, it
is alive with the rhythms and idioms, the pauses and suspensions and innuendoes
and shorthands, of living speech. It is in the dialogue, almost entirely, that
Mr. Hemingway tells his story and makes the people live and act.” The use of
dialogue is one of the key features of Hemingway’s style.
Hero
Hemingway’s solution to the ennui, or disillusioned nausea, that marked his
“lost generation” was the encouragement of each person in their path to being a
hero. However, as is clear in the novel, his theory did not include bravery in
war or sport but insisted that the individual create a moral code. One must
“never be daunted.”
Jake Barnes and friends are the best examples of Hemingway pursuing his theories. Succeeding Hemingway heroes do have the humanity to inspire our sympathy and imitation. This code-hero was defined eloquently by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks while discussing Hemingway’s “The Killers.” They said that the code-hero “is the tough man . . . the disciplined man, who actually is aware of pathos or tragedy.” Lacking spontaneous emotion, the code-hero “sheathes [his sensibility] in the code of toughness” because “he has learned that the only way to hold on to 'honor,' to individuality, to, even, the human order . . . is to live by his code.” Romero provides the clearest example not through his bullfighting but through his ability to ignore the bruises Cohn gives him in order to perform as he is capable. The success of the fiesta depends on his ability to do so. Brett and Jake also satisfy this definition. Brett decides she cannot corrupt the young bullfighter but will continue to live in style hiding her frustrated love. Jake decides he has to live according to his own code with the help of his stoicism.
Idiom
The heavy use of dialogue, the terse, staccato sentences, and the minimalist
tightness that characterizes descriptions and emotional expenditure are the
marks of the style or idiom that Hemingway made his own. According to this
idiom, carefully chosen language can relate fictional authenticity in such a way
that it will never ring false, the goal being to carefully construct a world
that has certitude and leave the uncertain unsaid. Thus the language appears
often to refer to ideas beyond what is actually written. However, only the
written words are to be trusted and only they are true. The effect of this new
style is similar to Biblical genesis: reconstruct from the rubble of war a
civilization of beauty and simplicity.
The bareness of the intention is best revealed on the fishing expedition, “Once in the night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed.” Two sentences were used where previous writers would have expended chapters. Furthermore, it is an incredibly simple and stark contrast to the sleepless nights of Paris and it directly calls to mind the howls of the “Waste Land.”
The Lost Generation
Writers, horrified by the stranglehold of business and the uselessness of
Prohibition, expatriated to Paris where the favorable exchange rate enabled them
to work for a newspaper or magazine. Yet these writers usually spent most of
their time sitting in cafes lost in the aftermath of a war for which they
refused responsibility. Disillusioned, they discussed their inherited
nineteenth-century values and the provincial and emotional barrenness of
America. Fortunately, they found comfort in an older generation. Hemingway,
armed with letters of introduction by Sherwood Anderson, joined this group who
flocked to Gertrude Stein’s Salon, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company
bookstore, the apartment of James Joyce, the transatlantic review offices
of Ford Madox Ford, or Samuel Putnam’s office. The older writers cultivated the
members of what Stein labeled, after overhearing her mechanic, as “the lost
generation.” Of the elders, Stein, who was the bridge between past and present,
and Ezra Pound, whom Hemingway tried to teach boxing in return for tutelage,
were the most important influences on Hemingway.
“The Lost Generation” succeeded in poking through the rubble of civilization and manufacturing art anew. From war’s negation comes affirmation as a means to live with disillusionment. T. S. Eliot wove the old myths together into a poem of epic influence, “The Waste Land.” A new poetry was created by e. e. cummings. F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, and Glenway Westcott were members of this generation who helped rejuvenate the arts. The most important contribution of “The Lost Generation” was to prove the resiliency of culture and set it moving again with the hopeful idealism that would mark American literature in the 1930s.
The Roaring Twenties
In the Europe of the mid-1920s, life was returning to normal and cities were
being reconstructed after the devastation of World War I. Tensions, which still
existed between France and Germany over border issues, were quiet, as France
became isolated. The French war effort had depended on American loans and their
repayment depended on reparations from Germany. These reparations were recovered
with difficulty because Britain and the United States were hesitant to force
matters. Still, Germany was potentially the most powerful nation in Europe and
was quietly being given favorable loan terms by the United States. The French
economy worsened when the franc was stabilized at 20% of its pre-war value. This
had the effect of making France a collector of gold and brought
adventure-seeking Americans, with moderate sums of dollars, to take advantage of
exchange rates.
New Leaders
Though a long way off, the leaders who would play a large role in World War II
came to power. Josef Stalin assumed his 27-year dictatorship in the Soviet
Union. He de-emphasized world revolution in favor of repressing and terrorizing
Soviet citizens and Russian neighbors. The Politburo, meanwhile, expelled Leon
Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev. In Italy, Benito Mussolini assumed control of the
country and the Fascist party became the party of state without opposition.
Chiang Kai-shek succeeded Sun Yat-Sen and began to unify China. In Japan,
Yoshihito died and his son became Emperor Hirohito (a role which he retained
until his death in 1989).
Economics
For members of the upper middle class or the rich, the twenties were indeed the
era of prosperity, debauchery, and bootlegging. For the rest of humanity, life
was still a struggle. The 1921 musical “Ain’t We Got Fun” encapsulates the
period saying, “The rich get richer, and the poor get children.” Coal miners in
America stretched their meager 75-cents-per-hour wages (roughly $7.50 in 1995
dollars) to feed their families. Public-school teachers made slightly less at
$1000 a year. Labor movements were met with brutal force but there were few
improvements. The Ford Motor Company introduced an 8-hour day and a 5-day week.
The picture for blacks in America was especially hard with 85% of blacks living
in the segregated south and 23% of them illiterate. Great numbers of blacks
began migrating north to the cities with lasting demographic effects.
Meanwhile, labor relations in Britain were tantamount to class war. A general strike crippled the nation as coal miners belonging to the Trade Union Congress demanded, “Not a penny off the pay; not a minute on the day.” Many workers sympathetic to the miners (railwaymen, printers, dockworkers, construction workers, and others) went on strike as well. At the root of the problem was the decision by Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill to return to the gold standard. That decision had the effect of cheapening import prices and thus forcing mine operators to cut wages so as to compete with German and Polish imports. Economist John Maynard Keynes considered Churchill’s decision “silly.” Matters nearly erupted in violence as the Royal Navy trained its guns on strikers who tried to prevent the off-loading of ships at the docks.
Already prepared for his style by the short story collection In Our Time and the subject matter by a short story, “The Undefeated,” Hemingway’s readers asserted that The Sun Also Rises more than satisfied expectations. The novel was appreciated for its modern “ease” and quickly became the novel of the “lost generation.” More recently, the novel has helped rejuvenate Hemingway’s reputation. Critical attention to the novel can categorized as follows: early surprise and discussion of plot (focusing on the bullfighting, Europe, or “the lost generation”); the alternative morality Hemingway provides in the face of disillusionment; the facts of impotency and gender in the novel; and finally, where the novel fits into Hemingway’s reputation.
Except for Allen Tate’s, the first reviews were glowing, congratulatory, and painfully aware of the ubiquitous war fatigue. Conrad Aiken, in the New York Herald Tribune, was struck first and foremost by the bullfighting which he compared to “half a course of psycho-analysis.” “One is thrilled and horrified; but one is also fascinated, and one cannot have enough.” Aiken observes that the novel “works up to, and in a sense is built around, a bullfight.” In addition, he is unaware of anyone using dialogue better than Hemingway does. A reviewer for the New York Times Book Review said, “It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts mere literary English to shame. Hemingway knows how . . . to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts.” Lawrence S. Morris, in The New Republic, saw the novel as “one stride toward that objectification” which the current generation needed after rejecting its inherited myths. Tate wrote negatively, in The Nation, that the significance of Hemingway’s subject matter “is mixed or incomplete.” Furthermore, the habit of throwing stones at the great “is disconcerting in the present novel; it strains the context; and one suspects that Mr. Hemingway protests too much. The point he seems to be making is that he is morally superior . . . [to] Mr. Mencken, but it is not yet clear just why.”
James T. Farrell wrote a 1943 reaction, in the New York Times, to a novel that was supposedly “the definite account of a war-wearied lost generation.” He explained the novel’s popularity as a result of the pacifism of the post-war generation ready to challenge those values that had brought that war. Hemingway’s novel, therefore, was right on time. “He arrived on the literary scene the absolute master of the style he has made his own; his attitudes were firmly fixed at that time, and he said pretty much what he had to say with his first stories, and his first two novels.” Philip Young was more succinct, saying the novel is “still Hemingway’s Waste Land and Jake is Hemingway’s Fisher King.”
Criticism became more analytical through the 1950s and gradually dissected Hemingway the man. Mark Spilka, in Twelve Original Essays, tried to find the moral of the story by focusing on its love theme. He concluded that Pedro is the hero of the story. Therefore, the lesson is that a hero is someone “whose code gives meaning to a world where love and religion are defunct.” Carlos Baker focused on the geography because “place and the sense of fact . . . [as well as the] operation of the sense of scene” is Hemingway’s style, nothing more. Earl H. Rovit felt otherwise, in Landmarks of American Writing. He likened the novel to a “Newtonian world-machine” which rendered the metaphor of our age—which is explosion—conscious for the first time. For this reason the novel continues to “provoke our thought.” Terrence Doody, in The Journal of Narrative Technique, was moved to say Hemingway did not know what he was doing with his narrator Jake Barnes. He added that the “naive contact with the world” the Hemingway style enables is clearly not sufficient since Faulkner and Fitzgerald are now preferred.
Sam S. Baskett picked up on the debate over Jake Barnes for his review in The Centennial Review, asking what sort of moral center Hemingway, spokesman for a generation, had come up with. Baskett answered this question by noting the value that characters have for themselves is a function of their regard for Brett—their godhead. Thus, Jake is the hero because he understands how to “live as a moral being” through writing his story and ignoring Brett. Andrew Hook’s review, in Ernest Hemingway: New Critical Essays, is also interested in the moral center which is imposed, contrary to the novels that follow where the hero makes the choice, on Jake. Hook found that in this novel Hemingway “risks challenging the very codes and values” of the rest of his fiction and his life.
Criticism of the 1980s summed up Hemingway or discussed issues of gender. Nina Schwartz, in Criticism, analyzed the novel as an attempt to return “man to the center of a humanistic universe” by allowing Jake to control the sigmfiers. The crucial act here is Jake’s displacement of his own desire to his favorite hero, Romero. Woman, or Brett as love object, assumes the most powerful position as castrator of “the very mythos of castration.” The woman becomes the author of the men and the Bull of their ritual. Suknta Paul Kumar more simply declared woman as the hero of the novel, not Jake or Romero. Kumar said the novel “paves the way for complete androgynous relationships through an acceptance and absorption of the new values as well as the new female ideal.” Sibbie O’Sullivan’s article, in Arizona Quarterly, defended Hemingway against charges of misogyny: he respected the new woman being created in the 1920s. O’Sullivan took inspiration from Jake’s idea that you had to love a woman to befriend her and showed that Brett “is a positive force . . . who makes an attempt to live honestly.”
Lastly, John W. Aldridge summarized up Hemingway’s modern reputation in The Sewanee Review. The dark side of the author is forgiven and his first novel is held up as a continuing inspiration for us not to “give up [our] hold on the basic sanities.”
Set in Paris and Spain shortly after the end of World War I, The Sun Also Rises, for many the finest of Hemingway’s longer works, is frequently described as a novel that captures the mood of an age. Its publication in 1926 forever identified the author with a generation and, even today, it is difficult, if not impossible for many readers and critics to consider Hemingway’s works without drawing on the wealth of biographical information available on the now-famous expatriate artists of the 1920s. Centered around Jake and Brett’s doomed love affair, the novel portrays the disillusionment and shift in values that resulted from the wartime experiences shared by a generation. In an essay emphasizing the historical context of the novel, Michael S. Reynolds explains that the end of the war signaled the end of a 20-year period during which the stable values of 1900 had eroded—“home, family, church, and country no longer gave the moral support that Hemingway’s generation grew up with. The old values—honor, duty, love—no longer rang . . . true. . . .” According to Linda Wagner-Martin, this loss of promise after the war led to the wasteland atmosphere evident in the works of Eliot and Dreiser. Similarly, The Sun Also Rises is frequently read as a record of the “Lost Generation,” a term attributed to Gertrude Stein that refers to the aimless and damaged youth who survived the war. Although many critics have recognized that such an interpretation is limiting and that to read Hemingway’s novel as a “paean to the lost generation” is, as Reynolds argues, to miss the point badly, Stein’s epigraph continues to influence many readers’ imaginations.
A frequently discussed aspect of Hemingway’s work is his suggestive writing style. When The Sun Also Rises first appeared, it was, Wagner-Martin explains, considered a “new manifesto of modernist style and was praised for its dialogue and its terse, objective presentation of characters.” The modernist method was understatement, “a seemingly objective way of presenting the hard scene or image.” There was, Wagner-Martin continues, “no sentiment, no didactism, no leading the reader.” This understated style, and the narrator’s apparent toughness of attitude, can sometimes conceal pain, emotion, and desire. A typical example of this understated style is Jake’s attempt, late in the novel, to justify Mike’s drunken and, at times, vicious behavior towards Robert Cohn. Jake tells Brett that Cohn’s presence in Pamplona has been hard on Mike, suggesting but leaving unsaid what is equally obvious: that Cohn’s presence, not to mention Mike’s and Pedro’s, has also been very hard on him. According to James Nagel, Jake’s love for Brett and the pain of their having to be apart “underscores everything he relates.”
Early in the novel, Cohn tells Jake that he longs to get away, to travel to South America, to be elsewhere. Presenting himself as someone who knows that “you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another,” Jake advises Cohn to start living his life now, in Paris. However, as Jake’s narrative unfolds, it becomes evident that he has not yet learned to live according to his own advice. Tormented by thoughts of his injury and by his love for Brett, Jake spends many sleepless hours inhabiting the elsewhere of an imaginary past—the past he and Brett could have had, the past that continues to be a source of pain and frustration every time they are together. Evidence of this ongoing frustration is easy to find. In response to Jake’s attempt at intimacy in the cab, for example, Brett turns away and tells him that she does not “want to go through that hell again.” Likewise, when Brett tells Jake that she is “so miserable,” he immediately gets the feeling that he is about to go through a nightmare that he has been through before and must now go through again.
The mutually destructive nature of Jake and Brett’s relationship has led several critics to point to the scene in which Jake acknowledges that all he really wants is to know “how to live in it”—it referring to the world, to the new and ever-changing post-war reality and, as Kathleen Nichols suggests, to the world of emotional relationships. Consequently, critics have also identified characters in the novel who might provide Jake with a model of behavior. Robert Fleming, for example, suggests that Count Mippipopolous is an early prototype of the character type known as the “code hero” or “tutor”—a type whose minor flaws “are outweighed by his strict observation of a code.” The Count illustrates courage and grace under pressure, maintains his self-respect in relation to Brett and, Fleming argues, imparts to Jake lessons “that will help [him] toward a philosophy of life.” Another critic, Scott Donaldson, proposes that it is Bill Gorton, through humor directed at ideas and institutions, not human beings, who provides a model of behavior that can be emulated. Jane E. Wilson looks to yet another character, discussing the significance of the Englishman, Wilson-Harris, in association with the regenerative fishing trip to Burguete. She believes that Jake’s relationship with Harris is “one of the keys to the meaning of the fishing episode and its beneficial aspects.”
The character most often identified as a model of behavior is the young bullfighter, Pedro Romero. Early in the novel, Jake tells Cohn that “nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.” The appearance of an actual bullfighter later in the novel thus commands attention. Pedro is described as a “real one”—a bullfighter who does always “smoothly, calmly, and beautifully” what others could do only sometimes. Allen Josephs, who has explored how the art of toreo (the bullfight) lies at the heart of The Sun Also Rises, cites the work of H.R. Stoneback who is himself citing Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, to show that “the bullfight is meant to convey an emblem of moral behaviour.” To be moral, conduct must be "rooted in courage, honour, passion, and it must exhibit grace under pressure. . . .” Josephs believes that all of the characters who make the pilgrimage to Pamplona “are measured—morally or spiritually— around the axis of the art of toreo.” He identifies Pedro, the creator of the art, as the character closest to perfection.
Robert Cohn, by contrast, is rarely included in discussions about models of behavior. On the contrary, Cohn’s behavior continually sets him apart from the rest of the group. The recipient of insults and abuse from several characters in the novel, Cohn is also frequently mistreated by critics. Josephs, for instance, has accused Cohn of being a “moral bankrupt who is completely out of place at the fiesta.” It is important to remember, however, that Jake may not be providing an accurate picture of the man who spent a week in Spain with Brett. Jake even acknowledges this possibility, noting that he may not have “shown Robert Cohn clearly.” He tries, briefly, to improve his incomplete portrait but continues to highlight moments and events that cast Cohn in a negative light. From the very beginning of the novel, Jake’s depiction of Cohn seems partial. He mentions that Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton, but then strips the achievement of any value by noting that he is not “very much impressed” by this title. Similarly, on the first day of the fiesta, Jake notes that, while everyone else is drinking and having a good time, Cohn is passed out alone in a back room, sleeping on wine casks. Jake also pokes fun at Cohn’s lack of acumen when the latter fails to understand a banner bearing the slogan “Hurray for the Foreigners!” As a result, when Mike verbally attacks Cohn, accusing him of following Brett around like a steer and of not knowing when he is not wanted, the accusations seem justified.
Sibbie O’Sullivan has described Cohn as a character who “lives in the waste land but does not adhere to its values.” Jake’s portrayal of Cohn appears to suggest that Cohn’s values are out of date and out of place. However, Cohn’s negative depiction is complicated by the frequent references to the fact that he is Jewish. Comments such as Mike’s, who tells Jake that “Brett has gone off with men, but they weren’t ever Jews,” have led several critics to address the issue of anti-Semitism in the novel. Michael Reynolds believes that the depiction of Cohn does betray Hemingway’s anti-Semitism but argues that to fault him “for his prejudice is to read the novel anachronistically.” He believes that the novel’s anti-Semitism “tells us little about its author but a good deal about America in 1926.” Barry Gross, on the other hand, dismisses critics who dismiss Cohn’s treatment in the novel as commonplace and wonders whether we should not expect our great writers “to rise above the regrettably commonplace of their society, especially writers who made careers out of being critics of . . . all that they considered regrettably commonplace in American society.”
Like other characters in the novel, Brett Ashley has also been identified as a model of behavior—but not for Jake. Instead, Brett’s daring and unconventional lifestyle has led several critics to identify her as a new kind of woman. Although she is not, as James Nagel has pointed out, the first representation of “a sexually liberated, free-thinking woman in American literature,” she is, Reynolds explains, “on the leading edge of the sexual revolution that produced two types of the “new woman”: the educated professional woman who was active in formerly all male areas and the stylish, uninhibited young woman who drank and smoked [and] devalued sexual innocence. . . .” But more than a model of behavior or a representation of something new, she is, like Jake, an individual trying to learn how to live her life. She is, like Jake, trying to get over what could have been.
Whether or not Jake and Brett do successfully overcome their attachment to the past they could have shared remains a topic of debate. The fact that Jake travels to Madrid to meet Brett is, for some, a sign that their relationship has not changed. James Nagel argues that the journey is evidence of Jake’s continued love for Brett and that he “is resigned to the pain that continued association with her is likely to bring.” But the continuation of their relationship, or at least, the continuation of their relationship as it has existed until now, becomes questionable in light of Jake’s response to Brett’s lament about the good time they could have had together: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The novel’s famous last words can be read as signaling a change in Jake’s outlook. Donald Daiker reads them as the “coup de grace which effectively and permanently destroys all possibilities for the continuation of a romantic liaison between them.” To Kathleen Nichols, the response shows that, instead of lamenting what could have been, Jake can now “calmly and ironically comment on how “pretty” it is to think [his relationship with Brett] would have been so good.” By no means a happy or even compensatory ending, Jake’s response does suggest the possibility of a relationship with Brett that is not burdened by unrealistic ideas about an imaginary past.
Source: Jeffrey M. Lilburn, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999. Jeffrey M. Lilburn, M.A. (The University of Western Ontario) is the author of a study guide on Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and of numerous educational essays.
My project is to consider the ways in which Jake Barnes’s male identity is called into question by the genital wound he suffered during the First World War, and the ways in which his fractured sense of self functions in relation to homosexuality and the homosexual men he observes at a bal musette in the company of Brett Ashley. Jake’s attitude toward the homosexuals—the way he degrades them and casts them as his rivals—will, I believe, reveal the extent to which sexual categories and gender roles are cultural constructions. Close readings of several key passages in the novel will at the same time uncover the reasons behind Jake’s own inability to openly accept, if not fully endorse, the potentialities of gender/sexual mutability.
I take as my starting point the recent work of theorist Judith Butler, whose influential book Gender Trouble maintains that “the heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine,’ where these are understood as expressive of ‘male’ and ‘female.’” [Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990.] This process suggests that “the gendered body is performative,” and, in fact, “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute reality.” Insofar as “the inner truth of gender is a fabrication,” “genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.” The notion of a “primary and interior gendered self” is, therefore, a cultural construction which creates the “illusion” of such a disguised self. That gender is itself a kind of “performance of drag . . . reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as—well as its contingency” (Butler’s emphasis). [Butler, 1990.]
With respect to the “crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves” that Jake encounters at the bal musette, external signs—that is, behavioral or performative acts—lead Jake to “read” the men as homosexual. The various signs by which their homosexuality is made known are these: their “jerseys” and “shirt-sleeves,” their “newly washed, wavy hair,” their “white hands” and “white faces,” their “grimacing, gesturing, talking.” While it may be argued that the idea of performativity (“grimacing, gesturing, talking”) is here conflated with the notion of the homosexual as a morphological “type” (“newly washed, wavy hair”; “white hands” and “white faces”) created by a congenital condition, I maintain that what may at first seem to be morphological is in fact performative: these men are “types” not owing to natural physical features, but rather because they have created themselves as a “type” in order to enact (perform) the role of homosexual.
Their casual dress and careful grooming suggest a “feminine” preoccupation with physical appearance. Their hair appears to be styled (“wavy”), like a woman’s, while then: “white hands” suggest delicacy, their “white faces,” makeup or powder. Just as the feminized Jew of the novel, Robert Conn, is mocked for his excessive barbering, the homosexuals are scorned for their obvious concern with appearance. Rather than exhibiting the reticence and rigidity associated with masculinity, they are overly and overtly expressive, uninhibited in the use of their bodies and voices. Jake’s “diagnosis” is confirmed, his own masculinity momentarily consolidated, by the policeman near the door of the bar, who, in a gesture that bonds the two “real” men and marginalizes the homosexuals as “other,” looks at Jake and smiles.
But what is it, really, that Jake “reads”? It is not the sexual orientation of the men but rather a set of signs, a visual (and aural) field—the body— upon which is inscribed, and through which is enacted, their otherwise concealed sexuality. The young men have their homosexuality “written” on their faces and on their bodies. They “perform” their sexuality through facial expressions and physical gestures. Just as Jake’s wound remains unnamed, so, too, homosexuality is never mentioned; both are instead disclosed through, in the words of Arnold and Cathy Davidson, “sexual and textual absences.” The reader, like Jake, “must read the ostensible sexual preference of the young men from the various signs provided and thereby decode covert private sexuality from overt pubhc sociability.” [“Decoding the Hemingway Hero in The Sun Also Rises” in New Essays on The Sun Also Rises, edited by Arnold E. and Cathy N. Davidson, 1987.] Homosexuality is therefore not simply a matter of erotic object choice and same-gender sex. It is also a way of being, for the performativity of the young men indicates—is, in fact, predictive of—their bedroom behavior. . .
Jake objects not so much to homosexual behavior (which is unseen) but to “femininity” expressed through the “wrong” body. Gender-crossing is what troubles Jake; the rupture between a culturally-determined signifier (the male body) and signified (the female gender) disrupts the male/female binary. But what if the young men had not crossed the gender line, if their behavior were “in accord” with their sex, if they, in short, acted the way Jake expects men to act? He would then have no “signs” of their homosexuality.
The perception that the young men are enacting the “wrong” gender leads to the conclusion that they are mauthentic, that the projection of a “feminine” persona is a parody, a send-up of the female's “proper” role. Just as their presumed sexual deviation is a “deviation from the truth,” a behavioral “error,” so the way they act in public is a deliberate “deviation” from the “truth” of their gender. Although one could argue that the men are “camping” in order to destabilize the notion of fixed (naturalized) gender characteristics—that theirs is a conscious deployment of gender for strategic political ends—Jake cannot allow for the possibility that they might truly be the way they act. He cannot believe that these men are really like that (“feminine”) because they are male. . . .
Jake’s inability to perform sexually corresponds to the homosexual’s inability to perform his “correct” gender. Jake’s sexual inadequacy and the homosexual’s gender transgression are therefore conjoined: neither can properly signify “masculinity.”
It is also notable that “it is not Brett who elicits Jake’s obvious and immediate attraction” [Davidson and Davidson, 1987] when she enters the bar, but rather her homosexual companions. “I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.” The urge to physically assault the homosexual man—what we now call “gay bashing,” which many theorists argue constitutes an attack on the “feminine” rooted in misogyny— quite clearly derives from Jake’s anger; but what, precisely, is he so angry about? The source of his rage is in part his frustration at being unable to categorize the homosexual within the male/female binary. That these men represent and enact gender nonconformity violates the cultural boundaries established to demarcate appropriate social and sexual behavior. Any attempted remapping of these culturally agreed upon borders exposes the arbitrariness of their frontiers, which in turn calls for a rethinking of the ontological groundwork of sex/gender itself. At the same time, his anger is self-hatred displaced onto the homosexual, for Jake has lost (physically and psychologically) his signifying phallus. What’s more, the tolerance he knows he should have for the homosexuals may also be the same tolerance he hopes Brett will have for him and his sexual failing.
In a cultural system that authorizes a single mode of self-presentation for each gender, transgressing the binary law of male/female constitutes a crime. Just as homosexuality is often constructed as “a crime against nature,” so, too, this crime, or sin, against naturalized gender performance must be punished: Jake wishes “to shatter that superior, simpering composure” which he sees as a homosexual or “feminine” trait. Robert Cohn’s manner is also described as “superior.” To whom or what the homosexual is “superior” is not expressed, but Jake apparently believes that they are, or think that they are, “superior” to him. He is also disturbed by their “simpering composure,” though one may wonder whether it is their composure itself which troubles Jake, or its simpering nature. In either case, the ostensibly heterosexual man here feels threatened by the homosexual’s acceptance and assertion of his presumably “incorrect” gender behavior. If he is superior to Jake, then it is axiomatic that Jake is inferior to him, for Jake himself hopes that he signifies what he is not, namely, the potent and powerful heterosexual male.
What Jake is unable or unwilling to acknowledge (disclose) is that his relationship to women resembles that of the homosexual. Though for different reasons, both Jake and the homosexual man do not relate to women in accordance with the demands of a heterosexual/heterosexist culture. What Jake desires but cannot do is to perform sexually with women, the same performance rejected by the homosexual. While the homosexual rejects heterosexual performance, he does so in favor of an alternative. Jake, on the other hand, is bound by a “masculine” signification and desire which is “untrue”—he cannot do what his appearance suggests he can. The homosexual signifies differently, Jake not at all, and so the homosexual is seen as “superior.”
Jake’s body stands, as it were, between himself and his desires; the homosexual’s “perverse” desire, however, circumvents the “natural” physical act. It is therefore not the homosexual’s denial or disinterest in women which offends Jake but the renunciation of naturalized male desire. When he looks at the homosexual man, what Jake sees is the body of a male that does not perform as a “man”; when he regards himself what he sees is the body of a male that lacks the sign of “manliness.” This tends to support Jonathan Dollimore’s observation [in his Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, 1991] that “the most extreme threat to the true form of something comes not so much from its absolute opposite or its direct negation, but in the form of its perversion . . . [which is] very often perceived as at once utterly alien to what it threatens, and yet, mysteriously inherent within it.”
In the following chapter (4), Jake’s affiliation with the homosexual and with gender reversal is even more pronounced. While undressing for bed, he sees himself in the mirror: “Undressing, looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed. That was a typically French way to furnish a room. Practical, too, I suppose. Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny. I put my pajamas on and got into bed.” While the digression concerning the armoire might at first appear to be an attempt to avoid seeing himself or talking about what he sees, it is actually a symbolic corollary of Jake’s wound. Just as the armoire represents “a typically French way to furnish a room,” so the penis is “typical” of the male body. Whereas the armoire is “practical,” however, Jake’s member is not (at least in relation to his sex life), rather, it is all “furnishing.” In relation to the female, the homosexual’s sex is similarly “furnishing.” That Jake regards his wound as “funny” recalls his earlier observation that homosexual men “are supposed to be amusing,” though clearly neither are a source of much humor. Both are instead ironic objects of derision. . . . That which is present signifies absence—not of desire but of ability. The mirror reflects appearance; it does not reveal essence. At the same time, the “external signs” which it presents can, if “read" correctly, provide the clues necessary to apprehend “inner truth.” In Jake’s case, that “truth” is his fractured sense of masculine identity. In holding the mirror up to himself, what Jake discovers is his close affiliation with the homosexual men.
Inasmuch as Jake considers himself to be heterosexual, the novel posits the site of sexuality in gendered desire rather than sexual behavior. What distinguishes Jake from the homosexual men is gender performance and erotic object choice. By this logic, it follows that sexuality is determined by gender identification rather than sexual activity. Jake’s sex can no longer penetrate a woman (and so all sexual relations are apparently ruled out), but he remains heterosexual by virtue of his desire. If the men from the bar discontinued same-gender sex, they would presumably remain homosexual. Sexual identity issues not from the sex act but from covert desire or overt social behavior. . . .
It remains unclear, however, whether Jake’s masculinity is in question because of the lost body part (morphology) or because of his inability to express what is regarded as masculine—that is, heterosexual performativity. This loss is later seen in relation to homosexuality itself, when Jake’s wound is directly linked to homosexual identity.
This linkage occurs about midway through the novel, during the fishing trip Jake takes with his friend Bill Gorton before the fiesta. The fishing episode is one of what Wendy Martin calls Hemingway’s “pastoral interludes, in which his male characters seek relief from social tensions,” part of a tradition in American fiction “that begins with Cooper and Brackenridge and extends through Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.” [“Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises”] This “pastoral interlude” is also a “set piece” profoundly colored by the homoerotic element. . . . In The Sun Also Rises the physical battle between male rivals is most overtly expressed in the bullfight, where two such signifiers are the man and the bull. And just as Jake is a spectator at the bullfight rather than a participant, so, too, he can only look on as other men (Robert Cohn, Mike Campbell, Pedro Romero) compete for the affections of Brett Ashley. The arena where “real” men compete— whether the bulking or the bedroom—is for Jake a foreclosed area of emotional and psychic involvement.
Whether “greenwood,” bulking, or battlefield, these episodes are intense moments of male bonding, which for Mario Mieli (and I concur) is always an expression of a “paralysed and unspoken homosexuality, which can be grasped, in the negative, in the denial of women.” [Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, 1980.] While alone and apart from the world, Bill teases Jake by asking him if he knows what his real “trouble” is: “You’re an expatriate [Bill explains]. One of the worst type. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.” Jake’s association with the old world places him within the shadow of European decadence, which is seen as a performance, a role unbecoming to him. That he has “lost touch with the soil” suggests that Jake is estranged from enduring values, for “the earth abideth forever.” Jake has become “precious,” “ruined” by “fake European standards,” so that his very identity has been compromised, if not corrupted, by foreign influences. Similarly, Jake’s body has been corrupted by a foreign object, perhaps a mortar shell. This has in turn transformed his corporeal existence into something foreign or other—not quite a “whole” man but certainly not a woman. Jake has come to inhabit the demi-monde, the world of the outcast, the lost, the homosexual—the decadent other par excellence. What’s more, like Lawrence’s, Hemingway’s “anxieties about homosexuality were conjoined with class antagonism” [Dollimore, 1991]—his antipathy for the rich, the “mincing gentry.”
Jake, like the homosexual, is a habitue of cafes, where one “does” very little except talk, and the homosexual, the female, and the Jew are constructed as overly discursive. (Another of Hemingway’s fears was that writing—talking—was unmanly, for it is not “doing.”) The gay man, however, is like a woman in that he “hangs around” and doesn’t work much. His only “work” is night-work related to sex, just as the “proper” work for a woman is to serve her man. Even Brett, the independent Modern Woman, exists only in relation to men—Jake, Mike, Robert, Pedro, Count Mippipopolous, the homosexuals.
Bill goes on to say that Jake doesn’t work, after all, and that while some claim he is supported by women, others insist that he’s impotent. A man who is supported by women is of course not a “real” man, but what Bill means by “impotent” is ambiguous. He may believe that Jake is sexually impotent or that as a decadent American who has adopted “fake” European standards he is psychically impotent. In either case, the link between non-normative sexuality and decadence is clear. Jake responds to Bill by saying, “I just had an accident.” But Bill tells Jake, “Never mention that. . . . That’s the sort of thing that can’t be spoken of. That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle.” Once again, just as homosexuality is the love that dare not speak its name, so Jake’s “accident” should not be discussed. “Henry’s bicycle” is a reference to Henry James and the “obscure hurt” he suffered while a teenager—either a physical wound which rendered him incapable of sexual performance or a psychic “hurt,” the realization of his homosexuality. [R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative, 1991.] The failure to perform in the culturally prescribed way (heterosexually) is therefore figured as “de-masculinizing.”
Jake and Bill then banter about whether Henry’s wound was suffered while riding a bicycle or a horse, with attendant puns on “joy-stick” and “pedal.” When Jake “stands up” for the tricycle, Bill replies, “I think he’s a good writer, too.” He adds that Jake is “a hell of a good guy”:
Listen you’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under the skin.
That Jake opts for the tricycle over the horse as the instrument of Henry’s “unmanning” implies that the modern world of the machine has had a negative, disruptive effect on traditional male/female roles. When Bill acknowledges that Henry, in spite of his wound, was “a good writer” (could still perform as an artist), he is also reassuring Jake that he can still perform as a good friend and “proper” man—fishing, eating, drinking. Jake will not be banished from the homosocial realm where all “good guys” go to escape from the debilitating influence of women.
While Jake may now occupy an uncertain place between the genders, Bill continues to be “fonder” of him than anybody. Defending himself from any potential “charge” of homosexuality, Bill quickly adds that had they been in New York, he wouldn’t be able to voice his affection for Jake without being a “faggot”; European decadence makes it possible to speak the unspeakable. Without belaboring Bill’s mock history of the Civil War, we should remark that “sex explains it all.” The “truth” of the self is revealed, after all, in sex; and homosexuality (in this instance, lesbianism) is inscribed in the body, concealed “under the skin.” If we recall that male homosexuality may be “read” in external signs, it appears here that lesbian sexuality is not similarly marked by gender nonconformity, that concealed lesbian identity cannot be discerned through observing performance but only by unmasking what is hidden in the body, under the skin. This seems to suggest that lesbianism is congenital, while male homosexuality is performative.
The novel concludes with the justly famous scene of Jake and Brett together in a cab: “‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’ Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” Earlier in the novel, Georgette pressed against Jake while in a cab, and now Brett is thrown against the body of a man who desires more than he can do; he wants not just “pressing” but penetration. Once again the symbolic policeman is present, but this time he isn’t smiling; he and Jake are no longer members of the same “club.” This time his raised baton is a rebuke. The policeman, a “manly” authority figure, is not only “mounted” (and perhaps “well-mounted”) on a horse (suggesting a “stud” or “stallion” while recalling Henry’s “accident”), but also a uniformed presence whose “raised” baton is suggestive not only of an erect phallus but also of the baton of a conductor or military officer, two whose role is to orchestrate the performance of others, though Jake can no longer perform.
The sun, almost always figured as “male” (and in most Indo-European languages grammatically of the “male gender”), “ariseth” and “goeth down,” as does a male. The earth, a female/maternal signifier, “abideth forever,” and “the soil,” it will be recalled, is what Jake has “lost touch” with. As Arnold and Cathy Davidson note, “Jake’s last words readily devolve into an endless series of counter-statements that continue the same discourse: ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ / ‘Isn’t it pretty to think isn’t it pretty to think so?’“ This “negation,” as the Davidsons call it, closes the novel and returns us to its title, for “only the earth—not heroes, not their successes or their failures—abideth forever.” [Davidson and Davidson, 1993.] The use of so “feminine” a word as “pretty” further underscores Jake’s mixed gender identification as well as the “feminine” qualities of life which abide forever.
Source: Ira Elliott, “Performance Art: Jake Barnes and ‘Masculine’ Signification in The Sun Also Rises,” in American Literature, Vol. 67, No. 1, March, 1995, pp. 77-91.
Emphasis in the considerable body of criticism in print on The Sun Also Rises rests with the cynicism and world-weariness to be found in the novel. Although Lionel Trilling in 1939 afforded his readers a salutary, corrective view, most commentators have found the meaning inherent in the pattern of the work despairing. Perhaps most outspoken is E. M. Halliday, who sees Jake Barnes as adopting “a kind of desperate caution” as his modus vivendi. Halliday concludes that the movement of the novel is a movement of progressive “emotional insularity” and that the novel’s theme is one of “moral atrophy.” [“Hemingway’s Narrative Perspective,” in Sewanee Review, 1952.] In his “The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,” Mark Spilka finds a similarly negative meaning in the novel. Thus Spilka arrives at the position that in naming “the abiding earth” as the hero of the novel, Hemingway was “perhaps wrong . . . or at least misleading.” [Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, 1958.]
But if Hemingway was misleading in so identifying the novel’s hero, he was misleading in a fashion consistent with his “misleading” choice of epigraph from Ecclesiastes and consistent with the “misleading” pattern he incorporated in the text of his novel. Far from indicating insularity and moral atrophy, the novel evidences circularity and moral retrenching. Much Hemingway criticism—always excepting Trilling’s—demonstrates the reaction of conventional wisdom to healthy subversion of that brand of wisdom. Hence the often truly sad gulf which Trilling laments between the pronouncements of Hemingway “the man” and the artistically indirect achievement of Hemingway “the artist.” [“Hemingway and His Critics,” Partisan Review, 1939.] Jake Barnes, to deal with the central character of but one of Hemingway’s novels, is far more than the “desperately cautious” mover through life which Halliday calls him. Like the Biblical Preacher, Jake is a worldly wise accepter of the nature of the human condition. That condition is, to be sure, a predicament, for as Hemingway more than once baldly stated, life is tragic. But recognition of the tragic nature of life is by no means necessarily a cause for despair. If any readers of The Sun Also Rises become misdirected, they are certainly not misled by Hemingway.
The opening verses of the Book of Ecclesiastes are ambiguous, and the individual reader’s responses to these and subsequent verses are varied. One must assume that Hemingway found the dominant tone of Ecclesiastes right for his artistic purposes, but one hastens to recognize the distinct possibility that that overall tone is not one of world-weariness (although the temptation to think so is great at many junctures) but of worldly wisdom. In reading the epigraph from Ecclesiastes which Hemingway provides, one is struck by the omission of all occurrences of “Vanity of vanities.” Most Hemingway critics appear to regard these omissions as ironically absent, as evidence, that is, of Hemingway’s application of his celebrated “iceberg” principle—in this instance of a knowledge shared between the author and reader of the bulk of the iceberg which floats beneath the surface. But is it not just as likely that the omissions are made not in the service of irony, but quite simply in the service of exclusion? The so-called “Hemingway Code” is designed, I suggest, not to provide a means of survival in a life which is a vain endeavor to discover meaning, but rather to provide a means of survival which itself is meaning. This I take to be the import of that passage in the novel, so readily identified as important, but so potentially “misleading,” in which Jake thinks,
You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I like, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.
Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.
Certainly Jake is not rejecting life, any more than Count Mippipopolous (“‘one of us,’” Brett insists) is “dead.” Nor is love dead in The Sun Also Rises; it is, rather, unattainable—or better, never to be consummated. All of which is to say that The Sun Also Rises is a far less bitter and a far more mature book than is A Farewell to Arms.
In any event, nothing in the passage actually chosen and printed as the second of the two epigraphs for The Sun Also Rises is in contradiction to Hemingway’s assertion that the abiding earth is the hero of his novel. There can be no denying, however, that circularity such as that contained in the epigraph may be employed by an author to suggest meaninglessness. Perhaps it may even be said that our usual response to circularity is that it suggests meaninglessness. . . . But when in a literary work circularity is demonstrated to be the pattern of life, the response of the reader is to be governed by the artist’s presentation; whether the author is complaining about what he regards as an inescapable fact of life or whether he is stating what he regards as an unalterable fact must emerge from the work itself.
And so to the text of The Sun Also Rises. To begin with, let us not forget that, as John Rouch says, “Jake Barnes is telling the story in retrospect. Because Jake has lived through these events, he is well aware of what is going to happen.” And let us further agree with Rouch that “Jake knows that the essential story is contained between the two cab drives of Jake and Brett.” [“Jake Barnes as Narrator,” Modern Fiction Studies, 1965-66] Let us add to these observations of Rouch, the second of which so clearly intimates a coming full circle, Jake’s thoughts after he has framed his telegram to Brett, who awaits his aid in the Hotel Montana in Madrid. “That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.” Echoing Rouch, I would point out that here Jake is not only “well aware” but perfectly aware of the position he is in. The ironic tone of Jake’s words is equal to the irony of his situation, and his going in to lunch is a simple demonstration of his ability to function rather than to dwell morbidly on the cruelty of Fate’s dealings with him.
Rouch speaks further of a change in Jake, but what can that change be? Not only does Jake tell the story in retrospect, knowing all along “what is going to happen,” but at no point in the novel does Jake announce that he has undergone a change. One must concede, however, that after he has been hit by Cohn, Jake does experience a change in perspective, a change which provides emotional preparation, since it falls between the passage “The fiesta was really started. . . . The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta” and the sentence early in Book III, “The fiesta was over.” This change in perspective, this new light of unfamiliarity and objectivity, is explained by reference to a “phantom suitcase.” Mark Spilka has seriously battered that suitcase in a totally unconvincing attempt to equate Jake and his suitcase with Robert Cohn and his Princeton polo-shirt; in an attempt to make Jake, like Cohn, “a case of arrested development.” But Jake is emphatically not a case of arrested development; as he says in another connection, he “‘just had an accident.’” Cohn wishes he could “‘play football again with what I know about handling myself, now.’” Can it be seriously proposed that Jake too wishes to play another football game, so that he may once more enjoy such a sobering experience as being “kicked in the head early in the game”?
Jake’s thoughts after he has sent the telegram to Brett at the Hotel Montana do not support Rouch’s contention that Jake undergoes a change. Indeed, Jake’s advice to Cohn to give up the romantic notion that he can further his experience of “life” by taking a trip to South America is placed very early in the novel precisely to establish that Jake the character, like Jake the narrator, has long since learned in a broad and fundamental way “how to be”: “‘Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.’”
Jake Barnes is especially privileged, both as narrator and as character: even before the events reported in the novel took place, he understood what was acceptable and supportable in life in the post-World War I era.
As Trilling so admirably explained in his corrective essay of 1939,
Everyone in that time had feelings, as they called them, just as everyone has “feelings” now. And it seems to me that what Hemingway wanted first to do was to get rid of the “feelings,” the comfortable liberal humanitarian feelings, and to replace them with the truth.
Not cynicism, I think, not despair, as so often is said, but this admirable desire shaped his famous style and his notorious set of admirations and contempts. The trick of understatement or tangential statement sprang from this desire. Men had made so many utterances in such fine language that it had become time to shut up. Hemingway’s people, as everyone knows, are afraid of words and ashamed of them and the line from his stories which has become famous is the one that begins “Won’t you please,” goes on through its innumerable “pleases,” and ends, “stop talking.” Not only slain men but slam words made up the mortality of the war [“Hemingway and His Critics ”]
The Sun Also Rises serves a corrective function, then, or better, several corrective functions, among them that articulated by Trilling and that implicit in Bill Gorton’s parody of editorials of the ’Twenties on the nature of American expatriates in Paris. But, as Malcolm Cowley has stated, “In 1926 one felt that he was making exactly the right rejoinder to dozens of newspaper editonals then fresh in the public mind; in the 1960’s these have been forgotten.” [Introduction to The Sun Also Rises, 1954.]
In addition to the corrective functions underlined by Trilling and Cowley, The Sun Also Rises contains a positive and timeless message with respect to the value of some kind of religious observance. If traditional religion no longer seems to apply to human problems, within the world of the novel the values of fishing and of bull-fighting remain. Such a statement smacks of the hysterically obvious in a discussion of Hemingway’s work, of course, and unquestionably no further discussion of the experience of Jake, Bill, and the Englishman Harris on the Irati is required. Nor need one pursue the general value of the bull-ring as the place of experiencing the moment of truth. But what seem to me the most important uses of circularity in the novel revolve about the symbolic distinction drawn between France and Spain, first in the opening three paragraphs of Chapter X, and finally in the last chapter of the novel:
The waiter seemed a little offended about the flowers of the Pyrenees, so I overtipped him. That made him happy. It felt comfortable to be in a country where it is so simple to make people happy. You can never tell whether a Spanish waiter will thank you. Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He would be glad to see me back I would dine there again some time and he would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in France.
Next morning I tipped every one a little too much at the hotel to make more friends, and left on the morning tram for San Sebastian. At the station I did not tip the porter more than I should because I did not think I would ever see him again. I only wanted a few good French friends in Bayonne to make me welcome in case I should come back there again. I knew that if they remembered me their friendship would be loyal.
At Irun we had to change trains and show passports. I hated to leave France. Life was so simple in France. I felt I was a fool to be going back into Spain. In Spain you could not tell about anything.
In Spain, one of course “could not tell about anything” because in Spain one encounters a Montoya. But, important as Montoya is to Hemingway’s establishing that Jake has aficion and that Pedro Romero’s greatness must be nourished and protected for the rare phenomenon it is, the fiesta at Pamplona and the total religious realm of bullfighting is described in such a way as to stress its elemental force in providing the integrity, the unity, the never-ending cyclical pattern at the heart of Spanish life.
The Spanish waiter who is so contemptuous of the “sport” of running before the bulls is not unlike the American editorial writers who fail to understand expatriates. The waiter may be said to be Hemingway’s spokesman for the uninitiated reader, the reader who views bull-fighting as a bloody, inhumane, pagan slaughter of a brute victim in service of a brutal, “inhuman” human desire. And Jake’s nearly complete lack of interest in the Tour de France is another telling instruction by indirection that in Hemingway fishing and bull-fighting are to be regarded as far more than the mere “outdoor sports” which Spilka wishes to dismiss them as.
Therefore, like the monastery at Roncevalles, which Bill and Harris agree is “remarkable” but not “the same as” the fishing on the Irati, traditional religious values are “nice” but no longer viable as the values inherent in bull-fighting are viable—for spectator as well as participant. With respect to the observance of religious practices within a church, Jake and Brett are in the position of Matthew Arnold in his poem “The Grande Chartreuse,” a position of respectful alienation.
With respect to bull-fighting, Brett has had no initiation prior to the Pamplona festival of the novel. It is she, then, and not the aficionado Jake who must represent the in-group in being put to the test. Desperately in need of some meaning for her life, Brett reaches a kind of nadir of promiscuity in going off to San Sebastian with Robert Conn. Labelled a “Circe” by Cohn, Brett is, within one page of text of the novel, first debarred from a church during the San Fermin religious procession and then kept from participating in a dance, so that she may serve as “an image to dance around.” Wishing to enter the church and wishing to dance, Brett is denied the privilege of entering into either ritualistic activity. In concert with her wearing her hair in a mannish bob, these details symbolize Brett’s lack of spiritual fulfillment.
Because she is unfulfilled, when the handsome young Romero captures her fancy Brett is in grave danger of becoming the bitch she feels herself to be, but more significantly she may destroy for a time the entire meaningful cycle of life and death which is bull-fighting in Spain. In the novel, particular definition of this cycle begins not with announcement of the death of an as yet unnamed runner before the bulls and not with the waiter’s contemptuous judgment following the runner’s death, but rather with that remarkable paragraph immediately following the conversation between Jake and the waiter. A notable example of the bare Hemingway style, the paragraph is not, as it may at first blush appear to be, ironic in tone. Rather, the style complements the ritualistic activities it reports, investing the death of Vicente Girones with a dignity which this simple farmer could not possibly have achieved through some other manner of dying.
And the succeeding paragraph provides the tension which builds the basic conflict of the novel, for in this paragraph we are immediately informed that the bull “who [not “which”] killed Vicente Girones . . . was killed by Pedro Romero as the third bull of that same afternoon.” We are also told that Pedro presented the ear of Bocanegra to Brett, and that Brett “left both ear and handkerchief, along with a number of Muratti cigarette-stubs, shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona.” By her callous indifference to the cycle of life and death into which Romero has permitted her to intrude, Brett has broken the circle, has momentarily robbed Vicente Girones of the significance of his death. The Hotel Montoya is, for the moment at least, corrupted.
Hemingway’s having Jake identify the bull and report what became of the bull’s ear before he has him describe the bull-fight in which the ear is taken is a master stroke. When the moment of the kill is described, the classic moment of perfection—that of the tableau on the Grecian Urn or of the scene at the death of Old Ben in Faulkner’s The Bear— is conveyed as a moment of supernal, eternal beauty. The viewing of that divine spectacle is an utterly spiritual, a fully religious experience.
What remains, then, is for Brett to prove herself sensitive to this religious meaning. By thoughtlessly discarding the bull’s ear in a drawer full of cigarette butts, Brett has profaned a religious structure; she has been guilty of sacrilege. To be worthy of Jake, to provide the measure of the moral worth of the group, she must atone for the sin of sacrilege. Her promiscuity is not her sin; it is her search. And her affair with Romero is not her sin: so long as the encounter is brief, Brett has been, as Jake suggests, “‘probably damn good for him.’” By giving Romero back to bull-fighting, his seriousness and discipline intact, Brett in effect removes the bull’s ear from the bed-table drawer and restores it to its rightful place in the religious ritual of which it is a part.
Brett’s famous words describing her satisfaction in being strong enough to give Pedro his freedom are therefore neither extravagant, nor, in the total context of the novel, small compensation for what the Lost Generation has lost. Brett indeed is not “‘one of these bitches who ruins children,’” and the capacity for moral discrimination required to make such a decision indeed is “‘sort of what we have instead of God.’” At this point of development in Hemingway’s novel one is reminded of the brilliant insight provided by William Styron's Peyton Loftis: “‘Those people back in the Lost Generation. . . . They thought they were lost. They were crazy. They weren’t lost. What they were doing was losing us.’” [ Lie Down in Darkness, 1957.]
Still, in the flush of her considerable moral victory, Brett is swept on to her final—and this is extravagant—lamentation: “‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’” Giving “them” “irony,” if not “pity,” Jake responds, “‘Yes. Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” In this truly concluding line, Hemingway cuts the sweetness of self-pity and avoids the curse of an up-beat ending (a curse very clearly drawn down upon Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner in the final scene of the movie version of the novel) by having Jake remain steady in his realistic, anti-romantic conception of life as it is.
Life can be made worse by human beings who “behave badly.” Robert Conn characteristically behaves badly: he wonders if one might bet on the bull-fights, he falls asleep in the midst of gaiety; his tennis game falls apart when he is a moonsick calf in a world of bulls and matadors; he does not fight when he is insulted, then later hits Jake, his “best friend.” And Brett begins to behave badly, for the integrity of bull-fighting as a religious ritual is dependent upon a valuing of the bull's ear as a symbol of significant victory in a direct confrontation of life with death.
Phillip Young writes of the novel’s ending, “Soon it is all gone, he is returned to Brett as before, and we discover that we have come full circle, like all the rivers, the winds, and the sun, to the place where we began. This is motion which goes no place.” [Ernest Hemingway, 1952.] But Geoffrey Moore is surely correct in speaking of the “queer, twisted but nonetheless real sense of standards in Brett.” [Review of English Literature, 1963.] Life and the bull-fight go on, and Jake will be welcome at the Hotel Montoya, as before, for Brett’s release of Pedro Romero guarantees that Vicente Girones will not have died in vain.
Explicitly termed “values” in The Sun Also Rises are understated, but they are not undermined. Traditional values are scrutinized and found inadequate, but the values of the group are tested and found adequate to the demands made on those values by life. The ending of the novel is of course not beamingly optimistic, but neither is it bleakly pessimistic. Life has not, as Young says, “become mostly meaningless.” The moral success of Brett and the comprehensive worldly wisdom of Jake have upheld and enhanced life’s meaning in a (war-torn—“The soldier had only one arm”) world which is otherwise mostly meaningless.
Source: Robert W Cochian, “Circularity in The Sun Also Rises,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. XTV, No. 3, Autumn, 1968, pp. 297-305.
1) “You are all a lost generation.” Epigraph
This quote doesn’t occur in the novel, but instead before it begins in an epigraph. It is a famous description by Gertrude Stein of the post-World War I generation, who felt apathetic and disillusioned by the war. The characters in the book feel this way, as did some people of the time. They, like Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, became expatriates, leaving the Unites States for Europe. They could no longer relate to American values, and struggled to find meaning and definition.
The Sun Also Rises not only gave a name to these people, it captured their experience. The book was Hemingway’s first big success. Whereas people couldn’t relate to their own lives anymore, they were able to relate to Barnes and Lady Brett. Bill Gorton tells Barnes, “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You’re an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.” However, as hopeless as Jake seems to be, he isn't completely. He regrets losing religion and still tries for love with Lady Brett, and this too made the novel popular.
2) “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.” Page 10
Jake Barnes is one of the lost generation; he is a realist. Robert Cohn, on the
other hand, is more romantic. Cohn wants to run away to South America, where he
feels he could have an adventure. He says, “I can’t stand to think my life is
going so fast and I’m not really living it.” But Barnes tells him only
bullfighters reach that ideal, and that “You can’t get away from yourself by
moving from one place to another.” This sets up Cohn and Barnes as opposites,
but also presents the difference between finding adventure within yourself and
hunting for it in books.
Bullfighters risk death every time they step into the ring with the bull, and it is a brutal, violent sport. Perhaps this is why Barnes says only bullfighters live life to the fullest: they risk death every day, instead of sitting around talking or wasting time. Hemingway himself was interested in bullfighting, and even wrote Death in the Afternoon about it. Some have likened Barnes’ injury to the bull in the ring; later, Mike says, “Tell him bulls have no balls.” While watching a bullfight, he observes, “each time he enters into the terrain of the bull he is in great danger.” The bull and bullfighter may be an analogy of Jake and Lady Brett, and the early reference to bullfighters serves as foreshadowing of Lady Brett’s romance with Romero, the 19-year-old bullfighter.
3) “Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.” Page 22
This is Jake’s description of Lady Brett the first time she appears in the
novel. Cohn is clearly taken with Lady Brett, emboldened by his own recent
successes with women and desire for adventure, but Brett turns him down to dance
and leave with Jake. Brett and Jake have history and a connection, and
admiration is obvious in Jake’s description of her not only as attractive, but
strong and confident.
Jake’s injury has emasculated him; he can feel desire, but can’t act upon it. This frustration echoes the frustration many people felt in the post-war turmoil, but also indicates how traditional values are changed. Lady Brett is described as more masculine; she has short hair, “like a boy’s,”and a traditionally male name. She surrounds herself with homosexual men, who Jake wants to beat up, because his own masculinity is threatened due to his injury. Later, Lady Brett is compared to Circe, the festival goddess who turned men to swine. She and Jake’s relationship is doomed because of his inability to consummate it. Instead, Brett has affairs, namely with a bullfighter.
4) “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.” Page 148
Jake is wandering, trying to find meaning in his life. He loves Brett but can’t
have her. After the war, he takes on a more monetary outlook. During this scene,
he is lying in bed, unable to sleep and not wanting to turn off the light, and
he can hear Brett laughing with another man. He thinks that you have to be in
love with a woman to be her friend, and that he had been getting “something for
nothing” in their relationship. Then he talks about the presentation of the
bill, and how life in general is an “exchange of values.” You pay with
experience or taking chances, and hopefully you learn from it.
What makes Jake a hero to many readers is his slight hope. He was not after empty experience. He was searching for meaning, and hoping that as he got older, he would discover that meaning. Of course, that hope is tempered with cynicism, as he realizes this current philosophy will seem silly in five years. Money is important to society, more so after the war, and Jake has adopted it because it's the only way he can define his hunt for a philosophy with meaning.
5) “Yes. . . . Isn't it pretty to think so?” Page 247
This is the last line in the book. Brett has sent Pedro away so she won’t ruin
him, and she and Jake are in a taxi, driving around Madrid. Jake puts his arm
around her, and they are comfortable. Brett says, "We could have had such a
damned good time together,” and this quote is Jake’s reply.
The castration theme echoes throughout the book. While Jake is physically unable to perform, like the bulls, Brett symbolically castrates the men who chase after her. Cohn and Mike are left in shambles by the end of the book, and Brett foresees the same fate for Pedro, so she leaves him, calling herself a bitch. Had Jake been able to perform, he most likely would not have escaped this fate either, and by
Assignment 1- Study Questions: Address the following questions. Please type your responses (MLA format), save your work as a Microsoft Word document, and e-mail it to me by class time on the date due. If for some reason you are incapable of submitting your assignment in this manner, please be sure to bring a typed hard copy to class on the date due. PLEASE NOTE: IT IS PREFERRED THAT YOU SUBMIT YOUR ASSIGNMENT VIA EMAIL.
Book I
Chapter 1
1. Describe Robert’s experiences with women. Why was he devastated by his
divorce? How has Frances affected his life? How has their relationship changed?
Why? How does this prepare the way for Robert’s relationship with Brett?
2. Explain why Hemingway begins the novel with this chapter. Why is Cohn important enough to describe in detail? What clues does Jake give the reader to his negative feelings toward Robert?
Chapter 2
3. Compare Jake’s and Robert’s views of life. Why does Robert think South
America will cure his dissatisfaction? How have Robert’s interests and goals
been developed? Jake’s?
4. Discuss this quotation: “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.” How does this foreshadow Jake’s afición values? Why does Jake feel life must be lived to the fullest? How does the “lost generation” fit into this attitude?
Chapter 3
5. Show Paris as a wasteland. How are perversions of love demonstrated? How does
Georgette fit into this? What is the significance of Jake’s anger in the dancing
club?
6. Explain Georgette’s comment, “Everybody’s sick.” How is this a statement on society? How does Jake’s injury represent society? Are there other “sick” characters in the novel?
Chapter 4
7. Explain Brett’s quote, “Don’t we pay for all the things we do . . . ? Why
does Brett feel she is being punished? How? To what extent are the wounds the
result of external forces?
8. How does Jake deal with his impotence? How do other people see it? Explain the quotation, “You, a foreigner . . . have given more than your life.” Does Jake agree? How is his impotence relevant to society’s?
Chapters 5-6
9. Describe the relationship between Frances and Robert. How does Frances feel
his leaving her demonstrates the aspect of his character of seeking adventures
through books? Why doesn’t Robert defend himself? How was their relationship
developed through his insecurities?
10. Contrast the normal people presented in the reading with Jake’s Paris friends. How are Krum and Woolsey different from Jake’s other friends? Why does Jake walk to work? How do the characters presented as normal working people contrast to Harvey Stone? Frances?
Chapter 7
11. Describe Count Mippipopolous. What things does he value? What do all those
things have in common? How does he represent the “lost generation”?
12. Explain Brett’s statement, “You haven’t any values. You’re dead, that’s all.” How does this describe Paris as a wasteland in Book I? How does this relate to the count? Jake? Herself?
Book II
Chapter 8
13. Relate the incident with racial prejudice in Vienna. Why does Bill remember
this so vividly? Why does Brett compare Vienna to Paris? How does she feel about
this? Bill?
14. Contrast Mike and Bill. How do they each handle alcohol? What is the difference between their finances? What are their topics of conversation (i.e., prejudice in Vienna vs. Brett’s hat)?
Chapter 9
15. How does Brett’s revelation about San Sebastian affect Jake? Why had she
gone? What does this tell about Brett? How does this drive a deeper wedge
between Robert and Jake?
16. Describe the scenes on the train. How does the “pilgrimage to Rome” of the Catholics on the train parallel to the pilgrimage of Jake, Bill, and Robert? What are they looking for? What is the relationship of Jake to the Catholic church?
Chapters 10-11
17. Compare Bill and Jake’s comments on surroundings with Cohn’s for
appropriateness. How is this indicative of the way Robert and Jake approach
life? How does this impact the deterioration of Jake and Robert’s relationship?
18. Contrast France and Spain. How does each represent a difference in values? What do the churches that are described have to do with those values? How does Jake’s statement, “I only wish I felt religious and maybe I would the next time” fit this?
Chapter 12
19. Comment on Bill’s feelings about expatriates who lose “touch with the soil .
. . drink yourself to death . . . become obsessed by sex . . . spend all your
time talking, not working.” How does this describe Jake or his friends? Jakes’s
attitude? Why is this good or bad?
20. Show how Bill and Jake’s fishing trip is similar to a religious experience? How does the wine drinking resemble communion? How does Bill’s observation “Our stay on earth is not long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks” relate? What does this have to do with the theme?
Chapter 13
21. Discuss afición. How does Montoya treat aficións differently?
How does this relate to Jake? Montoya? Bill?
22. What is the difference between bulls and steers? What does this conversation represent in the values and characters of the people of Hemingway’s time? In Jake’s group, who are bulls and who are steers?
23. Tell Mike’s story of the medals. What does this demonstrate about his character? How is this incident representative of the “lost generation”?
Chapters 14-15
24. Explain Jake’s statement, “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s
worth and knowing when you had it.” What is “it”? Why is Jake more interested in
how to live rather than why? Where does Jake’s relationship with Robert fit into
this?
25. Show Romero as a Christ figure. What are the circumstances when the reader first sees him? Explain the quote, “The others can’t ever learn what he was born with.” How does this fit the religious reference?
Chapter 16
26. Describe the setting up of Brett and Romero’s affair. What is the
significance of it? Tell why Jake’s role in the affair violated his code.
Discuss Robert’s charge that Jake is a “pimp.”
27. Explain why Montoya wants to protect Romero. How does he do that? How does Jake react to the invitation from the American ambassador? How does his involvement with Brett and Pedro contradict this? How does Montoya react?
Chapter 17
28. Describe Robert’s fights for Brett. How does this relate to Robert’s
experiencing life through books? Why is Robert the loser though he badly beat
Jake? Romero?
29. Describe Jake’s awakening after Robert calls him a “pimp” and hits him. Why is the statement the truth? How does his walk show renewed sensations about life? What does the bath represent?
30. Explain the quote, “All for sport. All for pleasure.” How does this relate to bullfighting? Relationships? The “lost generation”? Jake?
Chapter 18
31. Describe the ceremony before and during the final bullfight. Why does Romero
wait to kill the bull? What are examples of the tradition involved? Compare
Romero’s final fight with his fight with Robert.
32. Compare and contrast the three bullfighters. Why does Romero’s attention to the old style make him more skillful? Why does Belmonte think “Pedro had the greatness”? Do their styles suggest other characters in the novel?
Book III
Chapter 19
33. Compare the bullfighters and bike racers. What is meant by, “They did not
take the race seriously except among themselves.” How does his relate to the
“lost generation”?
34. Give reasons for Brett and Romero’s breakup. How does this show growth for Brett? What does the quote, “It’s sort of what we have instead of God,” mean?
35. Explain Jake’s comment, “Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right.” How does this relate to the final quote: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Does this show growth for Jake? What does it mean?
Assignment 2- Log Assignments: In at least one page for each, address four of the following questions. Please type your responses (MLA format), save the assignment as a Microsoft Word document, and e-mail it to me by class time on the date due. If for some reason you are incapable of submitting your assignment in this manner, please be sure to bring a typed hard copy to class on the date due. PLEASE NOTE: IT IS PREFERRED THAT YOU SUBMIT YOUR ASSIGNMENT VIA EMAIL.
1. According to Carlos Baker, Hemingway stated that The Sun Also Rises is not a "hollow or bitter satire," but a tragedy. Discuss this interpretation of the novel.
2. How does Hemingway employ the ritual of the bullfight in this novel?
3. How does Hemingway utilize vocabulary and syntax to achieve the "Hemingway style"?
4. What is the significance of the title of the novel, The Sun Also Rises?
5. Identify the most significant symbol in the novel and justify your choice.
6. State one possible theme of the novel, and support your position.
7. Give your opinion on why The Sun Also Rises is considered an important novel in the canon of world literature, and why it was seminal in the nomination of Hemingway as a Nobel Prize winner.
8. Describe how the setting complements the primary themes of the novel.
9. Explain why Hemingway begins the novel with the first chapter. Why is Cohn important enough to describe in detail? What clues does Jake give the reader to his negative feelings toward Robert?
10. Show Paris as a wasteland. How are perversions of love demonstrated? How does Georgette fit into this? What is the significance of Jake’s anger in the dancing club?
11. How does Jake deal with his impotence? How do other people see it? Explain the quotation, “You, a foreigner . . . have given more than your life.” Does Jake agree? How is his impotence relevant to society’s?
12. Describe Count Mippipopolous. What things does he value? What do all those things have in common? How does he represent the “lost generation”?
13. Contrast France and Spain. How does each represent a difference in values?
14. Consider Mike’s story of the medals. What does this demonstrate about his character? How is this incident representative of the “lost generation”?
15. Explain Jake’s statement, “Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.” What is “it”? Why is Jake more interested in how to live rather than why? Where does Jake’s relationship with Robert fit into this?
16. Show how Bill and Jake’s fishing trip is similar to a religious experience. What does this have to do with the theme?
17. Explain why Montoya wants to protect Romero.
Assignment 3- Essay: Write a formal, MLA-formatted essay in which you present your analysis of the novel. You may address any element of the novel (theme, setting, character, etc.), but remember to FOCUS YOUR THESIS STATEMENT. This essay is not to be a comprehensive analysis of ALL elements of the novel. Rather, you determine what issue related to the novel is significant and is worthy of exploration in writing.
As always, your essay is to demonstrate ALL that you have learned about formal writing. Follow the appropriate formatting, usage and style guidelines. Be intellectually honest.
As always, direct quotes are not recommended. They are REQUIRED.
When you have completed your essay, e-mail it to me at gaplatt@earthlink.net.
Are you stuck? Can't get your mind to "go to" the significance of the novel? Here are some questions to ask yourself. They might help....
How are Oedipus The King, The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises all, to a certain extent, tragedies? What has Aristotle written on the subject?
What are the themes of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises?
Do you see a connection between this novel and The Great Gatsby? Do you see a progression of the ideas central to the modernist movement?
Assignment 4- Poster Assignment: Form groups. On the topic below to which your group has been assigned, find a quote that exemplifies the topic, and then illustrate it on a poster.
Group 1: Night time
Group 2: Awakening
Group 3: Morality/ Integrity
Group 4: Fear
Group 5: Sacrifice
Group 6: Infertility
Group 7: Payment
Group 8: Innocence
Group 9: The Wasteland
Group10: Corruption
Group 11: Prayer
Group 12: Nature