"The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway

I only discovered this much later, but when I was in middle school and high school, there were two rival camps of English and American literature teachers. One camp celebrated all things Ernest Hemingway. The other believed the sun rose and set with F. Scott Fitzgerald.  

The two camps didn’t get along. 

 

My eighth-grade literature teacher was a Hemingway fan. But she faced a problem. She’d already gotten into trouble for assigning The Lord of the Flies and The Day of the Triffids to our all-boys class. And she loved Hemingway, but she knew he might be problematic. Her solution was to have us read The Old Man and the Sea, which had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and whose author had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. How could the principal and parents argue with that?

 

The author’s name you did not mention in her presence was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

My American literature teacher during my junior year in high school was squarely in Fitzgerald’s camp. Hemingway was not a writer, she sniffed; at best you might consider him a journalist. She was eloquent in her praise of The Great Gatsby, but The Old Man and the Sea proved you couldn’t trust the judgment of the Pulitzer Prize jurors. And Hemingway wrote about all kinds of unseemly, unmentionable things. She didn’t say anything about Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, which, one might argue, has an unseemly, unmentionable thing at its heart.

 

I had never read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which has at its core an unseemly, unmentionable thing, at least in the 1920s – a man’s impotence due to a war injury. The man is Jake Barnes, who works as a journalist (much like Hemingway did) in Paris. He speaks French and Spanish, in addition to his native American English, and he does what Americans of the Lost Generation do in Paris of the 1920s – visit night clubs and bars and drink a lot. Barnes is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, an Englishwoman in the process of divorce and re-marriage, who also has a string of affairs. Because everyone loves Brett Ashley, everyone forgives her affairs. Even her fiancé. 

 

Hemingway in the 1920s

We suspect, but can’t prove, that Lady Ashley’s affairs have everything to do with the fact that she loves Barnes, but it is a love that can never be consummated. Everyone else becomes a substitute.

 

Barnes and his circle travel to Spain for the annual running of the bulls and the bullfights. Barnes himself and his friend Bill also go for the trout fishing (Hemingway liked fishing stories). And it is there, in Spain, that the story reaches its crisis, although Hemingway’s famous writing style almost disguises the fact that the story is building toward a crisis. The bullfights are a metaphor, a plot development device, and a symbol for what the story is about. Barnes’ impotence, though barely mentioned, is also a symbol of a man who can’t fully live life and is consigned to living it vicariously through others (I’m not sure if it’s a commentary on journalism or not).

 

The Sun Also Rises is almost a century old (first published in 1926), but it reads almost like a contemporary novel. Hemingway wrote sparingly; he didn’t like many adjectives or adverbs. He also wrote almost stepwise and very matter-of-factly, not unlike the way journalists used to write (“He picked up his glass; he drank from his glass; he put the glass down.”). 

 

It’s significant that, with the exception of Brett Ashley, all of the characters are male, and even Ashley has a male name. This masculine focus has made Hemingway something of a persona non grata in many academic and literary circles today. I was also somewhat surprised at the rather open anti-Semitism that focuses on one character. 

 

The Sun Also Rises builds slowly. You don’t realize the grip the story has on you until deep into the narrative. The people are indeed card-carrying members of the Lost Generation. They can’t have what they desire most, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to obtain it.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Past as Enemy Country: Why Teachers of Great Books Should Be Teaching History, Too – James Hankins at Public Discourse. 

 

Dostoevsky the Prophet – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

What Problem Does ChatGPT Solve? – Jeffrrey Bilbro at Plough.

And Monday -- poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.