爱华网The first edition of The Sun Also Rises published in 1926 by Scribner's, with dust jacket illustrated by Cleonike Damianakes. The cover uses a Hellenistic design and was intended to tastefully suggest a quasi-sexual theme.[1]
The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel written by Ernest Hemingway about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work",[2] and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel.[3] The novel was published in the US in October 1926 by the publishing house Scribner's. A year later, in 1927, the British publishing house Jonathan Cape published the novel in England with the title of Fiesta. Since then it has been continuously in print.
Hemingway began writing the novel on his birthday (21July) in 1925, finishing the draft manuscript barely two months later in September. After setting aside the manuscript for a short period, he worked on revisions during the winter of 1926. The basis for the novel was Hemingway's 1925 trip to Spain. The setting was unique and memorable, showing the seedy café life in Paris, and the excitement of the Pamplona festival, with a middle section devoted to descriptions of a fishing trip in the Pyrenees. Equally unique was Hemingway's spare writing style, combined with his restrained use of description to convey characterizations and action, which became known as the iceberg theory.
On the surface the novel is a love story between the protagonist Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona. The novel is a roman à clef; the characters are based on real people and the action is based on real events. In the novel, Hemingway presents his notion that the "Lost Generation", considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong. Additionally, Hemingway investigates the themes of love, death, renewal in nature, and the nature of masculinity.
Contents
[hide]
1 Background
2 Publication history
3 Plot summary
4 Major themes 4.1 Paris and the Lost Generation
4.2 Women and love
4.3 The corrida, the fiesta, and nature
4.4 Masculinity and gender
4.5 Anti-semitism
5 Writing style
6 Reception
7 Legacy and adaptations
8 Notes 8.1 References
8.2 Sources
9 External links
[edit] Background
In the 1920s Hemingway lived in Paris, was foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and traveled to places such as Smyrna to report about the Greco-Turkish War. He wanted to use his journalism experience to write fiction, believing that a story could be based on real events when a writer distilled his own experiences in such a way that, according to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, "what he made up was truer than what he remembered."[4]
Ernest Hemingway (with the mustache) with Lady Duff Twysden (wearing a hat), Hadley, and three men at a café in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925.
With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting.[5] The Hemingways returned to Pamplona in 1924—enjoying the trip immensely—this time accompanied by Chink Dorman-Smith, John Dos Passos, and Donald Ogden Stewart and his wife.[6] The couple returned a third time in June1925; that year they brought with them a different group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently divorced), her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb.[7] In Pamplona the group quickly disintegrated. Hemingway, attracted to Lady Duff, was jealous of Loeb, who had recently been on a romantic getaway with her; by the end of the week the two men had a public fistfight. Against this background was the influence of the young matador from Ronda, Cayetano Ordó?ez, whose brilliance in the bullring affected the spectators. Ordó?ez honored Lady Duff—though she failed to appreciate it—by presenting her, from the bullring, with the ear of a bull he killed. Outside of Pamplona, the fishing trip to the Irati River (near Burguete in Navarre) was marred by polluted water.[7]
Hemingway intended to write a non-fiction book about bullfighting but thought that the week's experiences had presented him with enough material for a novel.[6] A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (21July), he began to write the draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later.[8] By 17August, with 14 chapters written and a working title of Fiesta chosen, Hemingway returned to Paris. He finished the draft on 21September1925, writing a forward the following weekend and changing the title to The Lost Generation.[9]
A few months later, in December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer joined them in January and against Hadley's advice urged him to sign a contract with Scribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the publishers, and on his return, during a stop in Paris, began an affair with Pauline, before returning to Schruns to finish the revisions in March.[10] In June, he was in Pamplona with Hadley and Pauline. On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation and left for the south of France.[11] In August, alone in Paris, he completed the proofs, and dedicated the novel to his wife and son.[12] After the publication of the book in October, Hadley asked for a divorce, and he gave her the royalties from The Sun Also Rises.[13]
[edit] Publication history
Hemingway spent December 1925 in Schruns, Austria with Hadley and Jack. During that period he wrote The Torrents of Spring.
Hemingway likely broke the contract with his publisher for the opportunity to have The Sun Also Rises published by Scribner's. In December 1925 he quickly wrote The Torrents of Spring—a satirical novella about the publishing industry—and sent it to his publishers Boni & Liveright. His three-book contract with them included a termination clause should they reject a single submission. Unamused by the satire, Boni & Liveright immediately rejected it and terminated the contract.[14] Within weeks Hemingway signed a contract with Scribner's, who agreed to publish The Torrents of Spring and all of his subsequent work.[15][note 1]
Scribner's published the novel on 22October1926. Its first edition consisted of 5090 copies, selling at $2.00 per copy.[16] Cleonike Damianakes illustrated the dust jacket with a Hellenistic design of a scantily robed woman, head bent, one hand holding an apple, thighs exposed. The title was decorated with apples—the intent was to present a quasi-sexual image tastefully.[1] Two months later the book was in a second printing with 7000 copies sold. Subsequent printings were ordered; by 1928, after the publication of Hemingway's short story collection Men Without Women, the novel was in its eighth printing.[17][18] In 1927 the novel was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape, title Fiesta, and the novel's two epigraphs were left out in the UK edition.[19] In the 1990s, the British editions were titled Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises.[20] Two decades later, in 1947, Scribner's released three of Hemingway's works as a boxed set, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.[21]
In 1983 The New York Times reported that The Sun Also Rises had been in print continuously since its publication in 1926, and was likely one of the most translated titles in the world. At that time Scribner's began to print cheaper mass-market paperbacks of the book, in addition to the more expensive trade paperbacks already in print.[22] In 2006 Simon & Schuster began to produce audiobook versions of Hemingway's novels, including The Sun Also Rises.[23]
In 2004 a first edition of the novel, with dust jacket and an inscription by Hemingway, was expected to sell at auction for between $80,000 and $120,000.[24]
[edit] Plot summary
The protagonist of The Sun Also Rises is Jake Barnes, an expatriate American journalist living in Paris. Jake suffered a war wound that has caused him to be impotent, though the nature of his wound is never explicitly described in the novel. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman. Brett, with her bobbed hair, embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s, having had numerous love affairs. Book One is set in the Café society of Paris. In the opening scenes, Jake plays tennis with his college friend Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute (Georgette), and runs into Brett and Count Mippipopolous in a nightclub. Brett and Jake leave together; in a taxi she tells him she loves him, but they know they have no chance at a lasting relationship.
In Book Two Jake is joined by Bill Gorton, recently arrived from New York, and Brett's fiancé Mike Campbell, who arrives from Scotland. Jake and Bill travel to Spain, where they meet Robert Cohn north of Pamplona for a fishing trip. Cohn, however, leaves for Pamplona to wait for Brett and Mike. Cohn had an affair with Brett a year earlier and still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. Jake and Bill enjoy five days of tranquillity, fishing the streams near Burguete, after which they rejoin the group in Pamplona, where they begin to drink heavily. Cohn's presence is increasingly resented by the others, who taunt him with anti-semitic remarks. During the fiesta the characters drink, eat, watch the running of the bulls, attend bullfights, and bicker with each other. Jake introduces Brett to Romero at Montoya's inn; she is smitten with the 19-year-old matador and seduces him. The jealous tension between the men builds; Mike, Jake, Cohn, and Romero each love Brett. Cohn, who had been a champion boxer in college, has fistfights with Jake, Mike, and Romero, whom he injures. Despite the tension, Romero continues to perform brilliantly in the bullring.
Book Three shows the characters in the aftermath of the fiesta. Sober again, they leave Pamplona. Bill returns to Paris, Mike stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastián in northeastern Spain. As Jake is about to return to Paris he receives a telegram from Brett, who left for Madrid with Romero, asking for help. He finds her in a cheap hotel, without money, and without Romero. She announces she has decided to marry Mike. The novel ends with Jake and Brett in a taxi speaking of the things that might have been.
[edit] Major themes
[edit] Paris and the Lost Generation
Gertrude Stein in 1924 with Hemingway's son Jack. She coined the phrase "Lost Generation".
The first book of The Sun Also Rises is set in mid-1920s Paris. Americans were drawn to Paris in the Roaring Twenties by the favorable exchange rate, with as many as 200,000 English-speaking expatriates living there. The Paris Tribune reported in 1925 that Paris had an American Hospital, an American Library, and an American Chamber of Commerce.[25] Many American writers were disenchanted with the US, where they found less artistic freedom than in Europe. Hemingway had more artistic freedom in Paris than in the US at a period when Ulysses, written by his friend James Joyce, was banned and burned in New York.[26]
The themes of The Sun Also Rises are apparent from its two epigraphs. The first is an allusion to the "Lost Generation", a term coined by Gertrude Stein referring to the post-war generation;[note 2][27] the other epigraph is a long quotation from Ecclesiastes: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."[28] Hemingway told his editor Max Perkins that the book was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever". He thought the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.[29]
Hemingway scholar Wagner-Martin writes that Hemingway wanted the book to be about morality, which he emphasized by changing the working title from Fiesta to The Sun Also Rises. The book can be read either as a novel about bored expatriates or as a morality tale about a protagonist who searches for integrity in an immoral world.[30] Months before Hemingway left for Pamplona, the press was depicting the Parisian Latin Quarter, where he lived, as decadent and depraved. He began writing the novel as a story of a matador corrupted by the influence of the Latin Quarter crowd; he then expanded it into a novel about Jake Barnes at risk of being corrupted by the wealthy and inauthentic expatriates.[31]
Hemingway at home in his apartment on the Left Bank, Paris, 1924
The characters form a group, sharing similar norms, and each greatly affected by the war.[30] Hemingway captures the angst of the age and transcends Brett and Jake's love story, although they are representative of the period: Brett is starved for reassurance and love and Jake is sexually maimed. His wound symbolizes the disability of the age, the disillusion, and the frustrations felt by an entire generation.[30]
Hemingway thought he lost touch with American values while living in Paris, but his biographer Michael Reynolds claims the opposite, seeing evidence of the author's midwestern American values in the novel. Hemingway admired hard work. He portrayed the matadors and the prostitutes, who work for a living, in a positive manner, but Brett, who prostitutes herself, is emblematic of "the rotten crowd" living on inherited money. It is Jake, the working journalist, who pays the bills again and again when those that can pay do not. Hemingway shows, through Jake's actions, his disapproval of people who did not pay up.[32] Reynolds says that Hemingway shows the tragedy, not so much of the decadence of the Montparnasse crowd, but of the self-destruction of American values of the period. As such the author created an American hero who is impotent and powerless. Jake becomes the moral center of the story. He never considers himself part of the expatriate crowd because he is a working man; to Jake a working man is genuine and authentic, and those who do not work for a living spend their lives posing.[33]
[edit] Women and love
In Lady Brett Ashley, Hemingway created a character who reflected her time. Paris was a city where divorce was common and easy to be had in the mid-1920s. The twice-divorced Brett represented the liberated new woman.[34] James Nagel writes that Hemingway created in Brett one of the more fascinating women in 20th-century American literature. Sexually promiscuous, she is a denizen of Parisian nightlife and cafés. In Pamplona she is out of her element and causes chaos: in her presence, the men drink too much and fight; she seduces the young bullfighter; she literally becomes a Circe in the festival.[35] Critics describe her variously as complicated, elusive, and enigmatic; Donald Daiker writes that Hemingway "treats her with a delicate balance of sympathy and antipathy".[36] She is vulnerable, forgiving, independent—qualities that Hemingway juxtaposes with the other women in the book, who are either prostitutes or overbearing nags.[37]
Nagel considers the novel a tragedy. Jake and Brett, in spite of their love, have a relationship that becomes destructive because the love cannot be consummated. Brett destroys Jake's friendship with Cohn, and in Pamplona she ruins his hard-won reputation among the Spaniards.[35] Meyers sees Brett as a woman who wants sex without love while Jake can only accept love without sex. Although Brett sleeps with many men, it is Jake she loves.[38] Dana Fore writes that Brett is willing to be with Jake in spite of his disability, in a "non-traditional erotic relationship".[39] Other critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Nina Baym see her as a supreme bitch; Fiedler sees Brett as one of the "outstanding examples of Hemingway's 'bitch women'".[40][41] Jake ends up pimping Brett to Romero and becomes bitter, as when he says, "Send a girl off with a man.... Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love."[42]
Critics interpret the Jake–Brett relationship in various ways. Daiker suggests that Brett's behavior in Madrid—after Romero leaves and when Jake arrives at her summons—reflects her immorality.[43] Scott Donaldson thinks Hemingway presents the Jake–Brett relationship in such a manner that Jake knew "that in having Brett for a friend 'he had been getting something for nothing' and that sooner or later he would have to pay the bill".[44] Daiker notes that Brett relies on Jake to pay for her train fare from Madrid to San Sebastián, where she rejoins her fiancée Mike.[45] In a piece Hemingway cut, he has Jake thinking, "you learned a lot about a woman by not sleeping with her".[46] By the end of the novel, Jake likely has changed—although he loves Brett, he undergoes a transformation—and in Madrid he finally begins to distance himself from her.[46] Reynolds believes that Jake represents the "everyman" and that in the course of the narrative he loses his honor, faith, and hope. He sees the novel as a morality play with Jake as the person who loses the most.[47]
[edit] The corrida, the fiesta, and nature
Ernest Hemingway (in white trousers) fighting a bull in the amateur corrida at Pamplona fiesta, July 1925.
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway contrasts Paris with Spain, and the frenzy of the fiesta with the tranquillity of the Spanish landscape. Spain was Hemingway's favorite European country; he considered it a healthy place, and the only country "that hasn't been shot to pieces".[48] He was profoundly affected by the spectacle of bullfighting, writing, "It isn't just brutal like they always told us. It's a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It's just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you."[48] He demonstrated what he considered the purity in the culture of bullfighting—called afición—and presented it as an authentic way of life, contrasted against the inauthenticity of the Parisian bohemians.[49] To be accepted as an aficionado was rare for a non-Spaniard; Jake goes through a difficult process to gain acceptance by the "fellowship of afición".[50] Hemingway scholar Allen Josephs thinks the novel centers around the corrida, (the bullfighting), and how each character reacts to it. Brett's reaction is to seduce the matador; Cohn fails to understand and expects to be bored; Jake understands fully because only he moves between the world of the inauthentic expatriates and the authentic Spaniards; the hotel-keeper Montoya is the keeper of the faith; and Romero is the artist in the ring—he is both innocent and perfect and the one who bravely faces death.[51] The corrida is presented as an idealized drama where the matador faces death, creating a moment of existentialism, or nada (nothingness), broken when death is vanquished and the animal killed.[52]
Hemingway named his character Romero for Pedro Romero, shown here in Goya's etching Pedro Romero Killing the Halted Bull (1816).
Hemingway presents matadors as heroic characters dancing in a bullring. He considered the bullring as war with precise rules, in contrast to the messiness of the real war that he, and by extension Jake, experienced.[30] Critic Keneth Kinnamon notes that young Romero is the novel's only honorable character.[50] Hemingway named Romero after Pedro Romero, an 18th-century bullfighter who killed thousands of bulls in the most difficult manner: having the bull impale itself on his sword as he stood perfectly still. Reynolds says Romero, who symbolizes the classically pure matador, is the "one idealized figure in the novel".[53] Josephs says that when Hemingway changed Romero's name from Guerrita and imbued him with the characteristics of the historical Romero, he also changed the scene in which Romero kills a bull recibiendo (receiving the bull) in homage to the historical namesake.[54]
Before the group arrives in Pamplona, Jake, Bill and Cohn take a fishing trip to the Irati River. As Harold Bloom points out, the scene serves as an interlude between the Paris and Pamplona sections, "an oasis that exists outside linear time". More importantly, on another level it reflects "the mainstream of American fiction beginning with the Pilgrims seeking refuge from English oppression"—the prominent theme in American literature of escaping into the wilderness, as seen in Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Thoreau.[55] Fiedler calls the theme "The Sacred Land"; he thinks the American west is evoked in The Sun Also Rises by the Pyrenees and even given a symbolic nod with the naming of the "Hotel Montana".[40] In Hemingway's writing, nature is a place of refuge and rebirth, according to Stoltzfus, where the hunter or fisherman gains a moment of transcendence at the moment the prey is killed.[52] Furthermore, nature is where men are without women: men fish, men hunt, men find redemption.[40] In nature Jake and Bill do not need to discuss the war because their war experience, paradoxically, is ever-present. The nature scenes also serve as counterpoint to the fiesta scenes.[30]
All of the characters drink heavily during the fiesta and generally throughout the novel. In his essay "Alcoholism in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises", Matts Djos says the main characters exhibit alcoholic tendencies such as depression, anxiety and sexual inadequacy. He writes that Jake's self-pity is symptomatic of an alcoholic, as is Brett's out-of-control behavior.[56] William Balassi thinks that Jake gets drunk to avoid his feelings for Brett, notably in the Madrid scenes at the end where he has three martinis before lunch and drinks three bottles of wine with lunch.[57] Reynolds, however, believes the drinking becomes more relevant when set against the historical context of Prohibition in the United States. The atmosphere of the fiesta lends itself to drunkenness, but the degree of revelry reflects a reaction against Prohibition. Bill, visiting from the US, drinks in Paris and in Spain. Jake is rarely drunk in Paris where he works, but on vacation in Pamplona he drinks constantly. Reynolds says that Prohibition split attitudes about morality, and in the novel Hemingway made clear his dislike of Prohibition.[58]
[edit] Masculinity and gender
Critics have seen Jake as an ambiguous code hero of Hemingway manliness. Critic Philip Young believes that Jake is an extension of Hemingway's autobiographical character Nick Adams, first introduced in his earlier short stories.[59] However, Kathy and Arnold Davidson write in "Decoding the Hemingway Hero" that neither Jake nor the novel itself should be minimized to such an extent,[60] for there are many ambiguities. For example, in the bar scene in Paris, Jake is angry at the homosexual men. Elliot believes that Hemingway viewed homosexuality as an inauthentic way of life, but he aligns Jake with homosexual men because, like them, he does not have sex with women. Jake's anger shows his self-hatred at his inauthenticity and lack of masculinity.[61] His sense of masculine identity is lost—he is less than a man.[62] Hemingway's writing has been called homophobic. For example, in the fishing scenes, Bill confesses his fondness for Jake but then goes on to say, "I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot."[63] Elliot wonders if Jake's wound perhaps signifies latent homosexuality, rather than only a loss of masculinity.[64] Romero is the symbol of masculine identity; at the bullring Jake can only be a spectator.[62] The Davidsons write that Romero reflects the code of masculinity in his bravery, and that Brett is attracted to him for this reason.[65] Jake destroys the code hero Romero in bringing Brett to him, diminishing him and diminishing his own afición.[66]
Critics have examined issues of gender misidentification that are prevalent in much of Hemingway's work. He was interested in cross-gender themes, as shown by his depictions of effeminate men and boyish women.[67] In his fiction, a woman's hair is often symbolically important and used to denote gender. Brett, with her short hair, is androgynous and compared to a boy—yet the ambiguity lies in the fact that she is described as a "damned fine-looking woman". Her feminine traits are minimized and her masculine traits emphasized.[68] Daiker speculates that Romero may have left Brett because he disliked her image and her short hair; she lacked the womanly qualities he wanted.[69]
[edit] Anti-semitism
Mike lay on the bed looking like a death mask of himself. He opened his eyes and looked at me.
'Hello Jake' he said very slowly. 'I'm getting a little sleep. I've wanted a little sleep for a long time ....'
'You'll sleep, Mike. Don't worry, boy.'
'Brett's got a bullfighter,' Mike said. 'But her Jew has gone away .... Damned good thing, what?'
— The Sun Also Rises [70]
Hemingway has been called anti-semitic, most notably because of the language he used and the characterization of Robert Cohn in the book. Cohn is often referred to a "kike" or Jew.[71] It was Harold Loeb, on whom Cohn's character is based, who perhaps lost the most when Hemingway immortalized him as the unlikeable Jew in the story. As Susan Beegel writes about Cohn, "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew."[72] Shunned by the other members of the group, Cohn is characterized as "different", unable or unwilling to understand and participate in the fiesta.[71] Cohn is never really part of the group—separated by his difference or his Jewishness.[30] Reynolds writes that in 1925 Loeb should have declined Hemingway's invitation to join them in Pamplona. Before the trip he was Lady Duff's lover and Hemingway's friend; during the fiasco of the fiesta he lost Lady Duff and Hemingway's friendship, but more importantly Hemingway based on Loeb a character chiefly remembered as a "rich Jew".[73] Hemingway critic Josephine Knopf thinks Hemingway likely intended to depict Cohn as a "shlemiel" (or fool), but that Cohn is the least authentically presented character in the book, lacking any of the characteristics of a traditional "shlemiel".[74]
[edit] Writing style
The novel is well-known for its style, which is variously described as modern, hard-boiled, or understated.[75] As a novice writer and journalist in Paris, Hemingway turned to Ezra Pound—who had a reputation as "an unofficial minister of culture who acted as mid-wife for new literary talent"—to mark and blue-ink his short stories.[76] From Pound Hemingway learned to write in the modernist style: he used understatement, pared away sentimentalism, and presented images and scenes without explanations of meaning, most noticeably at the book's conclusion, in which multiple future possibilities are left for Brett and Jake.[75][note 3] Hemingway scholar Anders Hallengren writes that because Hemingway learned from Pound to "distrust adjectives" he created a style "in accordance with the esthetics and ethics of raising the emotional temperature towards the level of universal truth by shutting the door on sentiment, on the subjective."[77]
F.Scott Fitzgerald told Hemingway to "let the book's action play itself out among its characters". Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin writes that, in taking Fitzgerald's advice, Hemingway produced a novel without a central narrator: "Hemingway's book was a step ahead; it was the modernist novel."[78] When Fitzgerald advised Hemingway to trim at least 2500 words from the opening sequence, which was 30 pages long, Hemingway instead wired the publishers telling them to cut the opening 30 pages altogether. The result was a novel without a focused starting point, which was seen as a modern perspective and critically well-received.[79]
Each time he let the bull pass so close that the man and the bull and the cape that filled and pivoted ahead of the bull were all one sharply etched mass. It was all so slow and so controlled. It was though he were rocking the bull to sleep. He made four veronicas like that... and came away toward the applause, his hand on his hip, his cape on his arm, and the bull watching his back going away.
—bullfighting scene from The Sun Also Rises [80]
Wagner-Martin speculates that Hemingway may have wanted to have a weak or negative hero as defined by Edith Wharton, but he had no experience creating a hero or protagonist. At that point his fiction consisted of extremely short stories, not one of which featured a hero.[30] The hero changed during the writing of The Sun Also Rises: first the matador was the hero, then Cohn was the hero, then Brett, and finally Hemingway realized "maybe there is not any hero at all. Maybe a story is better without any hero."[81] Balassi believes that in eliminating other characters as the protagonist he brought Jake indirectly into the role as the novel's hero.[82]
As a roman à clef, the novel bases its characters on real people, causing scandal in the expatriate community. Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker writes that "word-of-mouth of the book" helped sales. Parisian expatriates gleefully tried to match the fictional characters to real identities. Moreover, he writes that Hemingway used prototypes easily found in the Latin Quarter on which to base his characters.[83] The early draft included the real names of the group; Jake's character was called Hem, and Brett's was called "Duff".[84]
Although the novel is written in a journalistic style, Frederic Svoboda writes that the striking thing about the work is "how quickly it moves away from a simple recounting of events".[85] Jackson Benson believes that Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices for life in general. For example, Benson says that Hemingway drew out his experiences with "what-if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?"[86] Hemingway believed that the writer could describe one thing while an entirely different thing occurs below the surface—an approach he called the iceberg theory, or the theory of omission.[87]
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
—Hemingway explained the iceberg theory in Death in the Afternoon (1932).[88]
Balassi says Hemingway applied the iceberg theory better in The Sun Also Rises than in any of his other works, by editing away extraneous material or purposely leaving gaps in the story. He made editorial remarks in the manuscript that show he wanted to break from the stricture of Gertrude Stein's advice to use "clear restrained writing". In the earliest draft the novel begins in Pamplona, but Hemingway moved the opening setting to Paris because he thought the Montparnasse life was necessary as a counterpoint to the later action in Spain. He wrote of Paris extensively, intending "not to be limited by the literary theories of others, [but] to write in his own way, and possibly, to fail."[89] He added metaphors for each character: Mike's money problems, Brett's association with the Circe myth, Cohn's association with the segregated steer.[90] It wasn't until the revision process that he pared down the story, taking out unnecessary explanations, minimizing descriptive passages, and stripping down the dialogue, all of which created a "complex but tightly compressed story".[91]
Hemingway admitted that he learned what he needed as a foundation for his writing from the style sheet for The Kansas City Star, where he worked as cub reporter.[note 4][92] Critic John Aldridge says that the minimalist style resulted from Hemingway's belief that to write authentically, each word had to be carefully chosen for its simplicity and authenticity and carry a great deal of weight. Aldridge writes that Hemingway's style "of a minimum of simple words that seemed to be squeezed onto the page against a great compulsion to be silent, creates the impression that those words—if only because there are so few of them—are sacramental."[93] In Paris Hemingway had been experimenting with the prosody of the King James Bible, reading aloud with his friend John Dos Passos. From the style of the biblical text he learned to increment his prose; the action in the novel builds sentence by sentence, scene by scene and chapter by chapter.[30]
L'Estaque, Melting Snow, Paul Cézanne, c. 1871. Writer Ronald Berman draws comparison between Cézanne's treatment of this landscape and the way Hemingway imbues the Irati River with emotional texture. In both, the landscape is a subjective element seen differently by each character.[94]
The simplicity of his style, however, is deceptive. Bloom writes that it is the effective use of parataxis that elevates Hemingway's prose. Drawing on the Bible, Walt Whitman and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway wrote in deliberate understatement and he heavily incorporated parataxis, which in some cases almost becomes cinematic.[95] His skeletal sentences were crafted in response to Henry James's observation that World WarI had "used up words", explains Hemingway scholar Zoe Trodd, who writes that his style is similar to a "multi-focal" photographic reality. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic "snapshot" style creates a collage of images. Hemingway omits internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) in favor of short declarative sentences, which are meant to build, as events build, to create a sense of the whole. He also uses techniques analogous to cinema, such as cutting quickly from one scene to the next, or splicing one scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap as though responding to instructions from the author and create three-dimensional prose.[96] Biographer James Mellow writes that the bullfighting scenes are presented with a crispness and clarity that evoke the sense of a newsreel.[97]
Hemingway also uses color and visual art techniques to convey emotional range in his descriptions of the Irati River. In Translating Modernism: Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Ronald Berman compares Hemingway's treatment of landscape with that of post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. During a 1949 interview, Hemingway told Lillian Ross that he learned from Cézanne how to "make a landscape". In comparing writing to painting he told her, "This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods, and the rocks we have to climb over."[98] The landscape is seen subjectively—the viewpoint of the observer is paramount.[99] To Jake, landscape "meant a search for a solid form.... not existentially present in [his] life in Paris".[100]
[edit] Reception
Hemingway's first novel was arguably his best and most important and came to be seen as an iconic modernist novel, although Reynolds emphasizes that Hemingway was not philosophically a modernist.[101] In the book, his characters epitomized the post-war expatriate generation for future generations.[102] He had received good reviews for his volume of short stories, In Our Time, of which Edmund Wilson wrote, "Hemingway's prose was of the first distinction". Wilson's comments were enough to bring attention to the young writer.[103]
No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing.
—New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises, 31October1925.[104]
Good reviews came in from many major publications. Conrad Aiken wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, "If there is a better dialogue to be written today I do not know where to find it"; and Bruce Barton wrote in The Atlantic that Hemingway "writes as if he had never read anybody's writing, as if he had fashioned the art of writing himself", and that the characters "are amazingly real and alive".[17] Many reviewers, among them H.L. Mencken, praised Hemingway's style, use of understatement, and tight writing.[105]
Other critics, however, disliked the novel. The Nation's critic believed Hemingway's hard-boiled style was better suited to the short stories published in In Our Time than the newly published novel. Writing in the New Masses, Hemingway's friend John Dos Passos asked: "What's the matter with American writing these days?.... The few unsad young men of this lost generation will have to look for another way of finding themselves than the one indicated here." Privately he wrote Hemingway an apology for the review.[17] The reviewer for the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote of the novel, "The Sun Also Rises is the kind of book that makes this reviewer at least almost plain angry."[106] Some reviewers disliked the characters, among them the reviewer for The Dial, who thought the characters were shallow and vapid, and The Nation and Atheneum deemed the characters boring and the novel unimportant.[105] The reviewer for The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote of the book that it "begins nowhere and ends in nothing".[1]
Hemingway's family hated it. The author's mother, Grace Hemingway, distressed that she could not face the criticism at her local book study class—where it was said that her son was "prostituting a great ability.... to the lowest uses"—clearly articulated her displeasure in a letter to him:
The critics seem to be full of praise for your style and ability to draw word pictures but the decent ones always regret that you should use such great gifts in perpetuating the lives and habits of so degraded a strata of humanity.... It is a doubtful honor to produce one of the filthiest books of the year.... What is the matter? Have you ceased to be interested in nobility, honor and fineness in life?.... Surely you have other words in your vocabulary than "damn" and "bitch"—Every page fills me with a sick loathing.[107]
Nevertheless, the book sold well—young women began to emulate Brett and male students at Ivy League universities wanted to become "Hemingway heroes". Scribner's encouraged the publicity and allowed Hemingway to "become a minor American phenomenon"—a celebrity to the point that his divorce from Hadley and marriage to Pauline attracted media attention.[108]
Reynolds believes The Sun Also Rises could only have been written in 1925: it perfectly captured the period between World WarI and the Great Depression, and immortalized a group of characters.[109] In the years since its publication the novel has been criticized for its anti-semitism, as shown in Cohn's characterization. Reynolds explains that although the publishers complained to Hemingway about his description of bulls, they allowed his use of Jewish epithets, which showed the degree to which anti-semitism was accepted in the US after World WarI. Cohn represented the Jewish establishment and contemporary readers would have understood this from his description. Hemingway clearly makes Cohn dislikeable not only as a character but as a character who is Jewish.[110] Likewise, Hemingway was seen as misogynistic and homophobic by critics in the 1970s and 1980s, although by the 1990s his work, including The Sun Also Rises, began to receive critical reconsideration by female scholars.[111]
[edit] Legacy and adaptations
Hemingway's work continued to be popular in the latter half of the century and after his suicide in 1961. During the 1970s, The Sun Also Rises appealed to what Beegel calls the lost generation of the Vietnam era.[112] Aldridge writes that The Sun Also Rises has kept its appeal because the novel is about being young. The characters live in the most beautiful city in the world, spend their days traveling, fishing, drinking, making love, and generally glorying in their youth. He believes the expatriate writers of the 1920s appeal for this reason, but that Hemingway was the most successful in capturing the time and the place in The Sun Also Rises.[113]
Bloom says that some of the characters have not stood the test of time, writing that modern readers are uncomfortable with the anti-semitic treatment of Cohn's character and the romanticization of a bullfighter. Moreover, Brett and Mike belong uniquely to the Jazz Age and do not translate to the modern era. Bloom believes the novel is in the canon of American literature for its formal qualities: its prose and style.[114]
The novel made Hemingway famous, inspired young ladies across America to wear short hair and sweater sets like the heroine's—and to act like her too—and changed writing style in ways that could be seen in any American magazine published in the next twenty years. In many ways the novel's stripped-down prose became a model for 20th-century American writing. Nagel writes that "The Sun Also Rises was a dramatic literary event and its effects have not diminished over the years".[115]
The success of The Sun Also Rises guaranteed interest from Broadway and Hollywood. In 1927 two Broadway producers wanted to adapt the story for the stage but no immediate offers were made. Hemingway considered marketing the story directly to Hollywood, telling his editor Max Perkins that he would not sell it for less than $30,000—money he wanted Hadley to have. Conrad Aiken thought the book was perfect for a film adaptation solely on the strength of dialogue. However, Hemingway would not see a stage or film adaption anytime soon:[116] he sold the film rights to RKO Pictures in 1932,[117] but only in 1956 was the novel adapted to a film of the same name with Peter Viertel writing the screenplay. The royalties went to Hadley.[118]
Hemingway wrote more books about bullfighting: Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932 and The Dangerous Summer posthumously in 1985. His depictions of Pamplona, beginning with The Sun Also Rises, helped to popularize the annual running of the bulls at the Festival of St. Fermin.[119]
[edit] Notes
^ The Torrents of Spring has little scholarly criticism as it is considered to be of less importance than Hemingway's subsequent work. See Oliver (1999), 330
^ Hemingway may have used the term as an early title for the novel, according to biographer James Mellow. The term originated from a remark in French made to Gertrude Stein by the owner of a garage, speaking of those who went to war: "C'est une gènèration perdue" (literally, "they are a lost generation"). See Mellow (1992), 309
^ Hemingway wrote a fragment of an unpublished sequel in which he has Jake and Brett meeting in the Dingo Bar in Paris. With Brett is Mike Campbell. See Daiker (2009), 85
^ "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."
[edit] References
