The Authentic

In travel, authenticity is something that most people desire. They want their experience abroad to be “authentic”; whatever that may mean. In The Sun Also Rises, the theme of authenticity is certainly evident in the characters and their actions.

Authenticity is brought up by Bill when he tells Jake that "You're an expatriate. Why don't you live in New York? ... Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers. ... 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 by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes." (120) He mentions “fake European standards” and suggests that Jake is an inauthentic writer because he has lost touch with his roots. By living as an expatriate, Jake is somehow not being truly authentic. It seems that Hemingway felt that many expatriates were inauthentic.

In the article “Hemingway among the Bohemians: A Generational Reading of The Sun Also Rises”, Soto tells of Hemingway’s opinion on fellow bohemians in Paris: “The bohemians to whom Hemingway refers in the article, "the scum of Greenwich Village ... skimmed off and deposited in large ladlesful on that section of Paris adjacent to the Cafe Rotonde" (BL [By-Line] 23)… they have become precious, ruined by fake European standards; because they spend their time talking, not working. "You can find anything you are looking for at the Rotonde-except serious artists," reports Hemingway. Visitors to the Latin Quarter, he continues, do not encounter "the real artists of Paris"; instead, they find "loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any degree of recognition. By talking about art they obtain the same satisfaction that the real artist does in his work" (24-25).” The characters in The Sun Also Rises seem to fit this stereotype: they hang out in cafes, drink, talk, and don’t write although many of them are supposedly writers. The characters' fakeness is shown throughout the novel. For instance, when Jake introduces Georgette as his fiancée, the singer Georgette Leblanc, there is an idea of fakery and pretense. Brett’s hat serves as a disguise – suggesting she is not really herself. “To take off her hat would mean self-revelation and vulnerability, which frighten Brett. Whenever she is nervous in the crowd, she pulls her hat down farther over her face, indicating her fear of exposure.” (Brett Ashley: The Beauty of It All)

Robert Cohen is hated by Jake (and the other characters, for that matter), not because he is Jewish, but ultimately because Jake views him as inauthentic. “According to the logic of The Sun Also Rises, one is either a bohemian who writes (authentic) or a would-be writer who dabbles in bohemianism (inauthentic).” (Hemingway among the Bohemians: A Generational Reading of The Sun Also Rises) Cohen is the latter; he only arrives at his ideas from other authors.

Pedro Romero is the opposite of the extradite characters – he is completely authentic. In his bullfighting, he is the only bullfighter who does not use tricks. “Romero is not a phony imitation of himself, and he does not use trickery: "Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews ... to give a faked look of danger" (167-68),” (Brett Ashley: The Beauty of It All). Romero is also cautious of talking in English, for he views it as inauthentic and says that the people wouldn’t like it.

Jake is seen as more authentic than his other “bohemian” friends by the hotel owner because he is an aficionado. “Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights. ... Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a 'Buen hombre: But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain,” (132). The bullfighting is the one authentic action in the book. It is “real” whereas everything else is seen as “surreal.” Jake describes the fiesta as “a wonderful nightmare,” (222).

The authenticity of the novel itself can also be brought up since the novel is based on “truth.” In “Hemingway among the Bohemians: A Generational Reading of The Sun Also Rises”, it is said that “the relationship between Hemingway's novels and his "true" experiences, as well as between his fictional characters and actual persons, has been a recurring theme of Hemingway criticism. Virtually all bohemian fiction tends more toward the confessional than the merely journalistic; the genre lives up to Emerson's prophesy (later deployed as the epigraph to Henry Miller's first bohemian novel) that "novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies-captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experience that which is really experience, and how to record the truth truly."” This makes The Sun Also Rises more authentic because it is more of a diary than a novel. Then again, one must wonder how much of what Hemingway “calls his experience” is really authentic and if he indeed did “record the truth truly.”