Searching for a Centre

where to go?

"You are all a lost generation," resonates Gertrude Stein's voice in the epigram of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. As expatriates, Hemingway and his company surely were lost; disillusioned about their place in the world. Suffering through World War I, Hemingway's characters, who reflect his and his contemporaries' attitudes and emotions towards the times, have come to leave their country. Looking at them under the sociological lense, we observe that Jake and his pals fall into a category of tourists who seek renewal in the unknown. As Erik Cohen describes in his study, A Phemenology of Tourist Experiences, characters like Jake and Cohn are "experimental travelers" who "do not adhere any more to the spiritual centre of their own society,"  and so they "egage in a quest for an alternative in many different directions" (189). Indeed, the war seems to have destroyed a bit of these characters, taking something from them they seek to get back in other places. For Jake, whom the war rendered emasculated, spending time in Paris seemed like a possibly "re-creative" act, more than one of "recreation," a distinction Cohen establishes in his essay.

But, as their stay in Paris prolongs, these travelers cannot seem to find the spiritual grounding they seek. Advising Cohn against up and leaving to South America from Paris, Jake says, "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" (19). Jake understands that no matter where he goes, he will remain the same. In this way, he follows Cohen's description of the experimenter, who "seeks to discover a form of life which elicits a resonance in himself," while "refus[ing] to fully commit himself to it; rather, he samples and compares the different alternatives, hoping eventually to discover one which will suit his particular needs and desires" (189).

And so, Jake and his friends engage in continuous holidays: their fiesta is all-encompassing, and when they are not traveling, they are drinking excessively, or engaging in both. Their drinking is a form of travel for them, because their type of travel insists upon escape and seeks many possible paths, in a trial-and-error fashion, to goals they aren't necessarily cognizant of. Cohen points out in his article that "Internal and external quests for the centre are homologous" (Eliade, 1971: 18), and Jake looks outward to try to clarify something inward. When visiting Spain, as he does every year to witness the most authentic and meaningful symbol in his life, the bullfight, Jake enters a cathedral. Inside, distractedly praying, he says of his experience, "I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time" (103). Though he was raised Catholically and thereby is a Catholic, Jake cannot even find spiritual refuge in his own ethnic background. Instead, he looks to another culture's tradition of the bullfight, a symbol of commitment and meaning in the closeness the matador comes to death. This recalls to mind Don Marquis' "The Lesson of the Moth," in which the moth, always attracted to the electric light which will eventually kill him, says,

"it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever

and never be a part of beauty

our attitude toward life is come easy go easy we are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves"

Marquis' words warn us about what Cohen has observed occuring often with "experimental" travelers, whose search may eventually become a way of life, leaving no room for commitment or the "'leap of faith'" required to attach oneself to an idea. Indeed, Hemingway concludes his novel ambiguously, with many of his characters continuing to travel, seeking new places, new cultures to observe, while remaining foreign to them. "We could have had such a damned good time together," Brett says to Jake in the last few lines of the novel, exemplifying the hollow, tragic endlessness of a life in perpetual quest of the spiritual centre. For Jake, there is no redemption where there is no transcendence from this cycle, and his fault lies in witnessing the bullfights as a spectator instead of engaging in acts of equivalent value himself.