3. The Sun Also Rises

In The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway, the main characters are American expatriates in Europe caught up in a whirl of partying, in places where judgements against hold no weight. However, as they are leading their relatively carefree lives, the actual citizens of Paris and Europe live and work in the background, with less romantic sentiments about their city.
Essentially, though, the main characters manage to manipulate their destinations in Europe, especially Paris, into their own collective personal paradises. This is supported too, in the essay “Expatriate lifestyle as tourist destination: The Sun Also Rises and experiential travelogues of the twenties” by Allyson Nadia Field, where she makes the point that Hemingway, too, during his time in Paris, made it his own, and used this as an inspiration for the setting of this novel. She also points out, however, that as this group of expatriates mold their own world seemingly cut off from the real one, they begin to create their own standards, which include an air of exclusivity, and a willingness for promiscuity and drinking.
So, it seems, that by trying to escape the uptight world of the United States, the characters have done nothing more but create their own exclusive world, completely cut off from reality.

People play a vital role in the experience of place in The Sun Also Rises. With his friends Barnes is an expat and a writer. When mobs of tourists are around he and his circle resent the flood of foreigners into France, because they ruin the naturality of places. A place loses emotional value when it's too commercialized, when it is overflowing with people who did not stumble upon it and decide to "utitilize it" but who came for a superficially authentic experience. It is the way you treat the places you visit that makes the distinction between tourist and traveler.

Alone, i.e. when absorbed in though and not socializing, Jake is a traveler. He continually describes the scenery and the weather and the people on the trip to Spain. Similarly in Paris he talks about what he sees in the cafes and on the streets. He has lived in the city for some time but he is still not quite a local. He is an expat. He works in Paris, drinks there, has friends there, but he describes his lifestyle as a traveler.

A new city, a new bar Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, is commonly referred to as the novel that defined the “lost generation,” but it’s interesting to explore what this title really means. As Deborah Tall states in her essay, The where of writing: Hemingway's sense of place, the word ''lost'' resonates with the political and spiritual crises of the time. Yet to be lost is, of course, a geographical condition--we are lost when we cannot find our destination or way home. To be spiritually lost, then, draws on the anxious figure of physical displacement. …But perhaps we doubt our place in the world, in part, because we are not adequately rooted in it, physically.

While many believe these characters are lost simply because of the tragedies they experienced in the war, I would suggest that this novel focuses more on Tall’s last comment, that they are lost because they have no physical foundation or sense of place. From Hemingway’s dialogue, in seems that in every location they visit, the most important part of the trip is always getting drunk, so they are barely aware of where they actually are. Even though they may physically be spending most of their time in France, they spend most of their time under the influence of alcohol, and therefore mentally, they are actually spending most of their time lost in their own realities. This causes them to get so lost in their own battles, that they can’t see the world around them to even try and change their ways.

FlapperWorld War I changed everything, a fact Hemingway should know very well as a member of the Lost Generation himself. The dawn of the twenties ushered in this vibe that seemed, from the outside, about being a little more uninhibited, a little freer, but that was actually about having become disenchanted with past values almost to the point of being numb to any values at all. I wonder, after reading The Sun Also Rises, what it would have been like to travel during that time. There is a recklessness in Jack and Brett and Bill that I don't think could exist today.
"Hemingway scholars are well aware that, just as he rejected bohemian pretenses, so too did Hemingway reject the "Lost Generation" label made so fashionable by The Sun Also Rises. And yet cultural historians, with the vision of hindsight, have recognized the extent to which a bohemian Lost Generation redefined United States culture at home and abroad, liberating American literary expression from its stubbornly pragmatic roots and its Victorian pieties (or so the usual cliche goes)."

Stein by Picasso, epitome of the left bank“Do you want to know something, Jake?”
“Yes”
“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”’
The travel that Hemmingway is dealing with in The Sun Also Rises is a type of travel that we don’t see much of these days. It is less about Travel and more about Getting by in a foreign country. Jake Barnes, much like Hemmingway himself, is an expatriate writer exploring Paris and Spain. In Jake’s meeting with Harvey Stone, the reader sees a flash of Hemmingway himself, and what others must be experiencing. There is a lack of money and food, and a serious need to churn out writing. In the first section of the book (the part that takes place in Paname) although Jake and his friends are in Paris, they aren’t quite acting as if they are traveling. They are living in the moment, and doing what everyone else is doing. The scene on the left bank in the 20’s was filled with all sorts of expatriates who “came to say, at least for a time (some for only a few months, others for many years).” One gets the impression that Jake Barnes regards Paris as home in a way. Although he is in fact abroad, he is not bothered by going out and seeing sights, life consists of drinking and writing, writing for the purpose of making more money and thus being able to drink more.

Over the course of Ernest Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises, all of the major characters (Jake, Brett, Bill, Cohn, etc) display an interest in traveling all the way to Pamplona, a distance of approximately 905 kilometers, to experience the “fiesta at Pamplona”. This consists of a series of bullfights that still exist today, and culminates with the “running of the bulls”. But while the bullfights remain relatively the same today as they exist in the story, the attitudes towards this bloody sport are much different.

One of the most interesting things I have encountered in my reading of The Sun Also Rises so far is the behavior of the American expatriates toward the places they travel to in Europe, especially Paris. The Literary Expatriates in Paris article places great emphasis on the artistic appeal of Paris, and the extensive expatriate community that flourished there in the periods following both world wars. However, in the novel, some of the characters show a distaste for many of the places they have been to in Europe. Early in the novel Jake talks about his own distaste of the roads in Paris, along with Cohn's dislike of Paris itself (determined to be most likely a result of the literature he reads)Parisian Cafe. When Cohn returns from New York, "he was more enthusiastic about America than ever."

Aficionado: Hemingway with the bulls

As anti-bullfighting as I am, I found Hemingway’s fascination with the sport entirely intriguing. Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure details the influence bullfighting had during Hemingway’s lifetime. In 1923 Hemingway went to Pamplona to witness his first bullfight, and continually returned to compete in amateur bullfighting competitions and conduct research for his manifesto on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. No one can say exactly why Hemingway was so attracted to the sport, but bullfighting became a instrument he incorporated in his novel to express different occurrences of verbal violence between characters in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway parallels bullfighting events with demoralizing episodes between Jake and his friends. At the beginning of the fiesta, the first bullfighting scene in which the bull kills the steer prefigures Mike’s attack on Cohn and Brett's devaluation of Cohn and his values. The violent passion of the bullfight expresses the underlying forceful anger of Mike and Brett’s verbal outburst toward Cohn. The destructivity of the grotesque sport Hemingway writes about emphasis the level of abuse Cohn endures.

magnoliasMy copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” is now scattered with highlighter, pen and pencil circling the numerous on-point travel quotations that I could easily relate to. One of my favorite quotations is the following from page 82:

“We ate dinner at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.”

Bullfighter

“One way to read the novel is as an inverted novel of initiation. In traditional initiation stories, a young man leaves his home or community, goes through experiences that change his character or worldview, and returns to take his place in his community as a mature person. Jake Barnes, in contrast, leaves his autonomous position in Paris to join the group on their trip to Pamplona. His experiences there constitute an initiation, though not an initiation into the group but an initiation into self-reliance apart from the group. At the end, he renounces the detrimental influence of his friends and especially of Brett. If Brett is the "sun" of the title around whom the men revolve, Jake has succeeded in breaking out of the orbit and becoming an independent person (another sun) himself. Ultimately, the novel propagates the self-reliance and autonomy embodied by Romero, the bullfighter whom Jake admires.”

This selection is from Wikipedia, but it’s appropriate when the course mission statement is built around John Gardner’s idea that all stories follow one of two forms: a stranger comes to town, and someone goes on a journey. In this case, the latter plot has been as perverted as Jake Barnes fears becoming.

The novel begins with the quotations from Ecclesiastes 1:4, "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.” In a very literal sense, Jake’s generation “cometh” and the change is massive between his and the former generation. Stained by the war, these characters display sexual inadequacies, gender role upheavals, inferiority complexes based on religious inequalities, and alcoholism.