To encounter Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises as a first-time reader now is to wander into surprising areas of sometimes dubious prejudice and often dated bigotries. The first sentences, about the writer Robert Cohn, have a tang of anti-Semitism, one that only becomes stronger later on as the narrator draws the reader into a shared understanding that there is something absurd and overcompensating about a Jewish Ivy League boxer. Nor are many subsequent pages—with their slighting references to gay men, and with the normal sexual appetite of the heroine regarded as a slightly undignified affliction—entirely to contemporary taste.
Against that other mighty pillar of 1920s literature, The Great Gatsby—though doubtless we have at times romanticized there what is in fact a brutal American parable of self-making and violence and gangsterism—The Sun Also Rises offers some barbed wire and thorns in the perimeter of its effects, ones that must be leapt past and over. What is it in this book, then, that has kept it alive for a century and that, as much as any other, has compelled writers to mine it in the making of so much subsequent American fiction? A charmingly direct new reader—in a more Hemingwayesque cadence than he may be aware—announces on Reddit that it “Just felt like a boring travel vlog….Just people going to a place and doing a thing.” This is not entirely wrong—indeed, in an unintended or not fully realized way so entirely right—that it is worth glossing.
The book is about going to a place and doing a thing, and the clarity of purpose it took for Hemingway to strip writing of obvious weighted allegory or neatly labeled social “comment” and make it about the particulars of going to places and doing things is perhaps the secret to the book’s still-evergreen originality. As with all such things, some forensic work helps. The story is simple and not even quite a story: a group of expatriate Americans—and, significantly, some Brits— who are living and working in Paris at the height of the American “occupation” of the 1920s, decide to go to Pamplona for the annual “running of the bulls” and the bullfights that surround it.
This takes place during the weeklong San Fermín “fiesta,” to use the British title chosen for the novel by Hemingway’s London publisher, at a time when the festival was not yet the commercialized global event it is today (at a time, too, when Hemingway was not yet successful enough to dictate his own titles). While there, the heroine, Lady Brett Ashley, begins an affair with the most romantic of the young Spanish bullfighters, rejecting Cohn, the Jewish writer whom she had briefly favored before—and all in lieu of actually connecting with the narrator, Jake, who we are to understand is the real love of her life but has been emasculated, or at least left impotent (the mechanics are somewhat unclear) by a wound in the Great War. Hemingway brought the stoical code back to life exactly by not articulating it as a self-conscious code.
He gave it new life as a series of sensual experiences. It is by general reputation, as one of the epigraphs of the book suggests, the testament and witness of the “lost generation.” The meaning of this term—put by Hemingway into the mouth of his mentor and teacher Gertrude Stein, rather unpoetically, at a gas station in provincial France—is disputed. The original French speaker (the patron of the gas station) may not have meant “lost” in the sense of unmoored and searching for meaning but merely “missing.” Millions of young Frenchmen had been killed in the war; an entire generation was lost.
Yet the meaning of the term has settled on a second, more romantic sense—a generation “lost,” free to wander where they would. Hemingway surely intends it to reference the second meaning, but it is done in consciousness of the first. These otherwise lucky and fortunate people, free to drink and wander in a Europe where the American dollar goes far, are lost—the war that annihilated millions also annihilated the surviving generation’s confidence in the old order that got the millions annihilated.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
