“Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.
Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along, you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.”—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
My recent post on the birth of Ernest Hemingway, along with my friend Maura’s list of “15 Books That Stuck”, brought to mind the title that, as a sophomore in high school, finally made me take Hemingway seriously: The Sun Also Rises. For me, no single passage summed up the existential struggle at the heart of the novel so well as this one. As a teenager, I despaired of the possibility of learning “what it was all about.” “How to live in it” seemed far more realistic.
Through his narrator-protagonist, Jake Barnes, Hemingway gave voice to his career-long argument with God. The genital wound incurred during World War I that cuts Barnes off from love with Lady Brett Ashley also symbolizes a civilization left emotionally impotent by the carnage and savage disillusionment associated with the War to End All Wars.
At the time he wrote the book, Hemingway was divorcing his first wife Hadley. His new wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was a devout Catholic. The novelist would convert to Catholicism in 1927 and his novel about the Lost Generation reflects, in part, the aching hope that his new faith would fill a void in his life.
Jake Barnes is an observer and odd-man-out of his group of lost souls for another reason besides his wound: his Catholicism. His faith tests him and, in ways any sinner can understand, continually finds him wanting. His good friend Bill Gorton asks if he’s a Catholic. “Technically,” Jake answers. He has lapsed, but believes, despite his devastating loss of certainty, that it remains “a grand religion.”
By himself, on the first day of the festival in Spain, Jake attends Mass. Perhaps he is prompted by the thought that the festival is a religious one. In any case, amid the noise and haste of life, he longs for quiet and peace.
To some extent, he finds this on his fishing trip with Gorton, whose banter not only lightens a grim novel but, under the guise of foolery, makes some important points. “Remember,” he tells Jake, “the woods were God's first temples." The woods are also the only place where Jake can be himself. (Given the central importance of nature in just about every Hemingway novel, he would probably identify any god he believed in as a god of nature.)
Bill utters another phrase of powerfully pregnant meaning in the novel: “simple exchange of values.” The “values” are not the byproducts of simple commercial transactions but rather the codes by which civilization lives. Jake’s circle hopes to forget their losses by devoting themselves to drink and promiscuity, but it only leads to emptiness and disorder.
Hemingway keeps the struggle for faith at equipoise, as glimpsed in the closing scene between Brett and Jake. The 34-year-old Brett is congratulating herself on rejecting her 19-year-old matador lover and saving him from ruin. She decides that “deciding not to be a bitch” is so good, “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”
“Some people have God,” Jake responds. “Quite a lot.”
There is not really a “plot” to The Sun Also Rises; nothing changes irrevocably as a result of the holiday in Pamplona. In another sense, though, the lack of resolution nearly mirrors Hemingway’s endless quest—“how to live in it”—when the world has exploded. Even embracing faith does not ensure nirvana; the struggle against meaninglessness continues.
And yet, as the Ecclesiastes passage that gave the book its title indicates, “the earth endures forever.” Maybe Jake does, as he hopes, “learn something”: how to live stoically, without illusion, maybe even with some of the values that friends Brett, Robert Cohn and Mike Campbell have rejected. That’s one way to interpret the famous final exchange between the would-be lovers Brett and Jake, when she tells him that they could have had a fabulous time together. “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” he answers.
The Sun Also Rises, born out of tangled, complex motives (including jealousy over the relationship between the real-life models for Brett and Robert Cohn), gains so much of its power because it is about painfully fallible human beings. As honestly as Hemingway treated anything else in his work, his depiction of the struggle to live ethically and with faith acknowledges both the necessity for a system of values and the immense difficulties involved with sustaining it.
Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along, you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.”—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
My recent post on the birth of Ernest Hemingway, along with my friend Maura’s list of “15 Books That Stuck”, brought to mind the title that, as a sophomore in high school, finally made me take Hemingway seriously: The Sun Also Rises. For me, no single passage summed up the existential struggle at the heart of the novel so well as this one. As a teenager, I despaired of the possibility of learning “what it was all about.” “How to live in it” seemed far more realistic.
Through his narrator-protagonist, Jake Barnes, Hemingway gave voice to his career-long argument with God. The genital wound incurred during World War I that cuts Barnes off from love with Lady Brett Ashley also symbolizes a civilization left emotionally impotent by the carnage and savage disillusionment associated with the War to End All Wars.
At the time he wrote the book, Hemingway was divorcing his first wife Hadley. His new wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was a devout Catholic. The novelist would convert to Catholicism in 1927 and his novel about the Lost Generation reflects, in part, the aching hope that his new faith would fill a void in his life.
Jake Barnes is an observer and odd-man-out of his group of lost souls for another reason besides his wound: his Catholicism. His faith tests him and, in ways any sinner can understand, continually finds him wanting. His good friend Bill Gorton asks if he’s a Catholic. “Technically,” Jake answers. He has lapsed, but believes, despite his devastating loss of certainty, that it remains “a grand religion.”
By himself, on the first day of the festival in Spain, Jake attends Mass. Perhaps he is prompted by the thought that the festival is a religious one. In any case, amid the noise and haste of life, he longs for quiet and peace.
To some extent, he finds this on his fishing trip with Gorton, whose banter not only lightens a grim novel but, under the guise of foolery, makes some important points. “Remember,” he tells Jake, “the woods were God's first temples." The woods are also the only place where Jake can be himself. (Given the central importance of nature in just about every Hemingway novel, he would probably identify any god he believed in as a god of nature.)
Bill utters another phrase of powerfully pregnant meaning in the novel: “simple exchange of values.” The “values” are not the byproducts of simple commercial transactions but rather the codes by which civilization lives. Jake’s circle hopes to forget their losses by devoting themselves to drink and promiscuity, but it only leads to emptiness and disorder.
Hemingway keeps the struggle for faith at equipoise, as glimpsed in the closing scene between Brett and Jake. The 34-year-old Brett is congratulating herself on rejecting her 19-year-old matador lover and saving him from ruin. She decides that “deciding not to be a bitch” is so good, “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”
“Some people have God,” Jake responds. “Quite a lot.”
There is not really a “plot” to The Sun Also Rises; nothing changes irrevocably as a result of the holiday in Pamplona. In another sense, though, the lack of resolution nearly mirrors Hemingway’s endless quest—“how to live in it”—when the world has exploded. Even embracing faith does not ensure nirvana; the struggle against meaninglessness continues.
And yet, as the Ecclesiastes passage that gave the book its title indicates, “the earth endures forever.” Maybe Jake does, as he hopes, “learn something”: how to live stoically, without illusion, maybe even with some of the values that friends Brett, Robert Cohn and Mike Campbell have rejected. That’s one way to interpret the famous final exchange between the would-be lovers Brett and Jake, when she tells him that they could have had a fabulous time together. “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” he answers.
The Sun Also Rises, born out of tangled, complex motives (including jealousy over the relationship between the real-life models for Brett and Robert Cohn), gains so much of its power because it is about painfully fallible human beings. As honestly as Hemingway treated anything else in his work, his depiction of the struggle to live ethically and with faith acknowledges both the necessity for a system of values and the immense difficulties involved with sustaining it.
Today, 9/26/13, your blog has been a lovely find!
ReplyDeleteHemingway's writing and The Sun Also Rises made an indelible impression on me when in community college at 30 or so. My 20's saw 3 marriages, 2 husbands, a serious job injury, and much devastating torment.
I came across your blog today when emailing with a dear friend about her 92-yr-old father saying today that he is ready to divorce his beyond-hateful, verbally-abusive 2nd wife. We're not sure he means it but my friend holds hope that he will spend his remaining time with his children, in peace. I wrote back "'Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?'" Then added "'Make it so'" from Jean-Luc Piccard in Star Trek.
Thank you, Mike T.
Donna L.