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Hemingway Travels

The Sun Also Rises?qsrc=3044

The Sun Also Rises  
First edition cover
AuthorErnest Hemingway
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Novel
PublisherCharles Scribner's Sons (USA) & Jonathan Cape (UK as Fiesta: A Novel)
Publication dateJune 1926 (USA) & 1927 (UK)
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages259 pp (hardback first edition)
ISBNNA
Preceded byThe Torrents of Spring
Followed byMen Without Women
This article is about the novel. For other uses, see The Sun Also Rises (disambiguation).

The Sun Also Rises is the first major novel by Ernest Hemingway. Published in 1926, the plot centers on a group of expatriate Americans and Britons in continental Europe during the 1920s. It follows the group from Paris to the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The book's title, selected by Hemingway (at the recommendation of his publisher) is taken from Ecclesiastes 1:5: "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." Hemingway's original title for the work was Fiesta, which was used in the British, German, Russian, Italian, Czech and Spanish editions of the novel. It is often described as Hemingway's best novel.[1]

The novel made Hemingway famous, inspired young ladies across America to wear short hair and sweater sets like the heroine's—and to act like her too—and changed writing style in ways that could be seen by picking up any American magazine published within the next twenty years.[2]

Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[3]

 
Table of Contents
1Plot summary
2Background
3Writing style
4Reception
5Major themes
6Adaptions
7See also
8Footnotes
9References

Plot summary

The narrator of The Sun Also Rises is Jake Barnes, an expatriate journalist in his mid-twenties who lives in Paris. Barnes is impotent because of a war wound, though the nature of his wound is never explicitly described. He loves Lady Brett Ashley, a twice-divorced Englishwoman in her thirties who gained a title from her most recent marriage. Brett wears her hair short and embodies the new sexual freedom of the 1920s, having had numerous love affairs. Book 1 is set in Paris. Jake plays tennis with his Jewish college friend Robert Cohn, picks up a prostitute in one scene, and escapes with Brett from a gathering at a nightclub. Brett declares that she loves Jake, but they both realize, without speaking it, that his inability to fulfill her sexual needs would make a lasting relationship impossible.

In Book 2, Bill Gorton, another college friend, arrives from New York to join Jake. Mike Campbell, Brett's fiancé, arrives from Scotland. Jake and Bill travel to Pamplona by train and hired car, and meet Cohn north of Pamplona for a planned fishing trip. However, Cohn leaves his friends to wait for Brett and Mike in Pamplona. It emerges that Cohn had an affair with Brett a year before, and still feels possessive of her despite her engagement to Mike. Jake and Bill enjoy five days of tranquility, fishing the streams near Burguete. Once they arrive in Pamplona, the group reunites and they start drinking heavily. Cohn's presence is increasingly resented by the others, and they began to taunt him with anti-Semitic remarks. When the fiesta starts, the time is devoted to drinking, eating, watching the street running with the bulls, attending bullfights, and bickering with each other. Jake introduces Brett to a young bullfighter, Romero. Brett is so smitten by the 19-year old Romero that she contrives to visit him in his hotel room and seduces him. The jealous tension between the men builds; Mike Campbell, Jake, Robert Cohn, and Romero are all in love with Brett. Cohn, a championship boxer in school, has fistfights with Jake, Mike, and Romero, whom he rather seriously injures. Just the same, Romero manages to perform brilliantly in the bullring.

Book 3 shows the characters in the aftermath of the fiesta. Sober again, they leave Pamplona. Bill Gorton returns to Paris, Mike Campbell stays in Bayonne, and Jake goes to San Sebastian. Jake has decided to return to Paris when he receives a telegram from Brett, who is in Madrid. She asks him to join her because she has gotten herself in trouble. Jake finds Brett broke and without Romero in a cheap Madrid hotel. She announces she has decided to settle down with Mike Campbell. The novel ends with Jake and Brett in the back seat of a taxi talking of how things might have been.

Background

Ernest Hemingway with Lady Duff Twysden, Hadley Hemingway, and three unidentified people at a cafe in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925. (John F. Kennedy Library)

Since his first visit to see the bullfighting at the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona in 1923, Hemingway was fascinated by the sport; he saw in it the brutality of war juxtaposed against a cruel beauty.[4] In June 1925, Hemingway and his wife Hadley left Paris for their annual visit to Pamplona and were joined by a group of American and British expatriates [4] that included his friend Harold Loeb, and Lady Duff Twysden who was estranged from her husband. A level of tension developed during the fiesta that permeated the group: Hemingway was interested in Lady Duff; he was jealous when he learned she spent a week with Loeb in France; Loeb argued about money with another member of the group; and Hemingway and Loeb almost had a fist fight. Against this background was the influence of the young matador from Ronda, Cayetano Ordóñez, whose brilliance in the bullring affected the spectators. Hemingway realized the fiesta of 1925 was the stuff of a novel. He decided to use a first person narrator and began to write as soon as the fiesta ended. By September, about six weeks after beginning the novel, he was done with the first draft.[5]

After he was finished with the first draft, in order to maintain perspective, he started work on a new manuscript.[6] In the fall of 1925 Hemingway wrote the satirical novel The Torrents of Spring which his publisher immediately rejected. Within a month Charles Scribner's Sons agreed to publish both The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway decided to slow his pace and devoted six months to the novel's rewrite.[7] Hemingway made the necessary revisions to the manuscript during 1926 in Paris and in Spain. He finished the final proof in Paris at the end of August in 1926,[8] and Scribner's published the novel in October.[9] The first edition had a print-run of 5090 copies sold at $2.00 per copy.[10]

Writing style

The Sun Also Rises is written in the spare, tightly written prose for which Hemingway is famous, a style which has influenced countless crime and pulp fiction novels. But the simplicity is deceptive. Hemingway uses polysyndeton to convey both a timeless immediacy and a Biblical grandeur. Hemingway's polysyndetonic sentences use conjunctions to juxtapose startling visions and images; the critic Jackson Benson has compared them to haiku[11] Many of Hemingway's acolytes misinterpreted his lead and frowned upon all expression of emotion; Saul Bellow satirized this style as "Do you have emotions? Strangle them."[12] Hemingway, however, was not trying to eliminate emotion but to portray it more scientifically. Hemingway thought it would be easy, and pointless, to describe emotions; he sculpted his bright and finely chiseled collages of images in order to grasp "the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always"[13] This use of an image as an objective correlative is characteristic of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, and is also part of the Japanese poetic canon.[14]

Reception

The Sun Also Rises received good reviews. It epitomized the post-war expatriate generation for future generations.[15] The novel is is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work"[1] along with A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.[16] On October 31, 1926, The New York Times published a review that included this praise:

No amount of analysis can convey the quality of "The Sun Also Rises." It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame. Mr. Hemingway knows how not only to make words be specific but how to arrange a collection of words which shall betray a great deal more than is to be found in the individual parts. It is magnificent writing, filled with that organic action which gives a compelling picture of character. This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature.[17]

It is considered ground-breaking in its economic use of language for creating atmosphere and recording dialogue. Upon its publication, many U.S. critics[who?] denounced its focus on aimless, promiscuous, and generally licentious characters. On the other hand, it was extremely popular with a young and international readership. Since then, the novel has gained general recognition as a modernist masterpiece.

Major themes

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway melds Paris to Spain; vividly depicts the running of the bulls in Pamplona; presents the symmetry of bullfighting as a place to face death; and blends the frenzy of the fiesta with the tranquility of the Spanish landscape. The novel presents the culture of bullfighting with the concept of afición, an authentic way of life, whereas the Parisian bohemians are depicted as inauthentic.[18] Hemingway later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.[19] Recurring themes in American literature exist with clarity in The Sun Also Rises. Leslie Fiedler sees the theme he defines as "The Sacred Land"—the American West—extended to include mountains in Spain and the American West is given a symbolic nod with the naming of the "Hotel Montana".[20] Although Hemingway writes about sports, Carlos Baker believes the emphasis is more on the athlete than the sport.[21] According to Stoltzfus and Fiedler, Hemingway's nature is a place for rebirth, for therapy, and the hunter or fisherman has a moment of transcendence when the prey is killed.[22] Nature is where men are without women: men fish; men hunt; men find redemption in nature.[20]

Fiedler believes Hemingway inverts the American literary theme of the evil "Dark Woman" versus the good "Light Woman". The dark woman—Brett Ashley—is a goddess; the light woman—such as Margot Macomber of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"—is a murderess.[20] Nina Baym believes that Brett Ashley and Margot Macomber "are the two outstanding examples of Hemingway's 'bitch women.'"[23]

While most critics tend to take the characters seriously, some have argued that the novel is satirical in its portrayal of love and romance.[24]

In The Sun Also Rises, gender issues are dealt with very seriously by critics, though there is little consensus among them. Some critics charge that the depiction of Brett as a 'liberated woman' is intrinsic to her divisiveness in relationships throughout the novel, and therefore that Hemingway saw strong women as causing trouble, particularly for the men who otherwise dominate the novel.[25]

Hemingway's work has been characterized as misogynistic and homophobic. Susan Beegel analyzed four decades of Hemingway criticism, published in her essay "Critical Reception". She found, particularly in the 1980s, "critics interested in multiculturalism" simply ignored Hemingway; although some "apologetics" have been written. Typical is this analysis of The Sun Also Rises: "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew." During the same decade, according to Beegel, criticism was published that investigated the "horror of homosexuality", and racism in Hemingway's fiction.[26]

Adaptions

The Sun Also Rises was adapted into a film in 1957.[27]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Meyers 1985, p. 192
  2. ↑ Donaldson, The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, p.87
  3. ↑ "ALL-TIME 100 Novels: The Sun Also Rises (1926)." Time magazine. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Meyers 1985, pp. 117–119
  5. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 33–34
  6. ↑ Baker 1972, p. 76
  7. ↑ Baker 1972, pp. 30-34
  8. ↑ Baker 1972, p. 44
  9. ↑ Meyers 1985, p. 189
  10. ↑ Oliver, Charles M. (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark. ISBN 0-8160-3467-2. 
  11. ↑ J. Benson, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, p 309
  12. ↑ A.Hoberik, Twilight of the Middle Class, p.87
  13. ↑ Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, chapter 1
  14. ↑ R. Starrs, An Artless Art, p. 77
  15. ↑ Mellow 1992, p. 302
  16. ↑ Tyler, Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway, p.43
  17. ↑ "The Sun Also Rises". The New York Times. October 31 1026. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-rises.html. Retrieved 2010-01-18. 
  18. ↑ Müller 2010
  19. ↑ Baker 1972, p. 82
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 Fiedler, p. 345–365
  21. ↑ Baker, p. 101-121
  22. ↑ Stolzfus
  23. ↑ Baym 1990
  24. ↑ Jackson J. Benson, The Writer's Art of Self-Defense (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969).
  25. ↑ http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9831(199503)67%3A1%3C77%3APAJBA%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q
  26. ↑ Beegel 1996
  27. ↑ "The Sun Also Rises (1957)". film. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051028/. Retrieved October 8, 2009. 

References

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