Modern Life
The release of The Sun Also Rises in 1926 heralded a new era in American literature. Ernest Hemingway parlayed a background in journalism and a talent for tight, compelling writing into a a style that made him one of the most unique stylists in the history of American letters. Hemingway worked closely with the poet Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald in developing the modernist prose style that made The Sun Also Rises one of the 20th century’s most notable literary debuts. Critics have accused Hemingway of self-indulgence, even shallowness of vision. Yet he crafted a remarkably impactful method for conveying a deeper meaning through the omission of excessive verbiage, particularly the avoidance of adjectival language. The Sun Also Rises, through its taut, sparse language, broke new ground in its expression of a profounder sense of meaning than is initially apparent.
Hemingway’s writing style is more than the self-conscious invention of a new literary voice. It was an extension of Hemingway’s personality, a masculine, reserved persona that underscored the author’s stoic world view. The prevailing view of writers and critics prior to publication of The Sun Also Rises was that effusive, emotive writing is the most effective way to communicate depth and meaning. The Sun Also Rises addresses the nature of gender roles in the modern world, specifically, in a world forever changed by the catastrophe of World War I. The men and women in the novel act out a gender-based ambiguity that hints at the meaninglessness
and existential angst of the post-war period. Hemingway simultaneously communicates a loss of emotion and the marginalization of chivalric, masculine identity (Banach, 2012). The book’s male characters, such as Roy Cohn and Mike, exhibit a sense of feminine vulnerability that challenges the reader’s perspective and preconceived notions about the role of men and women (2012).
Many of Hemingway’s critics have overlooked his dual accomplishment in exploring gender and erotic themes while developing relationships that hint at deeper intention and of thoughts left unsaid. In this, Hemingway imitates the way in which human beings typically communicate, and the ways in which they fail to communicate. There is an unbridgeable gap between the characters, as if each has far more to say than they are able to voice. Hemingway’s experiences during the Great War left him deeply affected and impressed by the fact that words often say less than intended, and are often veneers through which people perpetuate a false honesty. The post-war, “Lost Generation” was one that sought a new means of communications, one that was more direct and sincere than the flowery prose of their literary and artistic forebears. Hemingway’s concise and symmetrical writing manages to be both unobtrusive and overtly stylistic at the same time.
The discerning reader is given to wonder how the traditional writing style of the pre-World-War-I era might have affected Hemingway’s story. It would be interesting to read a more “gilded” version of The Sun Also Rises; specifically, to determine whether the deeper metaphysical considerations which Hemingway’s laconic style facilitated could be achieved. Hemingway’s use of tension to create pathos was unique in The Sun Also Rises. This was the product of what he called the “iceberg theory,” which he began to develop after the publication
of his short story “Out of Season.” This approach, in which omission is a conscious literary element, was a novel approach to conveying truth. Carlos Baker, who wrote one of the most well-known and best-received Hemingway biographies, said that the author learned how to “prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth” (Baker, 117).
The initial critical response to what The New York Times called Hemingway’s “lean, hard, athletic” prose was largely positive (NYT, 1926). Negative reviews were primarily concerned with a perceived lack of philosophical significance, as if Hemingway’s verbal economy equated to a lack of intellectual depth and inner contemplation. The passage of time, and the approbation of countless critics and academics, has shown that such criticism is one-dimensional and ill-considered. The 1926 New York Times review grasped the inventiveness of Hemingway’s accomplishment. “Mr. Hemingway has chosen a segment of life which might easily have become ‘a spectacle with unexplained horrors,’ and disciplined it to a design which gives full value to its Dionysian, all but uncapturable, elements” (1926).
The “uncapturable elements” to which the Times refers describe what Hemingway’s literary compatriots sought to distill. The Sun Also Rises represents a new ethic in the literary canon, but it was just part of a larger movement, the creation of a new aesthetic, emerging from the artistic community that made Paris a “laboratory” of paradigmatic expansion, a source of modernistic innovation unparalleled in the 20th century. Hemingway was influenced by the general atmosphere of invention that characterized Paris in the 1920s and individually by the likes of Pound, Ford Madox Ford, E.E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein, whose salon was a
legendary gathering place for the literary illuminati of the day. Pound provided a significant amount of specific direction to Hemingway. The American poet John Peale Bishop later wrote that Pound’s commentary on the early manuscripts that Hemingway produced was uncompromising, demanding and encouraging. Peale noted that when Pound returned the chapters, they were heavily marked with blue pencil with most of the adjectives removed (Wagner, 88).
The Sun Also Rises is written in such a way that the reader seems to have access to the character’s thought processes, as conceived within the author’s inner voice. The action and the relationships that play out among the characters are simultaneously active and interpretive, allowing the reader to observe the passage of events and dialogue exchanges while Hemingway’s prose provides a unique perspective on the story. Hemingway’s traditional, journalistic voice achieves a uniquely philosophical depth that arises from the emotional and physical distance with which the author imbues the story. One of the most compelling examples of omission is Jake Barnes’s war injury and the vague, elliptical ways in which he alludes to himself and what the war has done to him. The reader is left to wonder about the extent and nature of Jake’s injury – was it physical and permanent, or psychologically transformative? Jake’s malady seems temporal and self-evident, but it is clear that the war has changed him in some deeper way.
Hemingway’s dialogue is probably the best example of his terse prose style. The exchanges between characters are typically Heminway-esque indications of more intense meaning. Hemingway’s dialogue, one quickly understands what critics mean by “staccato,” such as in the following exchange between Mike, Cohn and Brett:
“He was a very distinguished solder,” Brett said. “Tell them about the time your horse bolted down Piccadilly.”
“’I’ll not. I’ve told that four times.’”
“’You never told me,’” Robert Cohn said.
“’I’ll not tell that story. It reflects discredit on me.’”
“’Tell them about your medals.’”
“’I’ll not. That story reflects great discredit on me.’”
“’What story’s that?’” (Hemingway, 139).
In Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises: The Crafting of a Style, Frederic Svoboda takes up the subject of distance, and the uses to which Hemingway employs it in The Sun Also Rises. Distance, Svobody contends, is the foundation upon which Hemingway constructed his “iceberg theory (Svoboda, 44). Dialogue exhibits the peculiar quality of omission, which Hemingway uses to the physical and emotional distance between characters. It is this dialogue, which is “pared down to an irreducible minimum,” that communicates the restraints that limit and define the relationships between the novel’s key characters. Thus, Hemingway entices the reader to follow the story’s deeper interests and underlying meaning through its dialogue, or the thought left unexpressed. Hemingway underwent a deeply intense and introspective process in the writing and editing of The Sun Also Rises.
And yet he avoids sacrificing other aspects of the story to purely stylistic considerations. Critics who are concerned with Hemingway’s prose style overlook (or ignore) the use of metaphor in Hemingway’s first novel. As previously mentioned, there is abundant
representation of sexual and gender-based themes. There are also a number of erotic/sexual inferences at work in The Sun Also Rises. Jake’s impotence points to the social insignificance and marginalization that underscores the story (Hay, 263). Gender confusion also affects Jake, who finds it difficult to resolve the changes that took place in society in the wake of World War I with the traditional notions of maleness. Hemingway also makes use of overtly erotic metaphors, such as the bullfight and the dominance/submission symbolism inherent in the bull-bull fighter dynamic. The bull fighter thrusts and the bull avoids as long as possible before inevitably submitting.
It is this use of metaphor that Hemingway intertwines with his characters, who struggle with a potent sense of nihilism and existential angst. Style and content work together elegantly to create a persistent tension that runs throughout the story. Hemingway rejected the convention of the more traditional plot line, choosing instead to allow dialogue drive much of the story. This is manifested in the amount of dialogue, and the persistently repetitious comments and responses that play against each other, in so doing creating ambiguity among the story’s characters. As the dialogue plays out, the distinctiveness of each individual character melds into a collective whole. This graying of individuality in the book’s dialogue appears to marginalize uniqueness and the importance of individual perspectives. As the story progresses, each line seems as though it could be spoken by any of the other characters. Ultimately, it matters little what Mike or Cohn is saying. In this, Hemingway is creating a new mode of literary discourse, which supports and promotes an important element: conventional notions about human relationships mean little in the world the group inhabits.
This is what makes Hemingway’s characters so unforgettable. The Sun Also Rises is an elegy to a generation that was marred in body and spirit, as well as an introduction to a new world, one changed forever by war and loss. In either respect, readers could understand and relate to Hemingway’s themes, if not always with his style. Motive and action do little to affect the characters, who exist in a kind of timeless state. As such, Lady Brett, Jake, Mike and the others remain vividly etched on our memories. For Hemingway’s haunted characters, life is a gray place, where once-reliable assumptions have been eroded by a massive subversion of all they once believed. The trenchant dialogue reflects the psychic rootlessness of the characters and their time:
“’We’ve had a grand time, Harris.’”
“Harris was a little tight.”
“’I say. Really you don’t know how much it means. I’ve not had much fun since the war.’”
“’We’ll fish together again, some time. Don’t you forget it Harris.’” (Hemingway, 134).
Hemingway does not resolve the story. Rather, he emphasizes the ambiguity of modern life, making it clear that each character faces any number of possible destinies. He is not seeking contentment for his characters. Their story is one of loss and the attempt to reconcile existence with what each has suffered. The characters are close yet distant, endearing and ambivalent. A more verbose expositional style would have failed to capture the moral and existential dilemma they face. Hemingway’s use of style underscores this crisis of the soul and works symbiotically with content to drive home the story’s deeper themes.
References
Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press,
Banach, Jennifer. “Gender Identity and the Modern Condition in ‘The Sun Also Rises.’” Salem
Press. Retrieved July 5, 2012 from http://salempress.com/Store/samples.
Hays, Peter L. The Critical Reception of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2011.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2006.
“Marital Tragedy.” The New York Times. 31 October 1926. Retrieved July 4, 2012 from
http://www.nytimes.com/books/
Svoboda Frederic. ‘The Sun Also Rises’: The Crafting of a Style. Lawrence, KS: Univ. Press of
Kansas, 1983.
Wagner, Linda W. “‘The Sun Also Rises’: One Debt to Imagism.” The Journal of Narrative
Technique, 2(2), May 1972, pp. 88-98.
