 |
| Original Cover Art |
Originally, Hemingway intended to write a non-fiction book about bullfighting, but by the end of July 1925 he decided to write a novel because he had gathered so much interesting material on his trip to Spain. The novel, which is considered Hemingway's most important, was published in 1926 by Scribners. It features Hemingway's distinctive writing style, lean and spare of description, and is often composed in simple declarative sentences with few adjectives ("She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm"). In The Sun Also Rises and in a lot of his work, Hemingway does not explain every situation in detail, preferring to leave much for the reader to piece together. This way of purposely omitting details has come to be known as Hemingway's "Iceberg Theory" or "Theory of Omission."
 |
| Hemingway (Jake Barnes) in Spain with Lady Duff Twysden (Lady Brett), his wife Hadley, Harold Loeb (Robert Cohn) Don Stewart (Bill Gorton) and Pat Guthrie (Mike Campbell), 1925 |
The main plot of the novel follows a group of disenchanted people who drink heavily, get into ill-advised relationships, and seem to lack any sense of purpose. Much of the sense of malaise in the novel comes from difficulties caused by World War I, most notably Jake Barnes' impotence due to a war wound, and the general sense that morality and values can no longer be counted on. Because of the war, the central love relationship in the novel between Jake and Lady Brett Ashley can never be consummated. They love each other but cannot be fulfilled together, in part because of Jake's impotence and in part because Lady Ashley knows she will cheat on him. Although the Roaring Twenties were a celebration of new freedom and great music, the decade can also be seen as an effort to escape the horrors of World War I through alcohol, sex, and unrestrained behavior.
Thus, in The Sun Also Rises, the reader witnesses a group of hard-living drifters going from the cafes of Paris to the bullfights of Pamplona without ever finding any real contentment. Robert Cohn is in an unfulfilling relationship with his fiancee Frances and seems always haunted by insecurity and dominating women; Jake wants Lady Ashley but can never be with her; Lady Ashley, often drunk, goes from man to man without ever settling down; and Bill Gorton can't often remember his escapades because of his extreme drinking. The group is what Gertrude Stein said of Hemingway and his peers who came into adulthood during World War I, a "Lost Generation" without any firm moral values or definite goals.
Sources:
http://bama.ua.edu/~sigmatau/texts/sun.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises
http://gaylealstrom.blogspot.com/2008/08/sun-also-rises.html#!/2008/08/sun-also-rises.html
http://grammar.about.com/b/2011/08/22/revision-strategies-hemingways-iceberg-theory.htm
--Mr. Cooke
I am in the process of writing a blog entry about Fiesta and Hemingway, and rooting around the web I came across your blog entry. I have to say I disagree with you entirely, and it is possibly relevant that your critique could be seen as nothing much more than a vague resume put together from snippets you found on the net, especially Wikipedia. Did you read the novel?
ReplyDeleteThe story of how Fiesta came about - and your account of the novel’s genesis is simply wrong - is interesting, but the novel itself isn’t much at all. Its success had as much, possibly rather more, to do with the publisher Scribner’s wanting something ‘different’ to sell to the reading public as any potential literary worth. Well, they certainly got that.
These judgments are always subjective and there simply can’t be a definitive answer, but in my view Fiesta is not at all well-written, and to call his style ‘lean and athletic’ is PR cant. It is most certainly ‘distinctive’, but that is certainly not a word always synonymous with ‘good’ or even ‘will do’. All budding writers are advised ‘show, don’t tell’, but Hemingway never shows us of the great love Jake and Brett apparently feel for each other, but that is just one of my many criticisms.
After reading the novel a few weeks ago for the first time and being baffled as to why it was and is being called ‘a masterpiece’ and why Hemingway is regularly described as ‘a writer of genius’ I wondered whether I was missing something - to put it bluntly I reasoned with myself that the I couldn’t be right and the world, including the Nobel Prize committee which honoured the man, wrong. So I did what I have previously done with other novels and as soon as I had finished it, I read it again, only to find that my initial reaction was the same: it is not very good, and most certainly not ‘a masterpiece’.
That’s when I decided to write a blog entry and cast about for more info. In that way I came across ‘Everybody behaves badly: The true story behind Hemingway’s masterpiece The Sun Also Rises by the the Vanity Fair writer, Leslie M M Blume. I haven’t yet read the book itself, but I have read several reviews of it - in the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe and elsewhere, as well as a piece in Vanity Fair which Ms Blume published while work on her book was still in progress. And from what I have gathered my judgment is not very wrong.
I shall leave it there, although I could go on. But all I shall say is that I disagree with you entirely.