Sacrilegious Thoughts on The Sun Also Rises
My third read of Hemingway’s putative masterpiece has me questioning things
For those of you who follow me on Instagram, this review may look familiar — it’s the extended version of a post from last year, which I’ve saved for a month when I’d take a vacation or, more likely, get buried with work. Hope you enjoy!
The first time I read The Sun Also Rises, in high school, I liked the book but felt that I didn’t “get it.” I brought this up in a creative writing class in college, and my peers agreed with me. The prof replied simply, “Page thirty-four. He doesn’t have a penis. I missed that too the first time.”
The second time I read it, I found that indeed the main character, Jake Barnes, had been most unfortunately wounded in World War I (hey, get it … the sun *also* rises?), and what do you know, everything made a lot more sense.
After watching the Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway, my son and I decided to read through Hemi’s oeuvre together starting with this one, his first novel. I was careful to reveal from the very beginning this important plot point: “Hey, wanna start with his book about a man who doesn’t have a working penis?” He was totally down for it.
For those of you who haven’t read this classic, the book follows a group of expatriates after World War I in their travels from Paris to Spain for a bullfighting festival. The impotent Jake pines after twice-divorced Lady Brett Ashley, who sports short hair, drinks much too much, and annoys the hell out of readers. She’s what I call a sloot, a word I thought I made up to sound less judgy, but, alas, Urban Dictionary tells me it’s even less generous of a word. Brett and Jake are in love, but consumed by post-war decadence, Brett is unable to choose love over sex.
The most striking quality I noticed in my third read was what’s not being said in the novel. This is Hemi’s “iceberg” theory of writing at work, a minimalist technique he coined that involves letting the themes stay largely underneath the surface with just a little bit poking through the top. Indeed, the bulk of the story — Jake’s feelings, the horrors of the Great War, the moral decrepitude of the Lost Generation — remains unsaid, a big, boozy elephant sitting in the room.
The other thing that struck me in my re-reading was … the crude and inexpert writing.
While at times the stark, stripped-down prose shines for its poetry, many more passages are toneless, tedious, or otherwise lack the finesse of his later work.
For every eloquent passage like this:
There was a close, crowded hum that came every day before the bull-fight. The cafe did not make this same noise at any other time, no matter how crowded it was. This hum went on, and we were in it and a part of it.
There’s a lackluster passage lying just around the bend:
No one was up before noon. We ate at the tables set out under the arcade. The town was full of people. We had to wait for a table. After lunch we went over to the Iruña.
This isn’t style but the absence of it.
So what I want to ask you today is: IS The Sun Also Rises actually a masterpiece? Or is it just a work of genius whose brilliance lies not in its technical execution but in its originality and influence?
I happened to read this book alongside another novel, which came out in 1932, just six years after The Sun Also Rises. I’m convinced the prose style is as groundbreaking as Hemingway’s, and for the same reasons — it’s just as limpid, unadorned, and restrained — but it’s also much more artfully executed. However, probably owing to the fact that it was written for young readers, its genius has been overlooked. The book I’m talking about is … Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
As in Hemi’s works, Little House contains a nostalgia for a much simpler world in which we lived in communion with nature. Long passages fetishize the lost arts of pioneer living, which are detailed as painstakingly as any Hemingway fishing scene and with the same spiritual reverence. For all that it evokes, there’s no overt sentimentality — the bulk of feeling lies unsaid, which only makes the book and its isn’t-it-pretty-to-think-so ending (the famous final line of The Sun Also Rises) that much more poignant.
I know you probably haven’t read it since third grade, but I defy you to revisit it without recalling Hemingway and marveling at its clean, direct, masculine style:
Then Pa put a clean, greased rag on the ramrod, and while the gun barrel was still hot he greased it well on the inside. With another clean, greased cloth he rubbed it all over, outside, until every bit of it was oiled and sleek. After that he rubbed and polished the gunstock until the wood of it was bright and shining, too.
How Hemingway can you get?
The works of Wilder — who was, like Hemingway, a journalist in the Midwest — are now considered to be a collaboration between her and her daughter, Rose Lane (also a journalist), with Wilder bringing the substance and Lane bringing the style. Now, if Wilder or Lane were influenced by Hemingway, Google appears to be unaware of this fact, but what I do know is their writing is far more polished than 27-year-old Hemingway’s.
But one cannot deny the allure of the moral degeneracy and spiritual alienation of Gen Lost, or the glamor of the aimless expat life in 1920s Europe. The berg underneath The Sun Also Rises is made of black ice. Which is why readers will continue to venerate it even if they happen to miss that key revelation on page thirty-four.