The Sun Also Rises

These past few weeks -- prodded by that aforementioned and all-too-true warning I found in Florence King (about would-be clever people who only ever read obscure books and thereby end up as ignorant of cultural touchstones as the unlettered) -- I have been making somewhat of an effort (probably a short-lived one) to finally "get around" to some indisputably famous novels that never in the past aroused much interest in me. The works of Hemingway have long been in this category.

And while I thought I might make an approach to this immovable mountain of literary boredom by starting with The Torrents of Spring -- Papa's 90-page parody of Sherwood Anderson that is not really as droll as it ought to be (though it's funny in places) -- I realized afterward that this is just another version of the Florence King syndrome -- simply a means of sucking the nectar of obscurity from even such an overgrown husk as Hemingway. I had to face my fears head-on, I decided. Like a matador. I opened The Sun Also Rises. 

The things one immediately notices in the book mostly confirm one's expectations (and few people in our society will dip into The Sun Also Rises without bringing some cultural expectations to bear). That "Gertrude Stein quote" that you learned in Freshman English about Hemingway's friends being "all a lost generation" -- and which you were told somehow captured the experience of everyone alive in those years, rather than that of ten to fifteen literary people who all wrote books referencing each other -- is attributed to Stein "in conversation" in the front matter of this novel.

The famous Hemingway style is also on full display, and it truly is distinctive. There are a lot of meandering, go-nowhere dialogues in which people say the same things over and again using monosyllabic vocabulary. Sometimes a character will just bellow the same phrase five or six times. This lack of verbal dexterity is usually chalked up to everyone's being "tight."

It's interesting that we rely so frequently in this novel on the tiresome restatement, as one of the Andersonian stylistic excesses that Hemingway mocks most adroitly in The Torrents of Spring is the pretentious repetition. ("It was no good going on [....] Something told him it was useless to go on." Or: "On the railway station was written in big letters: PETOSKEY. [...] Scripps read the sign again. Could this be Petoskey?") It's a stylistic device of Sherwood Anderson's that Lionel Trilling also teased in one of his essays in The Liberal Imagination: "Anderson's prose [...] has the intention of making us doubt our familiarity with our own world [.... W]hen we hear again and again of 'a kind of candy called 'Milky Way' long after we have learned, if we did not know already, that Milky Way is a candy, when we are told of someone that 'He became a radical. He had radical thoughts,' it becomes clear that we are being asked by this false naïveté to give up our usual and on the whole useful conceptual grasp of the world we get around in."

The pretentious repetition is also the target of one of the best short passages of literary parody I've ever encountered, from a review essay about Martin Amis by Mark O'Connell: "One of the most frequently remarked-upon aspects of Amis’ writing is that it’s nearly always possible to tell, within a sentence or two, when you’re reading him," writes O'Connell, "(You know it when you see it, with its gimmicks, its lists, its italicized stresses. You know it when you see it, Amis’s style, with its grandstanding repetitions.)"

I'd prefer grandstanding repetitions, however, to the dull-witted variety. The number of times Mark tells Robert Cohn in this novel that he is not wanted and that "bulls have no balls" exceeds even the most portentous of Anderson's solemn reiterations.

There are various other macho linguistic quirks in the novel. A prepositional phrase using the word "to" is never followed up by an infinitive, with the "in order" implied. Nobody ever says they are "going to the store to get some cigarettes," for instance. They are forever "going to the store and get some cigarettes." Which does sound somehow more full of American élan. Then there is the fact that no one ever goes "to a party;" they are only ever "on a party" -- which, to be fair, may just be the preferred phrasing of the era (I notice the same thing in Fitzgerald) -- and anyways makes more sense, when you think about it.

There are also the locales and fêtes that became famous largely as a result of this book -- the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the Spanish bull fights, etc. In an episode of the great Ken Jennings/John Roderick podcast The Omnibus Project I heard earlier this year, John shamefacedly explains that, several times in his youth, he had the opportunity to see the running of the bulls, and managed to sleep through it on each occasion. He needn't have apologized. It turns out from this book -- Ground Zero of the fetishization of Spanish bull-baiting -- that sleeping through the event is as much a part of the legend as observing it. Jake Barnes manages to miss the 6 o'clock starting rocket by several hours, due to a hangover. Toward the end of the novel, he sleeps through the Tour de France as well.

Why do we want to attend bull-baiting events at all, you may ask? Do we, as sensitive literary people, have any qualms about them? Hemingway's characters are not totally oblivious, it turns out, to the moral objections that might be raised to the deliberate torture and killing of complex sentient organisms in the bull-fighting ring, or to foot races in which it is taken for granted that "a drunk" or two might be gored to death each year. Some of them even raise these objections. Robert Cohn becomes visibly sick during the bull-fighting spectacle, and accuses the heroine of sadism for enjoying it so much, but he is cruelly razzed for this by the other male characters (this on top of the Anti-Semitic snobbery to which he is subjected throughout the book). After a man is killed by a bull during the morning's running, likewise, a waiter --one of the few sensible people in the book -- says that all this violence is not for him. He asks Jake: "A big horn wound. All for fun. Just for fun. What do you think of that?"

Similarly, toward the beginning of Green Hills of Africa, a European traveler asks Hemingway why he hunts inoffensive and harmless animals. "Why would any man shoot a kudu? You, an intelligent man, a poet, to shoot kudu."

In both cases, Hemingway or our Hemingway stand-in, responds with a species of reply that he may well have invented, and which has become so familiar to us since: the male non-answer. "I don't know," he says in The Sun Also Rises. In Green Hills, it's: "I haven't shot any yet. But we've been hunting them hard now for ten days."

The idea -- tragically transmitted to many subsequent generations of American males -- seems to be that this manner of shrug is sufficient -- in fact, that it is a higher form of cleverness than any complex argument. For surely, in the face of the ironies of modern life, in the midst of so much absurdity, such existential dread, that defines our modern condition, it is the only fitting response. Toward the beginning of Sun Also Rises, Jake offers a gift to every theme-hunting, quote-seeking high schooler in the nation when -- in the midst of a conversation with a French girl which has just turned into a familiar rut --  he deadpans: "We would probably have gone on and discussed the war and agreed that it was in reality a calamity for civilization, and perhaps would have been better avoided. I was bored enough."

Here we see the birthplace of the monosyllabic American male, in all his ignominy. The conviction that beneath our silence and occasional ejaculations of verbal clichés there must course hidden reservoirs of truth too raw and scorching to bear direct expression.

It is a notion that is as ultimately implausible when applied to Hemingway's novel as to the "I-dunnos" of any teenager. We have been told that this novel is a fine example of Hemingway's "iceberg theory" of prose style, according to which the author should recount only surface events and impressions, leaving these to imply the deeper subaqueous themes and emotions of the story. Yet, anytime the characters in this novel do have a serious emotion, they are sure to tell us about it directly. Brett and Jake perhaps love each other. But they can't be together, because Jake's war wound has rendered him impotent. How do we know how they really feel about all this? They tell us.

Jake: "Don't you love me?"
Brett: "Love you? I simply turn all to jelly every time you touch me."
Jake: "And there's not a damn thing we could do. [...] We'd better keep away from each other."

This situation, of course, leaves both of them feeling "low" and "lousy" and a lot of other complex American emotions. Then, at the end of the novel, we have our made-for-Hollywood closing lines from the pair. Brett says: "Oh Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together." Jake: "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?" Don't you just hear the music swell and see the credits roll?

The notion that there are deep, ineffable things happening within us for which we cannot find the words is bound to appeal to the romantic imagination, and certainly operates as a handy excuse for the willfully taciturn. (One of the many amusing parts of Barton Swaim's book The Speechwriter, about his time working for the disgraced South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, concerns the way in which the governor is forever persuaded that he is full of profound insights, but they always seem to just barely elude expression. "I don't mean just language, just words," says Sanford, toward the end -- after his fall -- "It's more than words. It's conceptual. [...] I always find myself trying to communicate something -- larger.")

I'm not sure that a great deal of evidence has ever been marshaled in favor of the theory that incommunicativeness is a sign of intelligence. (When I am at a loss for words, it's usually because I have nothing to say in that moment -- because my mind is singularly blank.) It seems to me that this -- as in so many other areas -- is simply one other instance in which Hemingway has cursed our society with another justification for male mediocrity. He has given us the notion that the true elite must aspire to do nothing, to say nothing, and possibly to kill large mammals on occasion because the vague atavistic promptings within us are as good a motive as anything else in this world.

As a result of the same misguided reversal of values that hears "masculine" silence as a sign of hidden genius, "feminine" loquacity has also been unfairly maligned in our society. I note the way in which the use of the word "upspeak" -- which originally referred to a linguistic quirk of American English (the rising intonation at the end of a sentence that is often associated with stereotypical "Valley Girl" speech) -- has migrated from being a term of disapprobation employed chiefly by speech therapists to being a snide and facially non-sexist way to put down female podcasters, radio presenters, and other audio professionals. This American Life has covered the phenomenon. I also recall seeing some nasty reviewers of an excellent fashion history podcast who accused the two presenters of "upspeak." Have they never heard Matt Yglesias?

I find I greatly prefer the decadent and prolix Fitzgerald to his monosyllabic contemporary and friend -- based at least on the strength of The Beautiful and Damned. And I found moreover that this novel includes an empowering defense of upspeak that we ought to bring back into the national conversation. Describing the voice of his unforgettable creation Gloria -- based on his wife Zelda -- Fitzgerald writes: "Her voice took up the thread of subject and wove along with faintly upturning, half-humorous intonations for sentence ends—as though defying interruption[.]" Rather than being a sign of stupidity, upspeak here is a means of holding the floor in a conversation -- a way of indicating to would-be male interrupters, "Wait, I have not yet finished speaking."

Spare, masculine prose has had its day. I'm sure it was a necessary corrective at the time to whatever came before it. But I prefer now to languish in the florid hothouses of the long-winded and the over-written. The truths of the world we inhabit may often defy expression. But the joy of literature is in the chase. The piling on of words in the hope that we are getting closer to the one that is juste. The saying of the same thing, with much the same syntactic structure, in several only slightly different ways, in the hope that each iteration is beginning to approximate what we have in mind. In short, I desire the grandstanding repetition.