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Article Excerpt
To date, The Sun Also Rises has received little ecocritical attention, despite its concern with interrogating literary depictions of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. This concern is most evident in the novel's attention to the importance of truthful reporting, woven into Jake's indictment of Cohn's admiration for The Purple Land, which Jake brands "a very sinister book." His critique provides a key for analyzing the many ironic allusions to the pastoral tradition in the novel.
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"See that horse-cab? Going to have that horse-cab stuffed for you for Christmas. Going to give all my friends stuffed animals. I'm a nature-writer."--Bill in The Sun Also Rises
ALTHOUGH HEMINGWAY'S WORK has begun to attract the attention of ecocritics, the most widely taught and frequently analyzed work of the entire Hemingway canon, the 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, has yet to receive detailed ecocritical analysis. (1) What little attention the book has attracted has been dismissive. Glen A. Love, a founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and a pioneer in environmentally-concerned criticism, presents the novel as a test case of the narrowly anthropocentric vision of much literary scholarship. Love says,
[W]e must ... recognize ... our discipline's limited humanistic vision, our narrowly anthropocentric view of what is consequential in life.... The challenge that faces us in these terms is to outgrow our notion that human beings are so special that the earth exists for our comfort and disposal alone.... While critical interpretation ... tends to regard ego-consciousness as the supreme evidence of literary and critical achievement, it is eco-consciousness which is a particular contribution ... of nature-writing, and of many other ignored forms and works passed over because they do not seem to correspond to anthropocentric--let alone modernist and postmodernist--assumptions and methodologies. In such a climate of opinion, for example, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which is little concerned with ecological considerations, is widely taught in college classes, while his The Old Man and the Sea, which engages such issues profoundly, is not. ("Revaluing Nature" 230)
Despite Love's objections, The Sun Also Rises is profoundly concerned with ecological considerations, as the passage of Ecclesiastes echoed in its title would suggest. The novel presents the main characters as aimless, displaced persons without a secure sense of meaning or value and suggests that the characters could find that meaning and value in cultivating a more intimate connection with the natural environment. The novel criticizes conventional depictions of nature, and calls for a literature that offers a more complex picture of the connection between humanity and the natural world.
The Sun Also Rises has been so frequently treated as a novel of the Lost Generation that this approach has become something of a critical cliche. Yet Hemingway described the novel as less about the life of postwar expatriates than about the rhythms of nature as an expression of eternity. "The point of the book to me was that the earth abideth forever--having a great deal of fondness and admiration for the earth and not a hell of a lot for my generation," Hemingway remarked in a 1926 letter to Maxwell Perkins. "I didn't mean the book to be a hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero" (SL 229). We have not paid enough attention to this statement, or to the ecocentric implications of the novel's title.
Hemingway is noted as a writer concerned with truth in representation. Suzanne Clark claims, "the true reporting of experience, of the active life carefully observed--that was a moral basis for writing itself that Hemingway translated into the literary tradition" (56). This concern is reflected in numerous statements Hemingway made about writing at various points in his career, perhaps most forcefully in Green Hills of Africa, where he says "I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary" (21). (2) This concern with truth in art is one of the central concerns of The Sun Also Rises. Frederic Svoboda, in his study of the novel's development through various manuscript versions, says that Hemingway "hoped to write a new sort of prose that would derive from the language and facts of real life" (12). Svoboda quotes Hemingway from an early notebook version: "none of the significant things [in the novel] are going to have any literary signs marking them. You have to figure them out for yourself" (12). Svoboda demonstrates that accurate representation is one of the fundamental principles on which the novel is built. Hemingway, Svoboda says, "was very much opposed to an artificially imposed conventional structure. He was Seeking to remove the conventional frameworks interposed between the reader and the reality that is represented in a work of art" (12).
A concern with truth in representation is evident in the views of Jake Barnes, who is impatient with people who rely on conventional ways of seeing. At a news conference lake distinguishes reporters who ask questions "to hear themselves talk" from those who ask because they "wanted to know the answers" (SAR 44). Jake criticizes Robert Cohn for letting literary convention dictate his opinions, lake reports that Cohn thinks he can solve his problems by running to South America and that he does not like Paris. Cohn "got the first idea out of a book," Jake says, "and I suppose the second came out of a book too" (20). lake's narration suggests that he connects truthfulness with a degree of self-reflectivity, an awareness of the limitations built into any mode of discourse. "I mistrust all frank and simple people," Jake says, "especially when their stories hold together" (12). The novel's concern with truthfulness in representation is reflected in its careful use of allusion.
Although criticism has recognized much of Hemingway's use of allusion in The Sun Also Rises, one important allusion which remains unacknowledged is Hemingway's extensive reference to pastoral throughout the novel. (3) The novel has the use of pastoral convention built into its very structure. The Sun Also Rises is not only "a damned tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero," as the author claimed, but is also a critique of pastoral. The novel tests the pastoral vision, acknowledges its enduring attraction, and interrogates its limitations.
The novel invokes the central elements of pastoral convention: the presentation of city life as complex and of city people as corrupt, the presentation of rural life (and of nature) as somehow more "real" and more simple than life in the city, and the presentation of rural folk as more honest, direct, and virtuous than city dwellers. Invoked as well are the pattern of retreat and return and a nostalgic vision of a lost Golden Age. In addition to these familiar conventions of pastoral, Hemingway has built into the novel extensive allusions to the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, the two works most central to the establishment of the pastoral mode.
As Glen Love notes,
Literary pastoral traditionally posits a natural world, a green world, to which sophisticated urbanites withdraw in search of the lessons of simplicity which only nature can teach. There, amid sylvan groves and meadows and rural characters--idealized images of country existence--the sophisticates attain a critical vision of the good, simple life, a vision which will presumably sustain them as they return at the end to the great world on the horizon. ("Revaluing Nature" 231)
The novel follows this pattern of retreat and return: the central characters leave cosmopolitan Paris and travel to the rural countryside of northern Spain to attend a fiesta, then return to the city.
The novel's most direct reference to pastoral is sharply critical, and woven into Jake's harshly disparaging portrait of Robert Cohn. Jake resents Cohn because Cohn reminds Jake of the most unflattering aspects of himself. Cohn falls in love with Brett, and then follows her around like a lost puppy. Jake similarly follows Brett, often at the expense of his own personal dignity, spends sleepless nights on the verge of tears over their hopeless relationship, and even offers to pay for Brett's divorce so that she can marry Mike. Jake seems to be conscious of his similarity to Cohn. He says, "Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly. The reason is that until he fell in love with Brett I never heard him make one remark that would, in any way, detach him from other people" (SAR 52). In Jake's mind, Cohn's love for Brett becomes his defining...
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