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Article Excerpt
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises demonstrates that teaching can be a powerful source of learning for the teacher. Jake Barnes tries to teach Lady Brett Ashley the significance of bullfighting, especially Pedro Romero's, but Brett fails to understand the "course in bull-fighting" that Jake offers. Yet in teaching Brett, Jake himself becomes the learner. In the novel's closing pages, most clearly in the final Madrid sequence, Jake puts into practice the knowledge he has internalized from teaching Brett, becomes the metaphorical bullfighter, and, saying "I'll finish this," ends forever his mutually destructive romantic relationship with Lady Brett.
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"HE WHO TEACHES OTHERS, TEACHES HIMSELF," wrote the great Moravian educator and reformer John Amos Comenius almost four centuries ago. Comenius believed that teachers learn in the very act of teaching because "the process of teaching in itself gives a deeper insight into the subject taught" (47).
Educators past and present agree with Comenius that teachers learn by teaching. The sixteenth century encyclopaedist Joachim Fortius believed that "if a student wished to make progress, he should arrange to give lessons daily in the subjects which he was studying, even if he had to hire pupils" (Gartner 15, ital. mine). The 19th century English educator Andrew Bell writes, "That the teacher profits far more by teaching than the scholar does by learning, is a maxim of antiquity, which all experience confirms--'Docemur docento'--'He who teaches learns'"(75). The American psychologist Jerome Bruner tells this story of teaching quantum theory to college students:
I went through it once and looked up only to find the class full of blank faces--they had obviously not understood. I went through it a second time and they still did not understand it. And so I went through it a third time, and that time I understood it" (88).
Sandra Cisneros agrees that turning students into teachers is one of the best ways of enhancing their learning. When asked to identify an appropriate writing assignment for students reading her award-winning novel The House on Mango Street, Cisneros replied, "My assignment as a teacher would be to have the students write the Cliffs Notes. When you teach is when you have to look at the text deeply" (7).
Ernest Hemingway's brilliant novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) demonstrates that teaching can be a powerful source of learning for the teacher. Jake Barnes, the novel's narrator and protagonist, tries to teach Lady Brett Ashley, the woman he loves but cannot have, the importance and significance of bullfighting. Brett fails to understand the lesson, but in teaching Brett Jake himself becomes the learner. In the novel's closing pages, most clearly in the final Madrid sequence, Jake puts into practice the knowledge he has internalized from teaching Brett, becomes the metaphorical bullfighter, and thereby ends forever his mutually destructive relationship with Lady Brett.
That The Sun Also Rises is a novel about teaching and learning (1)--what Terrence Doody calls "a novel of education" (217)--is established in its opening paragraph when Jake Barnes tells us that Robert Cohn disliked boxing but "learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton." Jake adds that Cohn had been a "star pupil" of boxing coach Spider Kelly, who "taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights" (SAR 11). (2)
But the importance of teaching and learning in The Sun Also Rises extends well beyond the boxing ring. Learning is the key to the philosophy of life that Jake articulates, and Hemingway endorses, in the novel's central chapter XIV:
You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. (SAR 152)
Jake asserts in this passage that "learning" is one of the major sources of enjoyment in life. By learning about food and drink, books and travel, languages like French and Spanish, and sports like boxing and fishing, Jake gets his money's worth of life's pleasures. Jake's goal in life, he explains, is "learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it."
Aside from friendship, Jake derives most pleasure from bullfighting, which he has learned about thoroughly if not yet painfully, lake carefully reads bull-fight newspapers like Le Toril (38), he travels to Pamplona and other venues to watch bull-fights "every year" (SAR 102), and he "often" (137) talks about bulls and bull-fighters with Montoya, the hotel proprietor, and other aficionados, those who are "passionate about the bull-fights" (136). lake has learned bull-fighting so well that Montoya places "his hand on [Jake's] shoulder" in recognition of a fellow aficionado (136).
Jake has learned to get his money's worth of enjoyment from bullfighting, and through the central portions of the novel he teaches his friends about it. Even before the bullfights begin, he teaches Bill Gorton about the unloading of the bulls and the role of the steers in quieting them down (SAR 138). He later helps Bill, Mike Campbell, Robert Cohn, and Brett Ashley see that bulls use their horns like boxers, with a left and a right (144). He explains that bulls are "only dangerous when they're alone, or only two or three of them together" (145).
But lake's teaching focuses on Lady Brett Ashley. During the second day of bull fights, lake completely ignores Mike Campbell beside him in order to become Brett's teacher: "I sat beside Brett and explained to Brett what it was all about" (SAR 171). Significantly, lake and Brett are seated in barreras, according to Death in the Afternoon the location most conducive to teaching and learning: "If you are...
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