‘The Sun Also Rises’: A Vain Search for Meaning
A review of ‘The Sun Also Rises’, by Ernest Hemingway; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926.
The Sun Also Rises is a novel of shadows. People are half-seen, lives are half-lived. Pleasures are half-experienced. It deals with a group of disillusioned expats living in Paris in the interbellum years. They cling to drink; they travel. They keep busy, generating tiny dramas as if to season their biographies and overcome their deep sense of failure. The war is over, and among the corpses are the old ideas of what represented meaning. Those who survived must try to find a reason to exist.
The narrator is Jake Barnes. He is an American, one who is both literally and metaphorically impotent due to a wound suffered in the war. This casts a low shadow over the events of the novel. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, as is everyone else, and she is as alluring as she is elusive. Encircled by admirers, engaged to Mike Campbell, she is attached in fact to no one. She is a kind of emotional vortex, pulling everybody into her orbit but offering no stability in return. She, Jake and a colourful cast of friends and rivals drift south from France to Spain, searching for distraction, or salvation, or something.
Jake and Brett share a mutual affection, but due to Jake’s injury, no romance can flow from it. In Pamplona, Spain, where the group go to see the bullfighting festival, Brett grows infatuated with a bullfighter, giving rise to a love triangle that creates tension within the set. This underscores the central theme of the story, which is disconnection. Like Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, which buried Georgian poetry and gave life to modernism, there is a profound atmosphere of alienation and isolation in Hemingway’s book. The characters are never alone, and yet could not be more alone in every other sense. They drift through life, unmoored, uninterested in where they might be going.
Like Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, which buried Georgian poetry and gave life to modernism, there is a profound atmosphere of alienation.
Jake’s matter-of-fact narration reflects this emptiness. Any kind of disclosure is rare. Robert Cohn, who serves to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Jake by contrast, says: ‘I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.’ But Cohn is naïve, a man-child controlled by the women in his life. He did not serve in the war. What is contained in that revelation is shallow and hackneyed compared to the existential hollowness that the other characters feel in the absence of the old certainties.
Hemingway’s prose is as sharp and unadorned as the bleached bones of a dead animal. There are no frills: this is peak Hemingway. There is action, there is dialogue (which we might file in any case under ‘action’). There is very little description. In Hemingway, things happen. But this simplicity is deceptive. It is not minimalism: rather, Hemingway leaves gaps for the imagination of the reader to fill. Those gaps are pregnant with meaning. The undercurrent of despair in The Sun Also Rises is palpable, barely masked by the forced gaiety the characters put on. Paris nightclubs, the dry, sunburnt fields of Spain, the bullring—these settings are vividly rendered yet never romanticised. As in Mann’s Death in Venice, beauty acts as a thin veneer, obscuring fragility.
Bullfighting, with which Hemingway was fascinated, serves as a grim metaphor for the violence of the war and of national life. For Hemingway, it is ritualised violence, clothed in the mantle of tradition, elevated through myth and propaganda, providing meaning, yet essentially meaningless. The death of the bull is a tragedy and spectacle, not a triumph. And so it is with war, hence why Wilfried Owen called the notion that dolce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’) an ‘old lie’.
Bullfighting, with which Hemingway was fascinated, serves as a grim metaphor for the violence of the war.
Here we could digress and ask ourselves what constitutes meaning, whether Hemingway is conflating two ways of seeing the world: the mode of the scientist and the mode of the philosopher or religious person. We are primates and persons; your favourite song is sound and music; love is neurochemistry and the most meaningful thing we can experience. Much trouble arises from dismissing what is meaningful as ‘nothing but’ its components. Such a reductive view is, in the last resort, anti-human, for it reduces us to mere matter, bags of meat moving through space. A great evil of war and those who seek it out without good reason is that they use our need for meaning, and the meaning we draw from the natural sympathy we feel for those with whom we share a home, to send people to their deaths.
But Hemingway was a sensitive man who understood paradox, and in part that is why The Sun Also Rises is so tragic. Hemingway understands the need for meaning, yet is scarred by the events of the First World War. He cannot steep seeing through the veil to the abyss beneath it. And in The Sun Also Rises we see it too. The characters live the kinds of lives that the image-obsessed try to suggest they live. They live the kind of lives that would make any Instagram addict proud. But it is also for show. These are lost souls. Hemingway does not moralise. He gives no commentary. He shows and does not tell. And he has no answers to the questions posed by these very empty lives.
Which is all a bit bleak. It might not be to your taste, reader, if you are looking for something with a redemptive flavour. But if you are not, and if you want to see and feel for yourself what life might have been like for those who had gone through the Great War and emerged on the other side, then you will like this book. And I should say that there is nothing about that ‘Lost Generation’ that holds a monopoly on emptiness. We are often told there is a ‘crisis of meaning’ in the West, thanks (depending on who you ask) to liberalism and its erosion of social bonds and commoditisation of everything, or to the rise of ‘my-truth’ morality, or to the loss of religion … The Sun Also Rises is charged with the quiet despair of anyone, anywhere who has felt herself unmoored and floating across the seas of a world that no longer makes sense.
