The Sun Also Rises Critical Essay
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In this excerpt, Cochran disagrees with the body of criticism which finds The Sun Also Rises overtly cynical, focusing instead on the circularity of the human condition.
Emphasis in the considerable body of criticism in print on The Sun Also Rises rests with the cynicism and world-weariness to be found in the novel. Although Lionel Trilling in 1939 afforded his readers a salutary, corrective view, most commentators have found the meaning inherent in the pattern of the work despairing. Perhaps most outspoken is E. M. Halliday, who sees Jake Barnes as adopting “a kind of desperate caution” as his modus vivendi. Halliday concludes that the movement of the novel is a movement of progressive “emotional insularity” and that the novels theme is one of “moral atrophy.” [“Hemingways Narrative Perspective,” in Sewanee Review, 1952.] In his “The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,” Mark Spilka finds a similarly negative meaning in the novel. Thus Spilka arrives at the position that in naming “the abiding earth” as the hero of the novel, Hemingway was “perhaps wrong or at least misleading.” [ Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, 1958.]
But if Hemingway was misleading in so identifying the novels hero, he was misleading in a fashion consistent with his “misleading” choice of epigraph from Ecclesiastes and consistent with the “misleading” pattern he incorporated in the text of his novel. Far from indicating insularity and moral atrophy, the novel evidences circularity and moral retrenching. Much Hemingway criticism–always excepting Trillings–demonstrates the reaction of conventional wisdom to healthy subversion of that brand of wisdom. Hence the often truly sad gulf which Trilling laments between the pronouncements of Hemingway “the man” and the artistically indirect achievement of Hemingway “the artist” [“Hemingway and His Critics,” Partisan Review, 1939.] Jake Barnes, to deal with the central character of but one of Hemingways novels, is far more than the “desperately cautious” mover through life which Halliday calls him. Like the Biblical Preacher, Jake is a worldly wise accepter of the nature of the human condition. That condition is, to be sure, a predicament, for as Hemingway more than once baldly stated, life is tragic. But recognition of the tragic nature of life is by no means necessarily a cause for despair. If any readers of The Sun Also Rises become misdirected, they are certainly not misled by Hemingway.
The opening verses of the Book of Ecclesiastes are ambiguous, and the individual readers responses to these and subsequent verses are varied. One must assume that Hemingway found the dominant tone of Ecclesiastes right for his artistic purposes, but one hastens to recognize the distinct possibility that that overall tone is not one of world-weariness (although the temptation to think so is great at many junctures) but of worldly wisdom. In reading the epigraph from Ecclesiastes which Hemingway provides, one is struck by the omission of all occurrences of “Vanity of Vanities.” Most Hemingway critics appear to regard these omissions as ironically absent, as evidence, that is, of Hemingways application of his celebrated “iceberg” principle–in this instance of a knowledge shared between the author and reader of the bulk of the iceberg which floats beneath the surface. But is it not just as likely that the omissions are made not in the service of irony, but quite simply in the service of exclusion? The so-called “Hemingway Code” is designed, I suggest, not to provide a means of survival in a life which is a vain endeavor to discover meaning, but rather to provide a means of survival which itself is meaning. This I take to be the import of that passage in the novel, so readily identified as important, but so potentially “misleading,” in which Jake thinks,
You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I like, 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 moneys worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your moneys worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies Ive had.
Perhaps that wasnt true, though perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe If you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.
Certainly Jake is not rejecting life, any more than Count Mippipopolous (” one of us,” Brett insists) is “dead.” Nor is love dead in The Sun Also Rises; it is, rather, unattainable–or better, never to be consummated. All of which is to say that The Sun Also Rises is a far less bitter and a far more mature book than is A Farewell to Arms.
In any event, nothing in the passage actually chosen and printed as the second of the two epigraphs for The Sun Also Rises is in contradiction to Hemingways assertion that the abiding earth is the hero of his novel. There can be no denying, however, that circularity such as that contained in the epigraph may be employed by an author to suggest meaninglessness. Perhaps it may even be said that our usual response to circularity is that it suggests meaninglessness. But when in a literary work circularity is demonstrated to be the pattern of life, the response of the reader is to be governed by the artists presentation; whether the author is complaining about what he regards as an inescapable fact of life or whether he is stating what he regards as an unalterable fact must emerge from the work itself.
And so to the text of The Sun Also Rises. To begin with, let us not forget that, as John Rouch says, “Jake Barnes is telling the story in retrospect. Because Jake has lived through these events, he is well aware of what is going to happen.” And let us further agree with Rouch that “… Jake knows that the essential story is contained between the two cab drives of Jake and Brett.” [“Jake Barnes as Narrator,” Modem Fiction Studies, 1965-66.] Let us add to these observations of Rouch, the second of which so clearly intimates a coming full circle, Jakes thoughts after he has framed his telegram to Brett, who awaits his aid in the Hotel Montana in Madrid. “That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring