World War I

This is not the first time reading The Sun Also Rises but I definitely had a stronger reaction to the text this time through because I was reading it through the scope of the War. Something that struck me was the ambivilent nature of the characters despite living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. They obviously have motivations for becoming expatriates, but it seems that they are constantly saying that Paris is just okay. Jake goes into a lot of detail describing where they go and what they do and has a strong grasp of the geography of the city but echoes the other characters' desire to leave the city and go find something else.

I was also struck this time around by the complete unfairness of Jake's injury. He and Brett seem to want desperately to be together but they are held back by the limitations of Jake's body. It's very difficult for me to imagine the turmoil of feeling sexual feelings but having a body that cannot respond to these desires. Jake does not acknowledge his impotency very often and seems less enraged about it than Brett, probably because it is hard to him to verbalize the immense pain he feels. I think his impotency reflects the chaos and unfairness of the War. While he got to survive the fighting, he is left with very damaging effects that cause him to live life in a very different way. This reflect the idea that no one really made it out of WWI alive, which we see in the way that most of the characters in the novel seem to be empty shells of once-active and passionate people.

The book The Sun Also Rises it is said to be about the lost generation after WWI. It is evident that this a generation in disbelief of what occured in the previous years during the war and what they should do now that the war is over. Each character is trying to deal with those questions in their own way. A lot of it dealing with alochol and social clubs. But two characters dealings with the war really struck me because it was different. When Cohn expresses how he wants to visit South America because he feels they (he and Jake) are not living life to the fullest. This example of childish behave is his way of dealing with what has changed in his world. The other example is at the end of chapter 6 when Frances goes on her rant about why Cohn will not marry her. This again is a childish act, which seems to a re-occuring way to deal with post war life. But she has repressed many of these feelings towards Cohn. It seems that her idea is to repress any negative feelings and they will go away and to just live happy, because Hemmingway constantly refers to Frances' smile as brightly despite her angry rant she is going on.

I think these two examples of childish behavior and the example of repression was a way much of this generation dealt with post war life. For many, the war interrupted their young lives and these people were forced to grow up way before they were normally meant to. So after the war, many felt their life has slipped past them and reverted to child-like behaviors because it took them back to a much happier pre-war life they knew. Post war life was filled with a lot of confusion, so to revert to pre war characteristics brought them back to a better time in their life.

The use of repression seemed to be another way this generation dealt with the post war life. With the war, many of this generation could not and did not express emotions so they would repress all they saw or felt and that is how they dealt with things. This trend seemed to continue after the war. It seems that because repression had been part of their life for so long it was just normal for them. But even in Testament of Youth, repression only lasted so long before someone blew up and let it all out. Much like how Frances blew up on Cohn for not marrying her. These actions are example how the war affected their lives even after it had ended.

The Sun Also Rises provides insight into the lives of those who lived through WWI. Focus is placed on a group of adults (around their 30s) who mask their painful recollections with alcohol and other substance and partake in partying at clubs. They do not enjoy this however, these activities are a medium which they can temporarily escape their overwhelming feelings of emptiness, loss, and sorrow. The character Jake, a WWI survivor, embodies the insecurity of manhood that came about during the post-war cultural change. Due to his war related injury he can no longer produce offspring; this causes him to feel inadequate, and is intensified with recurring rejection from Lady Brett, the woman whom he is in love with. Lady Brett Ashley is a strong sexually independent woman who embodies traditional masculine qualities. This causes an increase in the male characters’ gender anxiety and in one case it results in violence. Jake’s relationship with and emotional loyalty to Lady Brett results in the loss of other relationships and is portrayed as a self destructive love affair… more accurately an obsession. Hemingway creates a sense of aimlessness within the characters lives that are lacking purpose and affection. Relationships among the characters come off as fake; they are not genuine, but temporary arrangements. 

All through Book I, all I could think of was The Waste Land, specifically the Fire Sermon with its sterile, dutiful sex and dispassionate interactions.  While Brett and Jake clearly care deeply about one another, they react to their feelings with frustration and annoyance rather than with the wonder and passion one would normally expect of their age and situation.  They tell everyone that they have their careers to think about, but this irritating thing called love keeps getting in the way, mucking things up, throwing them in with one another against their better interests. 

It took more than one readthrough for me to catch on to the actual issue, which brought to mind more of The Waste Land, n the form of the Fisher King.  Career, duty, and practicality seem to be the priority for both characters, especially Brett, who is about to enter her third loveless marriage, which is what I assumed to be the issue.  While these may play a minor role, though, the largest issue is that of fertility.  From what I could pick up, she seems to be entering these marriages because, while she loves Jake, he cannot give her what she needs.  It is quite clear from the momentary lapses, when she is drunk, open, and upset, that Jake is the one she wants to go to, but the "wound" that he refers to more than once seems to be of a sexual nature, analogous to the Fisher King's wound.  Perhaps out of dutiful commitment to reproduction, perhaps out of a desire for sex, Brett chooses the whole men over the broken one she loves.

The worst thing about the whole situation is that it has clearly broken these characters.  Jake drifts, watching his friends gain women, lose women, abandon women, in almost a mockery of his own inability to do any of these things.  He cannot fathom Cohn's inability to fight back when being berated by Frances, because if he had what Cohn had, he'd defend it.  Brett, on the other hand, has found love bitter and unfulfilling, and as a result, plunges herself into marriages with men she does not love, sex just for the sake of itself rather than for herself or for another person, party after party with man after man falling hard after her.  If the love she holds dear can be so cruelly held against her, why not do the same to others?  In this light, the "booty call" of the Fire Sermon makes infinitely more sense than it ever has before.

One of Brett’s lines towards the end of book one really stood out to me as defining all of the characters, and the state the war left them in: “You haven’t any values. You’re dead, that’s all (67)”. The war seems to have stripped them of all the values and desires that any earlier generation would have had. Love, marriage, children, a stable life—the magnitude and destruction of the war has made all of these seem insubstantial or naïve. They’re all adults in their mid-thirties, divorced or never married, and childless (Cohn’s children don’t even seem to be a factor in his life). They go to parties and drink heavily, and live entirely day-to-day, with no thought to the future.

Another effect the war had was on people’s relationships with each other. The characters don’t seem to have any more connection to each other than they do to ideals or values. Jake’s interactions with all characters but perhaps Brett are incredibly detached. During Frances’ confrontation with Cohn, though he feels vaguely sorry for the other man and seems to want it to end, Jake merely gets up and leaves his (apparent) friend and doesn’t seem to spare a thought to him. People drift in and out of Jake’s life, and don’t affect him in any way. Brett has a similar attitude, and only seems to feel anything substantial for Jake. All the other characters in her life—the original group at the party, the count—are just people that she happens to be using at the time. 

I was reading a little bit about Ernest Hemingway after I finished reading Book I of The Sun Also Rises, and I came across the term "iceberg theory" in reference to Hemingway's style. His famously pared down and restrained writing style is deceptive, the theory says, and the short, declarative sentences that Hemingway uses are really signposts pointing to the rich symbolism and emotional meaning hidden under the surface. All throughout the first book I was distracted by the thought that nothing was really happening; the characters seem to be taking taxis in circles around Paris, seeing the same sights and having the same conversations night after night. I think all of these events that Hemingway flashes in front of our eyes one after the other are the tip of the iceberg, and that there is an immense amount of depth to the characters that he simply refuses to show us explicitly.

This doesn't mean that the depth isn't there; it simply means that it is more difficult for the reader to access. I think this is the major way that the War has affected the characters, apart from the physical damage it has done. It has left them with fewer words to say. The landscape of the world is more barren now (as illustrated by Jake's infertility), so as soon as reproduction becomes impossible for him, emotional connection is the only avenue by which he can connect with other people, and the War has put up barriers on this road in the form of trauma and physical and moral destruction. The Paris nightlife is the activity which takes place amidst this destruction. Hemingway's iceberg theory is his way of demonstrating the sterile, corrupted world which the War left behind. The humans who inhabit this world are no different from before, but they do have much more difficult emotional hurdles to overcome in order to make sense of their world and of terms like "love".

This is my first time reading The Sun Also Rises and is one of only a few pieces I have read by Ernest Hemingway. I am a fan of Hemingway’s writing style, but I am sure I missed a lot of details reading through this book for the first time. As for how the war affected the characters in this book, I very quickly found several repeating ideas, such as: the need for escape, the need for love, and even the complete desertion of the idea of love. Most of the characters in The Sun Also Rises show at least one of these “symptoms” of war while some show even more. The main characters who seem to show great damage from the war are Jake and Brett who, in many ways, seem to have opposing damage from the war.

While some of the damage in the characters is physical, such as Jake’s wound, most is mental, which causes many to hide it. Jake, while trying to shrug off his wound, still faces the mortality it forces him to realize. Jake faces his mortality with a need to live his life to the fullest in his own eyes by traveling and seeing the world with a companion.

Brett, on the other hand, faces the horrors of the past war in a different way. She tries to merely escape the past by surrounding herself with companions. She also copes with a device used very commonly even today, alcohol, which she uses to escape from the demons of war. Both try to use love or companionship to shelter themselves from their demons, and both discover this to be difficult because love, as it was known before the war, seems to be dead.

I read The Sun Also Rises in a class last year, and I am happy to be reading it again. I loved it the first time I read it, but I felt as though there was a lot I missed in that first reading. Reading it this second time has brought my attention to several things that I missed before. The war has affected these characters in many ways, I think. The most obvious effect is in the character Jake. His injury from the war is mentioned multiple times, although, interesting, Hemingway never comes right out and says what it is. We can infer it though, based on his conversations and interactions with other characters, mainly female. I think this is interesting. Jake's injury prevents him from reproducing, which was on the minds of many people after the war. The fact that Hemingway never says clearly what had happened to his main character, and the fact that Jake never says it specifically himself, suggests to me a kind of reluctance to speak of it. I wonder if this would have been the case with any injury that wasn't immedietely visable. Perhaps speaking around it and avoiding the topic would have been a way of dealing with it. 

When Jake does speak of it, he makes light of the situation almost. In his conversation with Brett, he says, "What happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it" (34). But we see in other points that Jake thinks about it quite a lot, and that he doesn't find it funny at all. This seems to me to have been a way of coping. There were countless people in the war who suffered injuries like Jake's, as well as much more serious ones. People would have dealt with it in whatever way they could. Jake outwardly tries to make light of it, but thinks about it a great deal by himself. "Perhaps I would be able to sleep... My head started to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded and flying on a joke front like the Italian" (38). In Jake's case, the war has injured him, as well as emasculated him and made a joke of him. He continues on with his life as best he can, although it is clear that he is still struggling with it. 

In The Waste Land, Eliot uses quotation to decentralize the poem's authority. Much of the poem's message is not present in the central text, but is scattered throughout numerous classical allusions and references. Eliot deliberately obscures any central theme or coherent message in the poem with tangential references and margenalia. Eliot constructs his poem from the fragments of the exploded past culture, crafting a wasted land of reconfigured shards which would become the background of modernity.

    One reference that stood out to me was in lines 99-100, referring to the myth of Tereus and Philomela. Understanding the brutal context behind Philomela's rape and mutilation definitely added meaning to the poem for me; Eliot includes a symbol of violence and suppression to illustrate the stifling effect World War 1 had on English culture. The myth also served as the basis for Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. I think Eliot uses this reference to indicate how other authors have reworked antiquity to suit their own creative vision. By melding so many different references into one work, Eliot is in many ways continuing the storytelling tradition of appropriating and retelling old stories, albeit with a distinctly modern twist on them.

This was my first time to read The Wasteland. In reading other blog posts about it, it seems as though it may not be uncommon to have a difficult time understanding and fully grasping the piece. I thought his use of quotations was definitely indicative of it being a modernist piece, but also thought it contributed to the desolate anxiety of it as well. The repetitive use of "hurry up its time" and abrupt switches between strange characters somewhat illustrated maybe the emotion or feeling of the war. 

The choppy text and characters, as well as the lines he drew to Shakespeare and the Bible seemed to definitely make the piece about western culture, and his discussion of tarot cards and repetitive use of "hurry up its time" created a foreboding feeling that seemed to highlight the emptiness, desolation, and anxiety of a post war world. He's describing a wasteland barren of men who can start a new generation, with deep scars and scared eyes anxiously looking around at a destroyed world.