Back when I was enrolled in the obligatory American literature class in high school, we read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
It bored me to tears. I had no idea why I was reading a whole bunch of boring conversations between boring people.
Now, it is only fair to note that when I was in high school, my literary tastes were unrefined. Well, that is putting it mildly; I had no taste. So, my high school reaction to books is generally not even remotely accurate. But, in this case, I was actually not too far off. This novel really is a record of a bunch of boring conversations between boring people. That, as my older self realizes, is exactly the point.
A bunch of Americans living in Paris after War War I spend all their time roaming around bars, pretending to both work and sleep when they aren’t at the bar. They drink a lot. They talk about drinking even more which apparently makes them thirsty so they have another drink. They swap meaningless gossip. They trade insults, which every now and then results in a drunken brawl. They pout when things don’t go their way, which since they have no way, is all the time. There is, of course, a girl. Everyone likes Brett. So, they fight over her too. She doesn’t mind much. One might suspect she encourages it. Then, because they are bored, one day they all head down to Spain to, you know, drink and have more boring conversations.
There are two things that break up this pattern. First, there is the closest thing to a genuine love story in the whole novel. The narrator, Jake, and the girl, Brett, love one another. They have loved one another for years. Yet, they cannot run off into the sunset and live happily ever after. Why not? Jake’s war injury. The nature of this injury is never explicitly stated, so I suspect I totally missed it in high school. It’s hard to imagine we actually talked about it in class. Jake, you see, is impotent. Symbolism Alert!
I’d love to rewind and go back to see those discussions in my high school class which read this book. Did we really skip over the single most important detail in this novel, the detail which makes the book something other than boring people having boring conversations? Or did we discuss it, and somehow I forgot all about what must have been the most risqué conversation we ever had in an actual class in my high school? I have no idea.
Then we get to the other part of the novel which rises above all those deliberately boring conversations. Bull-fighting. While in Spain, our something-less-than-merry band goes to watch the bullfighting. Brett, in particular, is enraptured by the bull-fighting, and in particular the young bull-fighter so attractive that he is guaranteed to make every young heart swoon.
When Hemingway comes to write about the bulls, the prose noticeably shifts. Instead of the lazy, boring conversations of the bar, we get vivacious descriptions of bulls charging. The bulls are full of life, surging and thrusting their horns. The bullfighters do a delicate dance of teasing the bull just enough to get it to charge but then at the last minute dancing away, frustrating the bull, so the bull charges again with even greater fervor only to be frustrated again and again and again as the tension builds and builds and builds. In the end, the bull is slain by the bullfighter and falls limply to the ground. Yeah, if you don’t blush when reading Hemingway’s descriptions of the bullfights you aren’t paying attention. As Brett becomes increasingly excited, as Jake watches the bullfights with a sense of longing, if you don’t notice what is happening, you really aren’t paying attention. Way beyond symbolism alert.
We had that disturbed emotional feeling that comes after a bull-fight, and that feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight.
I found that quote, by the way, simply by opening the book to a random page in the section about Spain. I had no idea what was going on in this book when I read it in high school. None.
Which raises the question: why do people assume that every Great Book is equally good to use in high school English classes? In what world is The Sun Also Rises the best book to give to an 11th grade class? Even if you want to use Hemingway in high school, this is not the book to use. The Old Man and the Sea works vastly better with high school students. It has themes a 16 year old could appreciate. What 16 year old needs to reflect on the impotence of middle age when dreams have died and there is no life to sustain a day-to-day existence? What 17 year old needs a primer on the power of, ahem, bull-fighting to recapture a lost youth?
The Sun Also Rises and the Sun Goes Down. One generation ends and another begins. What abides? The old ennui. Decades after Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, the King of Cool, sang about it. Decades after Sinatra, Kurt Cobain sang about it. Decades after Cobain, you are reading a blog post about a book about bored people having boring conversations. The Earth abides. Hemingway and the Preacher have spoken.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.
