In any case, thanks again for a great discussion; it was fun to work through London's London last week. We might begin our discussion this week by talking a bit about literary naturalism before we move to literary modernism, as I want us to think about the impact of intellectual history on changing notions of travel and mobility in the early twentieth century. Or we might just see where the conversation takes us... it went in some interesting directions last week, so let's just keep the momentum, eh?
Per our usual routine, after you read The Sun Also Rises please post your question and 12-minute attempt to answer it in the comments here.
See you Tuesday,
Kevin
I liked this book for the most part. There were some very interesting aspects that mirror class discussions. The one that stood out the most was from the beginning of the book. A discussion between Cohn and Jake where Cohn says he would be too old before he could ever travel. Jake’s response, “Don’t be a fool. You can go anywhere you want. You’ve got plenty of money” (p. 18). In the same conversation, Jake says, “going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another” (p.19).
ReplyDeleteThat last statement was really interesting to me because the idea of escape has come up several times. Similarly, the idea of self-discovery has been a theme. I suppose my question is why people use travel as an excuse to escape a place or themselves? Self-discovery is definitely something that happens when traveling, but I don’t know that it should be a main reason for the travel. It seems strange that someone attempts to escape themselves because that seems almost impossible. I understand escaping a situation or a place, but does that translate into escaping yourself?
This was a difficult book for me to get into – easy reading, but I’m usually not a fan of so much drama. That being said, I still enjoyed the parts that annoyed me for their realism and frankness. While one could place a focus on the physical travel taking place throughout the book, Jake and Brett’s relationship seems to take center stage. Traveling to a new place seemed to really bring out all of the struggles, tempers, and grudges between the main characters. Things that managed to lurk just behind the surface just couldn’t be hidden anymore, and while the trip seemed to bring out some pleasant camaraderie, it also brought out the worst in some of them.
ReplyDeleteThis isn’t really a main theme of the book, but something I noticed and thought was interesting; the descriptions changed drastically when Jake finally had time to himself, with only a bottle of wine for “good company.” So I suppose my question is: how does travel change when someone is alone versus in a group? Would Jake have gotten in fights or became extremely drunk if he went to the fiesta in Spain alone? Does the grand tour have to be made in the company of friends? And most importantly, how do one’s attitudes toward travel, the place one is visiting, and life in general, change when one is traveling alone? While alone, Jake’s emotions and actions are steady, long-lasting, or tame. In a group, he seems to live life to its fullest (or craziest). Traveling alone doesn’t seem to change his mind about anything – you could even say he’s completely self-absorbed. Back with his friends at the fiesta in Spain – or even in Paris – he seemed so much more alive.
Jessika (Bambi) Caudy
ReplyDeleteOctober 5, 2015
Ernest Hemingway’s book this week was a page turner for me. I enjoyed the personal aspects of everyone’s lives and all the love, fighting, and drama. My main focus on the book became the Pamplona Inn’s owner, Montoya. Montoya was a bullfighting expert and a paternal figure for the young upstart Pedro Romero. Montoya’s actions and attitude, as they developed throughout the last half of the book, displayed the difference in the attitudes that indigenous people hold towards tourists. So I guess my question is how do indigenous people change when around outsiders?
When we as readers were first introduced to Jake and Montoya’s relationship, it was established that Montoya respected Jake for being a genuine bullfighting enthusiast. Jake appreciated the art form and was accepted into that community, he became an insider in the bullfighting ring. Jake was even invited to dine with Pedro Romero and was asked his opinions on the bulls and Pedro’s performance. All these interactions established that Jake was well accepted into the community and respected as more than just a tourist.
This began to change when Brett began to show interest in Pedro and Jake allowed the young bullfighter to get mixed up in the “outsider” crowd. Montoya expressed to Jake the dangers involved in allowing Pedro to intermingle with the outsiders, because they would corrupt him. Jake did nothing but support the interests of Brett.
Because of this interaction and lack of interference on Jake’s part, Montoya began to treat Jake less like a fellow enthusiast and more like a tourist. He remained polite but did not ask Jake’s opinion on a fight, and did little to even acknowledge him other than the same polite nod given to all other tourists.
Jake’s status within the community changed altogether when he aided the corruption of Pedro Romero. This exemplifies the thin line that travelers walk between “tourist” and “one of the indigenous”. This was further displayed when Jake went to France and gave out generous tips to workers to “make friends”. He never actually made any real friends of which to go back to; he became a valued commodity in the tourism industry of where he visited. His relationships became superficial in France; he would never be more than a tourist with a big fat wallet.
This is essentially the same thing that happened between Jake and Montoya. Jake went from being a respected member of a community to just another tourist coming to see the bulls. Montoya judged that although Jake understood the fine art behind bullfighting, he did not understand the people involved.
I enjoy reading about the interactions our travelers have with the indigenous people of the places they visit. You can always see a shift in attitude when a traveler’s status is changed in a community.
This book is set right after World War I. At this time many people who had seen the war were a lost in their loss of meaning. People came back from the war unable to reconnect with what used to keep them grounded in life. Things that seams so sure before became uncertain. Jakes loss of religion and Brett’s loss of morals seam to be two key things to recognize from this book. To escape this uncertainty they gallivant around other traditions and always make sure their minds are preoccupied by plenty of drinking as so they wont have to confront these feelings or loss of feeling. Has this outlook on life carried on? We have this theme of self discover that keeps coming up (Leesha has also mentioned it) and I am wondering how time period works its way into that. War seams to be a big part of the loss of ones self in many way literature. Are the characters in this book trying to find themselves again after their experiences related to the war? Does the self discovery theme live on in travel today because we have never gained a moral grounding in which we can understand the harsh times of violence that we see almost every day in our modern world? To escape this inability to understand, do we seek a new means outside of ourselves and our own cultures? Or do the answers we seek lay at our feet and they are just in too many pieces to sort out having been shot down each time we try to build the puzzle? Is it possible to have anything but a ghost for morals?
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, I was reminded of a reoccurring question from one of our first meetings in class. In these first couple of weeks, we have discussed the trope of travel writing as an attempt at self-discovery. Leesha and Annie have both begun this conversation in their posts, and I would like to prompt it further with my own question: When traveling abroad do we need to strive to immerse ourselves in the cultures we come in contact with? Or must a traveler always remember where they came from (their nation of origin, if you will) and diligently stay true to their own cultural standards? Which of these principles leads to better travel writing?
ReplyDeleteDuring a conversation over coffee with Jake, Bill makes the comment: "You know what's the trouble with you? You're an expatriate" (Hemingway 120). In the same paragraph Bill says, "Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing" (120). He goes on to say that as an expatriate, Jake has "lost touch with the soil" and that "fake European standards have ruined you" (120).
Bill's attitude reminded me of our Mad Libs reading from Stuff White People Like. I got the picture of the traveler who returns home "completely changed" following a new religion, new diet, new interests, etc. all based around their time abroad. But in Jake's case, he doesn't return home to America. Jake has been abroad for a long time now and according to Bill, this is the source of his problem. Annie brought up the search for meaning after WW1 in her post and I agree that aspects of that are at work here. After such a horrible war, people were questioning their very identities and wondering about their place in the world. I think many people still travel today with these same questions. But I wonder, is Bill right about the dangers of this exploration? Bill blames the drinking, the obsession with sex, and the general laziness on Jake's dislocation from the home country (120). I'm not saying his extended time abroad is to blame for his life choices, but it is an interesting thing to consider. In the middle of trying to find oneself abroad, do we actually begin to lose pieces of ourselves across the borders of different countries? Does travel break us down more than it makes us "whole"?
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ReplyDeleteThe Sun Also Rises made me continually question the nature of travel itself. I kept asking myself, how exactly these characters are really travelling? To me, it seems that the escapist motivations of travel have manifested themselves in the very way the characters live their lives. They live in one city, Paris, but travel all over the place within it. They are on a continual track that runs between certain bars and clubs. They’re always drinking/drunk, so I think a majority of their travel is travelling to different states of soberness, haha. They do the same thing in Paris as they do in Spain; they can do those things anywhere. Bill writes Jake that, “the States were wonderful. New York was wonderful. […] He wrote that Vienna was wonderful. Then a card from Budapest: ‘Jake, Budapest is wonderful.’” Bill doesn’t even remember that much about Vienna, apart from the prize-fight. At the conclusion of his tale, Bill says, “Well, anyway, let’s eat […]. Unless you want me to tell you some more travels stories”. I felt that this was significant, because it hadn’t really seemed that he differentiated all that much between the places he’d been, because they’d all just been “wonderful”. Brett is travelling to different men and relationships statuses. My overarching question throughout the entire book was, what’s the point? And I think I get that maybe there isn’t a point.Their lives just seemed like the manifestation of restlessness and disenchantment, a manifestation of why they were expatriates in the first place, whether they were in Paris or in Spain.Only Jake seems to convincingly cross over between the expatriates and the locals while in Spain.
ReplyDeleteIn The Sun Also Rises, the main character, Jake, seems to occupy a sort of liminal space between the traveler and the local. He acts comfortable and at-home in France and Spain, he knows the places, he knows the people, he knows the languages and customs well enough, and he gives the impression that he has no intention of returning to America. He views himself as separate from other travelers, such as the scene at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant where there are “too many compatriots” (page 82). And the locals may even view him as separate from other travelers too, such as how Montoya recognizes him as an aficionado, while Americans cannot truly have aficion (pages 136-137). What is this liminal space? Is it a transition into becoming local? Or is Jake just walking the boundary?
ReplyDeleteIt’s hard to tell if the characters are really traveling. There is so much romantic involvement and drama that it’s hard to tease out the travel narrative. Their journeys feel somewhat pointless and unfulfilled. Because he’s the main character, we get to see a little more into Jake’s thoughts, but still not enough to really figure him out. While he acts more local than the others in his group, I think our discussions in class point out that one can never truly become local to a place they’re traveling to. Jake seems broken and lost. He pursues excitement and new experiences by going fishing and watching the bull-fights, but in the end he’s in the same place . . . not really fitting in anywhere.
I found the book to be very readable but also very depressing. Genuinely depressing. It didn’t make me depressed, but I felt tinges of great grief and hollowness throughout the book, and for me it’s impossible to read it without considering Hemingway’s suicide later in life. I think a lack of rootedness is tied to that. It has been often remarked that Hemingway and his colleagues were disillusioned after World War I, along with other dehumanizing factors modern life. Hemingway has a famous quote that “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed on the page.”
ReplyDeleteAll this can be very wrenching, but it is also the epitome of Romanticism. Romanticism is the response to dehumanizing, urban, industrial modern life. It raises up the individual. There is also a lack of rootedness from the instability of urban life. It is no wonder to me that Hemingway and his colleagues chose to be immigrants in Europe, or “expats”, if you like terms seething with white privilege. They were uprooted from the beginning, and so leaving “home” didn’t mean much to them. I believe there is a great longing for a sense of home throughout the book. It is amazing how sensitive Hemingway and everyone else is in the book. They can get pretty childish, too. It’s not the tough image I imagined when first (lightly) reading the book in high school. They didn’t have much stability, so it’s no wonder that they got “tight” so easily, got down, and drank themselves silly. It’s very appealingly Romantic in one sense, but it’s most definitely not the life I’d enjoy. Way too emotionally volatile.
I was pleasantly surprised at how easy a read this novel was. I was really expecting a bit more of a struggle. Within the first 2 chapters I was reminded of the same tropes that keep being brought up in class; privilege, travel, self-discovery, and culture immersion. I see that Leesha also mentions the same quotes that stood out to me, and I want to sort of prompt off of her, if acceptable. A quote that really stood out to me was in chapter two, when Robert Cohn says, “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it” (P.18) Do people travel to prove that they are doing more in their life? Are they justifying that they lived a full and happy life because of traveling to other parts of the world? Cohn goes on to tell Jake, “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it” (P.19)? A few short sentences between this dialogue Jake responds, “[…] going to another country doesn’t make any difference. […] You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another” (P. 19). I understand that Robert wants to get more out of his life, but does traveling abroad really help with that? Jake doesn’t seem to think so. I’ve often heard people talk about how they’re going to book a trip to Haiti, that way they can really appreciate the life they’ve been dealt. What does that mean? Can you truly get away and see a bigger picture if you travel for these purposes?
ReplyDeleteReading Hemingway, I couldn't help but draw a few connections between this text and the text I'm reading for Richard Simpson's Allegory class in regards to the birth of leisure in culture; specifically, what is travel (the american vacation) if not the epitome of leisure activity. French philosopher and critical theorist Henri Lefebvre, (who we're reading with Richard) argues that "with its fragmentation of labour, modern industrial civilization creates both a general need for leisure and differentiated concrete needs within that general framework". What he is speaking in reference to regards Marx alienation of workers from labour. Because in the modern world, we don't find a sense of individuality in labour, we seek leisure as a result, and the sort of leisure which we seek exists dialectically to the sort of work we fulfill within modern society; it is to say, the type of leisure reflects the type of labour. In Hemingway, the type of leisure, obviously, is travel, including the activities that occur in the passing of that travel (fishing, watching bull fights, getting wasted, bedding women); so reading Hemingway, I tried to identify (thinking of Lefebvre) what is the mode of labour which this type of leisure (travel) reflects. I believe that the answer is, war. Jake, and if I'm not mistaken, at least one other of the characters has served in the military (as did Hemingway) and is now an expatriate. Bill tells Jake, "You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes," (115). I find it terribly fascinating that travel and war are the two aspects of this dialectic. The reason, I think that war is so key the labour/leisure dialectic, returns to the Marxist alienation; instead of being estranged in labour from the process/product/self/and other as Marx argues, war is the ultimate connection which renders the local to the global; war connects economies, commodities, demographics, and geography in one great social relation. I don't think it is all that surprising then, that travel (leisure) is dialectical to war (labour) because in the post war and modernist world, war and travel reflect each other, that is, travel reflects the needs which war creates. What need is that? I'll have to think about it a lot more to have any sort of articulate and more definitive conclusion, but to pull a quick one out of my butt, I think the need in leisure which the labour of war creates, is connectivity; that is, a desire for a global identity which is only manifest in a post war setting.
ReplyDeleteI'm not someone who reads an awful lot of Hemingway - in fact, even though the name is familiar to me, I really don't think I've read anything by him. I may even have gotten out of reading The Old Man and the Sea in high school. So reading The Sun Also Rises was an interesting experience for me, in part because his writing style was sort of reminiscent of Oscar Wilde (my favorite author) in places and in part because I don't think I've ever read anything where so many people talk so much. But through their talking, I picked up on what seemed to be a sort of recurring theme, which helped me to develop my question. In reading The Sun Also Rises, all of the characters all seemed to be one thing: bored. So I wanted to know: why? Or, maybe for a more specific question: why does travel seem to be portrayed as being so boring in older writing?
ReplyDeleteAnd I mean, I'm not just talking about the physical process of travel. Because yeah, before airplanes, of course travel was boring. But I guess I mean more of the experience of traveling, of going to and being in different countries and cities and immersed in these very different cultures. Nobody in Hemingway's book seems excited to be where they are, even though they're Americans living in France and visiting Spain for the holiday. Going "abroad" for a vacation seems dull and commonplace to them, and being surrounded by bullfights and drunken Spaniards is of less interest to Jake than what Brett is getting up to. One paragraph in particular, where he is finding his hotel and figuring out where to meet his friends, struck me as being remarkably mundane. Or at least, it was in sharp contrast to the travel writing of today, where even accounts of fictional travel are colored by exclamations about the culture and how different everything is and the difficulty of getting around in cities where you've never been (or maybe where you have been once or twice before).
While the American Travel Writing anthology we read at the beginning of the semester was certainly far more recent than Hemingway's works, even in those pieces there was always still a sense of wonder and excitement to be somewhere other than where they were from. I will admit that I found it difficult to invest myself in the characters and their problems, simply because they were constantly apathetic about their surroundings.
How does Hemingway show suffering in his characters travels? Is it a post war mindset in being close to where they fought?
ReplyDeleteHemingway himself lived in Paris not long after World War I and was displaced within himself. A lot of himself is within the character Jake, who seems to be struggling despite Hemingway’s little to no written out emotion. They seem to be in need of something grander within their lost generation minds, but struggle because of the horrors of war and women. Jake is impotent because his mind and body was injured, he needs to travel to feel that masculinity, but is he just causing himself more suffering. He can only suffer the longer things go on and the more his group falls apart, the further away a happy ending seems. It seems like things never really get better for Jake. It ends with a melancholy note of things that could have been in the wake of the trips disaster. Everyone loses something but none so much as the Jake and Hemingway himself. Who suffer in tandem for their travel, they never find a complete feeling from it. Jake drinks heavily with friends and lives in chaos, but he in all these moments never seems fully there, like the chaos is just another war to him. He can’t relate to people unless it’s in chaotic moments where nothing makes sense.
And then it goes into something Leesha proposed, does traveling allow for self-discovery and self-escape? Or is Jake merely trying to escape all of what is tying him to the countries, both America and Europe.
I’ve never been a big fan of Hemingway, mostly due to personal reading preferences rather than finding something displeasing about his writing. It’s just not the sort of story if I picked up off a shelf and read the description that I would want to actually bring home and finish reading. That being said, I did enjoy The Sun Also Rises for the most part. A recurring theme in much of Hemingway’s writing (and his own life of course) is expatriates. And who doesn’t love to daydream about running away to some idyllic town in France or Spain, immersing oneself in local culture and customs, and escape certain parts of your current everyday life (cough cough homework)? But does an expat ever truly become a local, become a part of the culture they’re living in, or are they sort of stuck as a perpetual traveler? At least from my experience with Hemingway’s writings I would argue that they are perpetual travelers, even if they live in the community for the rest of their lives. The expats in The Sun Also Rises live in the culture, speak the language, eat the food, etc., but there is obviously something that separates them from the locals, besides them obviously not actually being local. I would say it’s at least partly this “expat” identity. They hang out with other expats and share this similar experience and identity with them that they will never share with people who are from the community they are living in. They didn’t move to this place to become a part of the community, they moved for the purpose of leaving the place they were in.
ReplyDeleteReading about a group of expatriates was an interesting change from the usual fare. Following a group that was unmoored, seemingly in a continual state of displacement bred a much different feel than many of the other writings, much more sobering, as a matter of fact. I wonder at how Hemingway's (Jake's) personal feelings and relationships colored the places visited in the book. Paris has a melancholic hum to it. It is a busy place, with many people, nightclubs, and drinking. I would liken it to Jake's relationship to Brett. There is an attraction and a steadfastness to it, but, as Georgette says, it is "dirty. There are too many things going on, and in the meantime the absence of the natural world in the city lies in step with the uncertain masculinity of the impotent main character. Compare this to the later scenes in the countryside, then in Spain. Jake, for the first time, really relaxes while out fishing with Bill Gorton, and the pastoral scene has a dao to it not present at any other time. Later, Spain, where Hemingway feels most confident in masculinity, Brett serves as the foil by which it is brought to near ruin. The place and the way in which jake wrestles with himself are very similar.
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ReplyDeleteIn Hemingway’s story, the main character lives, works, and parties in London, but yet he is still considered an “American” by local Londoners and people he meets. My question is, when might Jake be considered a local? Will he ever become a Londoner? Or just not be branded an American? How long might such a process take? We talked briefly on this subject already in the first few weeks of class, but I thought it really applied to this book and was interested in delving more in depth. To me, Jake already seemed like a Londoner in the beginning. It wasn’t until I got a little ways into the book did I realize that he was still an American. This makes me think that other Americans tourists and travelers may consider him to be part of London, but that true Londoners still associate him with the Americans. This is a fascinating concept, as he is then not associated with either group of people. If this is the case, is he an American or a Londoner? Could this possibly be part of the transition from one to the other? The first step in the process may be becoming disassociated with either side. Or is it impossible to ever be fully accepted into a new place? Even if London changes jake so much that Americans don’t recognize him as one, is he still American? Can he ever be a local somewhere other than America?
ReplyDeleteThe question that stuck out to me in certain scenes of Hemingway's narrative was, what significance do travelers and tourists tend to place on a personal familiarity with the foreign culture? Specifically, how does their own understanding of the language affect their self-perception?
ReplyDeleteFor example, in one of the very first scenes introducing Jake's set of friends, Hemingway contrasts Frances' and Mrs. Braddocks' interactions with Georgette. Mrs. Braddocks, a Canadian, speaks to Georgette almost for the sole purpose and enjoyment of speaking in French. She is so delighted by her own abilities that it crowds out any real interest in the other person or the conversation. On the other hand, Frances' rapid and seemingly effortless French still manages to come off superior and basically uninvested.
Later, when Jake and Bill travel out for their trout fishing in Spain, one of the Basques on the train engages with them in English. He confidently makes a brief conversation with them, but afterwards he seems to have accomplished his goal and doesn't speak to them anymore. Additionally, the display of his command of English has raised his fellow Basques' opinion of him. The knowledge of another language increases his status among his peers.
I love Hemingway more than the Beatles. I’d read this novel awhile ago, when I first set off for Europe at the tender age of 17. I tried to emulate the expat lifestyle during my time living in Florence – it was shocking how similar expatriates lived their lives around Western Europe. We weren’t necessarily post war, although we were sandwiched between the Gulf Wars, just a hair shy of 9/11 and the coming of the EU. We got hammered, we went to night clubs, we’d chase and be chased by attractive Carabinieri. So much of Brett and Jake’s disconnection was dually felt by my friends and I in Europe, 80 years later. When I traveled to SE Asia, just a couple years ago, the same vibe seemed to be just as strong among the hostels and cheap bars. These places we went, though full of foreigners, began to have the same dullness of any given night at the Imperial in Juneau.
ReplyDeleteThat brings me to wonder, has anything changed? If so, what? Has it become worse than Hemingway’s time with the advent of social media?
The Sun Also Rises was an interesting novel to read, for a few reasons. Starting off the list is because it was an awful tragedy, right from the beginning. Next, (more of a relevancy to this class) is that I’m not exactly sure that this could be classified under the normal guidelines of “travel literature” as defined in earlier works that we’ve read. They remain mostly in Paris, right? They venture away to Spain in the latter half of the book, but (in my opinion) it isn’t really the most conventional travel narrative. All of this may be so, but the question I had come up with is based on the section classification: The Grand Tour.
ReplyDeleteDoes this book defy the conventional “Grand Tour” narrative?
It seems as though while Jake is living in Paris, he doesn’t partake in the usual checklist of things travelers/tourists do while in Paris. Only while he is in Spain does he pull out his metaphorical checklist and does some things that someone on a grand tour may do. Running of the bulls seems to be a festival that he partakes in yearly. Jake even mentions earlier in the piece that bullfighters are the only ones that live life to the fullest, giving us the impression that he has some sort of infatuation with them. As I wrap up this twelve minute blog write, I’m indifferent to the classification as a conventional Grand Tour narrative. Jake doesn’t seem to travel from some far off place just to fulfill some dream of watching the running of the bulls. This seems sort of natural for him, something he looks forward to yearly. The real question might be that when does the tourist attraction that we love to take part in as tourists become part of a routine and no longer considered touristy?
I found Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises to be quite interesting and entertaining. The free for all lifestyle made the story colorful and entertaining. The drunkenness and restlessness was brought on by the most horrific war the world had ever seen to date. Hemmingway was able to relate to this lifestyle because he had lived it in some ways. Although some is over the top behavior there were a many of young people who had witnessed horrific things and wanted to forget what they had seen. For many the only way to relieve the pain and fear was to drink and live life like it was your last day. Hemingway’s take on travel via PTSD brings a different experience to travel that had probably not yet been explored until The Sun Also Rises was published.
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