Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, 2nd Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

206 Pages·2010·1.64 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Ernest Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Sun Also Rises—New Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ernest Hemingway’s The sun also rises / edited and with an introduction by Harold
Bloom.—New ed.
p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-890-0 (hardcover)
1. Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961. Sun also rises. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title.
III. Series.
PS3515.E37S92355 2010
813'.52—dc22
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Date printed: October 2010
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
From the rue Saint-Jacques to the Pass of Roland to the
“Unfinished Church on the Edge of the Cliff” 3
H. R. Stoneback
Bill Gorton, Jake’s Wounded Preacher:
The Therapeutic Nature of Jokes 43
Wolfgang E. H. Rudat
The Sun Also Rises: Learning to Live
in a Naturalistic World 65
Paul Civello
Narrational Values and Robert Cohn
in The Sun Also Rises 83
James Nagel
Protestant, Catholic, Jew: The Sun Also Rises 91
Ron Berman
The Way It Wasn’t in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises 107
Adrian Bond
vi Contents
Whiteness and the Rejected Other in The Sun Also Rises 123
Daniel S. Traber
“The Saloon Must Go, and I Will Take It with Me”:
American Prohibition, Nationalism, and
Expatriation in The Sun Also Rises 141
Jeffrey A. Schwarz
The Pedagogy of The Sun Also Rises 165
Donald A. Daiker
Chronology 179
Contributors 181
Bibliography 183
Acknowledgments 187
Index 189
Editor’s Note
My introduction centers on Hemingway’s rhetorical stance, as the point
where his style and sensibility come together.
H. R. Stoneback sees the fundamental structure of the novel as based
on pilgrimage, while Wolfgang E. H. Rudat explores the therapeutic nature
of humor in the book.
Paul Civello turns to Hemingway’s naturalistic proclivities, followed by
James Nagel’s discussion of narrativity as it relates to the figure of Robert
Cohn.
Ron Berman considers the religious divisions that informs the novel,
while Adrian Bond addresses the moral and emotional ambiguities Heming-
way presents.
For Daniel S. Traber, Jake Barnes embodies a privileged whiteness that
imposes judgment and division on the novel, while Jeffrey A. Schwarz turns
his attention to Prohibition, alcohol, and alcoholism as it touched Heming-
way and his characters’ worlds.
Donald A. Daiker concludes the volume in asserting that The Sun Also
Rises is a pedagogical novel and that teaching and learning are central to the
philosophy of life Jake Barnes espouses.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
S
o severely stylized and rigorously mannered is Ernest Hemingway’s The
Sun Also Rises that it continues to achieve a classic status, decades after its
initial publication. It is a masterpiece of stance and of sensibility, and like
The Great Gatsby (which influenced it) The Sun Also Rises evades all the
dangers that might have reduced it to become another mere period piece.
Again like The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises is something of a prose
poem, emerging from the literary era dominated by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land. Like Eliot himself, who was much affected by Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness, both Fitzgerald and Hemingway take up a narrative stance that
is influenced by Conrad’s Marlow, the prime narrator of Heart of Darkness,
Lord Jim, and (though he is unnamed there) “The Secret Sharer.” Nick Car-
raway in The Great Gatsby and Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises are equivo-
cal narrators, each with a protagonist who is his main concern: Gatsby
for Carraway and Lady Brett Ashley for Jake Barnes. There is something
feminine in sensibility about both Carraway and Barnes, as there was about
Conrad’s Marlow and about Eliot’s Tiresias, the implied narrative sensibility
of The Waste Land.
The wounded Fisher King of The Waste Land, impotent and yearning
for spiritual salvation, is clearly akin to the impotent Jake Barnes, maimed
in World War I and so no longer Brett Ashley’s lover, though they continue
to be in love with each other. Interpreters of Brett take remarkably varied
views of her, ranging from a man-eating, Circean bitch-goddess to another
lost Waste Lander, stoic and disinterested and essentially tragic, questing for
what cannot be recovered, a lost image of sexual fulfillment. It is suggestive
1