Maddalena Maria Missaglia

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HIGH MODERNISM IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

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Maddalena Maria Missaglia

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How was steins concept of the lost generation represented in Ernest

Hemingways the sun also rises?

The sun also rises is the first novel by Ernest Hemingway1 published in New York in 1926 and in
London in 1927; it made him the preeminent writer of his time and the icon for American
expatriates2. It tells the story of the protagonist Jake Barnes and his friends, from sordid caf in Paris
to the excitement for the upcoming Pamplonas Fiesta, in the autonomous region of Navarra, in
Spain. The story continues to the description of the fishing trip in the Pyrenees during the journey
to Spain.
The main theme is the love story between the young Jake Barnes, made impotent by a war wound,
and the charming, decidedly promiscuous, divorce Lady Brett Ashley. The relationship between the
woman and Jakes friend Robert Chon leads to the breakdown of the friendship between the two
men; and because she seduced the nineteen bullfighter, Romero, Jake lose the good reputation he
had among the citizens of Pamplona.
The love, the friendship, the virility, the relationship with the nature, the travels fascination and the
hedonism are the themes that mark the novel.
In the background: beautifully presented Paris and its boulevards, bistros and alleys: Paris is life as
it is: complex, difficult, unfulfilling, but endurable3; Spain with the obsessive attraction-repulsion
for the bullfight, narrated in its most cruel and charming realism; and the America of the immediate
postwar period, where the economic boom is exploding, in which the war seems both a distant
memory, a risk shelved forever, and a background to the belief that nothing worse could happen.
It is from here, from these premises, that the history and the life of the group of friends, who
embodies the Lost Generation, arise.
"That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You
are a lost generation."4.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21st 1899, he volunteered during the first world war and he setttled in Paris in 1921,
becoming part of the expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein. He committed suicide in Idaho in 1961. (Scott Donaldson, 1996, p. 87-88).
2 Scott Donaldson, The Cambridge Companion To Hemingway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 87.
3 A. Robert Lee, Ernest Hemingway: New Critical Essays (U.S.A.: Vision Press Ltd., 1983), p. 54.
4 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p.12.

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The expression is borrowed from Gertrude Stein, who accused Hemingway and his generation
because their moral dissipation. We know about it from Hemingways book A Moveable Feast"
which was published posthumously in 1964. Stein reported a sentence said by the master of the
garage where she left her Ford, to a young wars veteran worker, who repaired the car badly: you
are all a generation perdue5.
The definition, initially a little scornful and slyly vicious, refers to the young people, especially, but
not only, children of what we could call the well-off middle class, who lived one day at, or rather
dragging his days, looking for some changes, through bars, literary caf, intellectual cavils, almost
never realised dreams and projects, started and finished love-affairs and boredom .
An individualist, conformist, libertine, anti-prohibitionist and disengaged youth, who arrived in the
old continent mainly from America and who settled in Paris hanging out at bars, drinking and
devoting themself to a life of dissipation and hedonism. Most of them were wars veterans who
judged scornfully the war itself. They were people who lived through the trauma of a catastrophic
event at an early age, that inevitably scarred them for life, leaving a sense of loss and isolation, and
who were thrown into the world, trying to reborn under the scars of the war: the inflation and the
economic crisis were around the corner. Lazing at the cafes or travelling on a pleasure trip,
consuming alcohol, watching bullfights and having parties: This is what Gertrude Stein talked about
when she used the term Lost Generation.
Later the definition starts to identify that group of writers and artists, who were the exponents of
the aggressive avant-garde that mixed up the traditional lexical and expressive categories,
recreating them with original, post-modern and innovative methods. The lost generation is part of
the generation of the so-called roaring twenties, which were characterized by the rebellion against
a society that was dramatically changing in each branch, thanks to the technologys innovations.
The years narrated in The Sun Also Rises are contradictory, the destruction caused by the war and
the subsequent sense of liberation and loss led to behaviors that showed a reading of life as
meaningless, lived without a line for the future.
The characters of the sun also rises live as geniuses, which some of them are, while some others
just believe to be, they write novels and search for publishers, they match their daily lives with the
greatness of art. Almost all of them are Americans, wars veterans or rich families children, living in
Paris, seeking out new values and disgusted by the middle-class society, which is alienated.
5

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964), p.12.

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We see all of them nurse their own body and spirits wounds, with the illusion of changing their
lives. All of them express mal de vivre and a nihilism typical of the ideological and anti-human
devastation that will materialize itself in the life and arts expressions during the second half of the
twentieth century.
For these reasons but not only for them the book is an absolute testimony of the lost generation, a
fictionalize documentary: the characters, the choices, the stories, the dissipated aimless life, which
is dedicated to pleasure and the hopeless love. A Sense of Loss of innocence characterizes the
generation described: They feel a lot of hypocrisy in the world and in the people and therefore they
do not care about anything because there is no more illusion so they do not feel confident or
optimistic. Characters, who represent a part of the society of that time, rebel against what the
society forbids.
The title, The Sun Also Rises refers to the sentiment of the lost generation: it indicates new style,
new beginning and new identity: an attempt to resist. The title evokes element of loneliness.
Each of the male character lives the wars consequences and this is the reason for their unhappiness,
which gives rise to fights and to a sense of provocation and anger. The book also tells about
bullfighting and boxing which are similar to the war, the boxing battlefield is perceived as the war
battlefield, where you face the enemy and feel the fear of death.
Jake Barnes, the narrator, is a war veteran, scarred in the body and in the spirit; he received serious
physical injuries that made him impotent. Jakes sterility personifies the sterility of the world, which
is now powerless and "sites of loss".6. As it is said in the Cambridge companion to Ernest
Hemingway book Barnes is a representative of lost-generation radicalism. (S. Donaldson, p. 91).
Jake is a cynical man; he is in love with Brett Lady Ashley, with whom he act with studied indifference
because he seems to be resistant to bonds. He tries to find solace in work, in watching bullfighting
and especially in drinking alcohol. He lives in a world of self-deception and he can be described as a
representative of the romantic period. In the fourth chapter the author, through Jake, with a veiled
and ironic way, critics the church and the way it solves the problems simply without thinking about
them and without confronting them, just like Jake do with his impotence problem. Every evening,
however, in his apartment in Montparnasse, lit by a gas lamp, he deals with his problem and starts
to think about it, reliving the moment when the Italian doctor had revealed to him the consequences

A. Robert Lee, Ernest Hemingway: New Critical Essays (U.S.A.: Vision Press Ltd., 1983), p.54.

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of the war; with a larger view we can read the great criticism to the war, to its aftermath and to the
damages that it caused.( E. Hemingway, 1926 p. 42).
In the fourth chapter Jake passes near the statue of Marshal Ney: through the figure of the marshal
whose actions were a proof of patriotism, Hemingway justifies the expatriation from America of his
generation as "for Ney's generation, it seemed, one retreated in order to preserve the state; for
Hemingways - and Thus for Jake Barness - one retreated to eschew it. "7.
Brett Lady Ashley, who is loved and probably in love with Jake, is a libertine divorce narcissist, lover
of many men, adored by the group of friends. She personifies the elusive woman, and the feminine
anxiety of that time. With her masculine haircut and with her many love affairs, she embodies the
new wave of sexual liberation of the roaring twenties.
Bretts desire for Jake is constantly stimulated because it is never satisfied. As a result, Jake becomes
the even more desirable subject. Jakes missing penis not only represents the power to be gained
though creative losses, but also its material absence puts in check the liberal sexuality and idleness
of the novel's expatriate community ".8
Consequently, Brett and Jake live a particularly contradictory love that generally reflects the attitude
of the lost generation towards life: avoiding the problems and leaving them unsolved, and therefore
decided not to make choices. Jake, while talking with Robert Cohn about his insomnia do not talk
about Cohns discussions which he had during the night, probably with his fiance, and which keep
him up: "what was the matter?" (Jake, Ed.) "Talking" he said (Cohn, Ed.) [...] We went out to the
Cafe Napolitan to have an aperitif and watch the evening crowd on the Boulevard. " (E. Hemingway,
1926, p. 13)
Robert Cohn is Jakes Jewish friend. He is the first character presented in the book and he represents
the desire for revenge and the buried anger of his social class - the Jews - marked by stigma. Robert
Cohn is probably the quintessential representative of the lost generation, he has an aimless life, he
is divorced and he is living a crisis in his current relationship, he is perpetually looking for himself so
he desires to travel but, as Jake says to him, travelling would not help. (E. Hemingway, 1926, p. 75).
He feels inferior and from the very beginning, he deeply desires redemption, which he tries to
achieve through boxing, that is, through physical force and aggressiveness. "He cared nothing for

The "Lost Generation" And The Generation Of Loss: Ernest Hemingway's Materiality Of Absence And The Sun Also Rises, MFS Modern Fiction
Studies, 54 (2008), p. 747.
8 The "Lost Generation" And The Generation Of Loss: Ernest Hemingway's Materiality Of Absence And The Sun Also Rises', MFS Modern Fiction
Studies, 54 (2008), p. 755.

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boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of
inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton." (E. Hemingway, 1926,
p.3)
The sense of failure that characterizes this character is immediately visible: he is passive to what
happens around him; Jake talks about the Roberts failure, bringing the sense of failure in the story,
since the beginning of the book. Cohn is also witness of the sense of isolation that he is forced to
live as a Jew: he is and will always be an outsider and he will never really fit in. this is the reason why
he is so weak.
His partner Frances tries in vain to become his wife, representing her in contrast, the bourgeois
attitude from which he runs from. Nevertheless, she keeps him in check as the culture and the
society do with his mind. Until Robert himself decides to pay her to go in England: she will attempt
to justify this trip, to herself and to others, as a sacrifice for literature. In a sarcastic, ironic and
tragicomic way, Frances tells Jake how Robert wants to send her in England to get rid of her; with
the occasion, the author exposes with an attitude of respect but clearly apparent derision all that
clique of artists, in fact fake artists, failed, who leaves: "but remember it's for literature. We all ought
to make sacrifices for literature. Look at me. I am going to England without a protest. All for
literature ". (E. Hemingway, 1926, p. 50).
References to the origins of the typical lost generations representatives abound in the book,
normally they are children of wealthy parents and wasteful of their assets. in the sixth chapter,
Frences talking about Robert and his previous divorce and she highlights the fact that his wife was
rich, he is a writer who has a good life because he is the son of a rich mother (E. Hemingway, 1926,
p. 46). She clearly used a sarcastic voice, but definitely full of envy for life that Cohn can lead while
she, without him, is forced to go to England, left by the man who promised to marry her. In the same
terms, Jake refers to young Americans coming from the wealthy middle class and belonging to the
lost generation "somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly. The reason Is that until he
felt in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark That would, in any way, detach him from
other people. (E. Hemingway, 1926, p. 47).
Harvey Stone, a penniless gambler, is another witness of the aimless life, addicted to gambling and
alcohol; he dissipates all his savings "no money. Money has not come "(E. Hemingway, 1926, p. 42).
In an almost surreal situation, after five days without eating, he prefers that Jake offer him to drink
rather than to eat. (E. Hemingway, 1926 p. 43).

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Mike Campbell, who is Bretts official boyfriend, develops a hatred to Jake, hatred unspoken except
under alcohol effects.
Then there is Bill Gorton, who can be said to be the best part of the lost generation. Bill has fun, his
days go by without too many questions and concerns, each occasion is good to laugh (and mock)
about the life.
The puritanism and religious bigotry are far, as can be imagined, from the members of the lost
generation, and The Sun Also Rises do not fail to let us notice it: on the train to Spain Jake and Bill
are relegated to the fifth service because of a group of pilgrims travelling in Europe. When Jake finds
it out, he comments indignantly, "I know that's what they are. Pilgrims. Goddam Puritans."(E.
Hemingway, 1926, pp. 86). Right after during a conversation with a family, it also emerges the
criticism of the American Prohibition, one of the main reasons that lead expatriates to Paris.
The trip to Spain, Pamplona, the meeting with the cruel bullfighting, will mark a turning point in
each of them, as a curtain that opens unexpectedly. This sudden change in the plot is represented
by the meeting with the young bullfighter Pedro; after falling in love, Brett will run away with him
and this will permanently change her relationship with Jake.
One of the main argument that the lost generation deal with is the war, and particularly the wars
nonsense: Hemingway, through Jake, commenting on the futility of betting on the bullfighting,
compares it to the futility of betting on the war. 9
Here the circle is broken, the group of friends-enemies, traveling companions, seems to lose his
thread. We will read that the relationship between Brett and Pedro will end soon because Brett is
irremediably unstable - the lost generation has no stability -. About the group we can only imagine
that - as historically happens in the lost generation - each of them will continue to seek, to find, to
lose, and to regain a sense for their own life and art, in order to release them from the wars signs.
But as we know in their immediate future there is the crisis of 29.
The Sun Also Rises is also Hemingways declaration of love to Spain, or to everything that did not
have the old-new-States.
We can see Hemingway life and personalitys hints in Jake, who has an apparent detached behavior
from the others, while actually he is completely involved by the lost generation lifes habits. Actually,
Hemingway take the cue for his novel from his unhappy summer in 1925 when he went to Pamplona

lets bet on something else. Can you bet on bull-fights? you could, Bill said, but you dont need to. it would be like betting on the war I
said. you dont need any economic interest. (E. Hemingway, 1926, p. 98)

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with some friends to fish and watch bullfights. He was with his wife, with a friend (whose name was
Bill), a girl with a boy haircut and a Jewish friend who had gone in Princeton: at the end of the
summer Hemingway decided to write his book, he changed the name of the characters, but it is
clear that they inspiring him.10
"Hemingway's early modernism, then, seems ultimately to view story-telling itself as a" lost "causenarrative being an absence that Nevertheless has a presence, which can then be commemorated in
the form of a book. That which is materially present, Hemingway ultimately suggests, is only
valuable insofar as it Enables us to engage with whatever absence or loss helps us better understand
a given generation. "11.
Making the themes of loss and absence the main themes of his book, Hemingway focus on them
"rendered throughout the novel in term of value, power and control."12
To conclude it could be said that while Hemingway tried to take the distance from his
contemporaries actually, he ends up recalling the forms of the time and he made him and his novel
high representatives of the Lost Generation.

10

Scott Donaldson, The Cambridge Companion To Hemingway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.89.
The "Lost Generation" And The Generation Of Loss: Ernest Hemingway's Materiality Of Absence And The Sun Also Rises, MFS Modern Fiction
Studies, 54 (2008), p. 758.
12
The "Lost Generation" And The Generation Of Loss: Ernest Hemingway's Materiality Of Absence And The Sun Also Rises, MFS Modern Fiction
Studies, 54 (2008), p.757.
11

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References
Donaldson, Scott, The Cambridge Companion To Hemingway (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Hemingway, Ernest, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1964)
Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner's, 1925)
Lee, A. Robert, Ernest Hemingway: New Critical Essays (U.S.A.: Vision Press
Ltd., 1983)
'The "Lost Generation" And The Generation Of Loss: Ernest Hemingway's
Materiality Of Absence And The Sun Also Rises', MFS Modern Fiction Studies,
54 (2008), p. 744-765