‘The Sun Also Rises’: Hemingway and the Art of Repetition

E. MILLER BUDICK 'The Sun Also Rises': Hemingway and the Art of Repetition For the larger part of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Jake's autobiographical narrative consists of a psychological fantasy in which neurosis has overtaken literature and the story has resisted consolidation into a work of art. In Hemingway's narrative structure, Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn, along with the stories which they tell or which are told about them, enact the book's major themes, one of which is the failure of certain kinds of story-telling to achieve dramatic objectivity and literary power. In Jake's narrative seen in itself, however, characters and events demonstrate his unconscious, uncontrolled projections and repressions. Cohn, for example, can be understood inJake's story as representing one such unintentional projection in which Jake identifies with qualities he himself does not possess-himself as boxing champion, lady's man, successful writer-and in which he reveals the feelings of emotional inadequacy, effeminacy, and impotence which on a conscious level he represses.' This disjunction between authorial and narrative texts is, I believe, an explicit concern of the book. Hemingway writes and rewrites Jake's autobiography in order to demonstrate the difference between the mindless and uncritical repetitions of life and literature, which conceal and distort, and the revisionary texts which interpretatively reproduce the repeating patterns of experience and, in so doing, create the possibility for psychological health and purposeful art. But Hemingway does more than play psychoanalyst to his tormented protagonist, or, more accurately, psychoanalytic critic to his heavily burdened story, slanting information, juxtaposingscenes, and altogether revising his story, not to trap the narrator as one critic has argued, but to reveal and correct psychological distortions and transform fantasy into art.2 He also performs the role of social critic and historian. Hemingway superimposes Jake's story on a set of biblical and historical narratives which suggest how jake's problems represent a more general crisis in American literature and culture. In particular, he produces from behind Jake's autobiography, which itself hides behind the story of Robert Cohn, another story of which Jake's story and also Cohn's are unconscious replications. This is the story of America's quest for the promised land, which, in Hemingway's view, as in the view of many American authors before him, represented a serious misreading of the scriptural texts on UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, WINTER zg86/7 which America had constructed its self-identity and which had led to a subsequent miswriting ofAmerican history and literature.3 With its astute psychoanalysis of Jake and Cohn and the lost generation reaching in one direction, and its biblical title, epigraph, and allusions reaching in the other, The Sun Also Rises creates nothing less than a theory of the relationships between and among the psychological, biblical, historical, and literary texts which, in Hemingway's view, stand behind human, and especially American, experience. What Hemingway wishes to reveal in the course of the novel is not only how the great American novel will have to be written, but what its subject will have to be when it is written, indeed as it is being written by Hemingway himself. I The description of the dance-hall scene in chapter 3 illustrates the repression, projection, and consequent misrepresentation which characterize Jake's story-telling through much of the novel amI which he mistakes for social commentary, journalism, and art:4 A crowd ofyoungmen, some injerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly washed wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. They came in.As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces,. grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was Brett. Shelooked very lovely, and she was very much with them. ... And with them was Brett. I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, anyone, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure. (P 20) Jake's disgust is...