In Hemingway’s early work, mourning is often unspeakable. The Sun Also Rises and A
Farewell to Arms are two early examples that show how Hemingway treats the corollarylosses of the Great War with taciturnity, irony and bitter comedy. Moments of loss occasion a deflection of narrative focus: we can contrast this to how this focus rests at length – and lovingly – on the toro and the torero in The Sun Also Rises, or the detailed military retreat from Carporetto in A Farewell to Arms. But it is where the narrative skips over its subject that interests me: and moments of loss always seem to have this rushing, emptying effect in Hemingway’s early narratives.
Loss begins with the Great War for the characters of The Sun Also Rises. Though the
novel can be dated to approximately a decade after the war’s end, it is the losses
directly linked to the war that continue to scramble relationships and to sink people
into unspeakable misery. Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley are twins in their occlusive
responses to what they have lost: they block any attempt by themselves or others to
meaningfully speak or think of their loss. Leaked sentimentality on the part of other
characters – Frances Clyne, Robert Cohn and the mono-monikered Harris – show the extent to which the main aim for Jake and Brett is to block feelings of bereavement. By seeking to silence mourning, the author indirectly situates ‘loss at the heart of his literary project, making loss itself the foundation of Hemingway’s bid for literary prominence.’
77Jake Barnes
Jakes Barnes’s primary loss is his sexual potency. But the genital wounding, caused by a trench wound on the Italian Front during the war, is left ill-defined throughout the novel. Rarely is the wound described as anything but ‘it’ by this gang of sauced expatriates. This is the problem faced by ‘nearly all of the principal characters in Hemingway’s novel: that of rendering – verbally or otherwise – the lingering presence of Jake’s absent penis.’
78Jake’s wound is first shown obliquely by the ‘poule’
Georgette:
She cuddled against me and I put my arm around her. She looked up to be kissed. She touched me with one hand and I put her hand away.
‘Never mind.’
‘What’s the matter? You sick?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everybody’s sick. I’m sick too.’ (13)
Jake’s feelings of loss are insulated from exposure by a narrative which privileges external action over internal thoughts and feelings. The first mention of his wounding is described not via the ‘mind’ but via the give and take of hands: ‘She touched me with one hand and I put her hand away’. Jake’s injunction to Georgette is to ‘Never mind’. To ceaselessly put the wounding ‘out of mind’ is a directive that is echoed throughout the novel as a whole: Jake is constantly striving not to think of ‘it’, and other characters are urged neither to speak nor think of what Jake has lost in the war.
This prohibition against verbalising what has been lost is often placed on Hemingway’s heroes. Krebs, in ‘Soldier’s Home’ (1925) also valorises taciturnity:
77 D. Tomkins, ‘The “Lost Generation” and the Generation of Loss: Ernest Hemingway’s Materiality of Absence and The Sun Also Rises,’ Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 745.
78 Tomkins, ‘The “Lost Generation” and the Generation of Loss,’ 750.
‘Now he would have liked a girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk.’
79Likewise, Nick Adams is encouraged to ‘better not think about’ his ordeal in ‘The Killers’ (1927).
80This directive against speaking of loss is sometimes contravened in
The Sun Also Rises, but, when it is, it is lightened by humour: ‘Never mention that…’Bill Gorton later warns Jake in Burguette, ‘That’s the sort of thing that can’t be mentioned’ (101). (Gorton later jokes about Jake’s broken ‘joystick’ (101) as if Jake’s loss were nothing more trivial than a broken toy.) Put crudely, for a book so fixated on the main character’s cock and balls, The Sun is more fixated anatomically with controlling the characters’ minds and mouths.
Putting loss out of ‘mind’ is one tactic; ironizing loss is another. Jake’s reaction to Georgette talking of ‘that dirty war’ is met with a good deal of scoffing irony:
We would probably have gone on and discussed the war and agreed that it was in reality a calamity for civilization, and perhaps that would have been better avoided. I was bored enough. (14)
The war has killed any good language that once could have meaningfully addressed loss. Jake is therefore cornered into cliché and forced to talk about the dead in dead language: ‘it was in reality a calamity for civilization’. ‘Irony’ writes Paul Fussell in The
Great War and Modern Memory, was the only ‘appropriate interpretative means’ oftranslating a war so raided of substantive meaning:
Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort had been shot.’
81The Great War’s apparent causelessness has killed off meaningful commemoration;
Jake can only ironize his loss rather than mourn it. Later, Jake says he has gone beyond wanting to make sense of his loss: ‘I did not care what it was all about.’ (129) Now that meaningfulness is absent, Jake only wants to know how to make his loss endurable: ‘All I wanted to know was how to live in it.’ To ‘live in’ loss – to make a home within it – this is the minimal representation of what Hemingway sought for himself in the more elaborately imagined landscapes of his letters.
79 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time, 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction Ed (Scribner, 1996), 72.
80 Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women (London: Arrow, 1994), 53.
81 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 25th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7–
8.
Irony is Jake’s physic against his loss, and with irony comes black humour. Humour, argues Freud, is another way to block mourning: one of ‘the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer’.
82Jake sublimates his pain into humour so that what feels unjust becomes a jest: so that he might not ‘be affected by the traumas of the external world’.
83By ring-fencing his impotence into ‘a hell of a joke’, Jake’s humour is ‘a manner of repudiating reality and serving an illusion’
84– the illusion being that all is well the seat of Jake’s pants:
‘…what’s happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it.’
‘Oh, no. I’ll lay you don’t.’
‘Well let’s shut up about it.’ (23)
Here is the injunction again both to ‘never think about it’ and not to talk about it:
‘let’s shut up about it.’ (23) But wherever there is an injunction to ‘never mind’ Jake’s wound there is almost always a comic pun that immediately unsettles the directive.
Here, Brett puns unwittingly on the slang for sexual intercourse: she’ll bet (‘lay’) he doesn’t think about ‘it’, just as she might bet Jake doesn’t get ‘laid’ any more. This disruptive double entendre occurs again in the famous bedroom scene:
I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people…. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. (27)
The Church’s injunction ‘[n]ot to think about it’ is again comically sabotaged by the sexual vibrato on the word ‘swell’. Despite the fact we are told to ‘never mind’ his wound, Jake’s poor penis ghosts the novel. Now that Jake retrospectively looks back and pens his thoughts to paper, his pleasure in writing might only be the ‘true swell’
from the ‘slight touches of the chisel, the pencil, the pen.’
85These double entendres might be more bitter comedy for retrospective Jake who is actually writing the story, where the comic sexual word play is the only ‘swell’ thing left for still impotent Jake.
82 ‘Sigmund Freud - Humor 1927,’ Scribd, 162, accessed February 1, 2013, http://www.scribd.com/doc/34515345/Sigmund-Freud-Humor-1927.
83 Ibid., 163.
84 Ibid., 166.
85 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Baudry’s Foreign Library, 1832), 76.
Using comedy to commemorate loss was not a practice unique to the First World War. But its meaningless misery – the unmoved trench boundaries at the bitter cost of so many lives, for example – made traditional modes of elegizing the dead suspect.
‘The more revolting it was… the more people shouted with laughter…’ Philip Gibbs wrote at the time, ‘the war-time humour of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.’
86Erich Maria Remarque’s gives another blackly comic elegy in his opening to All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), when a company of soldiers greet the news of their battalion’s decimation with nothing less than joy. Their deaths have given them double rations for the week.
‘Yes, we had heavy losses yesterday—’
Then he looked into the cooking-pot. ‘Those beans look good.’
87Indeed, one of the longest moments spent thinking about the war in The Sun Also Rises is also one of the funniest: how Mike Strater was given someone else’s war medals by his tailor but got so ‘blind’ that he started to give them away in a night-club in Piccadilly. The girls in the night-club thought he was ‘hell’s own shakes of a soldier’.
(118) By lowering the register from an earnest engagement with war into Mike’s comic scene, from translating Jake’s loss of exploded genitals into ‘a hell of a joke’, Hemingway co-opts comedy a meaningful form of commemoration.
‘Do you think you can shut grief in?’ William Carlos Williams asks a congregation of mourners in his poem ‘Tract’ (1917), asking them if the mourners can ‘sit openly/to the weather as to grief’.
88But Jake cannot ‘sit openly’ to his grief. Indeed, he cannot even bear to look at his ‘old grievance’. Provoked by the marriage invitation sent in the post – the apex of a relationship that sexually impotent Jack will never achieve with sexually promiscuous Brett – Jake is finally jostled into confronting his wound in his bedroom mirror. And so it is no surprise that the first thing Jake’s mind leaps to is the very thing he persists in trying to ‘never mind’ his wound.
Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed. That was a typically French way to furnish a room. Practical, too, I
86 Phillip Gibbs cited in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 8.
87 Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, (London: Vintage, 1996), 4.
88 Williams Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1 (London: New Directions, 1986), 72–74.
suppose. Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny. I put on my pajamas and got into bed. (26)
Jake’s loss haloes everything. Would it be a stretch to wonder if the word ‘armoire’
puns on the French ‘amour’? After all, Hemingway might well have used wardrobe, but it is Jake’s inability to make amour that leads him to the next sentence with no apparent semantic link between the two: ‘Practical, too, I suppose. Of all the ways to be wounded.’ It suggests yet again how language again comically sabotages the attempt to keep the wounding out of ‘mind’. All language leads back to his loss:
My head started to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded and flying on a joke front like the Italian. In the Italian hospital we were going to form a society. It had a funny name in Italian.
(27)
If deflection does not work, elision serves Jake better: Jake jumps from the ‘front’ to the Italian ‘hospital’, from wound to recovery, within two sentences. How Jake’s war-wound actually occurred – perhaps the story we need to know in order to understand Jake’s loss – is as sunk within the text as a trench itself is sunk in land.
Brett Ashley
Brett Ashley, like Jake, operates within the same codes of taciturnity and irony.
Outwardly, Brett presents a seductive image: powerful in her beauty, stylish in her speech, she meets sexual success with any man she chooses. She is felicitously both the
‘racing yacht’ (19) and ‘the promised land’ (18) that most of the male characters aspire to get into, and arrive at. Brett observes Jake’s doctrine of public taciturnity, and yet privately she allows herself some unburdening: to Jake she twice describes herself as
‘miserable’ (21; 56). Brett suffers as a result of Jake’s war-wound: she says she is ‘in love’ with him, but her sexual appetite precludes her from making a commitment to an impotent man.
Brett is also a figure who has lost more directly ‘during the war’: ‘Her own true love,’
Jake tells us, ‘kicked off with the dysentery’ (34). (Jake’s euphemism ‘kicked off’
appropriates the losses of war once again with comedy. The original manuscript
reads, ‘Her own true love was away in a prison camp in Germany’.
89Hemingway’s edit ratchets up the gallows’ humour.) Mark Spilka has rightly pointed out Brett’s similarity to Catherine Barkley in his essay, ‘The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises’.
Both texts open with women who still mourn for men lost to the Great War. Unlike Catherine, however, Brett survives ‘to confront a moral and emotional vacuum among her post-war lovers.’
90Brett now operates in this world unable to speak her bereavement for what she has lost:
‘Oh darling,’ Brett said, ‘I’m so miserable.’
I had that feeling of going through something that has all happened before. ‘You were happy a minute ago.’
The drummer shouted: ‘You can’t two-time—
‘It’s all gone.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know. I just feel terrible.’
‘….’ The drummer chanted. Then turned to his sticks.
‘Want to go?’
I had the feeling as in a nightmare of it all being something repeated, something I had been through and that now I must go through again.
‘……’ the drummer sang softly. (56)
Brett’s behaviour at the club has all of the same qualities of Jake’s previous lamentation. She refuses – or cannot – name the source of her loss, (‘I don’t know. I just feel terrible’,) just as Jake will not reveal the mirror’s picture, nor will he disinter what happened in the depth of the trench. Like Jake, Brett dumps her un-nameable loss into the third person singular: ‘It’s all gone’ (my italics) without telling the reader
what has been lost. Really, Brett is as mute as the drummer, whose silent ellipses (‘…’)might be more revealing than her own spoken words that reveal nothing. Because neither Jake nor Brett can properly articulate their post-war traumas: this ‘it’, this
‘something’, it has the effect of horrible circularity: one in which there is no hope of an end.
‘Never mind’. ‘Never speak’. Not thinking. Not talking. Brett, like Jake, has a special horror of talking – despite being very good at it, especially when the characters engage in the fast moving badinage that fills the novel. Brilliant to read, and moving at a pace
89 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: A Facsimile Edition, ed. Matthew J Bruccoli (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990), 140.
90 Mark Spilka, ‘The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,’ in Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed.
Charles Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958), 244.
that would keep the dancers of the San Fermin happy, it is however a style of conversation that pivots readily but reveals nothing. Just as we think Brett might
‘really talk’ (as the Count encourages her to do (51) ), when in the chapel of San Fermin, her mouth opens but claps shut soon enough
Brett looked up at the yellow wall of the chapel.
‘Let’s go in. Do you mind? I’d rather like to pray a little for him or something.’
We went in through the heavy leather door that moved very lightly. It was dark inside. Many people were praying. You saw them as your eyes adjusted themselves to the half-light. We knelt at one of the long wooden benches. After a little I felt Brett stiffen beside me, and she was looking straight ahead.
‘Come on,’ she whispered throatily. ‘Let’s get out of here. Makes me damned nervous.’
Outside in the hot brightness of the street Brett looked up at the treetops in the wind. (180-81)
Brett’s movement in and out of the church mirrors Jake’s quick narrative jump from the trench to the hospital. Brett’s omertà against ‘talk’ is as strong as Jake’s: ‘I feel like hell,’ Brett says, hinting that she might be led into revelation, but the next sentence is:
‘Don’t let’s talk.’ (159) Indeed, Brett’s remark that ‘Talking’s all bilge’ is not wrong.
Described in the nautical metaphor with which we first met her, ‘built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht’, what might collect in this hull is ‘bilge’: foul, rank water. It is just the right metaphor for all of the psychic ‘bilge’ that Brett pushes down below deck.
Freud described such a paralysing state of blocked mourning in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). Melancholia is a state whereby ‘the patient cannot grasp what he has lost… nor what it is about that person that he has lost’.
91Brett and Jake are two such melancholic mourners: stuck with their ‘inexorable’ and ‘mysterious’
losses – represented in the text with the words ‘it’ and ‘something’ – and hence they are stuck in a ‘constant nightmare of it all being repeated’. Indeed, the end of the novel reiterates circularity by repeating the taxi-scene at the beginning. Hemingway choreographs the language and movement in the two scenes almost identically:
91 Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2005), 205.
My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. (22) / We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably.’ (216)
Jake similarly relies on the same scoffing irony he used to deflect Georgette’s
‘calamities of war speech’. When Brett says, ‘Oh Jake… we could have had such a damned good time together’ (216), Jake arms himself against Brett’s construction of meaning by responding in the conditional: ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’ (216)
Jake’s irony, which circulates in the novel so persistently that there is always a repeated image, a double in which the opposite is meant, perhaps highlights the likelihood that Brett and Jake will return to Paris still stuck in a ‘constant nightmare’
of endless repetition. Thoughts of their loss may be sealed shut by their attempts to
‘never mind’ and ‘never speak’, but as long as it is pushed aside or downwards, it is
also unfinishable, and endlessly repeatable. Both Brett and Jake embody ‘blocked
mourning as the most poignant and beautiful and manly response to socially induced
‘never mind’ and ‘never speak’, but as long as it is pushed aside or downwards, it is
also unfinishable, and endlessly repeatable. Both Brett and Jake embody ‘blocked
mourning as the most poignant and beautiful and manly response to socially induced
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