Fiesta; or, The Sun Also Rises

The back cover of my edition of The Sun Also Rises reads like a torrid romance novel, illustrating (again) how difficult it is to capture a book in summary, but also how important. Here's the back cover:

Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, but with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change.

When the couple drift to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman he loves.

I'll grant that this is a commercial summary, intended to sell the book, but it is a bunch of wretched nonsense all the same. The Sun Also Rises is not a frustrated, tragic love story, nor does anyone in this novel have a "nature," at least not in the sense in which that sounds. This is a novel firmly rooted in environment, in a time and several places, through which the war has left these characters to wander Europe, lost and half-dead.

For the duration of Book One, I found this a vastly frustrating novel to read. The first person narrator of the story, Jake Barnes, is a journalist living in Paris. His work occupies a very small share of his life; most of the time, he goes purposelessly from bar to restaurant to bar in the company of a great many characters he rarely bothers to introduce or to contextualize. (The writer Robert Cohn is an exception to this pattern, but more about him later.) When Jake first encounters his former love Brett Ashley, he is in a dance club, where he has brought a woman he stared at on the street. When Brett accuses him of turning romantic, he answers, "No, bored" - and that's exactly how he sounds in Paris. Bored. Aimless. Detached. One of the reasons for his bitterness, we soon discover, is that he sustained an injury during the war that left him impotent. That is likewise one of several reasons he and Brett can't be married. According to Brett, they can't even live together because she would cuckold him relentlessly. "You couldn't stand it," she tells him, to which he answers, "I stand it now." Brett leaves at the end of Book One for San Sebastian, where she conducts an affair with Robert Cohn.

The novel picks up serious steam in Book Two when Jake and his friend Bill Gorton go to Pamplona for the fiesta. Brett and her fiance, Mike, meet them there, and Robert Cohn comes along, too, which is of course awkward for everyone. Still, Jake comes alive during fiesta, I would argue because it organizes the experience of life - or rather, disorganizes that experience - in much the same way that war did. Fiesta goes on for seven days without ceasing. There are rockets going off, people thronging the streets. "Everything be[comes] unreal," as Jake says. Bill Gorton calls it a "wonderful nightmare." People share their wine, their food. It is an atmosphere of community and chaos and danger, as illustrated when a man is killed during the running of the bulls.

When it comes time to see the actual bullfight, Robert Cohn reveals his otherness, his difference from the rest of the group when he worries that he might be "bored" during the fighting. This remark incenses Bill Gorton, who says, "That Cohn gets me. . . He's got this Jewish superiority so strong that he thinks the only emotion he'll get out of the fight will be being bored." Brett's fiance picks up on the fury and the joke, and this exchange ensues:

'You weren't bored, were you?' asked Bill.
Cohn laughed.
'No. I wasn't bored. I wished you'd forgive me that.'
'It's all right,' Bill said, 'so long as you weren't bored.'
'He didn't look bored,' Mike said. 'I thought he was going to be sick.'
'I never felt that bad. It was just for a minute.'
'I thought he was going to be sick. You weren't bored, were you Robert?'
'Let up on that, Mike. I said I was sorry I said it.'
'He was, you know. He was positively green.'
'Oh, shove it along. Michael.'
'You mustn't ever get bored at your first bull-fight, Robert,' Mike said. 'It might make such a mess.'


By the end of this passage, the notion of boredom is exchanged for physical sickness in a way that I find significant. The concern before the fight is that the violence will prove too disturbing for Brett. That it also proves too disturbing for Cohn suggests that boredom is the equivalent of physical weakness, of being feminized. The rest of the men come to Spain to feel emotion, to be engaged, to be men again. This is especially true of Jake, who is very proud that he has aficion, or passion, for the bulls, which in this section seems to stand in for his lost and wounded masculinity. Americans aren't supposed to be able to have aficion, but Jake does, and it is real, validated by the Spanish men who touch him on the shoulder and approve. In the terms of fiesta, then, Jake is the strong one, the real man, and Cohn is weak and womanly.

Except that he isn't. As we know from the opening sentence of the novel, "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton," and when Cohn finds out that Brett has gone off with Pedro Romero, the 19-year-old bullfighter, he demands that Jake tell him where they are. Jake won't, and when Cohn comes at him, Jake tries to throw a punch only to have Cohn knock him out cold. Cohn is such a strong fighter that can't be defeated by the men in his party; he can only be defeated by Romero, whom he "masscres," but whom he can't knock out. Romero says he'll kill Cohn in the morning if Cohn doesn't leave town, and Cohn does finally depart, teary and regretful. Not long after that, Brett leaves with Romero.

Just as the war has damaged and blighted the men in this book, it has also damaged Brett, as we discover in Book Three. Just as Jake is settling into his hotel in San Sebastian to recover from fiesta, he gets a distress call from Brett, summoning him to Madrid, where Jake learns that Brett kicked Romero out because Romero wanted to domesticate her. (During the war, Brett married an English aristocrat, Lord Ashley, only to have him come home deranged and threatening to kill her. He went to bed every night with a gun beneath his pillow, and for her own safety, Brett took out the bullets as soon as he fell asleep. No wonder, then, that she does not take kindly to the idea of domestication.) Romero wanted Brett to grow out her hair and marry him so that "I couldn't go away from him, he said. He wanted to make sure I could never go away from him. After I'd gotten more womanly, of course." Brett is "all right" now that she's gotten rid of him, but she is very fixated on one idea as she talks to Jake:


'I'm thirty-four, you know. I'm not going to be one of those bitches that ruins children.'
'No.'
'I'm not going to be that way. I feel rather good, you know. I feel rather set up.'

Later, she adds: 'You know it makes me feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. . . .It's sort of what we have instead of God.'

At age 34, Brett's almost but not quite lost her chance to be fertile. That she still has a chance to procreate is clear from the fact that she can still attract a virile 19-year-old partner, the novel's consummate example of masculinity and the only man in the book who is not blighted or broken. (Jake is impotent. Mike is bankrupt. Cohn is Jewish, which the men in this novel regard as his weakness.) Still, Brett rejects this last opportunity to have kids because she doesn't want to be a bitch "that ruins children." After the terrible violent nightmare of the war, it is not procreation, but refusing to create that replaces God - and perhaps defies him.

So what is this a story about? Certainly it's about lost and damaged people clinging to each other after the war, when pre-war ideals and ambitions about career and family no longer make sense. In many ways, it's also about Jake Barnes' friendship with a Jewish writer and former boxer, who reads a book called The Purple Land that awakens the romantic in him, inspiring him to leave his long-time love, Frances, to pursue Brett, a woman of class. In this respect, Cohn is to Barnes as Gatsby is to Nick Carraway: the last example of strong, romantic hope after everyone else has already given up. That Cohn happens to be pursuing the object of Jake's affections is all the more perfect. Cohn's doomed quest to win Brett allows Jake to experience what would happen if Jake truly and sincerely pursued Brett himself, as shown in this conversation:

'Everybody behaves badly,' I said. 'Give them the proper chance.'
'You wouldn't behave badly.' Brett looked at me.
'I'd be as big an ass as Cohn,' I said.
'Darling, don't let's talk a lot of rot.'
'All right. Talk about anything you like.'
'Don't be difficult. You're the only person I've got, and I feel rather awful tonight.'

Brett needs Jake to be her friend, her "person," the one man who can't pursue her. And Jake seems to be liberated by Cohn's experiences so that he can be that "person," no longer trapped by the belief that he and Brett should be together. At the very end of the novel, it is she saying that they would have been good together, while he recognizes this as a "pretty" fantasy.

One final note is that I don't feel like I know enough historically to say how "Jewishness" is coded in this place and at this time in history. In this novel, however, it is treated with the same disdain by Brett's fiance as Gatsby's low origins are treated by Tom Buchanan (ironically, although Cohn has both money and a solid name in the place of his birth, that fortune is overshadowed by his ethnic and religious identity here).