The Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH MONEY AND VALUE IN THE SUN ALSO RISES CORAL FLANAGAN SPRING 2015 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in English with honors in English Reviewed and approved* by the following: Robert Caserio Professor of English Thesis Supervisor Lisa Sternlieb Professor of English Honors Adviser * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i ABSTRACT This thesis analyzes the role of money as a metaphor for value in The Sun Also Rises. Repeatedly in the text—most notably during a passage called Jake’s Reverie—spending practices are explicitly linked to other values, suggesting the symbolic role that money plays in delineating the ethics of this novel. Previous scholarly approaches to this topic have tended to focus only on the most literal implications of payment and spending, particularly emphasizing the philosophy of “exchange of values,” or simple equivalence, that Jake expresses during his reverie. However, this framework ignores the typically implicit quality of Hemingway’s narration, and thus obscures important interactions in the text that are not based on one-to-one exchange. In fact, I argue that Jake’s “exchange of values” philosophy is not the ethical center of the novel, but rather a pose he uses to distract himself from his internal conflict between morality and disbelief. The most important values in the novel lie in relationships that defy the concept of equivalence. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... iii Chapter 1 The Sun Also Rises as a “Moral” Novel ..................................................... 1 Reading Jake as a Character-Bound Narrator .................................................................. 4 Re-evaluating the “Code” Reading of Money .................................................................. 8 Chapter 2 Earl Rovit and the Tension between Materialism and Idealism.................. 11 Jake’s Relationships with Cohn and Brett........................................................................ 17 Jake’s Relationship with Catholicism .............................................................................. 23 Chapter 3 The Significance of Jake’s Spending Habits ............................................... 27 Chapter 4 Spain and Non-Equivalence ........................................................................ 34 Montoya and the Role of Bull-Fighting in the Novel ...................................................... 36 Chapter 5 A Damned “Good Time” ............................................................................. 43 Brett as a Moral Force ...................................................................................................... 46 Rereading the “Lost Generation” ..................................................................................... 52 Chapter 6 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 56 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 59 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you first to my thesis supervisor Dr. Robert Caserio who stuck with me through waxing outlines, overseas travel, and changing topics. Another thank you to my honors adviser, Dr. Lisa Sternlieb, who has given me so much advice and support over the last few years. Thank you to Dr. Sandra Spanier, and everyone at the Letters Project, where I first developed my love/hate relationship with EH. And a final thanks to Jake and Michelle, my roommates in the Maps Lab this semester. 1 Chapter 1 The Sun Also Rises as a “Moral” Novel In 1941, during a post-nuptial trip to Honolulu with his third wife Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway was invited to have lunch with professors from the University of Hawaii. Carlos Baker reports that one of the instructors pulled the author aside to tell him that he was having his students read A Farewell to Arms; Hemingway advised him against it. “That’s an immoral book,” he declared, “Let them read The Sun Also Rises. It’s very moral” (A Life Story 429). Hemingway’s first major novel sold five thousand copies in two months, was in its eighth printing by the end of two years, and launched him to international celebrity status seemingly overnight, but “moral” is hardly the first word that comes to mind when one thinks about The Sun Also Rises (1926). In fact, many of Hemingway’s contemporaries asserted the opposite. “Here is a book which, like its characters, begins nowhere and ends in nothing,” wrote one reviewer in The Cincinnati Enquirer. The Dial called Hemingway’s characters as “vapid” and shallow as “the saucers in which they stack their daily emotion.” The writer’s own mother thought the book was so full of “utterly degraded people” that it “would have been better if it were never written.” (Wagner-Martin 1) Somewhat ironically, these meandering characters, and the poignant sense of ennui they produce, have become a central object of accolade among modern critics. The Sun Also Rises is now widely lauded as an emblem of post-war malaise, an eloquent expression of the disillusionment associated with the end of WWI in the popular mind; the term “Lost 2 Generation,” appropriated from the novel’s first epigraph, has even become a common nickname for the twenty- and thirty-somethings of the early 1920s. “In the complications of the Jake-Brett romance lies Hemingway’s remarkable ability to catch the temper of the era,” explains Linda Wagner- Martin. “The loss of promise after World War I was one of the chief reasons for the expatriation of America’s writers and artists. Failure of belief in all of the traditional panaceas (religion, politics, economics, romance) led to the bleak ‘waste land’ atmosphere so evident in T.S. Eliot’s poem of that name…” (5). This characterization of the novel as an imprint of futility would seem to imply that The Sun’s most significant ethic is actually a lack of meaning. But if The Sun Also Rises is nothing more than an exercise in nihilism, in what sense does its author view it as “very moral”? The Sun is manifestly a text concerned with a kind of value, not in the least because Hemingway bombards us with the details of his characters’ quotidian financial interactions. There are, by Patrick Morrow’s count, 142 direct references to payment in the text including 30 specific sums, like the price of a car from Pamplona to Bayonne (150 pesetas), or the cost per night at the little hotel in Burguete (12 pesetas) (Hemingway 235, 115).1 This amounts to an average of one reference to money on every other page of the original Scribner’s paperback edition (Morrow 52). As Scott Donaldson points out, Hemingway cut 40,000 words between the first and final drafts of the novel, but “he retained these ubiquitous references to the cost of things.” Donaldson concludes: “He must have kept them for some perceptible and important artistic purpose” (402). 1 All citations from The Sun Also Rises refer to the 2006 Scribner’s Paperback Edition 3 This assertion finds ready support in the text, in which nearly every major character uses language related to monetary value symbolically to express ideas about ethical values. The most explicit example of this occurs in Book II, during an extended interior monologue about morality that is often dubbed “Jake’s Reverie.” As most previous interpretations of the role of money in the novel draw from this section, and because the passage in its entirety is laden with important contradictions, I will cite it at some length here: I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had. Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about. I wished Mike would not behave so terribly to Cohn, though ... I liked to see him hurt Cohn. I wished he would not do it, though, because afterward it made me disgusted at myself. That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No that must be 4 immortality. That was a large statement. What a lot of bilge I could think up at night. (152)2 Though different scholars focus on different parts of this passage, the majority take one or more of Jake’s statements in his reverie as a literal indication of the meaning of money in the narrative. In this thesis, I will argue that this strategy of relying on Jake’s most explicit ideas, and of using them to derive a single key or “code” for how money metaphors work in the text, obscures other important values that are supported, particularly implicitly, in the rest of narrative. Careful attention to the Reverie passage