TSAR pt 1

The Sun Also Rises’ Paris is one of a changing landscape: a Paris which had not previously existed and does not survive today. The book is an expatriate encounter with foreign identity, and with American identity. 

The review written by John Atherton asks whether The Sun Also Rises might be more of a Masquerade to Jake’s Paris, a hidden treasure map, where the gold is buried in the experience of looking. The hyperbolic nature of its characters feeds into the mythos of Paris: La Ville des Lumières, which shine when allumé, and blind even those who know their way around the city by heart. My lived experience is not far from the one in The Sun Also Rises; in Atherton’s itinerary, the reader is the tourist, the characters, then, pseudo-tourists, being neither French nor outside of the story. 

Hemingway’s curt voice leaves nearly all of the story up to the reader’s imagination. Paris is a subjective experience, like a belle esprit whose power allows her the ability to manipulate her victim’s perception, not too unlike Brett.

The idealism in the tense un-sexual relationship of Brett and Jake objectifies the hard-boiled masculinity, a term invented by Jack Doyle to describe the man whose interior is as tough as his exterior. Oddly that F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the symbolism of an egg in his The Great Gatsby, after having been in Hemingway’s company, no doubt. 

Joseph Doyle, an English heavyweight boxer whose career as a boxer ended in 1933, whereupon he travelled to America to pursue a career in Hollywood; his alcoholism and gambling problems bankrupt him and seriously damaged his health and he died in 1978. This commonality between Hemingway and Fitzgerald and boxing and Jack Doyle reveals a little of the easily permeable barriers between social groups. 

This hard-boiled masculinity is basis of his character Jake — undaunted, tight — all adjectives to describe the ideal masculinity of the ideal Hemingway-ian hero. The whole books gives the impression of being hard-boiled, its characters, plot, vicissitudes all pre-planned and under control. The conversation in the book takes on the quality of the vaudeville act Abbott and Costello’s tightly controlled comedic dialogue. 

More later.