Drinking as the Cause of Drinking in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 modernist novel The Sun Also Rises takes place within a circle of the American Expatriate scene in Paris and abroad, and is the text of the Lost Generation.  At the center is a man named Jake Barnes, the novel’s narrator and protagonist.  Through him we are given the dead-end of the Great War, in which he was emasculated by a wound.  Jake is thus hindered from forging any intimate relationship with the Lady that he loves, Lady Brett Ashley.  Matts Djos notes that the characters have an inability to connect with one another and that they stay conversant of the surface of things, and this, he argues, is brought on by their drinking.  He reads the characters’ behaviors as paralleling and being products of the numbing state of alcoholism, showing such things as Jake’s inward self-pity as a problematic state of alcoholics as evident in A.A. literature.  Jake then is ultimately supplying and feeding his own impotency and dooming himself into a state where he actually just believes himself disabled of being able to forge any intimate relationship with Brett, with his inner eye focused solely on his inability to literally penetrate a connection, and this being the be-all end-all.  Such a focus would make a fellow feel insecure about his masculinity.  In covering up this inability to pay, Jake’s economy becomes the makeup of his values.  He pays for and buys his masculinity—like when he leaves a club in Paris one night with Brett and leaves Georgette, a prostitute, behind, leaving her money with the house to be collected upon her finding of his departure.  Jake Barnes thus buys his masculinity and saves his self from being jeopardized by any confrontation with his inability to perform.  It is ultimately, then, this economy, birthed from his insecurity which is influenced by his idea of intimacy’s focus, that disconnects him in his values. Continue reading →

I cannot help but see the relation between, or the direct significance of, the “Nature” chapter in T.T. and Conservatism & the marriage debate happening now in our country, with its underlying insistence that there is a natural order that should be kept and restored / resorted to—and I mean to all of what the Founders constructed and to the institutions that seem basic and natural to this country’s birth—in marriage and in Christian values (which too has ‘natural’ emphasis in Genesis—but that is not so much what I’m looking at, but am looking at the foundation of values that are natural to this country’s (what seems primordial) birth.  All this is contradicted by, and with the notion that, homosexuality exists purely, or actually more appropriately, that the institution of marriage as it is now was maybe constructed to only fit one way in a world of many ways.  Proposing to keep with this natural state of the State has an insistence on that one way should be rendered ‘natural’ or right (though it was defined and constructed in a world that really doesn’t exist anymore).  But then this other side says it is a natural phenomenon existing naturally too and should not be suppressed.  Such an argument could possibly include and be exemplified further by looking at, for slim example, the Bonobos (who evolutionarily could be seen as a natural state (atavistically)), or as T.T. mentions, penguins in a book, who reside in what we consider nature, or, the wild and natural Kingdom.  Yet, this here that I’ve said also has its problems: animalistic traits as seen as barbaric versus traits shared between us and animals (underlying the divide) being a great connection which our place is celebrated by; and too it gives off some notion that homosexuality is some thing that someone is born with into a society of the norm, a society of something that is accepted as constructed, when the former can too be more than greatly influenced by everything…more than greatly (and then the norm is exposed as being a construct too that is only being held together by the sold notion of natural).  By seeing all sexual states as natural (in its sense) and beautiful rather than viewing them as chosen constructs that should exist outside of one another, that should not conflict with a ‘natural order’ that constitutes the constructed prime natural order of marriage (dangerously to a conservative agenda somewhat bridging a gap between humans and the wild) is seeing a certain ‘natural’ that goes beyond the ‘natural’ of a constructed system. (Or: one says this is natural, stay with natural; the other says this is natural, that is not only natural so let this in too.)  Something that is equally as dangerous to such an order is J. K. Rowling’s coming out with the character Dumbledore’s sexuality (which actually, too, fits among nicely with the many Classical elements of the series as he is a mentor of a young boy student, intimately (sharing knowledge is intimate), though this may be irrelevant here.  All this goes with T.T.’s split defining of the use of ‘Nature’: firstly: by “declaring a[n]…event natural renders it timeless and immutable; in the second instance, [it being of] the material world, the environment [the wild], and forms of nonhuman life that make up the ‘natural order’” (230).  Thus, a major political debate is actually, fundamentally, based on the opposing members’ senses of what is natural, or, even more so, what the natural state should be of a country that had a birth with certain values inherent, and how nature should either be suppressed or allowed into an environment that is socially constructed that is our society, which has norms and is not nature (our idea of nature).   Maybe.

Also– the character Hobbes, of Calvin and Hobbes, is based on Thomas Hobbes (Calvin being John Calvin)–and so I think this strip is neat when remembering Hobbes’ insistence that Nature is brutish–

——

[If there are three things in front of me, and I am to choose one of them, and I go for the youngest or newest thing, what is my reasoning?  I have acknowledged age.  If that is significant, then I have acknowledged expiration.  It is not that the young is just some symbol of death (or an exhaustion), but that death, say, is a subconscious factor reasoning out choices, reasoning down to what has the longest left yet, reasoning down reason with the knowledge of death, which is an acceptance.  So, to acknowledge something, and to act off of that and accept it as an inevitable fact, and to live with that as accepted and not live in a fool state where you believe in a fantastical power to change what you can’t, is power (and so is standing on a street corner and waiting for no one –G.C.)]

Wow: how once again I have only a short time ago completed a paper on a subject that’s come up after the fact around us in our class—my work was titled “Shelley’s Subconscious Preoccupation with Wordsworth’s Decay; an Autobiography of Shelley’s Mind” and dealt with a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s allegorical poet in “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude” as being Wordsworth, composed by Shelley to show a disappointment in Wordsworth’s poetic sensibility and ability’s downfall post-“Excursion”.  This was set beside refutes to that and readings of many aspects of the poem being of things that he had just done, his loves, interests, traits, preoccupations, fears, trauma troubles, etc. (not to mention Percy simply being a juvenile poet writing in fragmentary bursts of attention, which really can be a grave form of autobiography)–and these both held within it my insistence that one subconscious occupation does not cancel out another, especially when the allegorical poet is a Poet and his poem’s Poet  has been finding a falling—a general concern; as concerning as his being told of his state of rapidly decaying health, the same as his boat rides, as his depicting Jerusalem in a Barbauldian fashion, or his own ‘King of Kings’ Ozymand-ian rubble, based off of pictures in his head both from Tacitus’ descriptions and from his own atheism’s angst, the same as that most interesting universal unnamable state of the human mind that follows a falling out of a youthful newness that greets the Poet at many weird doors—and this mightily abridged, but I mean a speaking of the mind.  And it is just now that I hear about Freud!  (It is highlightedly ingrained when a thing is commonplace without a needtoknow knowledge of a source for its effect to be ever present on you.) (Not claiming this, either, to be Freudian or Psychoanalytical criticism, but only noting the heaviness on the subconsciousness.)     Freud was, too, just mentioned to me today while looking back on the use of brief but relevant hypnotism in recently read Romances: Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Dixon’s The Clansman –and hypnotism was a greatly growing interest and had all to do with a tapping into the Psyche, which had all to do with its growing acceptance and spread .    [Also, TT’s “Differences”, especially regarding some readers' take on Conrad’s Darkness and reasons to read, was pertinent while reading Thomas Dixon no doubt.]   So, everything’s for a reason on this end.

Post-modernism has a trait of the birds-eye-view.   It is important to be able to see something that is being itself, and then be able to see something that itself is seeing the being of something that was at one point inside of itself, or seeing the being of itself—it is the difference of looking through the glasses and knowing that there are glasses that you are wearing.  The sitcom as plausibility, as being inside itself with the attempt to conceal the fact of the script and the production and the form and process of the show itself, as turned on its head in Seinfeld (Seinfeld outwardly acknowledges through reference the fact that it itself is a show—where as the Cleavers never mocked their own production—Seinfeld too sees many daily forms from a birds-eye-view, and comes to mind is Jerry’s bit on soda commercials, where he takes the actual can of soda out of the wonderful and fantastic setting that is being portrayed on television and brings attention to the can of soda itself—very alike Andy Warhol taking the shoes out of the celebrated human experience and exposing the solid of ‘shoe’.) is the same phenomenon in Calvin and Hobbes.  Continually Bill Watterson brings attention to comic production, therefore leaving the body and looking down on itself as a form (This is a really cool website: http://postmoderncalvinandhobbes.blogspot.com/2009/10/anomie.html) or looking at life and its routine, an outside analyzing of routines, mocking of polls, of school, of television—and I don’t mean so much a satirical mocking, but I mean an exposing that occurs by stepping back and looking down on, acknowledging, the forms.  And, thinking of Thomas Pynchon, there is a grave invitingness for works to be encyclopedic.  In The Crying of Lot 49 you get to see a play, a band, and a movie.  It’s been awhile, but I can remember thinking ‘my god, he’s exposed the form, I think he’s above it,’ when watching the play.  Just like the movie, too, where a bet is made on how it will end, which along the way exposes the forms of outcomes in such productions, taking the movie not as a fact but as a created product (and the movie has a great ending).  Or I think of the idea of the ‘book-movie.’  William S. Burroughs’ novel The Wild Boys begins by describing the camera that is on a bird that is flying above the scene that is being described.  And how about post-rock?  Bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Jesu, and Mogwai have gone beyond rock and roll and make soundscape scenes through experimentally long songs full of walls and pits and caves of sounds; or the descents into almost nothingness of Sunn O))), Nadja, Jodis, Boris’ Flood, or Earth (though all more associated with drone doom); or post-metal bands like ISIS, Old Man Gloom, Pelican, Irepress, Mouth of the Architect, and Neurosis, who are all more focused on the oceans of sound and the shades of long, drawn out imagery—being what happened after the music that was inside of itself and its form that was of shredding guitars, and being a taking of those same instruments to make a very heavier something else.  Post- rock / metal are very meta, as rock and roll has thus been defined and passed, and metal has been defined and passed, therefore elements that are taken and are constructed to conduct the new audible visions allows deep looks at the deep spirit of what both of those are, as it can be noticed as an element, winding through and binding.  Yep.

Reading both Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the graphic A People’s History of American Empire drastically altered my perception of not only the times that they covered (and knowing that, still, I wasn’t and wouldn’t ever get the whole story, but finding something kind of Romantic in that anyway), but also of what History is.  It killed me (and we talked about this rendition of the teaching of History by looking at how tuned down classes on the subject are at the high school level), after the fact, taking a course on late western civilization over the summer at the community college.  To begin, my beliefs stand strongly that there is a special elite, and always has been, who play a grand Game upon the Earth and step over the people and see them categorized in their holdings, kept fed of their ideals, and named after their empires.  So, I took this course over the summer far after the fact of this enlightenment and during a very radical mood that was at culmination in a very dreamily transitional summer, and found my notebook filled with raging comments after each lecture, written right alongside the names, dates, and one-word-classifications of moods, views, and reasons and outcomes of dictators, wars, conflicts, countries, and tactics, as though this was really the history of the world—as if the names of dictators, generals, colonels, and tactics and wars really built the History.  I protested in my own way, of course.  Our term paper, our professor told us, could be on anything of our choosing, so long as it fit historically within the timeframe and the portion of the globe that was of our interest, and we could fill the allotted source-needs in an abstract with working bibliography.  I chose to study the Italian Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (not that they ever appeared in our textbook or lecture, and not that they, specifically, had to either) and the treatment of their trial under the Law of Judge Webster Thayer.  I read the riveting biography of the men by Bruce Watson, which opened up and delved into the world of People, stepped on, tired, mad.  I followed that by reading The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, and other pieces on American Anarchist history and on the Red Scare, and could not help but see that our class’s textbook was zoomed out as far as it could go.  There were People, too, on the Earth in the past!  Anyways, he liked it, so that was nice.  And another anyways, this is why I found our discussion on History today to be just so interesting and great– the thought of ourselves visiting the past and only being able to see through the glasses of the 21st Century is wild–’you bring to everything a certain set of expectations’–.  The Theory Toolbox has really been doing it for me—it is one of the most enlightening books that I have been introduced to, and every discussion we have post-reading really, I feel, alters me far for the better–and I really do not believe that this would be so, so strongly, without the revelatory lectures which accompany.

The lands of the Earth have no lines or boundaries but the lines and boundaries that have been invented, claimed, bought, owned, traded, stolen, walled, flagged, idealized, patriotized, and foreignized; and that are patrolled, policed, regulated, battled, and lawed to keep them present.  When you fly over the land, there is land, and there are people who live on the land.  When you look at the Whole Earth, there is land and there is Sea.

There is a house in Ohio and the house has a yard and fellows that are real tired come walking by all the time and never does a fellow who is passing by stop and take a sit in that yard.  It is a nice yard with good looking grass. Whenever a fellow looks at the yard, they think, without knowing it, ‘why, that yard is somebody else’s yard.  That is private property.  I can’t go on that land and that grass and stop.  But there are three pieces of land that the city calls parks.  I am allowed to go on that land to sit on that grass and stop.  It’d be something awfully strange for the man with the house to come to his house and for me to be sitting in that grass, but it is not so strange when the man with the house steps up and walks by me in the park when i am in the park and sitting on that grass.’

This seems true.  This is what the man was born into.  It’s natural.  That’s why there are battalions of police keeping everyone off of everything…because it’s natural.

Dr. Cohen could not have come at a better time.  I seriously have just recently acknowledged my fascination, my life-long infatuation, with Stone, —and this consciousness has brought me to ponder my beginnings.

When my father was younger and in school, his parents were overseas working, building glass factories.  My father was very lonely.  He would wander out on Sunday afternoons from his hidden away forestry college in New York to the one cutting highway and sit on a hill to watch the cars going by.  He once told me that the way that he could cope was by looking at the Moon at night, knowing that his eyes were looking and connecting with the very Rock that was looked at around the world.  He would be comforted by this connection.  He could connect with his parents knowing that they looked at the same Rock.  The Moon was the Great Connector, and it would move him deeply.

I have grown up with this and have found myself, uncountable times, looking at the moon and imagining the pondering to come when night falls upon India, Tokyo, Egypt, New York City…  -The Moon I am looking to, looking through.  And, when I process what I am doing in my head, it is always the word touch that comes about with the word look: my eyes are falling upon that same rock, my vision is coming into contact just as others’.  Well, I have taken this and moved much farther: not only can distance be transcended through the Rock, but Time; and this is Key really because Rock, Geology, is actually studied to age the Earth.   Beginning about four years ago, it seems every time that I look at the Moon I begin to think of my heroes (it’s funny but Walt Whitman seems always first to come to mind!), knowing that their very eyes descended upon that Rock.  I do not feel so disconnected and my Age seems far more an occurrence as does theirs, then– that we don’t live in such a different World.  -and maybe this sounds silly, but it is something terribly easy to dismiss.     I am transcending Time! Whenever I acquire a new hero I find myself always resorting to the primordial Stone as a way of knowing, a way of feeling.  When I cover my ears (if there are cars or the breathing of the City about) and look up through the treeleaves and see the stars residing beside the Rock, I can be anywhere! Any Time! Anybody!

And that Moon is not the only Rock through which I transcend Time.  When I am walking in the night, alone, and I go down a cobble street (primarily the street that lies by the ball fields coming off of the water front, with its quiet and its marsh smells dwelling), and no one is looking, I get down on my knees and put my palms to the cold Stone and feel my hands there on the day of their placement, on the night of their first stroll, as a kid running down the alley at night going to a candlelit home.  The carriages!  -And this transcending through Stone!

Stone has always been the destination in my life.  Like Melville ponders the magnetism attracting Man to water, I go for Stone!  I go and have gone to the town of Waynesboro, VA constantly in my life, and there is a trailhead that is connected to the Mighty A.T. up on the Parkway that goes up winding to Humpback Rocks! (And I do claim to have attained enlightenment for a yearlong 10seconds of that Stone.)  I have been born into this.  Just recently, about 3 years past, I have discovered a new trail, the White Rock Falls Trail, that goes through the watered woods, with boulders about, and that crosses a rushing stream where Rocks, very big Rocks, lead all the way up the mountain.  But the important thing is that, when you cross the stream and make your way up and around the inside of the mountain that stands erect beside, you come to a jutting boulder where you peer down into the untouched valley!  A very untouched valley, the crest of the bosom of the world!  Last summer I hiked this alone (as is usual) and made it to that Rock.  I sat upon and with my knees on the slab bent back so my 21^st century shoes were out of sight, and with the Stone there in bottom of my vision, with my fingers digging into the craggy moss, I went through a list.  You’d never believe how many people I was!  Ahhh, The Rock!

So, last night, when Cohen spoke of Man’s drawing to Rock, I only thought how Rock has drawn me, shaped me, my whole life. (which kind of means the same thing, maybe)

I completed a paper only two weeks ago in Romanticism, which I called “Rocks; or, The Keys of the Poet; or, The Poet the Rockhead,”  that was of Wordsworth’s epiphany and the becoming of The Poet, which was triggered by The Moon when he reaches the top of the mountain in the “Conclusion” to The Prelude– The Poet becomes the body of the cratered cranium and transcends and knows Time by the privileged access.  And also on the way that the rock cliffs in “…Tintern Abbey” connect the Earth to the Sky, which directs the mere pondering of the landscape into the boundless sky that contains the Mind–of which I was blown away by Jeffrey’s paralleled sequence of blocked-stone monument slabs in Berlin, directing and opening him to the deep grandeur of the sky on that day ; and then on Keats’s “Old Meg she was a Gipsy” and the way that the Stone of the Tomb jutting out from the dirt is the final grasping of the dead for the sky! –that is illuminated by the Moon in the night, shedding on and giving that grasping the Whitelight of the Heavens– which too was paralleled by Cohen’s returning to the grave-suggestive slabs at night, where the light of a Harvest Moon would meet and light the stone–and he did say after that it was for that Stone to Stone meeting; and on the way that Meg, herself, contemplates the Rock, where “‘stead of supper she would stare / [f]ull hard against the Moon.” and how “[h]er book [was] a churchyard tomb” (and Cohen did speak of inscriptions).   –The Great Sequence!  I told Cohen about all this last night after the lecture only to find out that he is working right now on a piece that is to do with the Moon!  And I was only triggered to study these things by my own infatuation!  Little did I know…little did I know.  He asked me if I’d seen the semi-recent Lunar Eclipse.  I told him that in fact I had laid back and looked on from beside a little bonfire on the beach at Folly.  I told him that, as the Moon faded away, the Milky Way came out and gleamed—then I realized that that was something terribly, terribly significant.

———These are quotes and questions and ideas and my thoughts (maybe not in wording but in content) of and on Cohen that will stay with me: “Stone and humans desire to bring into being cohabited spaces”— “Stone as monument is Stone in movement,” and where that movement originates is the question; is it from the hands that fashion it or from the Stone itself?—- that Stone conducts, inspires, and is lived through, is life indeed—- “Stone not only matters, it shimmers.  It is a kind of Poetry; the liveliness of that which is inhuman.  Even the most solid thing becomes a kind of intensity on the move, and no object remains mute or lifeless!” — “A Stone monument is a force sent to the future to induce memory”—- “Life goes on in the shadows of great tragedy,” the Stone monument opens itself constantly, continually, to life, contact, and interaction.

And, on High Culture (and switching gears completely to look at structures of complete impermanence) ————-

People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and
city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old
and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss
or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news,
the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

-from the 4^th section; Song of Myself

-Walt Whitman

—This is what I was thinking about in class on Monday.

But I do say, the new tool had me looking.  I remembered lines from The Preface to the 1855 ed. of Leaves of Grass:

-first, my mind went to:  “read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”

-It seems that each person has a steady self and that on top of that, and muddling it all up and influencing it, are external influences.  Do you really agree with what they told you in church? in school?  Dismiss what your soul does not find fit…. “and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips…”  This is saying that to not be the object of plagues-external (things you don’t want to be the object of—and this is key!) is to be yourself! Your soul! Your body! Unrestricted and unbound, you will move and breathe and be… without chains.  But, it is not a shedding down; it is a forming, a building (I know myself, and I know why I’m like this)…how you perceive everything you encounter, and while standing on the foundations inevitable of your birth (or past the path that on, you left), that’s the making of self—because there are endless combinations and revelations, and it is great architecture and building of bricks and people can become beautiful!  For the self is a real thing, but it is not independent; it is constructed (but can be constructed to be ‘independent’).  And this is Whitmanesque:  “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”—and there are whole mountains behind that remark…(literally).

And so, to conclude!:

“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (1855 preface). –Whitman.