3 - The Sun in Its Time: Recovering the Historical Context

Summary

More than a half century has now passed since we saw the first light of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises - a half century of bloody war and remarkable change: the jet age, the atomic age, the computer age. Next summer at Pamplona the grandchildren of the twenties will make the pilgrimage, looking under the Irunia arcade for an experience trapped in time. In Paris they will sip their beers under the red and gold awnings of the Dome, imagining faces long since gone under the earth. Great books have a way of doing that to us, a way of stopping time. Nostalgia is infectious and easily forgiven. But critics should know better. The places and the weather may look the same, but all else has changed. The music has changed. The clothes have changed. The prices, the moods, the politics, the values – all irrevocably changed. Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes are no longer our contemporaries. Hemingway, as he said of Henry James, is as dead as he will ever be; to continue to read his first novel as if it were written for our age is to be hopelessly romantic.

The Sun's timeless quality, of course, encourages such behavior, but to persist at it past the point of diminished returns is to devalue the novel. The Sun Also Rises is a period piece, a historical artifact as precisely dated as that frozen moment at Pompeii. The year is 1925 as it was in another country. The book could not have been written any earlier, for the Great War had not yet produced the warwounded generation that peoples The Sun.