Concerning Things that Can't Rise Anymore

Upon finishing up The Sun Also Rises, there seems to be considerable reason for sympathy Brett. Perhaps it comes from her relative pathetic-ness in the last section; having to telegram Jake to bail her out of the Hotel Montana, which stands in contrast with her usual on-top-of-the-world vibe. Perhaps the final scene forces us to contemplate the tragedy that is Brett and Jake's eternally unrealized romantic relationship.

Speaking of which, was it really a tragedy? My reading of the last scene had bitter, not wistful undertones. Brett and Jake's relationship is anomalous in the sense that it seems to be much more enduring than any other (particularly any other of Brett's). On the surface, this seems to be a testament to that there is more to Jake and Brett than sexual desire, and if only it wasn't for Jake's wound, Jake and Brett would be able to have this beautiful and whole relationship. Isn't their doomed love the reason behind Jake's lack of self-confidence and withdrawl and Brett's philandering (a search for a surrogate Jake)?

I don't buy that painfully tragic, romanticized take on it. I acknowledge that Jake is in love with Brett. But I don't think that if Jake and Brett had been able to fully realize their desire for each other -- if Jake hadn't been sexually incapacitated -- their relationship would have even progressed to its current point. Paradoxically, Jake's inability to love Brett has been what has kept Brett interested in him.

We know that Brett was truly in love with some man who died in the war. While Jake's reliability when we receive that information may be somewhat questionable, as he is attempting to dissuade Cohn from getting involved with her, I am inclined to believe him because Jake isn't one to poetically or ironically (remember how bad he is at irony?) refer to himself in such cryptic terms. So I actually believe that there was a guy before Jake who Brett was actually in love with.

This means that there's a large possibility that Jake isn't intrinsically more attractive to Brett than any of the other men she gets involved with. The one thing separating Jake from the rest of Brett's lovers is the fact that Jake is physically incapable of being her lover, and thus, incapable of the post-sex letdown that seems to come with a relationship that is only founded on lust. So while perhaps Brett was originally attracted to Jake in a similar manner that she was attracted to Romero's green matador pants, she never experienced that letdown, allowing her and Jake's relationship to continue to grow.

Cruelly, the only reason Brett and Jake could have had the romance of a lifetime is that they couldn't have had the romance of a lifetime. If Brett and Jake were able consummate their relationship, they never would have developed their true, deeper love for each other, because Brett's tendency to flit from man-to-man would have gotten in the way.

The Sun Also Rises (especially when you're on vacation)

In class, we discussed the shades of the pastoral tradition in Jake's travels to Spain. It's clear that Jake feels more at home in Spain, and life in Spain is simpler and less hedonistic than that of Paris. When people in Spain say something, it's not weighted down with cynicism and there doesn't seem to be the same worship of irony as there is in Paris.

We can see this even in expat-Parisian humor vs. Basque humor. Expat humor comes from a nonchalant disenchantment with cultural institutions. Take Bill's boxing story, which contrast racist pejoratives with the vast superiority of the black boxer, and Harvey Stone's drunken disgust with Cohn's anachronistic code of valor:
     "'You're awfully funny, Harvey,' Cohn said. "Some day somebody will push your face in.'
        Harvey Stone laughed. 'You think so. They won't, though. Because it wouldn't make any                     difference to me. I'm not a fighter.'"
Stone strips away all power from Cohn's tough man act by pointing out that it won't mean anything. Similarly, it's arguable that Bill is criticizing racism by invalidating racist terms with the fact that the white man is the butt of his joke (although I acknowledge that the overall merit of Bill's joke is murky at best, especially from a 21st century approach).

Basque humor is less bitter. One of the funniest moments on the bus, when a Basque peasant drinks a bunch of somebody else's wine under the guise of teaching Bill how to use the wine skin, has a slapstick quality:
      "One [Basque] snatched the bottle away from the owner, who was himself about to give a                    demonstration. He was a young fellow and he held the wine-bottle at full arms' length and raised          it high up, squeezing the leather bag with his hand so the stream of wine hissed into his mouth.          He held the bag out there, the wine making a flat, hard trajectory into his mouth, and he kept on          swallowing smoothly and regularly.
         'Hey!' the owner of the bottle shouted. 'Whose wine is that?'"

Undoubtedly, Paris is presented in a somewhat critical light when contrasted with Spain. But I can't help but read into the fact that Spain is a vacation. If Hemingway wanted to create a story where one of the main themes was the degradation of morals and human behavior that comes with the modern age, the most efficient way to drive home that point isn't to make your example of a purer side of humanity a vacation.

By putting Jake on vacation -- as opposed to, perhaps, moving to Spain -- in order to exemplify Spain's virtues, it actually ends up implying that the apathetic modernity of post-war Paris is a necessity to the continuity of civilization. Earth shattering things -- Brett's haircut, for instance -- aren't happening in Spain. The pastoral, simplistic quality of the people in Spain almost implies a sort of backwardness when contrasted with the complexity of many aspects of West Bank life -- humor, for instance. So, Jake's travels to Spain functions as more than a simple idealization of traditional life. It does have a kind of nostalgic quality to it -- back to a time when things weren't so screwed up and hardened from the war. But in the nostalgia, we realize that the Basque way of life is on its way out.

Woolf's Black Sheep

Mrs. Dalloway is marked by the intricacies of Wool's characterization. Everybody is seems like they are easy to identify and typecast -- Clarissa is a middle-aged, upper middle-class MP's wife and socialite, Peter is a slightly bitter Brit abroad, Septimus is a crazy veteran -- until we scratch just below the surface, and discover that nobody in Westminster is just one thing. A couple of my favorite examples are explicated below:

• Richard Dalloway - We don't meet him until well into the book. We get quite a negative picture of him from Peter (and Bourton-Sally, who conjures Peter to save Clarissa from Richard), who recounts his Richard at Bourton as somewhat of an uninteresting buffoon. For the first half of the book, as we peer into Clarissa's thoughts, we shift uncomfortably in our seats as she makes statements that put the happiness of her marriage into questions. But when we finally uncover Richard, he turns out to be, if not sweet, endearingly dopey. His excitement and anticipation when he thinks of expressing his love to her is cute. Richard is a pleasant surprise.
• At the end of the book (pg. 184, to be exact), Sally (Lady Rosseter, oh, the irony) passes judgement on Clarissa for marrying Richard and slipping into a life, as she puts it, of "all this" -- of all the parties and hobnobbing. Peter, of course, has been having similar thoughts throughout the entire party and the entire novel. What's fun about this particular instance is that, in the other room, Clarissa is having a very deep moment after she hears of Septimus' suicide.

Even the old bat Mrs. Kilman gets this subtly treatment. The way in which she proudly brands herself as not-one-of-the-rich but still envies them is insufferable for sure, but as readers, we can see where her hatred of Clarissa comes from. Perhaps that is one of the points of the novel; that everybody is such a complicated and varying ball of emotions and contradictions that for anybody else to be able to characterize them is near impossible.

But that's not 100% true, because we still walk away with some idea about the nature of the person that we read -- their "net" qualities that we can distinguish from the tangled mess that is their inner monologue. I would still call Mrs. Kilman "net bad." She's particularly disturbing in the way that she only takes pleasure in eating anymore, so bitter is she towards the rest of the world. 

One of the two significant characters to whom Woolf's subtle characterization and my "net" terminology doesn't seem to apply to is Hugh. I'll give it to him, Clarissa seems to like him, or find him harmless. Fine. NOBODY else does. I laughed aloud during the party scene, in which the narration bounced from character to character, and every time Hugh was seen anew, something defamatory was said about him. I think my favorite is Sally on 184 (again -- it's an excellent page):

   "Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat, dim, fat, blind, past everything he         looked, except self-esteem and comfort."

I am inexplicably reminded of a balloon at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I wonder if Woolf meant anything by making Hugh the black sheep of her cast -- the one who doesn't get to be complicated. It's worth noting that another decently universally hated figure -- in a novel where other character's opinions are often somewhat close to the mark, yet unavoidably simplistic -- is the much more secondary character of Dr. Bradshaw. Knowing a bit of Woolf's history is key to understanding Bradshaw's treatment; she was prescribed the rest cure for her breakdown, and was skeptical of psychiatrists because of it. Perhaps Woolf is using Hugh as a comment on early 20th-century British pomp.