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.
You make a very good point. Although Hemingway is undoubtedly portraying Spain in a very positive and pastoral way, there's also a sense of it being old and detached, no longer a thriving community. This is suggested also by the frequent mentions of dust and the border guards. These men stop a man without papers from crossing, but recognize that he's just going to wade across the stream a short distance away. They don't really care, and this apathy reinforces the idea of this pastoral culture dying out.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was thinking about that when reading. Like, if Hemingway is such an intentional writer, you begin to question why everything is included -- what do all these parts add to the story?? The trip to Spain is SUPER important. it adds this drastic contrast to the lifestyle Jake is living in Paris, and allows the reader to see how the world used to be, before all the shit went down in the war. Hemingway is letting us peer into this idyllic world of the past -- but its already obvious that its fading. IDK if Jake is happy about that, or rather sad to see it go, considering how he was raised in a world that aligned more with the Basque one than the life he leads in Paris. But yeah, I totally agree, this passage definitely emphasizes the differences, and sort of justifies the necessity of the Parisian lifestyle for the sake of a world that continues to move forward, and progress. Rlly cool insight
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with the fact that there's something to be said about the fact that Jake is only taking a vacation to Spain. A vacation spot is somewhere we go when we just need a break from the stresses of our current environment, but there's an implicit aside that says, "yeah, we're on vacation because it's a too-good-to-be-true place to live. West Bank is still where we're predominantly supposed to be." If Jake were actually moving to Spain, there'd be something entirely new to say: there's something fundamentally flawed with West Bank life and something inherently better in Spain. But, since that's not the case, I feel the novel's sly criticism of Paris loses a bit of its merit. (Also lol @ the title of this blog post)
ReplyDeleteAnother good example of the sort of isolated, traditional Spain is when Montoya is talking to Jake about Romero. Montoya tries to make sure that Romero doesn't talk to the foreign Americans so that he isn't "corrupted" by them. Romero seems to embody some of the innocence of the pastoral, idyllic Spain, and there's a sense that Montoya doesn't want him to be influenced by people that are part of the modern, post-war world.
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