rjmendera : University Essays
HEMINGWAY:Narrative Technique and Theme in The Sun Also Rises
(from March 16 1978-Instructor: Dave Allen-English 202 Fraser Valley College-Chilliwack)
The obvious stylistic feature is structure.Hemingway’s statements are simple,direct and concise.I was going to say unassuming and straight-forward but these superlatives imply that Hemingway’s prose is one dimensional.Au contraire! Dialogue reveals connections with character through Hemingway’s distinctive coda.You have to get at character by retaining inferences and verbal positions;Hemingway’s narrator doesn’t analyze like James or record like Proust.
The Jake -voice,in fact,fills in essential items of Robert Cohn’s life,then retreats into the Paris group allowing members like Lady Brett,Bill and Mike to establish their individual voices.Its value judgments are clearly subjective,at no time penetrating further than the range of close membership,usually speaking through its own,self-evident filter of prejudice.
Hemingway captures character where its on trial,in the debate of exchange.What Bill says to Jake doesn’t matter,particularly, on the fishing trip.They know each other well enough to insult each other.I recall one piece where Jake returns-the-ball with the comment that his reply proved he hadn’t been hurt.Sentimentality is the gutter.Conceit is another gutter.Robert Cohn bowls into both.Apparently the group bowls the alley of hard vinyl experience.That becomes their honesty!Experience!They want to discover their own system of morality,judge by “the feeling afterwards”,and clear sensuality alone maintains their honesty.No immuring abstract value system in Hemingway’s prose,but the blatant thrill of the bull-fight;the tangible,tragic presence of death.Thirst,hunger and sexuality fill their lives.The precise relationship between characters is not revealed.Brett and Jake have loved,but Jake is impotent;Jake is unmoved,ironic!Cohn has physical attributes but is meek inside and Mike exploits this.Cohn’s hollowness is revealed in his emasculated affront on the young bull-fighter!He hasn’t learned about honour,ficione,sensitivity.Brett is his prize and he wants to pay for her.Brett also serves as the focus of Hemingway’s morality,or at least his character’s morality.She doesn’t want to be one of those bitches who ruins children and rejects a marriage with the bull-fighter.Nevertheless,her weakness for affairs seems to cause the trouble.She’s engaged to Mike,and engaged with Cohn!Jake however,seems to represent a deeper devotion she can’t adhere to.Her own misery!He,after all, has the passion,the oficiondo title,the willingness to remain in the church.Or,better still,recall the Count’s analysis of Brett’s problem-she has class all over but can’t sit still!Again,the simplest,most common adjectives,serve to express Hemingway’s style.The wine is “very good” or fishing “felt great”. Definitely anti-intellectual!
Out of this gambit of absynthe and clover,Hemingway draws an almost impressionist judgement on his characters lives.They are lost much like Elliot’s Hollow Men.If they had religion their lives would be fine,but the “worthwhile” at the moment,the prosaic moment of the book,is experience-hedonistic,real !
Hemingway works with a type of double-entendre twist to reveal aspects of his characters.They are not,after all,vulgar people.Jake.especially,has sociable routines for refusing invitations,making exits,and the like.Jake’s whole scene with the call-girl Francine seems pleasant enough until he rushes off with Brett,leaving Francine some francs at the bar.She hasn’t penetrated or understood Jake’s relations.The Count is the only outsider who does.
Thematically you shouldn’t talk about a Hemingway book. You shouldn’t touch it with pen or poker.It doesn’t ask you to like its characters but you share the irony and compassion.When you wonder why their lives are shot(Mike is bankrupt,Brett has a form of nymphomania,Bill seems absurd,Jake won’t admit to writing the book)you evaluate their morality,simple as that,and thus you evaluate your own.Its safe to say only that the least dangerously committed to hell is Jake;he’s most likely to succeed,most reverent!That’s not what its about though:reverence, i mean.Its about safety,danger,and Hell.Its about guts(by painting the gutless),its about value(by showing the ruined).Its also about bloody,awfully sensitive people even though,(by the second chapter),you realize this sensitivity is killing some of them.
(Profs comment : “Perceptive,strongly argued.A closer look at the rhythms of the prose would have been appreciated”)
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Romeo and Juliet : The Web of Light
rjmendera Oct.27/1978 UBC Vancouver
English 365 Instructor:Durrant
(William Shakespeare)
The poet’s most enchanting mirage is the image by which intellectual concepts are organized into imaginative representations of reality.Like a magician’s sleight of hand,separate images combine to form a fine gossamer of grand illusion.Disparately,the images are static with little meaning.United,the puzzle lives like the celluloid frames of a film.We might say images form a reality contingent to that of the eye,an inner perceiving of intellect where abstractions assume suddenly a pictorial dimension.If the artist’s images cohere,we actually “see” his meanings,and that’s his trick;to show what cannot be explained.Similarly,the playwright’s skill concerns constructing those connections which allow his audience to perceive and be moved by language charged with emotion;by characters and the plausibility of their words and actions in dramatic situations.The poet relies solely on suggestive words-the dramatist ,words and visible situations.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been considered outside the tragic vision because Romeo is not aware of his fate and in fact isn’t a tragic hero at all,because,furthermore,there is no purging involved.More obvious an objection seems to be the inner triumph of the lovers over death,as is suggested by Romeo’s observation.
For here lies Juliet,and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.
Death,lie thou there,by a dead man interred.
ACT V,Sc.iii
Already, before their marriage,Romeo has suggested the invincibility of Love’s bond.
Then love devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.
ACT II,Sc.vi
Love’s triumph cannot be “tragic” therefore,despite death,because it is triumphant beyond death.That,anyway,is Shakespeare’s suggestion,one his images reinforce dramatically,contrasting light and dark,life and death,fullfillment and consumption,throughout the play.Light represents the lover’s hope of worldly joy,Juliet’s beauty,Romeo’s fate(the stars),and a “lightness” of spirit.but the darkness lurks and cannot be assuaged.If we view both lovers as one entity,their tragedy becomes an inevitable,almost clumsy movement towards death and the permanence of death’s resting place.Romeo’s death speech combines most of the images of light presented in the play.
Early in ACT I the infatuated Romeo provides a rather clouded version of his love,but already the “light” idea is apparent.
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs
Being purged,a fire sparkling in lover’s eyes,
Being vexed,a sea nourished with lover’s tears.
ACT I,Sc.i
Shakespeare further employs a secondary image of life-as-dream,that has been much explored in Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech,which also surfaces in Romeo’s final monologue,and which seems to be as characteristic of Romeo as “light” is of Juliet,but I’m concerned only with Romeo’s relation to the primary “light” image.
The use of stars to embody Romeo’s fate is quite obvious from the moment of premonition to his final defiance of that fate.
---my mind misgives
Some consequences yet hanging in the stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night’s revels,...
ACT I,Sc.iv
Is it e’en so ? Then i defy you stars!
Thou know’st my lodging.
ACT V,Sc.i
Oh,here
Will i set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh!
ACT V,Sc.iii
Notice,stars have become a yoke clinging to the flesh,Shakespeare’s pictorial representation of Fate,and Romeo shakes them off by his death.Furthermore,Juliet’s language,like her light,has more magnitude than Romeo’s,which is consistent with their characters.Juliet,as it were,corrects Romeo when he swears by the moon,and at their marriage,he,overcome with joy,defers to her greater skill with words.
A further characteristic of the central image concerns its fine distinction between darkness and light-foils of Juliet’s beauty;indeed,the contrasting nature of her beauty.
Oh she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,
- - -
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
ACT I,Sc.v
Repeatedly Shakespeare displays Juliet’s radiant beauty not only in the light but also interacting with light,until we perceive her organic connection to energy itself. She is this energy,the miracle of living feminine beauty spun over a nightly cavern.
But soft,what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east,and Juliet is the sun!
- - -
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven
Having some business,do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there,they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As lamplight doth a lamp:her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
ACT II,Sc.ii
This amazing conceit is extended through the balcony scene and the play,but increasingly we perceive Juliet’s radiance in contrast to darkness.
Finally “the palace of dim night” must win out,or assert its place,and the lovers dwell within.
Oh,speak again,bright angel! For thou art
As glorious to this night,being o’er my head,
As is the winged messenger of Heaven...
Romeo ACTII,Sc.ii
With love’s light wings did i o’er perch these walls ---
I have night’s cloak to hide me from their eyes---
Romeo ACTII,Sc.ii
Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face---
Juliet ACTII,Sc.ii
Not every reference,in context,specifically reaffirms the image,but that other,incremental suggestion remains.When Juliet describes her behaviour as “light”, we substitute not only “frivolous” but also the actual image of moving brilliance.
--- Therefore pardon me,
And not impute this yielding to light love,
Which the dark night has so discovered.
Juliet ACTII,Sc.ii
The dangerous,sudden,unpredictable element of light,Shakespeare shows us in lightning! We’re reminded,especially by the Friar’s moderation speech,that the combination of opposite elements can be disastrous and explosive.The lightening effect of love,its permanent fusion,cannot be quickly had. Juliet says:
I have no joy of this contract tonight
It is too rash,too unadvised,too sudden,
Too like the lightning,which doth cease to be
Ere one can say ‘It lightens’ Sweet,good night!
Juliet ACTII,Sc.ii
And later,in the vault,Romeo puns with pathos;
How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry!Which their keepers call
A lightening before death.Oh how may i call this a lightning?
Romeo ACT V,Sc.iii
The Friar,too,puns with light,in the dramatic image
Oh so light a foot
Will ne’er wear out the everlasting flint,
A lover may bestride the gossamer
That idles in the wanton summer air,
And yet not fall,so light is vanity.
Friar ACT III,Sc.i
‘Flint’ connects several ideas;the sparks of Juliet’s eyes,the lightning,everlasting energy and a celestial stairway.But again and again, Shakespeare reminds of impending doom.
Love’s heralds should be thoughts,
Which ten times faster glide than the sun’s beams
Driving back shadows over lowering hills
Juliet ACTII,Sc.v
Most dramatic,however,the culminating image of the vault,which Juliet fears will stifle her,or if she lives,will be like ‘The horrible conceit of death and night’,imposes itself with Romeo’s wrenching entrance into the tomb.The image has become the reality.Only Juliet’s beauty lights the vault,figuratively,and Paris is buried in its light,rather than a grave.The ‘feasting presence’ suggests a reception room where a monarch holds court,which Romeo chooses to inhabit with his suicide,and connects with ‘palace of dim night’. Love prompts Romeo to forgiveness,then to death.Precise and dramatic. Juliet wakes and dies,without eloquence.The lovers lie still.When the Watch enters,Shakespeare gives us a final reminder of the central idea/image as the Page says: This is the place... there,where the torch doth burn. And there,then,is death,but also enduringly,life.The play ends,but the Lover’s light,the torch image,burns on.
Oh give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book!
I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave-
A grave? Oh, no,a lantern,slaughtered youth;
For here lies Juliet,and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light
Death,lie thou there,by a dead man interred,
How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry!Which their keepers call
A lightening before death.Oh,how may i call this a lightning?---
Romeo and Juliet
Professor Durrant,who was in his last year instructing at UBC,gave this essay an “A” of which i was very proud.
Here his comments (1978):
‘An excellent treatment of the imagery and its coherences.This is a sensitive and lively essay;it was a pleasure to read it.’