I can’t stop thinking about The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. While thinking of material to mine for this blog post, I became fixated on the idea that Hemingway’s novel could be a codex of sorts with the power to decrypt the many themes, contradictions, and whispered questions that live within James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. As Porter states in his essay on intertextuality, “[we] understand a text insofar as we understand its precursors” (p#). Is The Sun Also Rises a central precursor to the text of Giovanni’s Room? What evidence do I have to answer ‘yes’ to this question, and how would an understanding of TSAR uncover hidden details or connections within Baldwin’s text?
Allow me to set the stage before my questions get ahead of themselves. The protagonist of TSAR is Jake Barnes — a white, American expatriate living in Paris not too many years after the end of WWI. The protagonist of GR is David — a white, American expatriate living in Paris not too many years after the end of WWII. But beyond the trappings of nationality and physical setting, Jake and David share a painful and often poisonous relationship with their sexualities. Jake Barnes exited the war with a wound that rendered him sexually impotent, thus unable to fulfill the role of traditional masculinity that he desperately needs to align himself with. David may have left the war with full control over his sexual facilities, but he also faces a form of stunted masculinity induced by sexual trauma: David views his sexual attraction to men as being in opposition to traditional masculinity, rendering him unable to perfectly fit into the role of a Man in his many relationships. For David and Jake, their sexuality is anathema to their right to claim masculinity as their own, as neither can participate in the cultural norm of a sexually dominant patriarch.
I believe that Baldwin wanted readers to pick up on the similarities between these two texts. If not only to create an associative link between his work and an already critically acclaimed title within the American literary canon, I think that Baldwin wanted to use TSAR as a framework for interrogating the cultural codes that Hemingway’s novel has come to solidify and provide validity to within American society. Broadly speaking, the popular interpretation of TSAR is that the Great War horrifically distorted an entire generation’s perception of the human condition, a particularly notable casualty being masculinity as a tool for control and self-empowerment. As readers dig into GR, David’s struggle to reconcile his sexuality with the expectations of normative masculinity evoke the same feeling of a masculinity that has been “lost” or is at least is not fully attainable any longer due to the unearthing of unpleasant truths. Jake’s unpleasant truth being: one cannot be a Man without sexual enforcement of Manhood; whereas David’s unpleasant truth is: being a Man relies on being a heterosexual and the dynamics of power inherent in a traditional heteronormative relationship.
Aside from the uncanny parallels between Jake and David’s predicaments with gender and sexuality, as well as their similar backgrounds in the American military, there are other bread crumbs sprinkled throughout Giovanni’s Room that recall the themes and central ideas within The Sun Also Rises. In the beginning of Baldwin’s novel, David recalls an argument from many years ago that he heard between his drunken father and his aunt Ellen. Ellen confronts her self-destructive brother for setting a poor example of a man for David to follow as he grows older, claiming that “[a] man … is not the same thing as a bull” (Baldwin 15). The reference of a bull immediately forces me to recall The Sun Also Rises — especially with the reference being used in tandem with a conversation about masculinity. A major fixation of Jake and the side characters of Hemingway’s novel are the Spanish sports of bull-fighting and bull-racing. The bull, and the men who challenge them, represent a pure form of hulking masculinity that the men in TSAR have all lost. The longing for the bull as an image of traditional masculinity is implicitly challenged by Baldwin via Ellen’s disparaging remark: David’s father may be emulating the pure and true masculine virtuoso of Hemingway’s bull, but is this actually an ideal worth emulating?
The character of Hella — David’s girlfriend / fiance — also brings forth implicit reminders of the similarities between these two texts. In many ways, she appears to be an echo of Hemingway’s character Brett Ashley. Both are somewhat emancipated women, perhaps not through law but certainly through their confident and liberal senses of self and womanhood. Brett Ashley is proudly promiscuous and enjoys toying with gender expectations in defiance of normative womanhood. Hella may not be explicitly promiscuous but she is certainly not afraid of admitting to her sexual desires and acting upon them. The two characters also have the odd similarity of Spain between them — Hella spends the first half of the novel away in Spain, finding herself and assessing what she truly wants from life; Brett Ashley accompanies Jake’s group of friends to Spain, and discovers her own unpleasant truths during her vacation. TSAR ends with Brett getting her heart broken in Spain for not being “womanly” enough (Hemingway 189), returning to Paris to reunite with an ex-lover who secretly makes her miserable. Ironically, Hella’s formal entrance into the narrative begins with her returning from Spain herself, returning to a relationship with David that she has quietly resigned herself to submit to.
While compelling characters in their own right, Brett Ashley and Hella also serve to accentuate the cultural codes that each novel’s respective protagonist finds himself in opposition to. David loves Giovanni, but he cannot fathom a life with Giovanni. David’s hopeless clinging to a rigid interpretation of masculinity blocks him from achieving any sort of meaningful contentment — either with the explicitly subversive Giovanni, or the relative normalcy of Hella. In this way, an understanding of The Sun Also Rises enhances the network of values at play in Baldwin’s novel by contextualizing the frameworks of gender and sexuality that David finds himself ruled by. As the distorted reflection of Jake Barnes, David wants to assimilate completely into traditional masculinity, a process which requires him to fulfill the role of the dominant heterosexual male. His romantic inclinations towards men prevents him from achieving blissful heteronormativity with Hella, much like how Jake’s sexual impotence prevents him from a blissful heteronormativity with Brett Ashley.
Where Jake and David differ, however, and what makes Baldwin’s evocations of Hemingway essential to his text, is the ultimate positive and negative charges that conforming to masculinity represents within each respective narrative. As Ellen posits that the “bull” is an undesirable form of masculinity, the bull in Hemingway’s novel is itself an object of masculine desire. Jake Barnes fails at the end of his narrative because he cannot live up to the perfect masculine nature represented by the bull. David fails at the end of his narrative because, too much like the bull, he has unceremoniously stampeded through and wrecked every close relationship in his life. According to Giovanni’s Room, to live steadfast by the example of hegemonic masculinity is a miserable and isolated existence. Unlike Jake Barnes, who serves as a pseudo-allegory for the dangers of living within a fractured heteronormative masculinity, Giovanni’s Room posits that living in defiance of this cultural framework is a more substantial path to happiness.
All You Read is Love 