"A very sinister book": The Sun Also Rises as critique of pastoral.

To date, The Sun Also Rises has received little ecocritical attention, despite its concern with interrogating literary depictions of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. This concern is most evident in the novel's attention to the importance of truthful reporting, woven into Jake's indictment of Cohn's admiration for The Purple Land, which Jake brands "a very sinister book." His critique provides a key for analyzing the many ironic allusions to the pastoral tradition in the novel.

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"See that horse-cab? Going to have that horse-cab stuffed for you for Christmas. Going to give all my friends stuffed animals. I'm a nature-writer."--Bill in The Sun Also Rises

ALTHOUGH HEMINGWAY'S WORK has begun to attract the attention of ecocritics, the most widely taught and frequently analyzed work of the entire Hemingway canon, the 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, has yet to receive detailed ecocritical analysis. (1) What little attention the book has attracted has been dismissive. Glen A. Love, a founding member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and a pioneer in environmentally-concerned criticism, presents the novel as a test case of the narrowly anthropocentric vision of much literary scholarship. Love says,

   [W]e must ... recognize ... our discipline's limited humanistic
   vision, our narrowly anthropocentric view of what is consequential
   in life.... The challenge that faces us in these terms is
   to outgrow our notion that human beings are so special that the
   earth exists for our comfort and disposal alone.... While critical
   interpretation ... tends to regard ego-consciousness as the
   supreme evidence of literary and critical achievement, it is
   eco-consciousness which is a particular contribution ... of
   nature-writing, and of many other ignored forms and works passed
   over because they do not seem to correspond to
   anthropocentric--let alone modernist and postmodernist--assumptions
   and methodologies. In such a climate of opinion, for example,
   Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which is little concerned with
   ecological considerations, is widely taught in college classes,
   while his The Old Man and the Sea, which engages such issues
   profoundly, is not. ("Revaluing Nature" 230)

Despite Love's objections, The Sun Also Rises is profoundly concerned with ecological considerations, as the passage of Ecclesiastes echoed in its title would suggest. The novel presents the main characters as aimless, displaced persons without a secure sense of meaning or value and suggests that the characters could find that meaning and value in cultivating a more intimate connection with the natural environment. The novel criticizes conventional depictions of nature, and calls for a literature that offers a more complex picture of the connection between humanity and the natural world.

The Sun Also Rises has been so frequently treated as a novel of the Lost Generation that this approach has become something of a critical cliche. Yet Hemingway described the novel as less about the life of postwar expatriates than about the rhythms of nature as an expression of eternity. "The point of the book to me was that the earth abideth forever--having a great deal of fondness and admiration for the earth and not a hell of a lot for my generation," Hemingway remarked in a 1926 letter to Maxwell Perkins. "I didn't mean the book to be a hollow or bitter satire but a damn tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero" (SL 229). We have not paid enough attention to this statement, or to the ecocentric implications of the novel's title.

Hemingway is noted as a writer concerned with truth in representation. Suzanne Clark claims, "the true reporting of experience, of the active life carefully observed--that was a moral basis for writing itself that Hemingway translated into the literary tradition" (56). This concern is reflected in numerous statements Hemingway made about writing at various points in his career, perhaps most forcefully in Green Hills of Africa, where he says "I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary" (21). (2) This concern with truth in art is one of the central concerns of The Sun Also Rises. Frederic Svoboda, in his study of the novel's development through various manuscript versions, says that Hemingway "hoped to write a new sort of prose that would derive from the language and facts of real life" (12). Svoboda quotes Hemingway from an early notebook version: "none of the significant things [in the novel] are going to have any literary signs marking them. You have to figure them out for yourself" (12). Svoboda demonstrates that accurate representation is one of the fundamental principles on which the novel is built. Hemingway, Svoboda says, "was very much opposed to an artificially imposed conventional structure. He was Seeking to remove the conventional frameworks interposed between the reader and the reality that is represented in a work of art" (12).

A concern with truth in representation is evident in the views of Jake Barnes, who is impatient with people who rely on conventional ways of seeing. At a news conference lake distinguishes reporters who ask questions "to hear themselves talk" from those who ask because they "wanted to know the answers" (SAR 44). Jake criticizes Robert Cohn for letting literary convention dictate his opinions, lake reports that Cohn thinks he can solve his problems by running to South America and that he does not like Paris. Cohn "got the first idea out of a book," Jake says, "and I suppose the second came out of a book too" (20). lake's narration suggests that he connects truthfulness with a degree of self-reflectivity, an awareness of the limitations built into any mode of discourse. "I mistrust all frank and simple people," Jake says, "especially when their stories hold together" (12). The novel's concern with truthfulness in representation is reflected in its careful use of allusion.

Although criticism has recognized much of Hemingway's use of allusion in The Sun Also Rises, one important allusion which remains unacknowledged is Hemingway's extensive reference to pastoral throughout the novel. (3) The novel has the use of pastoral convention built into its very structure. The Sun Also Rises is not only "a damned tragedy with the earth abiding forever as the hero," as the author claimed, but is also a critique of pastoral. The novel tests the pastoral vision, acknowledges its enduring attraction, and interrogates its limitations.

The novel invokes the central elements of pastoral convention: the presentation of city life as complex and of city people as corrupt, the presentation of rural life (and of nature) as somehow more "real" and more simple than life in the city, and the presentation of rural folk as more honest, direct, and virtuous than city dwellers. Invoked as well are the pattern of retreat and return and a nostalgic vision of a lost Golden Age. In addition to these familiar conventions of pastoral, Hemingway has built into the novel extensive allusions to the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, the two works most central to the establishment of the pastoral mode.

As Glen Love notes,

   Literary pastoral traditionally posits a natural world, a green
   world, to which sophisticated urbanites withdraw in search of
   the lessons of simplicity which only nature can teach. There,
   amid sylvan groves and meadows and rural characters--idealized
   images of country existence--the sophisticates attain a
   critical vision of the good, simple life, a vision which will
   presumably  sustain them as they return at the end to the great
   world on the horizon. ("Revaluing Nature" 231)

The novel follows this pattern of retreat and return: the central characters leave cosmopolitan Paris and travel to the rural countryside of northern Spain to attend a fiesta, then return to the city.

The novel's most direct reference to pastoral is sharply critical, and woven into Jake's harshly disparaging portrait of Robert Cohn. Jake resents Cohn because Cohn reminds Jake of the most unflattering aspects of himself. Cohn falls in love with Brett, and then follows her around like a lost puppy. Jake similarly follows Brett, often at the expense of his own personal dignity, spends sleepless nights on the verge of tears over their hopeless relationship, and even offers to pay for Brett's divorce so that she can marry Mike. Jake seems to be conscious of his similarity to Cohn. He says, "Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly. The reason is that until he fell in love with Brett I never heard him make one remark that would, in any way, detach him from other people" (SAR 52). In Jake's mind, Cohn's love for Brett becomes his defining quality. Yet Jake seeks to suppress any qualities he shares with Cohn. (4) This is evident in his critique of Cohn's taste in literature:

   He had been reading W.H. Hudson. That sounds like an innocent
   occupation, but Cohn had read and reread "The Purple Land"
   "The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life.
   It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect
   English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of
   which is very well described. For a man to take it at thirty-four as
   a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for
   a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French
   convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger
   books. Cohn, I believe, took every word of "The Purple Land" as
   literally as though it had been an R.G. Dun report. (17)

This "very sinister book" is a pastoral novel. It tells the story of an Englishman, Richard Lamb, who, living in Uruguay circa 1870, marries a local woman against her father's wishes, and travels through the countryside seeking a living. After several "amorous adventures" Lamb returns to rescue his lady fair from her disapproving father. Throughout his adventures, Lamb is secure in the superiority he feels as an Englishman traveling among the South American peasants, whom he characterizes as "simple-minded pastoral people" (87) living in "the one spot on the wide earth where the golden age still lingered ... this sweet Arcadia" (80). Certainly The Purple Land is pastoral at its most sentimental, and this seems to be the reason Hemingway calls such attention to it. (5) The novel inspires Cohn to escape his unhappy life in Paris by fleeing to South America. Jake tries to dissuade Cohn. "Going to another country doesn't make any difference. I've tried all that. You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another" (SAR 19).

Cohn is attracted to the pastoral convention of retreat. Terry Gifford notes that pastoral involves "some form of retreat and return, the fundamental pastoral movement, either within the text, or in the sense that the pastoral retreat 'returned' some insights relevant to the urban audience" (2). Although Jake is critical of Cohn for succumbing to the pastoral influence of The Purple Land, he engages in a similar pastoral retreat. Each summer Jake, the sophisticated expatriate, goes on a vacation to Pamplona to attend the fiesta of San Fermin. This trip is for him a restorative, a flight from the confusion and sorrow of urban life into pastoral simplicity. (6) When Jake and his friend, the humor writer Bill Gorton, travel to Spain, Jake views the landscape in pastoral terms. As their car approaches the Spanish border, Jake's description emphasizes the land's pastoral qualities:

   We started off up the street and out of the town. We passed some
   lovely gardens and had a good look back at the town, and then we
   were out in the country, green and rolling, and the road climbing all
   the time. We passed lots of Basques with oxen, or cattle, hauling
   carts along the road, and nice farm-houses, low roofs, and all
   white-plastered. In the Basque country the land all looks very rich
   and green and the houses and villages look well-off and dean.
   (SAR 97)

The details Jake emphasizes tie the Spanish countryside to the Arcadia of pastoral.

As Terry Gifford notes, Virgil's "Arcadia is significantly an alpine region that is cut off on all sides by other high mountains. It was the perfect location for a poetic paradise, a literary construct of a past Golden Age" (20). The Basque country of the Pyrenees is described in just such terms. Riding atop a double-decker bus, Jake and Bill are treated to a wonderful view of the country.

   After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees
   along both sides of the road, and a stream and ripe fields of grain,
   and the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then
   lifted to a little rise, and off on the left was a hill with an old
   castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going
   right  up to the walls and shifting in the wind.... Then we crossed
   a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in
   the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see
   the  plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain.... In back of the
   plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were
   other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across
   the plain going toward Pamplona. (SAR 99)

Pamplona, then, is described as an isolated town cut off by surrounding mountains. It is also made a location of nostalgia, linked with a pre-modern Golden Age. At the Spanish frontier Jake sees "an old man with long, sunburned hair and beard, and clothes that looked as if they were made of gunny-sacking, [and he] came striding up to the bridge. He was carrying a long staff, and he had a kid slung on his back, tied by the four legs, the head hanging down" (98). This goatherd seems to have stepped out of the distant past, or out of the Idylls of Theocritus. Significantly, the old man is turned back at the border by customs officials because he lacks an important trapping of modern life: a passport.

The Basque peasants Jake and Bill meet on their journey are idealized as the simple, generous shepherds of pastoral. The Basques gladly share their wine with the two Americans, teaching them to drink from leather winebags, and are wonderfully generous, polite, and friendly. "These Basques are swell people," Bill says (SAR 110). When they stop at a roadside posada for a drink priced at forty centimes, Jake says "I gave the woman fifty centimes to make a tip, and she gave me back the copper piece, thinking I had misunderstood the price" (112). Clearly, among these people, Jake is no longer in Paris, where "everything was on a clear economic basis.... [In France] no one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money" (237). Emphasizing a distinction between city and country is a hallmark of pastoral.

The scene in which Bill and Jake rest after fishing and engage in lunchtime banter recalls classical pastoral in several ways. The scene has a number of connections to the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil. Walking from the inn in Burguete to the Irati River, they pass through a pastoral landscape. Bill and Jake walk through fields that were "rolling and grassy and the grass was short from the sheep grazing. The cattle were up in the hills. We heard their bells in the woods" (SAR 121). In the first Idyll of Theocritus, Thrysis and his friend the Goatherd take their rest at noon alongside a waterfall that runs from a flowing spring. Bill and Jake rest at noon on a riverbank where water tumbles over a dam. Jake chills their wine in a spring "so cold my hand and wrist felt numbed" as he lowers the bottles into the water (123). This is also in keeping with the conventions of classical pastoral. In the fifth Eclogue of Virgil, the shepherd Menalcus offers to "make the banquet glad with much wine" (278), just as Bill and Jake do. A passage of Virgil could describe Bill and lake's pastoral excursion: "Here are chill springs, here soft meadows, O Lycoris: here the woodland: here with wasting time I too at thy side would waste away" (Eclogue X 291). The pastoral convention of otiurn, or leisure, is evident in this scene.

The witty banter with which Bill entertains Jake, beginning at breakfast at the inn, and continuing during their streamside lunch; is analogous to the song with which the shepherd Thyrsis entertains his friend the Goatherd in the Idylls. Thyrsis is renowned for his singing; Bill is a successful writer of humor, and the badinage he performs for lake, full of "Irony and Pity" and mocking topical references, is his stock in trade (SAR 118). "He had been going splendidly," Jake says. "But he stopped. I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent. I wanted to start him again" (120). Jake enjoys Bill's speech just as much as the Goatherd of the Idylls enjoys Thyrsis' song.

The Goatherd of Theocritus' Idylls offers his friend Thyrsis a prize for his song, a wooden cup decorated with an image of a woman:

   [O]n the inside [of the cup] a woman is fashioned,
      some masterpiece of the
   Gods' manufacture, outfitted with robe and diadem. By her
   Side are two men with elaborate hair-dos, disputing in
      speech, one
   After another, but none of their dialog touches her deeply,
   Rather, she gazes on one of them one moment, absently smiling,
   Then, in an instant she casts her attention again to the other. (4)

The woman depicted here could be Brett Ashley. The diadem indicates the woman is an aristocrat, like Lady Brett. Waiting for Brett in Pamplona, Cohn gets a haircut, irritating lake by indulging in "all that barbering" for Brett's sake (SAR 105). Mike, the man Brett is supposed to marry, also indulges in a fair bit of barbering, and "disputes in speech" with Cohn. He asks Cohn "why do you follow Brett around like a poor bloody steer? Don't you know you're not wanted?" and tells Cohn What if Brett did sleep with you. She s slept with lots of better people than you" (146). And, while her various lovers dispute, Brett "gazes on one of them one moment," then "casts her attention again to the other." These allusions clearly link the novel to the Idylls of Theocritus.

Thyrsis' song, in the first Idyll, finds some echoes in Bill's conversation with lake. Thyrsis sings of Daphnis, traditionally regarded as the original shepherd-poet of pastoral. James Sambrook explains, "Theocritus makes Daphnis a chaste shepherd who has angered Aphrodite, because he has boasted that he could overcome sexual love, but now he is overcome by love, and is dying" (Sambrook 3). This is quite analogous to Jake's position; unable to consummate his love for Brett, he is trying to overcome sexual love. Thyrsis sings, as Daphnis lies dying of lovesickness: "Hermes came first from the mountain and said to him, 'Daphnis, my good friend, / Tell me now, who is tormenting you? Whom are you so much in love with?'" (5). Similarly, Bill asks lake, "What about this Brett business? ... Were you ever in love with her?" Jake answers, "On and off for a hell of a long time." Bill seems to realize that this is a touchy subject for lake, and apologizes for prying. Jake tells him, "I don't give a damn anymore ... Only I'd a hell of a lot rather not talk about it" (SAR 128). The novel clearly links lake's situation to that of Daphnis.

The song of Thyrsis finds another echo in Bill's conversation with Jake. Bill, in the midst of his witty disquisition, touches on another sore subject:

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working.... You don't work. One group claims women support you. Another group claims you're impotent." (SAR 120)

This recalls a portion of Thyrsis' song:

   Then came Priapus
   Saying, "Unfortunate Daphnis--but why are you wasting away?
   ....
   'Cowherd,' you used to be called, but are now rather more like
      a goatherd,
   One of those goatherds who, when he observes how the
      she-goats are getting
   Stuffed, deliquesces in tears because he cannot be such a
      he-goat." (5)

The scene from The Sun Also Rises echoes speeches given by Priapus and Hermes in the Idylls. Significantly, each of these gods was frequently depicted with an erect phallus, precisely the body part Jake has lost in the war. The novel's echoes of pastoral underlie Jake's need to escape the sorrows he associates with his urban life, and yet show how he is constantly reminded of the main sources of his sorrow: his love for Brett, his rivalry with Cohn, and the genital wound that prevents consummation. (7)

The fishing scene, particularly with its air of otium, seems a pause, a reprieve from the emotional tension of the rest of the novel. The scene seems a testament to the continuing appeal of pastoral, in its presentation of a close and friendly relation between humanity and the natural world. But the humorous tone suggests an intention of undercutting or parodying familiar pastoral conventions. Terry Gifford notes that Virgil designed his Arcadia not only as a mountainous location separated from the surrounding countryside by other high mountains (like Pamplona), but also as "a literary construct of a past Golden Age in which to retreat by linguistic idealization" (20). When the highly artificial language of pastoral verse is transplanted into a realistic prose narrative, this linguistic artifice becomes comic, much as the inflated language and idealized characterizations of chivalric romance are made comic when Cervantes transplants them into a realistic narrative like Don Quixote. In this sense, Bill's humorous language in the fishing scene is an example of just this sort of linguistic idealization.

Other elements which critique and subvert the pastoral elements of the novel introduce the comic tone of the fishing scene. In contrast to the simple, generous, hospitable peasants of pastoral (such as the Basques in this narrative), the lady who keeps the inn at Burguete is tightfisted and inhospitable. When she tells Jake the price of the room, she is so ashamed of the inflated price that she cannot look him in the eye. The landlady mollifies Jake by telling him that wine is included in the price of the room, but is so stingy as to peek in to count the empty bottles they accumulate. Jake's description of the room in which they stay also seems to undercut the pastoral vision in this portion of the narrative. The room is decorated with "one panel of rabbits, dead, one of pheasants, also dead, and one panel of dead ducks" (SAR 116). These portraits of dead game animals recall Bill's earlier comment when he (drunk) and Jake (sober) walk by a taxidermist's shop in Paris. Bill tries to get Jake to buy a stuffed dog. Jake sensibly demurs. Bill comments, "See that horse-cab? Going to have that horse-cab stuffed for you for Christmas. Going to give all my friends stuffed animals. I'm a nature-writer" (79-80). Such scenes critique pastoral as a dead form, one so entrenched in artifice and convention that it fails to communicate one of the salient qualities of the natural environment: its organic vitality. To present an accurate and responsible picture of the natural world, a work of literature must create an impression of teeming masses of interconnecting, interdependent life forces. Instead, Jake and Bill confront stuffed animals and pictures of dead ducks. (8)

The fishing scene, in which the central characters are happiest and most at peace, is acutely self-reflexive. The scene is laden with allusion and introduced by other elements which question and complicate conventional depictions of the natural world. Bill parodies William Cullen Bryant's "A Forest Hymn" (1815), a poem rife with the sentiments of natural theology. Bryant's poem begins "The groves were God's first temples." "Let no man be ashamed to kneel in the great out-of-doors" Bill says. "Remember, the woods were God's first temples" (SAR 127). He also pillories the creationist sentiments of William Jennings Bryan, the fundamentalist minister and sometime presidential candidate who assisted the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a high school biology teacher was charged with the crime of teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. "Let us not doubt, brother" Bill says. "Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hencoop with simian fingers" (127). Both Bryant and Bryan follow a naively anthropocentric vision of the relationship between humanity and the natural world, and Bill and lake take great delight in puncturing this illusion. (9) In calling attention to the artificiality of these "frank and simple" constructions of the relationship between people and nature, the novel admits a more complex understanding of this relationship.

Hemingway's inclusion of elements which undercut and call into question the pastoral dream of escape mark the difference between The Sun Also Rises and The Purple Land, as well as the difference between two versions of pastoral. The Hudson novel, which, lake claims, Cohn wishes to use as "a guide book to what life holds," is a simple fable of escape (17). The Purple Land accepts without question the pastoral dream, and even preaches it as a sort of moral lesson. The Sun Also Rises uses pastoral materials, but in a much more critical and self-conscious manner.

The difference between these two types of pastoral is analogous to the distinction Leo Marx makes between sentimental and complex pastoral. The sentimental pastoral espouses a naive dream of escape from the difficulties of civilization into rural simplicity. The complex pastorals, Marx says,

   do not finally permit us to come away with anything like the simple,
   affirmative attitude we adopt toward pleasing rural scenery. In
   one way or another, if only by virtue of the unmistakable
   sophistication with which they are composed, these works manage to
   qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the
   illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture. (25)

By placing such extensive allusions to pastoral in the novel, Hemingway is able to explore the attractions of the pastoral vision, and at the same time acknowledge how it conventionalizes our relationship to the natural world.

Marx identifies the complex pastoral by its inclusion of a device which he terms the counterforce--an image, symbol, or event which intrudes on the scene, abruptly puncturing the quiet, idyllic dream. The steamboat that looms out of the night to smash Huck and Jim's raft is one prime example. The locomotive whistle that pierces the quiet of Walden Pond is another. Marx says that for most American writers of complex pastorals the counterforce that upsets the quiet of the pastoral dream has typically been some element of technology--the machine smashing into the garden. In The Sun Also Rises, the counterforce is more internal than external. Jake himself will spoil his own pastoral escape, as the novel's attention to the corrida makes manifest.

Although Jake criticizes Cohn for desiring a pastoral retreat, the retreat he himself attempts is a failure. Jake finds, on his pastoral retreat, that he cannot "get away from [himself]" by going to some imagined Arcadia. Everywhere he turns, he is reminded of his sexual incapacity and his doomed love for Brett. As Glen Love observes, the pastoral retreat is supposed to offer urban sophisticates "a critical vision of the good, simple life, a vision which will presumably sustain them as they return at the end to the great world on the horizon" ("Revaluing Nature" 231). "Yes," one can imagine Jake saying in response, "isn't it pretty to think so?" (SAR 251).

Jake ends up polluting the thing he values most about the "good, simple life" he seeks in Pamplona. Jake places enormous value on his membership in the exclusive coterie of the corrida. He particularly values his friendship with Montoya, the owner of a hotel frequented by only the most serious and worthy of matadors. Jake says of Montoya,

   He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret
   between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very
   deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though
   there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but
   that it was something that we understood. It would not do to
   expose it to people who would not understand. (136)

The outsiders, the people who would not understand, are the members of the urban culture Jake has left behind in Paris and in America. By contrast, the bullfighting aficionados make Jake feel exceptional, set apart from the foreigners with whom he travels. Jake tells us

   It amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow
   it was taken for granted than an American could not have
   aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but
   he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and
   there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out,
   rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the
   questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there
   was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or
   a "buen hombre." (137; my emphasis)

Jake's membership in this group is an important part of his pastoral retreat from his urban life because it sets him apart from the other members of the Left Bank bohemian community. The reference to the "oral spiritual examination" suggests the enormous cultural importance of the corrida. "Bullfighting is not a sport,' Hemingway explains in a 1923 article for the Toronto Star, "It is a tragedy" (DT 344). It is a religious ritual, an enactment of a pre-Christian blood sacrifice, and the matador is the priest who enacts the ritual.

In this supposed pastoral retreat, foreigners are regarded as a corrupting influence, and the priest, the matador, must be protected from them. This becomes evident when Montoya approaches Jake to ask his advice on a delicate matter. After Jake meets the promising young matador Pedro Romero, Montoya looks to Jake to help protect the young matador from corruption. Montoya comes to confide in Jake, explaining that the American ambassador has sent a message inviting Romero to a party at the Grand Hotel. Jake tells Montoya "Don't give Romero the message" Immediately, Montoya is relieved. He sees that Jake understands the priest must be protected. "People take a boy like that," Montoya says, "they don't know what he's worth. They don't know what he means. Any foreigner can flatter him. They start this Grand Hotel business and in one year they're through.... He ought to stay with his own people. He shouldn't mix in that stuff" (SAR 176). Jake values the trust Montoya has placed in him. It confirms his membership in the exclusive club of aficionados and his cherished identity as "buen hombre," setting him apart from his fellow foreigners.

However deeply Jake values his membership in the order of aficionados, Jake betrays the trust Montoya places in him. Romero joins Jake in the hotel dining room, sitting at a table filled with foreigners. Montoya "came into the room. He started to smile at me, then he saw Pedro Romero with a big glass of cognac in his hand, sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare shoulders, at a table full of drunks. He did not even nod" (SAR 180). Jake takes this betrayal of trust even further when he arranges a sexual liaison between Brett and Romero. This causes Jake to lose much of what remains of his self-respect, and destroys his membership in the order of aficionados. After Romero leaves the cafe with this foreign woman, Jake is aware of how deeply he has offended the brotherhood of the corrida. He reports, "the hard-eyed people at the bull-fighter table watched me go. It was not pleasant" (191). This experience punctures the idyllic dream Jake sought in coming to Pamplona. His own presence has polluted the pure and simple nature he expected to find, and offended the local people whose esteem he valued so highly.

This puncturing of Jake's pastoral dream is one aspect of the "counterforce" to pastoral offered in the novel. Marx notes a common element in the work of Fitzgerald, Frost, Nathaniel West, and Hemingway. "Again and again," says Marx,

   they invoke the image of a green landscape--a terrain either
   wild or, if cultivated, rural--as a symbolic repository of
   meaning or value. But at the same time they acknowledge
   the power of a counterforce, a machine or some other symbol
   of the forces which have stripped the old ideal of most, if
   not all, of its meaning. Complex pastoralism, to put it another
   way, acknowledges the reality of history. (363)

In acknowledging the affect the foreign visitors have upon this supposed Arcadia, the novel offers a much more complex vision than that offered in The Purple Land. In Hudson's novel, the central character, Lamb, is confident his presence will have no lasting effect on the Arcadia he travels through. As Lamb departs the remote back country he says

   Farewell, beautiful land of sunshine and storm, of virtue and of
   crime; may the invaders of the future fare on your soil like those
   of the past and leave you in the end to your own devices ... may
   the blight of our superior civilization never fall on your wild
   flowers, or the yoke of progress be laid on your herdsmen. (371)

In Marx's terms, The Purple Land ignores the reality of history, unlike The Sun Also Rises. In so doing, the novel exhibits a concern for ecological responsibility quite absent from Hudson's tale.

Love's contention that The Sun Also Rises is little concerned with ecological issues is linked to a recent tendency to disregard the significance of the novel's title. Peter L. Hays, for instance, dismisses altogether the idea that the title has any important thematic significance. "There is the novel's title," Hays says, "from Ecclesiastes 1:4-7, but, Hemingway's comment about 'the earth abiding forever' notwithstanding that particular passage has less direct significance for the novel than such titles as A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, or The Old Man and the Sea for the novels they head. Few critics any longer see 'the earth abiding forever' as the hero of the novel" (16). Kurt J. Krueger makes a similar claim. He says, "despite Hemingway's insistence that the point of The Sun Also Rises is 'that the earth abideth forever' ... there are scant explicit references in the novel to the permanence of the earth or to the efficacious effects of nature on its observers" (340). (10) But to reject the title's significance is to accept the novel as a mere portrait of the lost generation, and to overlook any serious social critique the novel may offer.

Wallace Stegner, in his famous "Wilderness Letter" (1960), offers a generalization about American literature that applies quite directly to The Sun Also Rises. Stegner sees a pronounced bitterness in American culture, a bitterness that has increased since the closing of the frontier in 1890:

   Literature [is] a reflection, indirect but profoundly true, of our
   national consciousness. And our literature ... is sick, embittered,
   losing its mind, losing its faith. Our novelists are the declared
   enemies of their society. There has hardly been a serious
   or important novel in this century that did not repudiate in part
   or in whole American technological culture for its commercialism,
   its vulgarity, and the way in which it has dirtied a clean
   continent and a clean dream. (149)

Certainly The Sun Also Rises depicts embittered characters who have lost their faith. But that loss of faith is balanced against the eternal cycles of nature, just as the novel's two epigraphs balance Gertrude Stein's remark, "you are all a lost generation" against the passage of Ecclesiastes that gives the novel its title:

   One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;
   but the earth abideth forever ... The sun also ariseth and the
   sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose ... the
   wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the
   north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth
   again according to his circuits.... All the rivers run into the sea;
   yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers
   come, thither they return again. (Ecclesiastes 1.4-7)

Here we have a powerful rebuke against the vanity of anthropocentrism, portraying the struggles of individual humans, even of entire generations of humanity, as tiny, fleeting, miniscule occurrences when measured against the indomitable rhythms of nature. What has brought Jake, Cohn, Brett and company to such a sorry pass is the fact that their perspective has become too narrow, too exclusively attached to human concerns. As Bill jokingly tells Jake, "you've lost touch with the soil. Fake European standards have ruined you" (SAR 120). If they were to cultivate a greater sense of attachment to the earth, they would have the opportunity to gain a sense of meaning and value that could give order and purpose to their lives.

The certainty of nature, the renewal evident in the recurrent cycles of sunrise and sunset and the endless flow of rivers to the sea, could be a powerful source of meaning for the central characters of The Sun Also Rises. Certainly the novel presents Jake's generation as lost and embittered. But it attributes this loss to, as Love puts it, "a narrowly anthropocentric point of view." By adopting a wider perspective and paying attention to the renewal and intricate order visible in the natural world, Jake and his companions could gain a greater sense of purpose in their lives. The novel urges the acceptance of humans as a part of the natural world. As Stegner says, "we need to demonstrate our acceptance of the natural world. We need the spiritual refreshment that being natural can produce" (149). This is the message the novel is designed to communicate; The Sun Also Rises is an effort to guide the lost generation home.

Why should this novel, which urges us to remember that nature is larger than humanity, and that the life cycles of the planet will continue long after we are gone, make such extensive reference to pastoral? And why should a pastoral novel be "a very sinister book?" The pastoral is, in many instances, a highly imitative form, less concerned with depicting the natural world than with following literary precedent. When John Milton writes in "Lycidas" of "fresh woods and pastures new" he is referring to new poetic projects rather than actual woods or pastures (1796). As such, the pastoral leads us not closer to nature, but farther away from it. In addition, Milton consciously imitates his predecessors, who wrote in imitation of Virgil, who wrote in imitation of Theocritus. Pastoral is among the tamest of literary forms, and the most vital aspect of the natural world is its wildness. Love points out a major objection leveled by contemporary ecocritics against pastoral:

   Pastoral as a genre works upon the principles of harmony and
   reconciliation. It emphasizes resemblances and points of ac
   commodation, often drawing the opposing worlds of nature
   and society into that characteristic meeting point of cultured or
   humanized nature, the garden. Implicit in this strategy of
   reconciliation, however, is a factor that has diminished the
   relevance of pastoral in contemporary thinking. That factor, which
   must be addressed if pastoral is to retain its critical authority
   for the present and the future, is its tendency to devalue wild
   nature, wilderness, the old, wild Arcadia, which from the time
   of the softened pastorals of the Roman poets until very recently,
   has been seen as an untenable extreme. (85)

In presenting the pastoral convention as a dead form, Hemingway calls attention to the ways in which the pastoral vision can obscure the complexity, vitality, and unpredictability of the natural world.

In depicting the vaunted Arcadia as a garden landscape, in placing highest value on land made subject to human utility, the pastoral shows its endorsement of agriculture. Love notes that "the word pastoral derives from the Latin pastor, for shepherd, and the original meaning refers to shepherds, herdsmen, and others directly involved in animal husbandry" (Practical Ecocriticism 80). In recent years a number of ecologically concerned writers have blamed farming for significant environmental damage. For instance, Dana Phillips observes, "environmental historians now argue that human degradation of the environment is due as much, if not more, to the ancient and ongoing development of agriculture as it is to more recent human innovations like heavy industry" (252). Pastoral, at least in its most conventional versions, valorizes the garden landscape, depicts an anthropocentric vision of the natural world, and endorses the subjugation of wild lands to human uses.

The novel's criticism of the pastoral vision is related to its treatment of the bullfight, or to adopt the term Allen Josephs prefers, toreo. Josephs calls toreo the"moral axis" of the novel and links it to the novel's criticism of modern life. "The primitive savagery of the plaza de toros was tantamount to Hemingway's embracing an ancient mystery and rejecting much of what passed for modern western values," Josephs says (153). The tameness and safety of the middle ground of pastoral is concurrent with the modern western values of 1924, the "American technological culture" which Stegner says American literature indicts for its vulgarity and commercialism. Toreo is Valued in this novel because it provides a connection to wildness, the wildness that originally lay at the core of pastoral. Because the pastoral depicts a garden-variety relationship between humanity and nature, and an air of calm leisure exudes from the pastorals of Theocritus, Virgil, and their later imitators, the violence of toreo may seem quite out of place in pastoral. But the tradition out of which Virgilian pastoral grew had a vital connection to the wildness, of nature, through its connection to the cult of Pan. As Love explains, borrowing from Phillipe Borgeaud's The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (1988):

   The Greek god Pan is an Arcadian and, for the Greeks, Arcadia
   symbolized the original life. The ancient Arcadians were seen in
   Greek life as rough, bestial, wild primitives who occupied their
   barren and forbidding region as "Pre-Selenians," that is, older
   than the time when the moon rose for the first time. "The Arcadians
   are autochthons.... integrally Connected with the earth
   from which they were born." They were identified with animals,
   herding, and hunting, and their chief divinity, Pan, was
   half-animal, half-man, copulating with animals as well as humans.
   (Practical Ecocriticism 75; Love's quotes are from Borgeaud)

Through its connection to Pan, the tame pastoral reveals a hint of wildness at its core. This connection to wildness makes toreo a central component of the novel's critique of pastoral. As Hemingway reports in a letter, toreo is "the one thing that has, with the exception of the ritual of the church, come down to us intact from the old days" (SL 237). Toreo stands outside modern western values, an ambassador from a world and time that accepted, celebrated, and even sacralized the wildness in nature.

The novel emphasizes the wildness of toreo. Despite the mastery of the matador, despite the high level of technique the matador brings to the performance, the bull is a wild beast, and the matador's control over him is limited. Toreo is a confrontation with wild nature, embodied in the bull, and the bull does not always lose. Terry Tempest Williams, in a keynote address she gave to the 1996 Hemingway Society convention on "Hemingway and the Natural World" describes her first experience of a bullfight in Spain:

   As the first bull charged into the arena, every hair on my arm
   raised. I recognized wildness. And then the carefully orchestrated
   ritual began.... My reaction went beyond thought, I felt some
   thing, something old and deep and archaic, right down to my
   bones. I saw an ancient story of love and loss, life and death, the
   paradoxical nature of both. I understood on some level the need
   to witness death over and over again. (12-13; my emphasis)

The narrative voice of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes the danger and unpredictability of the bullfight. (11) When Jake's party first sees the running of the bulls, Cohn reports "One of the bulls got into the crowd in the ring and tossed six or eight people" (SAR 164). lake witnesses the goring of a Spanish man running with the crowd ahead of the bulls:

   As the bulls passed, galloping together, heavy, muddy-sided,
   horns swinging, one shot ahead, caught a man in the running
   crowd in the back and lifted him in the air. Both the man's arms
   were by his sides, his head went back as the horn went in, and
   the bull lifted him and then dropped him. (200)

Jake values the wildness of toreo. This reverence for wild nature, this devotion to a ritual that honors wildness, is what draws lake to Pamplona each summer.. It sets him apart from his fellow expatriates and links him to the spiritual brotherhood of aficionados. By placing toreo at the heart of the novel, Hemingway is creating a broader, more complex form of pastoral, a wilder strain of pastoral.

The Sun Also Rises, despite the abundance of critical attention it has received, has never been appreciated for its engagement with ecological concerns. Yet the novel plays an important role in Hemingway's effort to expose and interrogate the limitations of conventional depictions of the natural world. As such, the novel is an attempt to revitalize the potential of literature to help humanity own its connection to nature.

WORKS CITED

Beegel, Susan F. "Eye and Heart: Hemingway's Education as a Naturalist." A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford UP. 53-92.

Benson, Jackson J. Hemingway: The Writer's Art of Self-Defense. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1969.

Borgeaud, Philippe. The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece. Trans. Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Bryant, William Cullen. The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant. Ed. Parke Godwin. 2 vols. 1883. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.

Clark, Suzanne. "Roosevelt and Hemingway: Natural History, Manliness, and the Rhetoric of the Strenuous Life." In Fleming. 55-67.

Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. 1935. London: Penguin, 1995.

Fleming, Robert ed. Hemingway and the Natural World. Moscow, Idaho: U of Idaho P, 1999.

Hays, Peter L. "Catullus and The Sun Also Rises." The Hemingway Review 1z.2 (Spring 1993): 15-23.

Hemingway, Ernest. Dateline: Toronto. The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920-1924. Ed. William White. New York:' Scribner's, 1985.

--. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner's, 1981.

--. Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner's, 1935.

--. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner's, 1926.

Hovey, Richard. Hemingway: The Inward Terrain. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1968.

Hudson, W.H. The Purple Land. 1885. New York: Random-Modern Library, 1926.

Hurley, C. Harold. "But Bryant? What of Bryant in Bryan?: The Religious Implications of the Allusion to 'A Forest Hymn' in The Sun Also Rises. The Hemingway Review 20.2. (Spring 2001). 76-89.

Gifford, Terry. Pastoral London: Routledge, 1999.

Josephs, Allen." Toreo: The Moral Axis of The Sun Also Rises." The Hemingway Review 6.1 (Fall 1986). Rpt. in Modern Critical Interpretations: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 151-167.

Kaye, Jeremy. "The 'Whine' of Jewish Manhood: Re-Reading Hemingway's Anti-Semitism, Re-Imagining Robert Cohn." The Hemingway Review 25.2 (Spring 2006): 44-60.

Krueger, Kurt J. "A Logotherapeutic Approach to Teaching The Sun Also Rises." Teaching Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Peter L. Hays. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 2003. 325-352.

Love, Glen A. "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism." Western American Literature 25.3 (November 1990). Rpt. in The Ecocriticism Reader. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 225-240.

--. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003.

Martin, Robert A. "Hemingway's Sun as Title and Metaphor." The Hemingway Review 6.1 (Fall 1986). 100.

Martin, Wendy. "Brett Ashley as New Woman in The Sun Also Rises." In New Essays on The Sun Also Rises. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1987. 65-82.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964.

McIlvane, Robert. "Robert Cohn and The Purple Land." Notes on Modern American Literature 5.2 (Spring 1981): Item 8. N. pag.

Milton, John. "Lycidas." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. New York: Norton, 2000. 1791-1796.

Murphy, George D. "Hemingway's Waste Land: The Controlling Water Symbolism of The Sun Also Rises." Hemingway Notes 1.1 (Spring 1971): 20-26.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Sambrook, James. English Pastoral Poetry. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West. 1969. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Svoboda, Frederic. Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises: The Crafting of a Style. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1983.

Theocritus. Idylls and Epigrams. Trans. Daryl Hine. New York: Atheneum, 1982.

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DAVID SAVOLA

Wittenberg University

NOTES

(1) This essay is a revision of a paper presented at the conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment at the University of Oregon in June 2005. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of my beloved companion Annette Steigerwald.

(2.) The influence of the Agassiz method of nature study on Hemingway's concern with careful observation and honest reporting is examined in Susan Beegel's "Eye and Heart: Hemingway's Education as a Naturalist." Beegel also treats the influence of the debate over the "nature-faker" controversy that played out in the popular press during Hemingway's childhood and which involved two figures that Hemingway admired, Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs. Roosevelt and Burroughs expressed outrage over popular writers who reported as true such obviously invented incidents as a porcupine escaping predators by rolling into a ball and tumbling down a hill, or a woodcock treating its broken leg by making a cast of clay.

(3.) Several critics briefly mention pastoral in their studies of The Sun Also Rises, particularly in reference to the fishing scene in Chapter XII, but none note the extensive use Hemingway makes of pastoral allusion throughout the novel. Among those who mention pastoral are George D. Murphy, Jackson J. Benson, Richard B. Hovey, and Wendy Martin. William Empson, though he does not discuss the novel in particular, links Hemingway's characters to the simple shepherds of pastoral. Empson says "The purpose behind a Hemingway character is to carry to the highest degree the methods of direct reporting--his stoical simple man is the type who gets most directly the sensations anyone would get from the events. This is a very general method for stories of action and has a touch of pastoral so far as it implies 'the fool sees true'" (16). Empson seems to fall prey to the view of Hemingway as "the dumb ox" propagated by Wyndham Lewis. Love applies the term "pastoral" to "Big Two-Hearted River," but not to The Sun Also Rises, though he does describe the shift "from pastoral to tragedy" as "the indispensable Hemingway note" (Practical Ecocriticisrn 118-119).

(4.) Another indication that Jake sees similarities between himself and Cohn comes in Chapter 16, after the bitter argument between Cohn and Mike. Jake says, "Everybody behaves badly ... give them the proper chance" To which Brett replies, "you wouldn't behave badly." Jake responds, "I'd be as big an ass as Cohn" (SAR 185).

Jake often conceals his similarity to Cohn by retreating to anti-Semitism, emphasizing Cohn's identity as a Jew as a way to insist on this narrow point of difference between them (see also Jeremy Kaye's recent article in The Hemingway Review). When Cohn first sees Brett, Jake reports "I saw Robert Cohn looking at her. He looked a great deal as his compatriot must have looked when he saw the promised land" (SAR 29). Jake's criticism of Cohn's admiration for The Purple Land serves a similar evasive purpose.

(5.) Robert McIlvane reads the allusion to The Purple Land as a key to the character of Cohn. He says, "Parallels between Richard Lamb and Robert Cohn are interesting and significant, especially since Hemingway strongly implies that Cohn associated himself with Lamb and longed to go to South America to have similar adventures. A reading of The Purple Land certainly enables the reader of The Sun Also Rises to have a clearer understanding of the attitudes motivating Robert Cohn's inappropriate conduct among the twentieth-century expatriates in Paris" (n. pag.). McIlvane notes no similarity between Cohn and Jake, nor does he make any connection to pastoral.

(6.) Leo Marx says "One has only to consider the titles which first come to mind from the classical canon of our literature--the American books admired most nowadays--to recognize that the theme of withdrawal from society into an idealized landscape is central to a remarkably large number of them. Again and again, the imagination of our most respected writers--one thinks of Cooper, Thoreau, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Hemingway--has been set in motion by this impulse" (10). While Marx notes the pastoral convention of escape in Hemingway, he does not specifically discuss The Sun Also Rises.

(7.) Yet another connection to classical pastoral in this scene is Bill's emphasis on Jake's role as an expatriate. The first Eclogue of Virgil depicts a dialogue between two shepherds: Tityrus, who sits happily playing on his pan-pipe, and the dispossessed farmer Melibeous who passes by, having been cast into exile. Jake may be seen as exiled from the United States.

(8.) Marx comments, "Among the more effective of the traditional counters to the pastoral dream have been certain stylized tokens of mortality" (25).

(9.) C. Harold Hurley examines the implications of the allusions to Bryant and Bryan in The Sun Also Rises, concluding: "Bill seems to indicate that William Jennings Bryan's conservative stance on religion and science, when held up for critical examination by skeptical minds ... can no longer suffice in the modern world, just as the Power that dwelt a century earlier in the forests, streams, and prairies of William Cullen Bryant's polished lines can no longer minister to men and women living in the third decade of the twentieth century" (85).

(10.) Some critics differ with Hays and Krueger on the significance of the title. Robert A. Martin sees the title of the novel as "forming a metaphorical connection between the characters and the events" (100). He says "Hemingway's use of the title serves to reinforce the thematic pattern of the sun's predictable course by contrasting the unpredictable course of human nature and the pointless circularity of the lives of the characters" (100). Frederic Svoboda sees the title as highly significant. In his study of the manuscripts of the novel, Svoboda notes that the novel as first published included another verse of Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity" But Hemingway cut this verse from the quotation in the third printing of the novel, "which tends to confirm that he very consciously decided to set the second quote as a more optimistic alternative to Steins statement ["You are all a lost generation"]" (108).