The Dumb Also Rises

      As my title may suggest, today’s riveting addition to shostahemingway will discuss The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, one of this blog’s two namesakes*. In today’s Zoom discussion of the ambiguous (emotionally intimate? romantic? sexually unfulfilled? toxic?) relationship between Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, we had a pretty impassioned chat debate centered around the following question:

Is Jake the dumb one in this relationship? In other words, is he stupid to keep Brett around, and not recognize that he has no future with her and that staying in this limbo between friendship and romance will only continue to hurt him? 

And my answer is that, yes, he is. From the outside, Brett may seem like she’s leading Jake on, but in their conversations, she is perfectly forthcoming about the nature of her relationships with men. In the nightclub scene where Robert Cohn starts to check her out, Jake chats casually with her about how she’s “made another one” and how she “likes to add them up” — he’s aware of her habits. Brett’s also transparent about the fact that she will not pursue a “real” relationship with Jake because she knows she’d only cheat on him. We’re not too far into the novel, and already Jake and Brett have had several conversations that go something like this:

J: “I love you!”

B: “I love you too, my darling!”

J: “Let’s be together!”

B: “It wouldn’t work and we’d just get hurt! Especially you, darling!”

J (implied): “~I can hear you! But I won’t!~”

And then, they’re back where they started. 

As readers, we get the sense that they’ve had many, many more of these conversations in the past. At a certain point, this has to get old; something has to happen. Of course, we also know that bouncing from man to man, never committing, are integral parts of Brett’s personality, and Jake knows this, at least on an intellectual level. And so, at this point, I think he’s stupid not to see the signs. He gets so heartbroken, so down-in-the-dumps about not being able to be with her, but he’s been in this game for long enough that he should know that it’s not going to happen. Yes, Brett doesn’t treat him so well—I would say she’s certainly smart enough to know the depth of his feelings for her, and perhaps she does genuinely care for him deep down, and other parts of her nature simply won’t allow her to commit to him—but at the end of the day, it’s Jake’s fault that he keeps letting her in. He never tells Brett that she’s hurting him. He never tells her not to barge into his place at four in the morning. And so, Jake’s largely responsible for the emotional damage he’s sustaining from his toxic relationship with her. 

I know some people in today’s discussion disagreed with me, so here’s your chance to rebuke me in the comments. Let me know what you think!

-NC

*The other namesake, for those who may have wondered, is Dmitri Shostakovich, twentieth-century Russian composer. I titled this blog after going through a bunch of twentieth-century composers and writers and smushing their names together in search of the most catchy combination. Thus, Shostakovich + Hemingway = shostahemingway.