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The Bull Also Loses

A review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway volunteered with the ambulance services during the Great War and was wounded by mortar fire. The shrapnel tore up his legs and put him in hospital for months.

While recovering, he had plenty of time to contemplate the arbitrary intimacy of war wounds: one shell tears up your legs; another, a few inches higher, might have taken something else. The Sun Also Rises reads like his meditation on that terror.

1. The Ship of Fools

The novel begins with a chapter-long biography of one of the narrator’s friends, Robert Cohn. He’s an awkward man of aristocratic origins, insofar as any Jew is permitted to be aristocratic in early 20th-century America. At Princeton, bullied for his Jewishness, Cohn learns to box. This does not work. He continues to get bullied. His fundamental failure to assert himself is not cured, even though he becomes the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

Cohn isn’t just inept at standing up to antisemites; he’s inept at standing up to lovers. He “married the first woman who was nice to him”. After this first wife leaves him, Cohn ends up being pushed around by a woman named Frances, whose brutal company he is still enduring as The Sun Also Rises begins. She scolds and manipulates and demeans and always, always gets her way. Chapter 1 closes with the sledgehammer phrase: “Evidently she led him quite a life.” (Here we glimpse the deep-but-simple genius of Hemingway. The addition of one simple pronoun - “him” - and a tepid cliché is transformed into a nauseating denunciation.)

Gradually the story opens up, and we learn about the other principal characters:

JAKE BARNES, the narrator, an American writer living in Paris.
LADY BRETT ASHLEY, the woman he loves.
MIKE CAMPBELL, Brett’s fiancé.
{Less importantly: BILL GORTON, another of Jake’s friends.}

One reads about Jake and Brett and Mike and thinks: “oh yes, a love triangle. Very familiar. Brett is going to grapple for a couple of hundred pages with her duty to Mike vs. her passion for Jake, and at the end she’ll probably break off the marriage and get together with Jake.”

No. That’s not how this book is going to go at all.

2. The Story

Jake was injured in the war, and the injury has permanently damaged his virility. He and Brett hang out and cuddle and fantasise about being together, but they both know the fantasies are going nowhere.

Meanwhile, Brett herself is constantly on the hunt. She scampers off with suitors left and right, and puts no effort into hiding it from her fiancé. She always comes back to Mike, and to Jake; and at the close of each escapade the three of them go out for drinks. I find it all quite strange and discomfiting, to be honest. It makes me queasy in ways I can’t easily articulate. The arrangement feels less like sexual liberation than it does like everyone politely agreeing not to notice a wound.

Each member of their social circle is either a writer or a minor aristocrat, so everyone is mobile. The gang are constantly going on trips to various European cities, either alone or in pairs or as a larger group. During one of these adventures, Brett falls into bed with Cohn. It means nothing to her but everything to him. He follows her around, unwelcome, searching for some way to win her back.

They all head off to Pamplona for the bullfights. Brett takes up with a young matador, Romero. Cohn shows up at their hotel room, gets into an argument, and beats up the bullfighter. The next day, Romero goes back into the ring with his face bruised and swollen. Cohn runs off in shame, probably back to Frances.

Brett leaves town with Romero and has a brief affair with him, then sends the matador away and telegrams Jake. He drops his own holiday in San Sebastian, takes the redeye to Madrid, and provides Brett with the emergency emotional comfort she seeks. She tells him she’s going back to Mike, and perhaps she somehow means it this time. She is distraught and broken, but resolved. Brett and Jake take a carriage ride around the city, and hug a bit, and talk laconically about how nice it would be if they could truly be together. Curtain down. End of novel.

3. The Bulls

There’s this whole bit in the middle about bullfighting, and it’s really done very well.

Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bullfighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed there. The commercial bullfighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back. The good ones came each year. In Montoya’s room were their photographs. The photographs were dedicated to Juanito Montoya or to his sister. The photographs of bullfighters Montoya had really believed in were framed. Photographs of bullfighters who had been without aficion Montoya kept in a drawer of his desk. They often had the most flattering inscriptions. But they did not mean anything. One day Montoya took them all out and dropped them in the waste-basket. He did not want them around.

Jake teaches Brett about bullfighting, about how to appreciate the art with real aficion. He unintentionally succeeds in driving her madly in love with Romero, a once-in-a-generation talent.

The bullfight on the second day was much better than on the first … I sat beside Brett and explained to Brett what it was all about …
She saw how Romero avoided every brusque movement and saved his bulls for the last when he wanted them, not winded and discomposed but smoothly worn down …

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger … Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.

Montoya has a great relationship with Jake, and confesses that he’s been keeping media opportunities away from Romero, because too-early fame might corrupt the young matador’s art. Jake confirms that this is indeed a noble choice, and Montoya relaxes, having received the absolution he was seeking.

After Romero runs off with Brett, though, Montoya won’t even talk to Jake. The hotelier is furious about how Jake’s no-good friends have distracted Romero from the art of bullfighting.

4. The Balls

There’s an old joke about a tourist in Seville who finds a cute little restaurant beside the bullfighting arena. He asks the proprietor for his best dish, so the Spaniard brings out a large pair of meatballs drenched in sauce. The tourist eats it, loves it, and asks what the dish was. In broken English, the restaurateur explains that the arena next door gives him the bull carcasses after each fight, and that the testicles are the most delicious part.

The tourist is a bit put off by this, but the dish was truly delicious, so he decides to come back the next day. Again, two giant balls drenched in sauce. Again, delectable.

The third day he comes back again, and of course he orders the same dish. This time, the sauce is the same but the meatballs are much smaller. Despite the reduced portion, it still tastes great. Afterwards, the tourist asks the restaurateur why the balls were smaller today. He replies: “The bull doesn’t always lose.”

The Sun Also Rises is about what if a man survived a war but left his balls in it. It’s also about how every man loses his balls, one way or another. How bull and matador both end up on the plate. Consider the three lead males:

1. Cohn is a princeling with potential. He gets pushed around by antisemites, then pushed around by women. He finally thinks he has found a woman worth fighting for, he fights for her, and she hates him for it. He ends up an outcast in his own friend circle, and flees back to Frances, an earlier bully whom he thought he had escaped.

2. Mike is a Scottish alcoholic. He is engaged to an aristocratic English alcoholic. They treat each other quite well, and then quite poorly, and then quite well, and then repeat. He is constantly being cheated on, and barely even seems to register it. Is he really okay with it? Does he think he just … has to act okay with it?

3. And Jake himself: the nightmare made literal. There’s a beautiful English aristocrat who loves him, and he loves her, and they cannot consummate their love.

In the actual bullfighting world, you find a triple castration which rhymes with the triple castration of the Anglophone expats:

1. Romero is an absolute master of his art, and can utterly dominate the fiercest of bulls. Yet when a whiny scorned middleweight interrupts his lovemaking over a woman neither of them can keep, the matador is proven completely useless at fisticuffs. The book describes his repeated futile efforts to fight back against Cohn, and how Cohn knocks the bullfighter down again and again. To Romero’s credit, he keeps getting back up. His integrity survives, but his mastery does not transfer.
2. Montoya is not merely a hotelier, he’s a sort of godfather to the bullfighters. He’s the man who runs the whole scene. After waiting so long for another fighter with true aficion, he is helpless to prevent the corruption of his precious young talent at the hands of an American interloper and his crass buddies.
3. Finally: the bulls themselves. What is a bullfight, really? It’s not just the killing of a bull; that would be relatively easy. The point of a bullfight is to publicly dominate the bull, to allow him to express the fullness of his masculine fury against you, and to dissipate his virility with the neat movement of a cape. Each bull is not merely slain, he is entirely unmanned first.

5. Brett and the Loaded Gun

Is Brett the fundamental villain of the piece? She torments Jake with her constant romantic overtures, poking him right where it hurts, kicking him in the proverbial nuts. She puts the horns on Mike: wantonly, publicly, repeatedly. She tortures Cohn by jumping into bed with him, making him believe, and then drifting away.

She takes promising young Romero and pulls him off his perfectly diligent run, for a romance she already knows will be brief. It is like an older lover persuading a brilliant student to abandon her examinations for a weekend affair: the seduction may be mutual, but the cost is not evenly distributed. There’s no permanence in Brett’s offer to Romero, nothing to validate the veering away from his previous state of complete focus. Hopefully he gets right back into his bullfighting, but it’s entirely possible that she has broken his concentration and jinxed his mind-like-water. A once-in-a-generation talent: soiled and possibly spoiled so that Lady Brett Ashley can chalk up yet another brief extramarital affair.

If Brett is a villain, she is a sympathetic one. Her tragic origin story is given, briefly, just a few pages from the end of the book. Her father was in the war (the Boer War, I assume), and came back paranoid, traumatized, and dangerous. More than once, he threatened her with his service revolver. When he did, he did not seem to know where he was, or who she was, or why pointing a gun at her was an unbelievably terrifying and damaging act. He slept next to his gun. She used to sneak into his bedroom once he was asleep, and quietly remove all the bullets.

We do what we must to survive childhood. When we grow up, we take the survival lessons we learned as kids and unwittingly misapply them to the repeated detriment of ourselves and of others. Some of us learn to be distant, others learn to be anxious. Brett learned to take the bullets out of her father’s gun. She does that to everyone she meets, repeatedly disarming and unmanning the world around her in a desperate effort to resolve her agitation. She doesn’t understand why she’s doing it: in her hotel in Madrid at the end of the novel, she helplessly confesses to Jake that it’s a mystery to her why she keeps hurting everyone. She wishes she could stop, but she doesn’t know why she can’t.

Perhaps, in her inability to escape her father’s long shadow, the girl with a boy’s name proves herself the most emasculated one of all.

6. The Lesson

It’s difficult to draw any lesson from Hemingway’s tauroctony more meaningful than “Wouldn’t it suck to be impotent? Someday, in some form, it will happen to you!”

But there is a lesson buried here, and it’s illuminated by this line from another of his novels, A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

That’s Hemingway’s invitation. Maybe that’s the hopeful note in this dirge. The characters in this book are destroyed by their humiliations, because they cannot imagine dignity after diminishment. But you can respond differently.

You, too, will be subtly unmanned. That’s what this book lays bare. It’s not just the literal impotence of the narrator. There are downfalls everywhere. You might win a beautiful wife, but she’ll inevitably have desires other than you. You can master your specific form of combat, only to be trounced and humiliated in a fight with different rules. You might be a remarkable boxer, but that doesn’t guarantee the respect of your peers. You might be 600 kg of rippling muscle, and still be laid low by a small Spaniard with a confusing cape. And so it goes.

There’s something really old and deep in this. It’s what sends young Gautama out from the palace. Aging, disease, death: they’re coming for everyone. They’re coming for you. Any model of manhood you muster will have to yield one day to tragedy. You will break. Accepting the hard truth is the beginning of mastering it, of transcending it.

Diminishment is universal. The world will find the place where your dignity is theater, and press there. Hemingway’s hope, if he has one, is not that the wound can be undone. It is that a man might learn to live honourably after the performance fails.