A Critical View

13 November 13, 2007

Precis
Chad Honsinger/ English 494

Field, Allyson Nadia. Expatriate Lifestyle as Tourist Destination: The Sun Also Rises and Experiential Travelogues of the Twenties. The Hemingway Review, Volume 25, Number 2, Spring 2006. Idaho University Press.

The Sun Also Rises as Travel Log

Hemmingway’s great early novel can be critiqued within the context of other travel logs of the period along with the novels literary themed critiques, or so Allyson Nadia Field argues. Field quotes Janet Flaner as preface to her analysis as characterizing Hemingway as a man who “was a born traveler as he was a born novelist”. She weighs The Sun Also Rises against four travel logs circulating in the period: Pages from the Book of Paris, Paris with the Lid Lifted, How to be Happy in Paris (without being ruined), and Paris on Parade. In ascending order of importance; the last log was written by Robert Forrest Wilson. Her intent then is fairly simply to illuminate the traveling nature of the text by displaying these other works. Her argument follows these lines. Because of the social diversity of society today the reader when reading about a bar or something else does not especially stick the place out in there mind. For readers of the twenties; the literary and artistic communities were mixing with the highest of society and creating their own entertainment. Especially true in Paris, the reader would then identify that this was the place to be. In our day, with the high degree of travelers, this seems to happen with entire cities (Amsterdam) or small chic hideaway treasures of “culture” (Cinque Terre). Fields argument then follows the line that when Hemmingway mentions the cafes, bars, and clubs he is inherently creating a travel log. The novel has a certain pattern in the repetition of places. Thus while Hemingway (known for tourist distain) did not create a travel log he created a work which the discreet observer could use as a travel log. In a second point Field puts forth the two kinds of travel logs; there were “theme” travel logs and experiential travel logs. There were travel records of great monuments, the Notre Dame etcetera, which gave people a site overview of the city. Then, which she reviews, there are the “experience” guilds. These are travel logs which show you where to get the experience, especially the less “puritan” experiences of Paris. Thus, Field argues, the novel is a record of the fleeing men and women who made foreign streets home and thrived on continual experience in the form of new itineraries and new loves. The perpetual experiences grow dull, but Hemingway has become an icon who rose above them and brought an “outsiders” perspective to the experience of expatriates in Paris.

The work adds to an understanding of Hemingway’s perspective on Paris and the culture of the times from which the work emerged.