Hemingway and the Bulls

It's been a while since I've read anything by Ernest Hemingway, though I have three of his novels on my bookshelf. When I read him in the past, I sometimes had an almost visceral sense of being pummeled, which may have derived in part from his prose style and in part from his themes. This week, however, I finally read The Sun Also Rises, and it all came about because I was reading a novel about his first marriage and his years in Paris. That novel, The Paris Wife, written from the point of view of Mr. Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, tells the story of the complicated personal relationships of the Hemingways and their friends and purportedly hews close to actual events.

The Sun Also Rises is, apparently, a barely disguised version of actual events described in The Paris Wife. As I finished the latter book, Mr. Hemingway's novel was literally sitting across the room from me, directly in my line of vision. It seemed like a good time to find out what he had made of events I'd just read about from someone else's perspective, but I was hesitant. Was I in the mood for literary punches and jabs? No, I wasn't, not really, but my curiosity had been piqued, so I decided to give Mr. Hemingway another try.

As happens to me with fair frequency, I found that I had a different reaction to the author than I'd had in the past. I can't speak to the rights or wrongs of the actual events, but only to the novel, which tells of painful circumstances and tragic characters with a surprising amount of humor. I enjoyed the careful descriptions of landscape, the sharp dialogue, and the vivid sense of place and time. In the time it took to read the novel, I was transported. I can fully appreciate how painful it might have been to be a participant in these events, but the work itself is graceful.

Mr. Hemingway's descriptions of the running of the bulls, the fiesta, and the bull-fighting in Pamplona made me realize something else. I've written before about an alternate outcome for the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, one in which the Minotaur is released from the labyrinth instead of being killed there. My thinking was that if the Minotaur is a disguised version of a sun god, his killing might be the key to the tragic events that follow his death. In the running of the bulls, one sees what this release of the Minotaur looks like in actuality. Though events are still, to some degree, choreographed (as they are in the bull-ring), the strength of the bull is at least celebrated and appreciated by the onlookers. The bull-fighters are judged, in part, against the size and ferocity of the bulls.

Mr. Hemingway made the bull-fights a central image in The Sun Also Rises, and to me, it seems he was very aware of the mythic import of the spectacle, which is also a ritual. Having seen so much death in the war, he must have been acutely alive to the ritualistic conquering of death in the bull-ring, where the bull-fighter "takes on" some of the animal's strength and vitality in the act of defeating it.

It seems to me that though the danger to the bull-fighter is real, the odds are still stacked against the animals. (In the bull-fights, at least as described in the novel, the animal invariably dies.) I don't think this was lost on Mr. Hemingway. Each triumph by a skillful bull-fighter is a temporary triumph, even when repeated many times. But to a character like Jake, shattered by a near-miss with death, the ritual of renewal, even if only temporary and somewhat conditioned, must have been very powerful.

Jake and the others of his generation who survived the war are mirror images of the bull-fighter, though less fortunate. They returned from the labyrinth alive but forever changed, aware of the futility of what they had been through and searching for a way to live with that awareness. As Jake tells it, his central project in life has become an accommodation to facts that cannot be changed. "I did not care what it was all about," he says at one point. "All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about."

It may be off the topic, but the metaphor of bull-fighting in The Sun Also Rises has given me an idea. What if, in the future, we settled all conflicts between nations in the bull-ring? Just send down the person or persons responsible for making the call to the ring and let them match wits with the bulls. It would have to be an even fight, though, so no sending in proxies or hiding behind the fences. If they came out of it still thinking that war is a good idea, then let them fight each other, if so inclined. It may sound crude and simplistic, but wouldn't it save everybody else a lot of trouble? If the bull wins, the whole thing is called off, and we have a two-week fiesta instead.

If I finished The Paris Wife feeling a great deal of sympathy for the first Mrs. Hemingway, I finished The Sun Also Rises with a new empathy for Mr. Hemingway. Glamorous and hip they may have been, but they had a lot stacked against them. Even with all the artistic fervor taking place in the Paris of their day, I don't think I would have wanted to be there, because too much of it seems to have resulted from pain and early loss that they could not surmount. Even though the war was over, they still seemed to be fighting it.

Deja Vu All Over Again

I attended a conference this weekend at my school. It was the first time I had stayed at Ladera, our second campus, since my first summer as a myth studies student. I drove up Thursday from L.A., met a friend for dinner in Carpinteria, and walked down to the beach for a stroll under the stars. We arrived at the campus in the dark, just like I did the first time I stayed there. I drove myself this time and was proud of being able to negotiate the winding, hilly lanes that had seemed so bewildering a few years ago.

By some quirk, my classmate had the same room in the residence hall that she had the first time through; I was still next door to her, but on the opposite side, which resulted in a very strange feeling of deja vu. It was one of those instances where time does a loop and carries you back, like a labyrinth that circles you around to the same spot from a different vantage point.

This circumstance invited a meditation on where we are now compared to where we were. I know that I listened to the conference presenters with a practiced ear, better able to evaluate both content and form, on the other side of doing multiple presentations of my own as a student. I talked to a filmmaker whose film I had seen years ago in my home town, never dreaming I would ever meet her, much less be able to talk to her seriously about my own interest in film. I played with graphite pencils, Play Doh, and crayons in the art loft, no longer so afraid of feeling silly and more willing to just see what would happen. I attended an early morning session in which people shared their nighttime dreams in what was called a Social Dreaming Matrix. (Hey, why not? -- this is California.)

I also noticed that the old Jesuit residence hall didn't seem quite as sinister at night, that the mountains are still stunning, whether viewed sharp-edged against the light or enshrouded in Arthurian mists, and that the walk up to the pretty little Vedanta temple is as steep as it ever was.

I thought the highlight of the weekend would be the pre-conference workshop on myth and the movies, until I was astounded by a lecture yesterday morning on Jung, imagination, and social consciousness. The presenter, Mary Watkins, explained the importance of bringing individuation into the wider world. A truly individuated person, she said, is an advocate for human rights and the need to heal divisions between people and countries. I flashed back to the first presentations I heard as a prospective student and remembered how exciting it was to hear someone talk about the ways depth psychology could help make a better world. Maybe that will give me a touchstone to steer by as I find my way through the labyrinth of my own research.

It's never too late to be surprised. I was heading down the hill yesterday, on my way back to L.A., with the satellite radio station cranked up in my rental car and '50s music rocking, when I realized, for the first time in four years, that the name of the road I was on -- Toro Canyon Road -- means "Canyon of the Bull." I have seen the minotaur in many places but overlooked his presence on this road until now. Of course, now I know that not only can you find him everywhere, but that he's more complicated than I used to think he was.