The Sun Also Rises
Let's define and unpack a few things...
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Allusion
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An allusion is a figure of speech that refers to a well-known story, event, person, or object in order to make a comparison in the readers' minds.
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Jungian rebirth
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Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung professed five different forms of rebirth: metempsychosis (transmigration of souls), reincarnation (in a human body), resurrection, psychological rebirth(individuation) and indirect change that comes about through participation in the process of transformation.
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Jung said of natural transformation: “Nature herself demands a death and a rebirth… Natural transformation processes announce themselves mainly in dreams… a… process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being. This “other being” is the other person in ourselves – that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul.” I wonder if Bruce's denial of Hemingway's work as an allusion to this could be a denial of the "other being" within him whom he has spent his life hiding.
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Roman-a-clef
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a novel in which real people or events appear with invented names.
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Bruce claims that Hemingway wrote himself into The Sun Also Rises as the character, Jake.
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Who is Jake?
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Jake Barnes was a soldier in World War I, where he was seriously wounded. The novel implies that, as a result of his injury, he lost the ability to have sex. Perhaps because of his injury, Jake is very self-conscious about his masculinity. Jake's love interest, Brett (a young woman whom he describes as boyish) refuses to enter in a relationship with him because she would have to give up sex. Jake is a representation of the Lost Generation who was abandoned after the war. He spends much of his time wandering from bar to bar constantly trying to get away from himself.
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Ernest Hemingway​
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Ernest Hemingway was a writer in the first half of the 20th century. He is famous for his iceberg theory which proposes that what appears on the pages in a book is only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the story lies beneath the surface.
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For a long time Hemingway was regarded as a model for monolithic masculinity, but recently new evidence has serviced which suggests that he struggled with his sexual identity. Hemingway also expressed interest in gender-nonconformity in his novel The Garden of Eden where one character convinces her husband to dye his hair for an “androgynous” appearance. Hemingway seems like a figure that Bruce might have identified with and admired. If Bruce thought Hemingway wrote himself into the novel as Jake, I'm willing to bet Bruce saw himself in Jake as well.
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Bruce doesn't give Alison this book. This is a book Alison is assigned in her Modern Classics class, which she later passionately discusses with her father. The professor told her that "Jake's renewal in Spain in The Sun Also Rises is really an allusion to Jungian rebirth." Bruce replies "That's bullshit! Jakes's not a symbol, he's Hemingway! That book is a roman-a-clef."
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Click for summary
Colette
Bruce sends Alison a book by Colette while Alison is away at college.
Colette was a French novelist in the first half of the 20th century best known for her novella, Gigi, and her novel, Cherí. Her writing is best known for her detailed sensuous descriptions. Colette's first novels were written while she was literally locked away by her husband, Henri Gauthier-Villars, who was also a writer. Her husband published her first four novels as his own. She left her husband in 1906 and soon got
involved with an independently wealthy lesbian, marquise de Balbeuf, who dressed masculinely and mocked the masculine manner. In 1914 she married again Henry de Jouvenel, editor in chief of the paper Le Matin, where she was finally able to publish novels as her own. In her later career Colette wrote about female sexuality, but she never actually wrote about lesbians. That being said, she almost certainly had affairs with women during her lifetime.
Baryshnikov
While in New York City small Alison asks Bruce, "can I look at the Baryshnikov book?" to which he replies, "Yes but be careful with it."
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Mikhail Baryshnikov was arguably the most famous ballet dancer in the world in the 1970s. He wrote a book titled, Baryshnikov at Work: Mikhail Baryshnikov Discusses His Roles, which was published in 1976, the year of the bicentennial. There are very few books about Mikhail Baryshnikov, so I think it's safe to assume this is the book Alison was referring to. Click here to watch a short video about Mikhail Baryshnikov.
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Bruce may have been fascinated by Baryshnikov for many reasons. Maybe it was purely a fascination with dance. Maybe it was a fascination with Baryshnikov's physicality. Maybe he appreciated Baryshnikov's advocacy for the gay community, even though Baryshnikov himself wasn't gay.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
After Alison has come out to her parents via letter she receives a call from Bruce in which he dodges the topic and instead asks, "Listen, before I forget, d'ja get the book I sent? The Joyce. Portrait of the-" Bruce is referring to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Irish writer James Joyce. Bruce goes on to say "You better damn well identify with every page!" Let's speculate on why he says that...
This book follows the spiritual and intellectual awakening of Stephen Daedalus, Joyce's alter ego and allusion to Daedalus, son of Icarus, from Greek mythology. This reference to Greek mythology is interesting because Alison actually compares Bruce to Icarus in the graphic novel.
When Stephen first goes off to boarding school he is homesick and lonely, but it doesn't take long for him to find his new home away from home. Stephen's visits home are full of tension and things unsaid, perhaps similar to Alison's visits home from college. Stephen's first sexual encounter is with a prostitute and he pushes his Catholic upbringing aside to engage in "sinful" behavior until he goes on a three-day religious retreat. Here he is met with three fiery sermons on sin, judgment, and hell. Deeply shaken, he devotes himself to Catholicism through abstinence and self-denial. It is not until he witnesses a young woman wading in a lake that he realizes love and the desire of beauty should not be a source of shame. He distances himself from his family and from Catholicism to live a life completely devoted to writing and the pursuit of beauty.
Bruce could be saying many things with this book. Comparing Alison to Stephen could be passive aggressive (Stephen abandons his family and his faith), or it could be his way of encouraging her to go and become an artist. James Joyce believed that in order to be an artist one had to be isolated. Perhaps Bruce agreed with this sentiment and was encouraging Alison to distance herself. This could possibly be Bruce's version of the "don't you come back here. I didn't raise you to give away your days like me" moment.
Winogrand Article
In one of Bruce's last letters to Alison, he says, "Dear Al, Did you receive that Winogrand article I was telling you about?"
I have a theory that this article is most likely a New York Times article from 1980 sometime between when Alison came out to her parents and Bruce's death. There are four articles referencing Garry Winogrand during that time frame in the New York Times archive. I would have to be a magician to pin down exactly which article Bruce is referring to, but I can tell a bit about Garry Winogrand.
Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer from the Bronx whose photographs have appeared in art galleries around the world. In 1979 he was traveling around the country on a Guggenheim fellowship investigating social issues of the time. Winogrand was revolutionary because his photos were shot at odd angles, from close encounters with his unprepared subjects. Winogrand captured the messy, controversial reality of individuals in the United States. His photographs focused on the individual people and their juxtaposition with the people around them. To be honest, I don't have a good sense of why Bruce wanted Alison to read an article about him. I'll let you decide that for yourself.
Araby
In one of Bruce's last letters to Alison he says, "Dear Al, I just re-read Araby. That could have been me- I was rather sensitive when I was little, you know-"
Araby is a short story by James Joyce which appears in his book, Dubliners. You can read the complete five-page story here. Araby deals with the idea of dreaming of new love but being encumbered by the drudgery and monotony of day to day life. The story follows a young man who falls in love with a young women, and he goes on a mission to buy her a present, but by the time he gets to the market it's all closed up except for one shop. The women at the shop is being unkind to him, so he doesn't buy anything. Rather than coming to the conclusion that he doesn't need a gift to woo the girl he loves, he gives up.
There is one quote from this short story that I want to draw specific attention to:
"I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play."
This quotation seems to be straight from the mind of someone suffering from depression. This is the last reading material Bruce mentions to Alison in the musical before his death. This placement of this reference seems to suggest that he was slipping into deep depression in the days or weeks before. If Alison remembers these book recommendations, is it possible she blames herself for not noticing what he was trying to say to her?
