The following text is the work of Kiril Tuntevski, class of 2009.
Trying to attribute the term of the Lost
Generation to a generation of living young authors is a travesty. The
term, in its literary form in the British idiomatic spectrum, applies
to the generation of soldiers killed in World War One, regardless of
their martial affiliation. To claim that somebody else belongs to a
lost generation, he or she needs to belong to another, usually older
generation. So, the former should be deemed the greatest hypocrite – no
traditionalist would likely doom a generation to their early proverbial
grave. On the contrary, that Hemingway’s Lost Generation is the primary
harbinger of modernity.
Actually, the preface to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
is Gertrude Stein’s utterance “You are all a lost generation”
originally refers to a pre-World War One generation of Northern
American expatriates from the last two decades of the 19th century.
However, its glorification through Hemingway’s 1924 novel refocused its
meaning on Hemingway’s post-war generation. In a sense, Hemingway has
recycled Stein’s phrase for his own purposes, in creating the
telegraphic, traditionally disenchanted world of post-World-War-One
Europe. In these terms, Hemingway makes a proverbial usurpation of
identity and purpose. While Stein doesn’t necessarily refer to
Hemingway’s generation, her quote is expanded and embodied in the
character of Bill Gorton, who benefits all the spoils of expatriate
life while being utterly cynical about it. Thus, the alleged
traditionalists (Gorton) are portrayed living the lives of Hemingway’s
Lost Generation.
This penetration of context enables Hemingway to write The Sun Also Rises
as a negation, rather than as an affirmation of Stein’s alleged claim;
the expatriates’ life is the best one there is. Further, Hemingway
himself has a claim that befits best his generation’s philosophy,
namely that there is no distinction amongst men except for the way they
live and the way they die.
As the life of the characters in The Sun Also Rises stems, in
most part, from the life of Hemingway’s contemporaries, as well as
Hemingway’s own life, the characters don’t seem to be lost at all.
Their travelling, eating, drinking along with every other carnal
activity they engage seems to be the thing they know best, even though
to a traditionalist they may seem lost.
When reading these
expatriates against the standards of an American (USA) text, I realize
that they do quite the opposite of the American Foundation. Namely,
they depart from the Myth of the Garden, and head back to the old world
to re-establish their carnal lives. They, Jacob Barnes, Robert Cohn,
Frances Clyne – predominately the WASP-like characters – are the
prodigal sons of the New World; now they return to Europe, as a result
of military struggles and psychological exile to reclaim the Old World
as their playground (with every right to do so!).
Personally, I choose to view this Hemingway’s Lost Generation as the
first stance of Globalization; the first generation that chose to look
beyond a nationalist veil at foreign things for their appeal, with a
dose of expressionist internationalism. Mechanization is this
generation’s primary trait – something that continues to be the
essential factor of Globalism – and its necessity stems from pragmatism
and exclusion of aesthetical ornamentations in speech and
correspondence. Many times, speech in The Sun Also Rises
seems to be shaped by the influence of correspondence. Bill Gorton’s
telegraphic utterances when he recounts his trip to Austria is one of
the text’s ubiquitous moments of modernity, while his speech is in fact
only a natural occurrence in today’s (beginning of the 21st century).
My major point is, that “lost generation” written about in works such as The Sun Also Rises
is the prototype of modernity and thus of contemporary life, which
despite the fourscore years hasn’t really changed in style.
The absurdity of the claim that the expatriate generation is a lost one
is only topped by the fact that the quotation comes from somebody who
spent most of her life in France (even though American). Gertrude
Stein, the “author” of this ubiquitous quote, thus seems to have an air
of pompousness around her – judging from this one single instance of
hypocrisy, though I am not usually likely to make such a judgement
prior to an in-depth study of an author’s works. Still, even the quote
in question in this paper seems to be a result of rushed-in judgement,
as expatriate (though not necessarily carnal) life today is greatly
attributed to intellectuals worldwide. There is nothing lost about
Hemingway’s Lost Generation. It is the initial step of
internationalization and unbiased global interaction.
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