The Sun Also Rises And Giovanni's Room

Ernest Hemingway’s famously wrote in a style likened to an iceberg. Like an iceberg that is 1/8 above water and 7/8 below the surface, Hemingway embedded the deeper meanings in his works through the silent or unaddressed issues. He stated that “the dignity of an iceberg is due to 1/8 of it being above water” and that the most dangerous and important 7/8, the part that sinks ships, lies below the surface. (“Art of Fiction”) (Onderdonk 75). In using Hemingway’s iceberg theory to examine his work The Sun Also Rises as well as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, the meaning of the texts changes dramatically. Both pieces deal with controversial themes of sexuality, gender relationships, and race relations that are hidden in order to challenge the
By hiding the themes of their texts in the silences of them, Baldwin and Hemingway are able to negate the importance of a straightforward discourse and reveal the negativity in perception. James Baldwin approaches the problem of space or an African American in America through his text, Giovanni’s Room, which does not contain a single black character and takes place in Europe. In applying Hemingway’s iceberg theory to Baldwin’s use of the hidden black space within the text, the issue of race becomes more prominent as it is below the surface and the text does not come across as a one-layered narrative. Through the “construction of whiteness” Baldwin is able “to explore to complexities of gender, national, and sexual identity, uncomplicated by the issue of racialized blackness” (Henderson 313). Baldwin is often criticized for white washing his characters and these critics who are not looking into the silences of the text and the manner in which homosexuality is merely a vehicle, analogous to non-normativity and repressed space, believe Baldwin is betraying the American black man (Shin 250). In examining the repressive space of a homosexual expatriate who lacks a home and a space to
Regarding sexuality, the link between homosexuality and silence is a long established tradition taking it’s roots from the phrase “the love that dare not speak it’s name” from the poem Two Loves by Lord Alfred Douglas referring to his relations with Oscar Wilde (Douglas). Finally, there is also the binary of accepted space. While normativity is allowed in public, non-normativity, namely homosexual acts in Giovanni’s Room are restricted to dark, hidden, private space. David’s attempts to practice his own sexuality and embrace his self are met with the discovery of a dark, repressive space for the homosexual man that corresponds to the space for the African American man that he likens to a cavern. After David’s first homosexual experience, he claims, “A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood tones, full of dirty words. I saw my future in that cavern. I was afraid” reflecting the manner in which David’s American fear of the unnatural opens up a space of darkness and loathing for his own body (Baldwin 14). David continues to project his own shame on those around him, describing the boy Joey who he has sex with as “the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood” further linking his own masculinity to