Many critics have claimed that Hemingway's portrayal of Jews through the character of Robert Cohn is anti-Semitic. I agree with them. Cohn schemes and tries to come between Lady Brett and Jake Barnes who love each other. While Jake and his friends drink, Cohn stays sober, devising some cruel plan.
What do you think?
Anyway, I'm a Jew; and I really don't care. People that want to censor literature for having racist elements are hypocrites.
" People that want to censor literature for having racist elements are hypocrites."
I'm not sure they're necessarily hypocrites, but they certainly don't understand that authors can portray racism without being racist themselves.
Originally Posted by Tabac
When an author portrays a minority in a demeaning fashion he is not portraying racism, he is displaying his own racism. But this is arbitrary.
Yes, you are correct. But I believe you misunderstood what I tried to express. An authors can [even vividly] give characters racist tendencies without believing in those thoughts themselves. To describe the evils or virtues of a character is entirely different from subscribing to them.
When an author portrays a minority in a demeaning fashion he is not portraying racism, he is displaying his own racism. But this is arbitrary.
Robert Cohn represents the bastard in all of us not just the jews.
to think that a character in a work of fiction is automatically a sign of the author's racist beliefs is pretty ignorant, frankly.
I liked Cohn. The others were mean to him because they were insecure themselves. I think they used the Jewish thing as an excuse.
[QUOTE=Robert E Lee;3438]Many critics have claimed that Hemingway's portrayal of Jews through the character of Robert Cohn is anti-Semitic. I agree with them. Cohn schemes and tries to come between Lady Brett and Jake Barnes who love each other. While Jake and his friends drink, Cohn stays sober, devising some cruel plan.
What do you think? [QUOTE]
You can find anti-semitism in practically anything, but only if you are looking for it.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Have you read Native Son? Is Richard Wright racist? Or is maybe something else going on in that novel?
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Cohn doesn't really scheme or devise cruel plans. He simply follows Brett everywhere.
Cohn was more pathetic than prejudiced. The fact that he is jewish is only a topic of elaboration in the early chapters & is more of a commentary on the shift in perception once he got into Princeton vs. his earlier days. I found his coping mechanisms (particularly w/ boxing, yet refusing to fight outside the ring) to be a more unique aspect of the character study than peripheral reasons for antagonizing him- they were merely vehicles.
http://unidentifiedappellation.blogspot.com/
One or two years before he wrote The Sun also Rises ....
Hemingway was in Spain and became enamored of an English lady who was his model for Brett. There was a Jew in their party of expatriates who also liked the English lady, and he and Hemingway almost got in a fight over her. Hemingway found out the model for Cohn had slept with the lady before. When Hemingway got back to Paris, he realized this was the stuff novels are made of, so he wrote The Sun. So the book was written with no Jewish prejudice in mind, but was based partially on real life.
This is what made Hemingway say, after the novel was published, that Brett would have had the hard-drinking party girl personality even if Jake had not had his war wound.
This is one of my favorite novels, and I think Hemingway had no anti-semitic views in mind. No more than Mark Twain had black prejudice when he wrote Huckleberry Finn.
I would say it's mildly anti-semetic. I would say that Hemingway is not prejudiced against jews per se, but he is using jewish sterotypes in a derogatory way. He does this with blacks too.
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Oh, it's totally anti-semitic. Nobody should read this filth!
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Shakespeare wrote about some pretty horrible people, but does that make him racist? Hardly, since many of his anti-heroes were English. The prejudice will be there if you wish it to be. Example. How Green Was My Valley. Most of the "baddies" were Welsh, but then, so were most of the "goodies"? Where did Llewellyn's prejudices lie? Who knows!
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