This Passage Has No Point

“He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office. That has nothing to do with the story. Anyway, his office had a green baize door and a big wooden door, and when I went out I left him sitting among the archives that covered all the walls, and I shut both the doors, and as I went out of the building into the street the porter stopped me to brush off my coat.

‘You must have been in a motor-car,’ he said. The back of the collar and the upper part of the shoulders were gray with dust.

‘From Bayonne.’

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘I knew you were in a motor-car from the way the dust was.’ So I gave him two copper coins.”

-The Sun Also Rises, p 102

That also has nothing to do with the story. Actually, it seems that over half this story has nothing to do with the story. This passage occurs about two-fifths of the way through the novel, yet it is still unclear thus far what the actual conflict is. Hemingway has basically written pages and pages of mundane, mindless descriptions of everyday life with the hope that the quantity of writing might distract the reader from realizing that the quality of the writing is virtually nonexistent. Honestly, I would not complain if Hemingway chose to be overly descriptive if he actually progressed the plot occasionally. He seems to have hinted that whatever happened between Cohn and Brett in San Sebastian will likely cause some sort of conflict later in the novel. Thus far, though, that is all that we have learned concerning the actual plot; the rest of the writing has been consumed by mindless drivel about painfully ordinary events.

Perhaps if it is revealed that this porter who brushed off Jake’s coat outside the archivist’s office with two doors and apparently deserves two copper coins for his guess that Jake was in a motor-car—if you pay attention, he does not receive the coins for the service, but for his guess that Jake was in a car—perhaps if this man turns out to be Robert Cohn’s long-lost biological father, who will finally mend Cohn’s emotional wounds and give him a spine, then this passage will actually have some semblance of meaning. Otherwise, Hemingway is simply wasting space.