READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
25
The worst failure is the central character, Robert Jordan. Like pre·
vious Hemingway heroes, Jordan is not an objectively rendered character
but simply a mouthpiece for the author. The earlier heroes had at least a
certain dramatic consistency, but Jordan is a monster, uniting--or trying
to--the nihilism and cynicism of the usual Hemingway hero with a rather
simpleminded political idealism-a sort of Hemingwayesque scoutmaster
leading his little troop of peasants. For the Hemingway who speaks
through Jordan is a Hemingway with a hangover, a repentant Hemingway
who has been in contact with a revolution and has accepted it enough to be
ashamed of his old faith and yet who cannot feel or understand deeply the
new values. The result is that Jordan as a character is vague and fuzzy,
destroyed by the continual friction of these irreconcilable viewpoints.
"TURN OFF THE
Jordan's confusion is shared and not under·
THINKING NOW
..."
stood by his creator, and this confusion is the
root of the failure of the novel. Although
Hemingway himself denies it frequently in the course of the book, and
although most of the critics take his denial at face value,
For Whom the
Bell Tolls
is a political novel, both in that it deals with a great political
event, the Spanish civil war, and that its author takes a definite (though
largely unconscious) political ·attitude towards this event. And it is a
failure because Hemingway lacks the moral and intellectual equipment to
handle such a theme. Instinctively, he tries to cut the subject down to
something he can handle by restricting his view of the war to the activities
of a small band of peasant guerrillas behind Franco's lines (and hence
safely insulated from Loyalist politics) and by making his protagonist–
in Karkov's words-"a young American of slight political development
but ... a fine partisan record."
But such limitations negate the pretensions of the book. Hemingway's
peasants have been so depoliticalized that it seems little more than chance
that they are Loyalists rather than Rebels, and so the long novel is reduced
to the scale of an adventure story. As for Jordan, on page 17 he admon–
ishes himself: "Turn off the thinking now, old timer, old comrade. You're
a bridge-blower now. Not a thinker." But what can be more fruitless than
to follow through some five hundred pages the thoughts of a hero who. has
renounced thought?
I think the novel is a failure for precisely the reason that many critics
seem to like it most: because of its rejection of political consciousness.
"The
kind
of people people are rather than their social-economic relations
is what Hemingway is particularly aware of," writes Edmund Wilson in
the
New
Republic,
and it is clear from the rest of his review that he con–
ceives of "social-economic relations'' as somehow conflicting with "the
kind of people people are." This false antithesis, between politics and 'art,'
or even between politics and 'life,' attractive enough always to the empiri–
cally-slanted American consciousness, is doubly seductive today when
