For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway's Undiscovered Country.

Sanderson, Rena

Allen Josephs has undertaken the difficult task of introducing For Whom the Bell Tolls, possibly Hemingway's richest and most complicated novel, to readers of the Twayne's Masterwork Studies series. Not surprisingly, Josephs proves himself eminently qualified to meet this challenge. A professor of Spanish, he has published extensively on Hemingway and Spain and brings to this book a solid familiarity with that country's geography, language, and culture. His book draws upon documents (in the Kennedy Library) related to novel's composition, and upon recent work by other Hemingway scholars, such as Robert E. Gajdusek, Edward F. Stanton, H.R. Stoneback, and William Braasch Watson.

The first section of the book, containing six chapters, offers a condensed and smoothly written overview of the novel's "Literary and Historical Context." Josephs provides a brief and informative account of the novel's historical context, current importance, and critical reception. He also discusses the significance of Spain to Hemingway (a discussion nicely punctuated by photographs throughout the book), Hemingway's politics, and the history of the Spanish Civil War. That war's political complexities and the controversies surrounding are explained with impressive clarity. He defends Hemingway against charges of political naivete, demonstrating that the novelist was in fact an "astute observer of European politics" (5), who, during a brief period, wrote engaged journalistic pieces that were "more or less overtly political in nature" (26). Nevertheless, Josephs sees these early war writings as exceptions to the otherwise apolitical or antipolitical stance--the ideology of "artistic anarchism"--that marked Hemingway's career (27). In contrast to the earlier war writings, For Whom the Bell Tolls is "frequently apolitical" (26).

In addition to emphasizing Hemingway's political independence Josephs stresses the importance of authorial invention in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway tackled "the writer's problem"--making the reader "experience the larger truth"--not by slavish adherence to historical fact but by dependence on his own imagination (7). In other words, Josephs joins the symbolist side in the debate between realist and symbolist interpretations; he thus takes his place in a critical tradition that extends from the early 1940s (Howard Mumford Jones, Malcolm Cowley) to the present. Drawing extensively on Carlos Baker's chapter "The Spanish Tragedy" in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist--which he praises as "the best balanced major piece on the novel" (21)--Josephs reads Hemingway's Civil War novel not as a "realistic" novel but as a work of mythical dimensions "above and beyond politics and partisanship" (21).

The second and larger section of the book, simply entitled "A Reading," contains seven chapters in which Josephs explores Hemingway's imaginative transformation of the historical. In the first of these seven chapters, Josephs works his way toward a "critical point of departure that affirms that For Whom the Bell Tolls-- all of it, including the 'real parts,' which are couched around and within the invented foregrounded action--was invented" (46). He predicts that old debates over the book's verisimilitude will continue to fade and be replaced by critical interest in the novel's attempts to capture the mythos, rather than the ethos, of the Spanish Civil War.

Although Josephs clearly endorses this mytho-critical direction, he does not disregard Hemingway's sources in the "real world." The chapter on the book's setting, for example, engagingly describes Josephs' personal visits to Spain in search of "hard evidence" about the bridge and the terrain described in the novel (52-54)-- this despite the overarching claim that everything in the book is Hemingway's invention. "Nothing makes the story come alive like experiencing the actual location" (54). Though the reader only experiences "the actual location" through prose descriptions (whether Hemingways or Josephs'), these anecdotes give Josephs' book a personal touch and convey his enthusiasm for his quest.

The chapter on the novel's characters proceeds in a similar fashion, balancing the claims of imagination and mimesis. Being careful not to reduce the novel to a roman a clef, Josephs divides the characters into three classes: real people, such as Andre Marty and La Pasionaria (Dolores Ibarruri); disguised real people, such as Karkov (Mikhail Kolsov) and General Golz (General Walter); and invented people, such as Pilar, Robert Jordan, and Maria. After establishing distinctions between the "real" and the "invented," however, Josephs swiftly erases them in order to present what he sees as Hemingway's inventive technique. Although agreeing, for example, with Edward F. Stanton that the character of Pilar is "based in part on Pastora Imperio," daughter of a famous Gypsy dancer, Josephs denies that the resemblance is only partial: "Pilar works so well and is so complex because she truly is Pastora" (76). Hemingway, that is, did not simply piece together his characters from different aspects of real persons but invented characters from real persons in their entirety (77). Although this description of Hemingway's creative process--presented by Hemingway himself in Death in the Afternoon--seems convincing, it nevertheless leaves unexamined the roots of the inventive act itself. Lack of clarity on this point leads Josephs, at times, into unwarranted hasty judgments. For example, he dismisses the view that the portrait of Pilar contains elements of Gertrude Stein or Grace Hemingway (73-75)--but surely Hemingway's feelings about these two powerful women may well have influenced the way he saw and re-created Pastora Imperio, the "real" Pilar.

The remainder of the book traces, in a more or less linear way, the unfolding action of the novel. Throughout, Josephs draws upon a wide variety of critical, literary, and religious texts that support his interpretations. Readers who are inclined towards Jungian theories and mythological approaches will find much of interest in this discussion of the novel's dense symbolic texture.

In a sense, Josephs' reading is a complex elaboration upon his book's subtitle. The phrase "the undiscovered country" (at one time Hemingway's choice for the title of his novel) refers in Hamlet to death, but "in the novel it encompasses much more than death." Above all, "the 'undiscovered country' is the realm of the artist's imagination" (xix). It is "primordial Spain," "the most totally other, the most radically different culture Hemingway had ever experienced," a world made partly accessible through the oracular wisdom of Pilar (114-15). It suggests "the dark side of nature...replete with sex, death, and mystery" (114). And it is also the site of mystical unity: the earth moves and time is suspended when Robert Jordan and Maria experience ecstatic oneness and transcendent bliss in a sacred union, or "hierogamy," of male and female, sacred and profane (80, 108, 134-37). In fact, Josephs regards For Whom the Bell Tolls as "first and foremost a love story, Hemingway's greatest love story"--but the term "love" here carries weight far beyond mere "romantic talk" (90). It is a love realized "by going within," transcending the observable and the rational (109), reaching for selflessness. It effects personal integration, social harmony ("No man is an island"), and, indeed, oneness with the universe.

As an introductory book, For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway's Undiscovered Country cannot fairly be expected to address every relevant issue. Nevertheless, though the book is ever alert to the original context of Hemingway's novel, it seems surprisingly unaware of its own context--Academia, U.S.A., 1994. In discussing the importance of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Josephs glowingly describes the impressive popularity of the book, especially among students, in China, in Latin America, and in the former Soviet Union (10). But such enthusiasm for Hemingway's work outside of the U.S. notably contrasts with Hemingway's less secure status, especially within academia, in his own country. Since Josephs' purpose, of course, is to bolster that status and to make this celebrated novel accessible to our students, it is somewhat puzzling that he remains silent about the debate over the American literary canon which is threatening precisely such "classics" as For Whom the Bell Tolls.

But this weakness, if that is what it is, does not outweigh the many strengths of this "Reader's Companion." Allen Josephs has given us a highly readable, informative, thoughtful, and thought-provoking analysis of Hemingway's most complex and undiscovered fiction.