Assignment paper no.108

 Assignment : paper no. 108

Topic: The Transformation of"For Whom the Bell Toll"

Name: Bhavna Sosa

Paper- The American Literature 

Roll no- 02

Enrollment no- 4069206420210034

Email ID - bhavnasosa211@gmail.com

Batch-2021-23(MA Sem-2)

Submitted to- S. B. Gardi Department of English. Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University. 

Introduction :-

For Whom the Bell Tolls, novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1940. The novel is set near Segovia, Spain, in 1937 and tells the story of American teacher Robert Jordan, who has joined the antifascist Loyalist army. Jordan has been sent to make contact with a guerrilla band and blow up a bridge to advance a Loyalist offensive. The action takes place during Jordan’s 72 hours at the guerrilla camp. During this period he falls in love with María, who has been raped by fascist soldiers, and befriends the shrewd but cowardly guerrilla leader Pablo and his courageous wife, Pilar. Jordan manages to destroy the bridge; Pablo, Pilar, María, and two other guerrillas escape, but Jordan is injured. Proclaiming his love to María once more, he awaits the fascist troops and certain death.

        "The world is a fine place and 

         worth fighting for and I hate

         very much to leave it."

The Transformation of For Whom the Bell Tolls :-

It's not inaccurate to say that Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is “A Farewell to Arms” with the background, instead, the Spanish Civil War. The hero, Robert Jordan, a young American Loyalist sympathizer, recalls Frederic Henry. Like Henry, he is anti-heroically heroic, anti-romantically romantic, very male, passionate, an artist of action, Mercutio modernized. Though the heroine, Maria, reminds one rather less of Catherine Barkley, the two women have much in common. Also, in both books the mounting interplay of death and sex is a major theme, the body’s intense aliveness as it senses its own destruction.

But there, I think, the resemblance ends. For this book is not merely an advance on “A Farewell to Arms.” It touches a deeper level than any sounded in the author’s other books. It expresses and releases the adult Hemingway, whose voice was first heard in the groping “To Have and Have Not.” It is by a better man, a man in whom works the principle of growth, so rare among American writers.

The story opens and closes with Robert Jordan lying flat on the pine-needle floor of a Spanish forest. When we first meet him he is very much alive and planning the details of his job, which is to join forces with a band of Spanish guerrillas and with their aid blow up an important bridge at the precise instant that will most help the Loyalist advance on Segovia. When we last see him he has fulfilled his mission and is facing certain death. Between the opening and closing pass three days and three nights. Between the opening and closing pass a lifetime for Robert and Maria and something very much like a lifetime for the reader. “I suppose,” thinks Robert, “it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years.” The full life lived by Robert and Maria spills over into your own mind as you read, so the three days and three nights are added to your life, and you are larger and more of a person on page 471 than you were on page 1. That is one test of a first-rate work of fiction.

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” is about serious people engaged in serious actions. The word “serious" occurs again and again. The thoughts of Robert, even at his most sardonic, are serious thoughts. “There are necessary orders that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn. As it can turn on everything that happens in this war.” It is a stern and grave reflection, sterner, graver than anything in “A Farewell to Arms.” The title itself is part of a grave reflection, from the sermons of John Donne. That we may see on what a new and different level of emotion Hemingway now works, I quote the sentence from which the title is taken: “No man is an Iland, entire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lessee, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manner of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

This utterance is about death and says yes to life. That men confer value on life by feeling deeply each other’s mortality is the underlying theme of the novel. Here is something other than Hemingway’s old romantic absorption in death, though growing out of it. Remember that “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is an anti-Fascist novel. “Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.” All of what the dictator most profoundly and religiously disbelieves is in that sentence. Hemingway is no fool. He portrays many of the Loyalists as cowards, brutes, and politicians-as they undoubtedly were. He portrays some of the Fascists as men of twisted nobility-as they undoubtedly were. But he knows that the war, at its deepest level is a war between those who deny life and those who affirm it. And if it is not yet such a war, it must become so, or it will, no matter who wins, have been fought in vain. I take that to be the central feeling of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and that is why the book is more than a thrilling novel about love and death and battle and a finer work than “A Farewell to Arms.”

It is interesting to watch in this new book a certain process of etherealization. Just as the Wagnerian death fascination of “Death in the Afternoon” changes here into something purer, so the small-boy Spartanism and the parade of masculinity which weakened the earlier books are transformed into something less gross, something-Hemingway would despise the word-spiritual. And yet this is by far the most sensual of all his books, the most truly passionate. This process of purification extends even to minor matters. In the other books, for example, drinking is described as a pleasure, as a springboard for wit, as a help to love, as fun, as madness. There is much drinking in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and none of it is solemn, but it becomes at times a serious thing. Liquor, drunk by these Spanish guerrillas before a battle, is a noble and necessary pleasure. Drinking has dignity.

Dignity also is what each of the characters possesses, from Fernando, who wears it like another skin, down to Augustín, whose every third word is an obscenity. Each has his own dignity, which means worth, and that dignity is gradually lifted to the surface by the harsh touch of death, as the grain of a fine wood reveals itself with polishing. Anselmo, the Shakespearean old man who fears his own cowardice and comes through at the end to a good and sound death; Rafael, the gypsy, unreliable, gluttonous, wild; El Sordo, the deaf guerrilla leader; Andrés, the Bulldog of Villaconejos; Pablo, the sad-faced revolutionary with the spayed spirit, the treacherous heart, and the subtle, ingrown mind; Pilar, the greatest character in the book, with her ugliness, her rages, her terrible memories, her vast love for the Republic, her understanding and envy of the young Robert and Maria; Maria herself, knitting her spirit together after her rape by the Falangists, finding the purpose of her young life in the three days and nights with her American lover-each of these has a value, a personal weight that Hemingway makes us feel almost tangibly, so that their lives and deaths are not incidents in a story but matters of moment to us who are “involved in Mankinde.”

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” rises above “A Farewell to Arms” in still another way. The love story in “A Farewell to Arms” is the book. Chapters like that describing the retreat from Caporetto or that beautiful scene of the conversation with the old man at the billiard table are mere set pieces and might conceivably have been used in some other book. But the love of Robert and Maria is a structural part of “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” It is not “love interest,” nor is it the whole story, either; it is an integral portion of three days and three nights of life lived by two young people facing death. Furthermore, though this love does not rise above passion, it endows passion with an end and a meaning. In the great scene just before Robert goes out to blow up the bridge, knowing that he will almost surely die, when he makes love to Maria, describing, his heart breaking, the fine life he knows they will never lead, he arrives at an identification of which Hemingway’s other heroes were incapable: “I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the fights of all men to work and not be hungry.”

Fine as the Italians were in “A Farewell to Arms,” these Spaniards are finer. “There is no people,” thinks Robert, “like them when they are good and when they go bad there is no people that is worse.” And here they are, good and bad. They are in some ways like Russians, the pre-Soviet Russians, very philosophic and confessional and poetical. But they are not soft; indeed, the Spanish fury to kill, to kill as a pure act of faith, is one of the dominating emotions of the book. And their language is superb, translated literally out of its elegant and formal original, a trick which sounds as if it might be atrocious and turns out one hundred per cent effective. As a matter of fact, I would imagine “For Whom the Bell Tolls” to be as excellent a Spanish novel as it is an American one.

I have no idea whether this is a “great” book, for I have read it only once, and too quickly. But I know there are great things in it and that the man who wrote it is a bigger man than he was five years ago. There are some technical flaws. For example, I think the chapters describing the disorganization and political chicanery of the Loyalist command impede the story. But the faults are far outweighed by a dozen episodes that invade the memory and settle there: El Sordo’s last fight on the hilltop; any of the love scenes; the struggle at the bridge; Pilar’s dreadful story of Pablo’s killing of the Fascists; Maria’s recital of the noble death of her mother and father; Pilar’s memories of her life among the bullfighters; the astounding conversation-this is a set piece, but it’s forgivable-about “the smell of death;” and the final scene, in which Robert, his left leg smashed, alone and on the threshold of delirium, trains his machine gun on the advancing Fascists and prepares himself, knowing at last why he is doing so, to die.

So I do not much care whether or not this is a “great” book. I feel that it is what Hemingway wanted it to be: a true book. It is written with only one prejudice-a prejudice in favor of the common human being. But that is a prejudice not easy to arrive at and which only major writers can movingly express.

Robert’s mission is to blow up a bridge, and he does so. Oddly, it is by the blowing up of just such bridges that Robert Jordan and Ernest Hemingway and all of us may be able to cross over into the future.

M.Lincoln Schuster’s introductory comments and general editorial paraphernalia are, on the whole, more interesting and better written than the famous and infamous epistles he has collected in his “Treasury of the World’s Great Letters.” Without his careful notes, this would be merely a sound anthology; with it, the book becomes a sort of private letter file of the inner crises and vanities of mankind, from Alexander the Great to Thomas Mann. The book is full of odd things that less catholic letter-collectors have missed, but there are also many of the familiar classics, including the damnably dull and obviously phony Héloïse and Abélard correspondence, Sam Johnson’s immortal whiplash laid over the back of the Earl of Chesterfield, and Stevenson’s corrosive letter to the Reverend Dr. C. M. Hyde, defending Father Damien.

Conclusion :-

Most of the letters are from the pens of great men, and often the greater the man the sillier-and perhaps more revealing-the letter. The love letters of Napoleon and Beethoven, for example, are about as embarrassing in their abject immaturity as anything in literature. All of which makes Mr. Schuster’s fine collection no less interesting, and a perfect bedside book for that weekend guest.

References :-

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "For Whom the Bell Tolls". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Oct. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/topic/For-Whom-the-Bell-Tolls-novel-by-Hemingway. Accessed 25 April 2022.

FAdiman, Clifton, editor. The Transformation of For Whom the Bell Tolls , no. Books October 26,1940 issue, 26 Oct. 1940.