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Article Excerpt
In For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Ernest Hemingway caricatures both Rafael and Pilaf as "gypsies" in order to "assimilate" the experience of living in Spain for the American character Robert Jordan and for a Western, non-Romani readership. While this assimilated Spanish experience does not genuinely represent Romani culture or people, it does exemplify very real misconceptions and misappropriations between Romani and non-Romani. Such misconceptions are often espoused and carried through a non-Romani historical and literary tradition, which provides Hemingway with an imaginative blueprint for challenging both Robert Jordan and the novel's audience with what it means to "be gypsy."
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IN DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (1932), a nonfiction account of bullfighting in Spain, Ernest Hemingway pauses to offer a little advice on writing: "When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.... People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer's assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him" (191, Hemingway's emphases). Yet less than a decade later, after returning to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Hemingway was writing a novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), that incorporated what was arguably his greatest "caricature" to date, a stereotypical "gypsy" character named Rafael. As a "gypsy," a caricature of a person of Romani descent, Rafael is carefree, easygoing, and even clown-like, as well as lazy, unreliable, and lacking seriousness. He whittles fox traps and chases rabbits when he should be guarding his post and makes jokes despite the seriousness of the war. Pilar, tom becomes "gypsy" when she reads palms, senses the earth move, and smells approaching death--skills which make her mysterious and even discreditable.
Rafael and Pilar are not "people" but skillfully constructed "gypsy" caricatures drawn from a mainly Western, non-Romani historical and literary tradition. This tradition associates gypsyness with mysticism, exotic dancing, and pastoral music, with a romantic and libertine disposition in relation to society and the law, and with a host of other colorful and less charming attributes like thievery, lying, and laziness. But For Whom the Bell Tolls also complicates and examines these traditions and associations. Through a conscious attempt to make Rafael and Pilar "be gypsy," Hemingway can better project "the writer's assimilated experience" of living in Spain both for his American protagonist Robert Jordan and his Western, non-Romani readership. ,While this "assimilated experience" does not accurately represent Romani culture or people, it does exemplify very real misconceptions and misappropriations between Romani and non-Romani in Spain. What often frustrates or challenges Robert Jordan about Rafael and Pilar is not who they are as people but what they are as gypsies. And yet, although critics have written a great deal about Pilar, there is very little consideration of Rafael or of "gypsyness" in the novel, or about what this concept may mean to readers.
Years of fanciful stories, media blurbs, and hearsay have created the concept of "gypsyness" embedded in popular culture. As Romani scholar Ian Hancock writes, "Although we Romanies have lived in Europe for hundreds of years, almost all popular knowledge about us comes not from socializing with our people at first hand, for we generally live apart from the rest of the population, but from the way we are depicted in stories and songs and in the media" (We Are xvii). This "popular knowledge" ignores a vital cultural history. Since migrating out of India in the 11th century, Romanies have interacted and melded culturally and socially with Middle Eastern, European, and other world cultures, and thus have affected and shaped them. Sadly, though, Romanies have also been banished, persecuted, and enslaved by these same societies. In Spain, where Romani migration occurred in the 15th century, Henry Kamen writes that "the first recorded law against them was in 1499. In 1525 the Cortes of Toledo petitioned that 'the Egyptians [the term "gypsy" derives from this common misconception of Romani origin] not wander through the realm, since they steal from the fields and destroy orchards and deceive people'" (109). "Gypsy" became synonymous with "liar" "beggar" "thief," and "criminal," and the distinction brought about two and a half centuries of persecution. Then, in 1783, with the hopeful intention of ending racial discrimination, Carlos III decreed that "Gitano" (the Spanish equivalent of "Gypsy") did not exist, being "merely a derogatory name given to or assumed by bands of thieves" (qtd. in Charnon-Deutsch 21), and that "by the same token any manifestation of distinctiveness, be it language, costume or lifestyle, was to be severely penalized" (Leblon 31). Ironically, Carlos III's decree was correct--the term "Gypsy" does not appropriately refer to any ethnic community, and many contemporary Romani scholars begin their publications pointing out that "gypsy" is a prescribed word invented by non-Romanies. (1) But the decree's insistence on assimilating Romanies into Spanish culture only further ostracized the Romani community, making "Gypsyness" more obvious than ever. It was not that the term "Gitano" or "Gypsy" did not exist (for it did when describing bands of thieves); rather the decree sought to erase the ethnicity represented by the word. Thus, the symbolic term "gypsy" remained alive while the Romani people and culture were driven into obscurity or worse. (2)
Whether Hemingway was fully cognizant of Romani history or culture when writing For Whom the Bell Tolls is not the focus of this essay. Certainly, though, he was aware of the symbolic value carried by the word "gypsy" At the end of Chapter Eighteen, we learn that in the "only book [Jordan] had published ... [h]e had put in it what he had discovered about Spain in ten years of travelling in it.... There had been such good books written by Borrow and Ford and the rest that he had been able to add very little" (248). The "good books" by George Borrow and Richard Ford could be any of several sizeable narratives about Spain written in the mid-1800s, but all were travelogues borne out of a curiosity about and fascination with the land and people. (3)
For Ford, Spain was a "singular country" that hovered "between Europe and Africa ... civilization and barbarism" (100), a place where "Nature reigns" (255) and her people were always "like Orientals," primarily because they were "descendents of the Arab" (100) but perhaps also because the Spaniard was the "raw man material made by nature, and treats himself as "he does the raw products of his soil, by leaving art and final development to the foreigner" (318). Although Ford professedly aimed for a more accurate...
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