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Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls with Barthes, Bakhtin, and Shapiro.

Article Excerpt
Using the theoretical work of Roland Barthes, Michael Shapiro, and M.M. Bakhtin, this essay revisits For Whom the Bell Tolls as a sociopolitical text on war. The essay analyzes how Hemingway frames the imagery and narrative of war, creates layers of discourse to tell the story of war, and codes social experiences of war within the text.

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WHEN FIRST PUBLISHED, For Whom the Bell Tolls was read with regard to then-current events surrounding the Spanish Civil War as well as in terms of its artistry (see reviews in Meyers). By contrast, recent literary criticism of For Whom the Bell Tolls emphasizes Hemingway's portrayal of gender roles, the love relationship between the novel's protagonists, and extra artistic considerations such as biographical matters. (1) Using the theoretical work of Roland Barthes, Michael Shapiro, and M.M. Bakhtin, this essay will attempt instead to revisit the work as a sociopolitical text on war. I will analyze how Hemingway frames the imagery and narrative of war, creates layers of discourse to tell the story of war, and codes social experiences of war within the text.

Framing War

For Whom the Bell Tolls includes many descriptions of a remote Spanish landscape, as Hemingway sets the imagery of war against a background of forests, rivers, mountains, and skies. The landscape works in part as a frame for viewing the war, establishing distance and creating images to counter its events. Hemingway writes:

Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the clear night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream. Dew had fallen heavily since the wind had dropped, but, as he stood there, he thought there would be frost by morning. (FWTBT59)

Throughout the text, Hemingway offers views of the landscape that work to draw the reader away from war; views of nature make up the artistic backdrop against which war is contrasted. Roland Barthes discusses how realistic authors establish such views:

Every literary description is a view. It could be said that the speaker, before describing, stands at the window, not so much to see, but to establish what he sees by its very frame: the window frame creates the scene. To describe is thus to place the empty frame which the realistic author always carries with him (more than his easel) before a collection or continuum of objects which cannot be put into words without this obsessive operation ... in order to speak about it, the writer, through this initial rite, first transforms the "real" into a depicted (framed) object. (54)

By framing war with a natural aesthetic, Hemingway poses the question of neutrality. Throughout the text, he juxtaposes descriptions of the Spanish landscape with descriptions of war machines, a technique that implicitly questions the necessity of war. Contrasting natural frames allow the ideological, logistical, and mechanistic in war to be viewed clearly as such. For example:

Then the sun lessened and was gone and looking up through the trees at the brown, rounded height that it had gone behind, he saw, now, that he no longer looked into the glare, that the mountain slope was a delicate new green and that there were patches of old snow under the crest. Then he was watching the bridge again in...

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