Monthly Archives: June 2016

For Whom the Bell Tolls II

Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Time and timing are of the essence in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The mission at the heart of the book, for which the young American Robert Jordan is to sabotage a bridge in concert with a Republican offensive, is time critical: “To blow the bridge at a stated hour based on the time set for the attack is how it should be done,” he is told by the man in charge, General Golz. “You must be ready for that time” (5). But then, ultimately, when it becomes clear that they have lost the advantage of surprise and Jordan tries to have the attack called off, his messenger cannot get through in time: “C’est dommage. Oui. It’s a shame it came too late” Golz reflects (428). His divisions are already on the move, and there is no stopping them now. Still, “maybe this time [. . .] maybe we will get a break-through, maybe he will get the reserves he asked for, maybe this is it, maybe this is the time” (430).

We never know what comes of the offensive, and whether indeed “this is the time,” though we must presume it isn’t: the book was published in 1940, and so in the aftermath of the eventual failure to save Madrid, and indeed Spain as a whole, from Franco’s forces. A sense of doom hangs over the entire enterprise: “I do not say I like it very much” responds Jordan to Golz even when he receives his orders (6). And “It is starting badly enough [. . .]. I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it” he muses once he is on the scene with the bridge (16). Little by little, step by step, things go from bad to worse: the sky is full of Fascist planes; the leader of the local guerrilla gang is unpredictable and broken; unexpected snow reveals the tracks of an allied group, who are unceremoniously slaughtered; Jordan has to deal with incompetence and betrayal. By the time they finally blow the bridge they know that it is effectively a suicide mission, and what’s worse for a larger cause that is itself destined to fail. Yet still they go on with it. The book ends with Jordan, his leg broken and so unable to flee, on the verge of unconsciousness, waiting for his last fight as the enemy come up the road: “Let them come. Let them come! [. . .] I can’t wait any longer now [. . .]. If I wait any longer I’ll pass out” (470). But again, we are not told precisely what happens next. Instead, the novel’s final line (“He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest” [471]) returns us to how it all started: “He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest” (1). The entire book is a circle, refusing to look ahead as though to stave off the certain tragedy of what is to come, and refusing equally to look back, for the little we glimpse of the past is likewise marked by violence and shame.

Instead, the novel carves out an oasis of time: four days, or rather “not quite three days and three nights” (466), in which almost the entirety of the novel is set, between the moment at which Jordan meets the partisans and the point at which they have to leave him there by the bridge, with hardly the chance for goodbyes: “There is no time” (462). It is not as though this brief stretch is unaffected by what has gone before and what is to come: it is clear, for instance, that some unresolved Oedipal drama has brought Jordan here, while the other characters have traumas of their own that they are unable to escape; and however much they stoically (or heroically?) try to deny their intuition of a bitter finale, they are unable to dispel these presentiments altogether. But Hemingway’s point, I think, is that within these three or four days they are able to live an entire lifetime. There is something almost Borgesian about this, like the short story “El milagro secreto,” in which a man in front of the firing squad lives out what for him is an entire year between the order to fire and the bullets piercing his chest. Robert Jordan lives out his own “secret miracle” in the company of Maria, the ragged-haired young woman that the guerrillas had rescued from a previous operation.

On their last night together (Jordan’s last night tout court), “Robert Jordan lay with the girl and he watched time passing on his wrist.” But this steady temporal progression is, he feels, somehow under his subjective control: “as he watched the minute hand he found he could almost check its motion with his concentration” (378). A little later, “as the hand on the watch moved, unseen now”–and so perhaps unchecked, but also unminded–comes an extraordinary passage in which Hemingway (or Jordan) tries to delimit something like a pure present of absolute intensity:

They knew [. . .] that this was all and always; this was what had been and now and whatever was to come. This, that they were not to have, they were having. They were having now and before and always and now and now and now. Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Come now, now, for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only now, not anything else only this now. (379)

Of course, the watch hand cannot be detained indefinitely: its motion can at best be “almost check[ed].” And language–or writing–inevitably unfolds linearly. The sentence, the paragraph, the book must all grind inexorably to their ends. But in the meantime, perhaps, this is the time; this is their time, our time. Hemingway’s wager, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is to rescue and resuscitate a moment of exceptional intensity and vivacity, even within the earshot and in full knowledge of the bells that toll relentlessly for a death that (as in the epigraph taken from John Donne) diminishes us all.

See also: For Whom the Bell Tolls I; Spanish Civil War novels.

Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls

In Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, we acquaint ourselves with the protagonist Robert Jordan, an expert dynamiter from the US who has given up his life at home to participate in the Spanish Civil War. By orders of a General Golz, he is to strategically blow up a bridge at the precise time of a Republican offensive in order to hinder the mobilization of Fascist reinforcements. In order to do this, he enlists the help of mountain guerillas of the area; he is led to guerillas’ hideout by his guide, the elderly Anselmo.

What is notable about this book specifically is its strange diction in which it goes about telling the story. Indeed it really incorporates an almost Spanish type of grammar, yet it is largely executed in English, with light Spanish punctuations here and there. The sentences are not incorrect, but they feel like direct translations of sentences first written in Spanish. This is particularly true for inter-character dialogue, but less so for the narration.

What I particularly enjoyed about this book is that it portrays very real experiences, human experiences, and with that, clear and substantial emotions. Hemingway deliberately takes the more palpable parts of the war and the human condition to his audiences, depicting the more basic, primordial side of people: hunger, lust, killing, and death. There is much that goes on behind the lines and in between battles; people get hungry, and food must be prepared (as in the first chapter). As well, Robert Jordan and Maria make love in the woods. There is constant talk of killing and death among the guerillas of the camp, and later in the book, the actual killing commences. As discussed in class, there is indeed a certain universality to this book and its characters, where such experiences could have been lived by anyone and at any time; war, killing, and love are forever.

Hemingway moves on to create more complex emotions as well, putting the reader in difficult situations just as the characters face. As an example, there is a very real uneasiness as the people of the cave plot to kill Pablo, and we later find out from Pilar that almost certainly has Pablo overheard the conversation.

In the same vein, he neglects to substantially explain the political motivations and underpinnings of the war. Perhaps Hemingway did not want to bog down his book with overly complicated and hardly relatable struggles of ideal (and the inevitable battle of acronyms) that plagued the earlier books we have read. We learn very little about the situation in Spain of that epoch, and as a novel of historical fiction, it serves more as fiction than historical.

Nonetheless, I enjoy its simple prose and I look forward to reading the rest of this book.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

I’ve brought up the idea in class before that there comes a time when a cause is no longer worth fighting for. I mean this in the practical, life saving sense if not the idealistic sense. I believe there exists such a time in every conflict, and it is not only not cowardly but it is the right thing to do to stop fighting at such a time.

In the beginning of  this novel, I believe Pablo has at least answered this question for himself. Whether or not we have reached this point where there is no point in keeping fighting is obviously a matter of perspective and opinion, but no other character shows signs of even having this question in mind, and Pablo is labeled a coward for having posed this question to himself.

I contend Pablo is the sanest of all the characters for having done this (though ironically the answer to this question is probably what led to his alcoholism), though I can see why idealists might disagree with me. Pablo was clearly brave, patriotic and committed to the conflict based on the information we’re given about how many people he killed when the conflict started. We’re further told of how disorganized and outgunned this group was when the conflict started so we can, I believe, safely assume that Pablo hasn’t stopped fighting now because they don’t have a logical superiority or lack of conviction.

Ergo, the only explanation that I can see that remains for Pablo’s behavior is that he’s done the math and realized that not only is this war unwinnable, and he’s doing his fellow countrymen a disservice if he keeps fighting by inflicting more death and destruction for no actual strategic gain. War, in particular its brutality, is often justified as the ends justifying the means; but here it has become clear to Pablo at least that the end is unreachable and hence there is no way to justify the means.

All other characters appear to be rationalizing keeping the fight up. In particular, I believe they’ve set up a kind of straw man for themselves with this bridge. They’ve deluded themselves into believing that if this bridge can be blown up, then the whole war can be won, whereas in reality it is a tiny and insignificant part of the larger conflict that can easily be rebuilt given Franco’s resources. We furthermore see their inability to recognize the true extent of how unmatched they are and facing reality by how they just assume planes passing by are their own, when most likely that was not the case or they just couldn’t face it not being the case.

For Whom the Bell Tolls I

Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Halfway through Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the protagonist Robert Jordan is thinking both forwards and back to Madrid. Forwards because, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, stuck in a cave behind Fascist lines waiting to begin a tremendously risky and seemingly ill-fated operation to blow up a bridge, he distracts himself by imagining what he will do if and when his mission is successfully concluded. “Three days in Madrid,” he thinks. The capital is under siege, of course, but even so it would offer creature comforts unimaginable on the front lines: a “hot bath [. . .] a couple of drinks.” There would be music and movies: he’d take his peasant lover Maria to see “The Marx Brothers at the Opera” (231). He’d have dinner at Gaylord’s, a hotel that “the Russians had taken over” where “the food was too good for a besieged city” (228).

But all this also leads him to think back (unusually, for a man not given to reminiscence) to other experiences he has had at Gaylord’s, a place of intrigue thick with rumor and “talk too cynical for a war.” It was here that he’d met the shadowy Russian Karkov–introduced by the last dynamiter to work in the zone and described as “the most intelligent man he had ever met” (231). And it was largely Karkov who’d made “Gaylord’s [. . .] the place you needed to complete your education. It was there you learned how it was all really done instead of how it was supposed to be done” (230). For in Jordan’s (and Hemingway’s) jaded eyes, the Republican cause may be right, but it is far from pure. Behind “all the nonsense” (230) is a murky world of machination and deception that only fully comes into focus at the Russian-held hotel. This is the epicenter of disillusion and corruption, but it is also the only place to “find out what was going on in the war” (228).

The hidden reality of the war is not pretty, but in some ways (Jordan reflects) it is “much better than the lies and the legends. Well, some day they would tell the truth to everyone and meanwhile he was glad there was a Gaylord’s for his own learning of it” (230). And Jordan and Karkov talk about when and how this truth will emerge: “out of this will come a book,” Karkov says, “which is very necessary; which will explain many things which it is necessary to know” (244). Jordan himself, a Spanish instructor at a US university, has already written a book–about “what he had discovered about Spain in ten years of travelling in it”–but it “had not been a success.” Some day soon it would be time to try again:

He would write a book when he got through with this. But only about the things he knew, truly and about what he knew. But I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle them, he thought. The things he had come to know in this war were not so simple. (248)

Now, Jordan is not Hemingway–and Hemingway is not Jordan, though the author has surely invested plenty in his character, a man of few words who prides himself on his powers of observation and his knowledge of the human psyche. But is this novel the book that Jordan would have wanted to have written? The work of a “much better writer” that is to explain the truth of a complex war whose surface veneer is attractive but whose grim interior is more fascinating still. Perhaps.

But For Whom the Bell Tolls is not really about the war’s covert machination. Indeed, what’s interesting about the novel is that Hemingway refuses to accede completely to Jordan’s notion that the “truth” of the conflict is to be found amid the cynicism and corruption that his protagonist tells us “turned out to be much too true” (228). Or rather, Jordan himself is shown as struggling to determine where the reality of the situation lies. Up in the hills, he knows that the situation is bad, not least when he sees the “mechanized doom” (87) of the Fascist planes that roar overhead and announce, as clearly as anything, that the enemy knows of the forthcoming Republican offensive. But he can’t quite admit this: asked whether he has faith in the Republic he replies “’Yes,’ [. . .] hoping it was true” (91). To admit to the precariousness of their fate, the difficulty of their mission, would be to fall into the trap that has ensnared Pablo, the local guerrilla leader who has let fear (and alcohol) overwhelm him, because he knows that their cause is long lost: he toasts “all the illusioned ones” (214) and explains himself by saying that “an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools” (215).

Ultimately, Jordan–and Hemingway–know that Pablo is right. But that cynical truth has to be both acknowledged and at the same time staved off, postponed, in the name of another truth that resides within the illusion itself, the legends and lies. So what we get is an ebb and flow, a tense and agonizing interchange between these two truths, between an apparent simplicity and purity (incarnated above all perhaps in the figure of Jordan’s lover Maria–who can never be taken to Gaylord’s–but equally in Hemingway’s characteristically terse and understated style) and a darker, more cynical complexity that can neither be denied nor allowed to dominate. So the paradoxical result is that simplicity ends up being far more complex than the web of machinations that it endlessly has to deny, precisely because in fending them off it recognizes and so includes them, while the cynic can only destroy all that is pure. It preserves, in other words, the infrapolitical paradox: that what is necessary for politics is never inherent in it, but vanishes with scarce a trace.

Crossposted to Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective.

See also: For Whom the Bell Tolls II; Spanish Civil War novels.

For Whom the Bell Tolls I

Crossposted to Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective.

Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Halfway through Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the protagonist Robert Jordan is thinking both forwards and back to Madrid. Forwards because, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, stuck in a cave behind Fascist lines waiting to begin a tremendously risky and seemingly ill-fated operation to blow up a bridge, he distracts himself by imagining what he will do if and when his mission is successfully concluded. “Three days in Madrid,” he thinks. The capital is under siege, of course, but even so it would offer creature comforts unimaginable on the front lines: a “hot bath [. . .] a couple of drinks.” There would be music and movies: he’d take his peasant lover Maria to see “The Marx Brothers at the Opera” (231). He’d have dinner at Gaylord’s, a hotel that “the Russians had taken over” where “the food was too good for a besieged city” (228).

But all this also leads him to think back (unusually, for a man not given to reminiscence) to other experiences he has had at Gaylord’s, a place of intrigue thick with rumor and “talk too cynical for a war.” It was here that he’d met the shadowy Russian Karkov–introduced by the last dynamiter to work in the zone and described as “the most intelligent man he had ever met” (231). And it was largely Karkov who’d made “Gaylord’s [. . .] the place you needed to complete your education. It was there you learned how it was all really done instead of how it was supposed to be done” (230). For in Jordan’s (and Hemingway’s) jaded eyes, the Republican cause may be right, but it is far from pure. Behind “all the nonsense” (230) is a murky world of machination and deception that only fully comes into focus at the Russian-held hotel. This is the epicenter of disillusion and corruption, but it is also the only place to “find out what was going on in the war” (228).

The hidden reality of the war is not pretty, but in some ways (Jordan reflects) it is “much better than the lies and the legends. Well, some day they would tell the truth to everyone and meanwhile he was glad there was a Gaylord’s for his own learning of it” (230). And Jordan and Karkov talk about when and how this truth will emerge: “out of this will come a book,” Karkov says, “which is very necessary; which will explain many things which it is necessary to know” (244). Jordan himself, a Spanish instructor at a US university, has already written a book–about “what he had discovered about Spain in ten years of travelling in it”–but it “had not been a success.” Some day soon it would be time to try again:

He would write a book when he got through with this. But only about the things he knew, truly and about what he knew. But I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle them, he thought. The things he had come to know in this war were not so simple. (248)

Now, Jordan is not Hemingway–and Hemingway is not Jordan, though the author has surely invested plenty in his character, a man of few words who prides himself on his powers of observation and his knowledge of the human psyche. But is this novel the book that Jordan would have wanted to have written? The work of a “much better writer” that is to explain the truth of a complex war whose surface veneer is attractive but whose grim interior is more fascinating still. Perhaps.

But For Whom the Bell Tolls is not really about the war’s covert machination. Indeed, what’s interesting about the novel is that Hemingway refuses to accede completely to Jordan’s notion that the “truth” of the conflict is to be found amid the cynicism and corruption that his protagonist tells us “turned out to be much too true” (228). Or rather, Jordan himself is shown as struggling to determine where the reality of the situation lies. Up in the hills, he knows that the situation is bad, not least when he sees the “mechanized doom” (87) of the Fascist planes that roar overhead and announce, as clearly as anything, that the enemy knows of the forthcoming Republican offensive. But he can’t quite admit this: asked whether he has faith in the Republic he replies “’Yes,’ [. . .] hoping it was true” (91). To admit to the precariousness of their fate, the difficulty of their mission, would be to fall into the trap that has ensnared Pablo, the local guerrilla leader who has let fear (and alcohol) overwhelm him, because he knows that their cause is long lost: he toasts “all the illusioned ones” (214) and explains himself by saying that “an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools” (215).

Ultimately, Jordan–and Hemingway–know that Pablo is right. But that cynical truth has to be both acknowledged and at the same time staved off, postponed, in the name of another truth that resides within the illusion itself, the legends and lies. So what we get is an ebb and flow, a tense and agonizing interchange between these two truths, between an apparent simplicity and purity (incarnated above all perhaps in the figure of Jordan’s lover Maria–who can never be taken to Gaylord’s–but equally in Hemingway’s characteristically terse and understated style) and a darker, more cynical complexity that can neither be denied nor allowed to dominate. So the paradoxical result is that simplicity ends up being far more complex than the web of machinations that it endlessly has to deny, precisely because in fending them off it recognizes and so includes them, while the cynic can only destroy all that is pure. It preserves, in other words, the infrapolitical paradox: that what is necessary for politics is never inherent in it, but vanishes with scarce a trace.


Class Discussion Reflection – Homage to Catalonia

Sebastian Lee and Annie Lu

Annie and I both thought that the class discussion went well. We initially created a surplus of slides on our PowerPoint presentation, with various questions that we had about the book and the war, as well as passages and quotes we found interesting. In particular, we had many questions centered on the politics of the civil war.

Ultimately, the slides were sufficient in provoking discussion for most of the class period, and there were very interesting points brought up by our classmates throughout.

Topics that frequently came up in discussion included Orwell’s motivations for writing the book (as a form of “propaganda”), Anarchist, Communist and Socialist policies, and what made foreigners want to participate in the war.

I felt that we presented some decent ideas, but to improve for next time, we could phrase the questions differently in order to make it easier for our classmates to respond. For a book discussion, I would make the questions more answerable by (and more specific to) the contents of the book itself, rather than more general questions about the civil war.

Also, the digressions from the planned topics of interest were quite entertaining and informative (e.g. the Cricket test matches), but as regulators we could keep the discussions a little more focused.

Overall, we felt that we asked significant questions, questions that went deeper than the superficial layers, and that the class generated good dialogue about the book.

Class Plan: Homage to Catalonia

 

Sebastian Lee and Annie Lu

 

We created a PowerPoint presentation with our personal questions regarding Homage to Catalonia to facilitate the class discussion.

We divided the questions/quotes into general categories, sharing and discussing the topics with the class in approximately the following order:

-The purpose, style and tone of the book (How was the book written? Why so?)

Point Of View

What was Orwell trying to achieve?

 

-The setting of the book (What kind of atmosphere did it create?)

Also: “Spanish” qualities, and their take on the war (“Mañana”)

 

-Politics

Subtopics:

War vs Revolution (What’s the difference?) – simplifying to “Fascism vs Democracy”

Motivations of the War (foreign interests, interparty skirmishes etc…)

The USSR’s effect on Spain

Anarchist and Egalitarian societies: how would they work?

Motivations of international fighters in Spain (e.g. Bob Smillie)

Skirmish of the Telephone Exchange: could it have been avoided?

The POUM microcosm: why was the class system unable to be abolished?

What happened to Georges Kopp?

 

–Miscellaneous: events of the book (Orwell getting shot in the neck, Rats, rats, rats! Weapons distribution to the public…)

-Religion: changing roles of the church

The Spanish Civil War, 80 Years On: Canadian Connections

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Serge Alternês sends us details of the following event…

Monday, July 18, 2016, 7:30pm
People’s Co­op Bookstore, 1391 Commercial Drive, Vancouver BC

July 18, 1936: Fascist generals attempt a coup against the elected Popular Front government of Spain, plunging the country into three years of bloody war that captured the attention of the world, and became a microcosm of the international political and
social conflict leading to World War II.

July 18, 2016: Marking the 80th anniversary, three B.C. writers explore the significant Canadian participation in, and connections to, the Spanish struggle against fascism.

civil-war-event_poster

civil-war-event_info

Homage to Catalonia

443px-Placa_George_Orwell_1.jpg

Fundada con motivo del sesenta aniversario de la Guerra Civil en 1996, la Plaça George Orwell, ubicada en el corazón del Barrio Gótico del centro de Barcelona, fue la primera plaza catalana en disponer de cámaras de videovigilancia desde el año 2001, (un homenaje un tanto irónico al creador del «Gran Hermano»).

Debo confesar que Homage to Catalonia rompió con varias de mis expectativas. En primer lugar, porque Orwell fue el primer escritor que empecé a leer en inglés cuando tenía quince años y yo sentía, por eso, que lo conocía bien. En este sentido, mi horizonte de expectativas estaba muy condicionado por dos recuerdos: mi lectura adolescente de Animal Farm y 1984 (que juzgué entonces como novelas profundamente políticas, o debería más bien decir ideologizadas) y la insistente recomendación de parte de varios amigos y profesores catalanes, para quien Orwell es prácticamente un prócer nacional.

Mi lectura postergada de este libro chocó de frente con estos recuerdos al leer una de las frases que inaugura el extenso capítulo V: «At the beginning I had ignored the political side of the war». ¿Cómo? ¿Orwell, el gran novelista y periodista comprometido de la primera mitad del siglo XX, se había ido hasta España para poner su vida en riesgo sin tener la menor idea de qué estaba pasando a nivel político? ¿Entonces resulta que hay otro lado de la guerra que no es político?

Desde la semana pasada cuando leímos L’Espoir, me quedé pensando mucho en la noción de afecto que Jon mencionó como explicación posible a por qué los milicianos extranjeros registrados por Malraux en su novela exponían sus cuerpos para ir a pelear a una guerra que a simple vista parecía serles ajena. Me quedé cuestionando mi previsible interpretación de que esa decisión sistemática de miles de personas se debía exclusivamente a ideales, a principios ideológicos. Creo que todo el capítulo V de Homage to Catalonia (hablo de aquel que comentábamos que algunos editores decidieron publicarlo en forma de apéndice por su notorio cambio de registro) puede leerse a partir de este concepto filosófico y me quedé con la impresión de que me gustaría ampliar esta lectura tal vez para el trabajo final.

Otro de los elementos que me llamaron la atención del libro fue la combinación de géneros que mencionamos a principios de la última clase. Me pareció interesante sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que Orwell presenta también una multitud de personajes pero a diferencia de Cela o de Malraux lo hace desde una voz narrativa más dominante, que no abunda tanto en cambios de voz abruptos ni en diálogos introducidos por un narrador que parece mantenerse al margen. La polifonía en Homage to Catalonia, entonces, estaría no sólo en los personajes sino en las múltiples elecciones formales: una suerte de mezcla entre proto-Non-Fiction Novel y periodismo gonzo (unas décadas antes de que ambos géneros se institucionalizaran, por cierto) yuxtapuesta con la crónica literaria y la novela histórica. Esta multiplicidad de géneros, para mí, no hace otra cosa que evidenciar las grandísimas dificultades que implica abordar desde la literatura un evento histórico sin la ventaja que ostenta el discurso historiográfico: narrar la Historia cuando ya se ha escrito sobre ella.

Homage to Catalonia

While reading Homage to Catalonia, I thought about the hypotheses that Jon mentioned in class at the beginning of the course, particularly the hypothesis that the Spanish Civil War was not really civil, nor was it a war. In the previous novels, we have seen that the war tends to be portrayed as a revolution, which is maintained here. Orwell talks often about the revolutionary spirit of the war that was intentionally sabotaged by the Communist Party.

However, it seemed to me that a secondary characterization was also present: rather than a war, especially in the earlier chapters, the conflict is depicted as a sort of camp-out or survival exercise. This can be seen in the many descriptions of looking for firewood, having to make due with little water and food, and having to put up with the discomforts caused by the weather. Indeed, the most important military objective is firewood, and the men even risk their lives going under fire to collect this valuable resource. For Orwell, this becomes a way of coming in contact with and learning about the plants around the posting:

“We classified according to their burning qualities every plant that grew on the mountain-side; the various heaths and grasses that were good to start a fire with but burnt out in a few minutes, the wild rosemary and the tiny whin bushes that would burn when the fire was well alight, the stunted oak tree, smaller than a gooseberry bush, that was practically unburnable” (30).

It seems like he is getting to know intimitely the land and its plants, and this is probably true, but he is motivated, mostly at least, by a desire to simply exploit it (by taking away the firewood). 

The war is portrayed as if it were almost an annoying afterthought. The real enemies were the lice that infested their clothing or the weather conditions; he notes at one point that “two Englishmen were laid low by sunstroke” (105 in my version). This trend comes full circle near the end of the book when human violence is likened to phenomena from the natural world. For Orwell, “a sudden clash of rifle-fire” is “like a June cloud-burst” (142) and, as in Cela, the violence is presented as “some kind of natural calamity, like a hurricane or an earthquake” (142). The idea seems is that this war is somehow uncontrollable, but in other ways ‘natural’. I wonder how widespread this use of ‘natural’ metaphors is in other war novels of this period, especially about the first and second world wars.

On the other hand, there are many passages that talk about the beauty of the landscape surrounding the battlefields, despite the poor conditions and the suffering that they bring him. At one point, he mentions both sides of the coin (i.e. the suffering and the beauty) in the same breath:

“seas of carmine cloud stretching away into inconceivable distances, were worth watching even when you had been up all night, when your legs were numb from the knees down, and you were sullenly reflecting that there was no hope of food for another three hours” (40).

Even though he ends the sentence with a complaint about the cold, still he says that it was “worth watching”. In some passages, it seems that the landscape —and the reproductive, cyclical aspect of the natural world— is evoked to contrast with the death and destruction of the conflict. Life will go on, despite the war.

Later, this contemplation of the landscape turns into a contemplation of the ‘human’ or ‘cultural’ landscape of the place, with accounts of the different customs of the Spaniards near the front, their dwellings, and their ways of making a living. These passages are particularly interesting given the end of the book that portrays the cultural and natural landscape of southern England. There seems to be a connection between ‘Englishness’ or ‘Spanishness’ and these landscapes that are presented in both cultural and ‘natural’ terms. This last passage is very interesting to me, especially because of the opposition that Orwell establishes between the “industrial towns” and “the England I had known in my childhood” (237). There is a desire to somehow preserve this landscape, both from war and  (as we are led to believe from the opposition industry-old England) from industrial development. 

This is a very rich book and I am excited for our discussion tomorrow evening.