Philippine E-Journals

For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Ideology of Form

E. San Juan Jr.

Discipline: Cultural Studies

 

Abstract:

Praised by Dorothy Parker, Howard Mumford Jones, Robert Sherwood, Edmund Wilson, Carlos Baker and other scholars, and condemned by Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Trilling, Maxwell Geismar, Alfred Kazin and other critics whose modalities of discrimination serve as inverted mirror-images of Alvah Bessie's trenchant denunciation of Hemingway's novel in his 1940 review, FWBT may have confirmed the opposite of its homiletic message: diverse islands of taste and opinion will never find themselves merging into a continent. For whom indeed is the bell tolling? In their wake, the body of criticism on this novel replicates the original partisan scruples and divisions. It is easy to dismiss MacDonald (Meyers: 326-31) and Bessie's charges of falsification (Baker: 90-94) as belonging to the species of normative criticism that seeks to impose what is construed as an extra-aesthetic model or standard of propriety based on a more accurate reproduction of the reality the artwork is claiming to grasp. This type of criticism is empiricist in claiming that its access to an empirical "real" or referent can judge whether the work is adequate to what it reflects. Meanwhile, critics who conceive of the work as a reservoir of unlimited meanings and whose task is to repeat these" essences" in various interpretations (found in most anthologies of Hemingway criticism) practice what since the hegemonic triumph of the New Criticism has become the dominant genre of hermeneutic or interpretive criticism. Like the normative type, hermeneutic criticism operates within an empiricist assumption that the intrinsic formal (linguistic, rhetorical) qualities of the text can serve as a guarantee of its ultimate, quintessential meaning.