“You have to know them in order not to be a
sucker.”
First published on January 9, 1776, Thomas Paine’s incendiary
pamphlet Common Sense helped define the rhetoric that would
shape the American Revolution in public thought: “The cause of
America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances
have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through
which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected. . . . The
laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against
the natural rights of all mankind . . . is the concern of every man
to whom nature hath given the power of feeling” (Paine 402). Paine’s
tract establishes an opposition, based upon “natural” rights
and the defense of mankind’s intended state that equates America’s
revolutionaries with defenders of nature against unnatural invaders.
Casting these insurgents as protectors of the “natural”
against the encroachment of Britain’s aberrant rule, Paine taps
into the ancient tropes of the pastoral genre. The new country is depicted
as a space in which the “principles of all lovers of mankind”
and other such concepts of natural purity still exist (Paine 402). Little
did Paine know at the time, but the pastoral ideals he invoked would
have far-reaching implications for American policy, and not necessarily
in the ways he intended. Through the thoughts of Leo Marx on the meaningless
value system of the pastoral ideal, combined with Michael Hunt’s
arguments for the prevalence of a revolutionary ideology based upon
popular conceptions of the American Revolution, I intend to illustrate
that the pastoral impulses inherent in the visions of the American Revolution’s
leaders created a means of control for the American political elite.
Utilizing the narratives of several modernist novels, I will conduct
an analysis of the reactions, in terms of their interactions with pastoral
ideology, of quintessentially American protagonists faced with societal
stratification and class-based conflict. In light of the pastoral theories
of Marx and Hunt, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House
and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and
For Whom the Bell Tolls demonstrate how an overarching ideology
pervaded American thought and checked the advance of revolutionary
tendencies in America’s social spheres.
As Leo Marx has notably argued, Paine’s conception of America’s
mission was not unique. An America of the “natural” manifests
itself throughout tracts of the revolution, the most obvious being the
Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase
concerning the unalienable rights of humanity, “life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness,” resonates with the pastoral tradition
(Jefferson et al 157). With these lines, in the defining document of
the American experiment, Jefferson argued that America would be dedicated
to providing its citizens the freedom to pursue individual pleasures—a
project that informs much of the pastoral ideal’s landscape. Furthermore,
Jefferson conceived this freedom as a natural right of mankind. Defining
America as the bastion of such rights helped guide the direction of
subsequent American revolutionary endeavors. As Marx indicates, even
before the revolution was over, Jefferson had an idea of the form the
new American economy should take (“Pastoralism” 50). In
Query XIX of Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia,” Jefferson
delivers a scathing indictment of Europe’s fledgling industrial
system, arguing that America should remain an agricultural society not
for the superiority of agrarian economy, but because “the loss
by the transportation of commodities across the Atlantic will be made
up in happiness and permanence of government” (269, also qtd.
in Marx, “Pastoralism” 50). Basing the future of a country
on such seemingly moral (as opposed to practical) grounds reveals a
strong belief in the advantages of a pastoral state over one mired in
industry.
Jefferson’s definition of America as the new hope for a harmonious
pastoral paradise had long been part of European dreams for the New
World. In his essay “Pastoralism in America,” Leo Marx notes
that the European perception of America was that of an unsullied land
in which existed “a via media between decadence and wildness,
too much and too little civilization.” Marx contends that many
revolutionaries believed the “new nation” could be established
“as an ideal society . . . midway between l’ancien régime
and the wild frontier” (38). In a similar argument concerning
popular perception, James Machor maintains that “at the close
of the War of Independence, there came into vogue the myth that the
war was conducted primarily, if not exclusively, by farmers . . . [the
farmer] was enshrined as the essence of the political system for which
the Revolution was fought” (83). In both of these accounts, the
conception of a latent Edenic America thoroughly permeated pre- and
post-revolutionary consciousness. This conception delineated America
as both a geographical space (between decadent urbanity and feral wilderness)
and an ideological construct (a state built around the perceived purity
of principles based more on nature than on societal creations). Both
Marx and Machor define the American Revolution as one in which the participants
characterized themselves to be thoroughly in touch with pastoral idealism
during their national project.
In pointing out the pastoral content of the revolution, Marx inaugurated
a long-standing critique of American politics that placed the issue
of pastoralism at the fore. According to Marx, the pastoral as a mode
has been transformed from a basis for revolt to a monolithic means of
control: “our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been
divested of meaning . . . [we must] recognize that the aspirations once
represented by the symbol of an ideal landscape have not, and probably
cannot, be embodied in our traditional institutions” (364). For
Marx, the pastoral dream of revolutionary America is no longer useful
to those who would effect change within America’s contemporary
social spheres. Timothy Sweet makes the case that pastoralism was never
useful to a dissatisfied underclass; rather, it was a means of control
for the elite from its origins. According to Sweet, the sedentary farming
required for Jefferson’s agrarian economy furthered an underclass
of tenants, landless laborers, and slaves: “Jefferson takes this
class structure for granted . . . assuming political leadership on the
part of the large landowner, political quietism on the part of the small
landowner, and powerlessness on the part of the landless” (102).
While Jefferson and the revolutionary elite overthrew what they perceived
as an unnatural threat, their highly-touted pastoral ideals quickly
evolved into an alternate means of effecting societal stratification
and gaining political control.
For those without power, the idea of a pastoral America holds no solutions
to immediate problems and constrains the would-be revolutionary attempting
to dent a monolithic American consciousness. Quoting Raymond Williams’
differentiation between emergent and residual values, Leo Marx further
explains the uselessness of a pastoral ideology to social revolutionaries:
“The appeal of pastoralism may be too exclusively confined to
the relatively privileged groups that would defend (or regain) residual
values. To provide the basis for an effective ideology, in other words,
adherents of pastoralism would have to form alliances with the hitherto
as advantaged carriers of emergent values—those for whom ‘the
recovery of the natural’ as yet has, in itself, little or no appeal”
(“Pastoralism” 66). Here, using the pastoral ideal as a
political ideology is not feasible, as only those who benefit from an
overly materialistic culture have and are dissatisfied with the material
(the residual values of which Marx writes). The disadvantaged urban
masses feel the more pressing needs of daily life and require the material
in order to survive before they can turn to any ideal. Therefore, a
revolution based around pastoral idealism holds no attraction for those
not in power—in other words, those looking to revolt.
While Marx considers the pastoral ideal’s irrelevance to a majority
of America’s population an impediment to social change, a group
of critics has recently emerged to counter this argument. James Machor
promotes the positive aspects of the pastoral in his case for the reform
of urban life. Machor argues that, while “territorial divisiveness”
and the “compromised urban pastoralism” of the suburb were
created by the myth of the pastoral escape from corrupted societies,
the contemporary social situation can be revised to include the best
of both the material and natural worlds (212). Nonetheless, Machor fails
to offer any specific solutions. Lawrence Buell admits the existence
of what he calls “the ‘imperial’ cast of American
pastoral ideology” but also observes redeeming aspects in pastoral
concepts (36). Buell lists several authors (Richard Wright, Mary Austin,
and, to some extent, Thoreau) who have used the pastoral mode to advocate
more than simple retreat from society. While the radical pastoral text
can comment (and hopefully effect change) upon society, Buell warns
the text must avoid the stereotypical traps of the consensualism it
is attempting to change, as well as categorical opposition to equally
inflexible institutions (50–2). Regardless, Buell concludes that
the utilization of pastoral ideas as a means of revolutionary organization
is still possible. Don Scheese agrees with Marx that many pastoral writers
use the pastoral retreat simply as a means of escape and avoidance (6).
However, Scheese also feels the pastoral may have something more to
offer those seeking change. For Scheese, “combining the place-consciousness
of pastoralism . . . [and] the polemical tone of cultural criticism,
nature writing as a cultural activity is more vital than ever as we
enter the 21st century” (38). Bringing the concept of ecocriticism
to bear upon pastoral works and ideas, Scheese sees a combination of
the “ecocentric” and “anthropocentric” worlds
as essential to finishing the project purportedly begun by the American
Revolution.
While these literary critics provide valuable thoughts on the sustainability
of the American pastoral project, scholarship outside the field inflects
Marx’s ideas in a new direction. Michael Hunt’s Ideology
and U.S. Foreign Policy traces ideological trends from their creation
in the formative years of the country to their resonance in current
American discourse. For Hunt, the main ideologies of American political
thought concern racial equality, the pursuit of “national greatness,”
and the means and content of revolutions. While racial ideologies run
rampant through the subjects of Hunt’s analysis, the ideologies
of national greatness and revolution provide the most cogent ideas relative
to Marx. Marx speaks of the implausibility of the pastoral as a catalyst
for change. Hunt takes this one step further by tracing the history
of an ideology that has a strong grip on American consciousness and
forces the revolutionary to aspire to impossible ideals, regardless
of the nature (social, political, urban, etc.) of the revolution.
Hunt makes the case that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton’s
differing views on the style of American greatness in the international
arena were instrumental in permanently shaping American foreign policy
and self-definition. Jefferson’s concept of America as an agrarian
state, free from the taint of European market economies, at first seems
quite opposite to Hamilton’s vision of the United States becoming
“ascendant in the system of American affairs . . . [and] able
to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!”
(Hunt 24). Rather than isolating America from the urbanity of Europe,
Hamilton foresaw a small educated class ruling from within a powerful
government and supported by a large navy as critical to bolstering American
strength. In Hamilton’s plan, America could then compete in a
world “yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and
perfect virtue” (Hunt 24). America could construct the agrarian
utopia that Jefferson envisioned not through isolation, but by becoming
competitive in a rapidly industrializing international environment and
therein able to protect the latent utopia throughout its development.
Hunt’s descriptions of national viewpoints, conflicting in philosophy
but not in practice, are important because they evince a seminal tenet
in American views of progress towards the pastoral vision of the American
Revolution. Hamilton’s plan for a modernized society guiding an
agriculture-oriented state, and Jefferson’s moves toward expansion
and industrialization during his presidency (guided by the demands of
reality over idealism) provided a method of control to those with a
hand in American politics. The United States was born to conflicting
visions of exactly how to create the frontier utopia, but in both the
citizens of the United States must initially subject themselves to the
realities of the corrupt system of international affairs; only after
they are able to protect themselves within this system can they begin
the creation of a pastoral utopia. The duality of realism and idealism
that America’s path must skirt creates a project very tricky to
complete; in effect, this duality can be utilized by those in control
to ensnare the populace in an eternal state of waiting for an unrealizable
future. Marx’s contemporary comments come into play here –
the “traditional institutions” (based on a pastoral ideology
deeply rooted in American consciousness) of which Marx speaks confine
the revolutionary to a dream of a deferred paradise, allowing the holder
of residual values to operate in the present at will. Jefferson and
Hamilton’s early proposals on how America should establish the
paradise for which the New World was destined helped define an ideology
that could (and would, if Hunt is to be believed) harness much of the
power of American consciousness.
Hunt illustrates American ideology concerning revolution through another
post-revolutionary discussion, this one between Jefferson and John Adams.
Adams held similar views on the human spirit as Hamilton: men are flawed,
some differences (including ones of class) are ineradicable, and revolutions
should strive to produce a government that takes these things into account
(Hunt 93). Otherwise, “revolutions degenerated into foredoomed
efforts to reorder society and root out those natural inequalities among
men such as talent, wealth, and fame” (Hunt 94). According to
Hunt, Jefferson thought that “revolution was the means whereby
men shattered the artificial constraints that stunted their development”
(94). Using metaphors comparing revolution to natural occurrences such
as thunderstorms which cleaned the air and “manure essential to
the healthy growth of the tree of liberty,” Jefferson continued
using the guide of the pastoral ideal to judge successful revolutions
(Hunt 95).
While their initial ideas regarding the perfect revolution might seem
to be quite different, the two men began to reconcile their ideas later
in life: “Cleansed of even the few taints of social violence and
radicalism that besmirched it, the independence movement . . . emerged
in their mature thinking, just as it did in nationalist mythology, as
a model of revolutionary moderation and wisdom” (Hunt 96). This
purified image of the American Revolution has become very influential
in American ideology as the image to which all revolutions, whether
foreign or social, must aspire in order to be judged both moral and
successful (Hunt 96). In this case, Hunt deals with specific instances
of Marx’s “inherited symbols” which are used as both
direct (the suppression of revolutions based on emergent [read: “immoderate”
or “immature”] values) and indirect (the ingrained ideology
of the perfect pastoral revolution) instances of social control. The
perfect revolution represents another meaningless symbol for Marx –
an impossible (and strictly pastoral) ideal to which those seeking change
must handcuff themselves.
Now that we have seen that the American Revolution was perceived by
its participants and its progeny as a pastoral struggle against unnatural
forces, and that the ideology surrounding the American view of their
revolution implies pastoral perfection, it is not a stretch to say that
a widespread revolution aimed at changing the social or urban sphere
is not likely in America. According to Hunt, “social revolutions
that ran out of control . . . were frightening because they combined
pervasive violence, despotic practices, and radical doctrines in a frontal
assault on individual liberty and private property . . . freedom as
American observers conceived it could not survive” (117). The
ridiculously pure conception of revolution created by Jefferson and
Adams surfaces here; fear of revolution becomes more intense as countercultural
influences stray away from “natural” conceptions of liberty
and toward more foreign and complex notions of how to effect societal
change. For those in power, the belief in the pure revolution sanctifies
public action against those who might topple the existing system. As
Timothy Sweet would have it, Jefferson, when putting forth his image
of agrarian America, “ignored altogether the existence of antimarket,
backwoods farmers as a class . . . by these means, [he] attempted to
effect the disappearance of a significant oppositional ideology . .
. promoting a market orientation by means of a discourse of rural virtue”
(121). Endeavors to stamp out revolutions that do not fit the pastoral
pattern are not recent developments; Jefferson ventured to pigeonhole
countercultural revolutions himself.
Hunt’s description of American revolutionary ideology’s
monolithic and controlling character, when combined with the pastoral
views of the American Revolution, supports Marx’s idea that the
pastoral has little to offer the carrier of emergent values. While an
analysis of specific political situations would be instructive as to
the effect of pastoral ideology on America as a whole, the need for
an effective pastoral politics to pass the test of the masses’
revolutionary needs makes more cogent an analysis of popular literature.
By analyzing modernist works from the early twentieth century, the resistance
(or lack thereof) to long-standing ideological undercurrents can be
found where it might most effectively circulate to the American public.
If nothing else, participation in ideological constructs can be best
illustrated through individual examples of revolutionary action, as
opposed to broad, unspecific statements of public opinion.
In The Professor’s House, Willa Cather details the struggles
of a pastoral figure, steeped in Hunt’s ideology, against the
indirect control of American society. Tom Outland, Cather’s protagonist,
intends to complete the utopic project begun by America’s purportedly
pastoral revolutionaries through the study of a mesa in New Mexico.
Tom’s mesa is a paradise which provides its inhabitants with stunning
beauty and secondary contact with a lost, utopic civilization. Tom visits
Washington with the intent to “bring back . . . men who would
understand it, who would appreciate it and dig out all its secrets;”
in other words, Tom feels that the mesa contains a hidden meaning and
strength which can better America (202). Immersed in Hunt’s pastoral
ideology (he states that the paradise belongs to the State and its people,
disregarding the Native Americans that created it), Tom manifests the
indirect control of those reaping the residual benefits of American
ideology by aspiring to the perfect pastoral revolution (219). For Tom,
Washington can harness the untapped potential of the mesa. He tries
to use the meaningful (if only to himself) symbol of the mesa to bring
value to the main project of American history via Washington’s
meaningless traditional institutions. While these institutions are worthless
to Marx, they are the source of ideological suppression of emergent
values by the residual elite. Tom admits “a very religious feeling”
inspired by the Capitol dome and strives to gain admission to those
in power in the government and the Smithsonian in order to gain their
blessing for his venture (203). Tom’s path is defined by the will
of the elite; his attempt at change is routed not through “the
people” or through nature, but through the secondary path of bureaucracy.
Admittedly, Tom’s revolution is not an especially dangerous one.
However, his attempt at effecting a pastoral change are routed through
channels, sought out by Tom because of his ideological upbringing, that
can control his attempt of national reorganization before it becomes
hazardous to the holders of residual values.
While his revolution is completely based in the pastoral (he does not
couch any of Hunt’s foreign political agendas in natural terms—his
revolution is merely the mesa), it is suppressed both by the residual
elite and their ideologically drugged emergent counterparts. Cather
illustrates Washington, the city at the center of the pastoral project
that Marx and Hunt describe, as a place whose inhabitants’ “lives
seemed to me so petty, so slavish . . . they seemed to me like people
in slavery, who ought to be free” (209–11). Washington overflows
with the beneficiaries of Marx’s residual values, such as the
various government officials who can only be reached through days of
waiting room vigils and promises of paid lunches or funded expeditions.
While these officials are free to pursue their interests, the societal
constructs which they create and from which they benefit smother an
emergent revolutionary of Tom’s ilk. Tom is amazed at his lower-class
landlords, a sharp contrast to the lost pastoral civilization of the
mesa, who “spent their lives trying to keep up appearances, and
to make [Mr. Bixby’s] salary do more than it could” (209).
It is ironic that the antiestablishment values Marx would normally term
emergent in a strictly social or urban sphere are here purely pastoral
in nature. Marx speaks of urban values as emergent vis-à-vis
residual pastoral values; here, however, the pastoral paradise is so
foreign to Cather’s contemporary society that overly urban values
are residual—the pastoral is reemergent in the form of
the mesa, if anything. Cather confirms Marx’s notion of the inherent
insignificance of America’s traditional institutions to any revolutionary,
pastoral or otherwise, as well as Hunt’s perception of the indirect
control under which the pastoral revolutionary operates. Tom’s
immersion in Hunt’s pastoral ideology verifies the implausibility
of a revolution based on the American pastoral ideal while supporting
Hunt’s interpretation of the prevalence of such ideologies.
In Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the protagonist does
not attempt to foment a social revolution. Rather, Frederick Henry,
an American in the Italian medical corps during the First World War,
whose name brings to mind several American revolutionaries, escapes
the uncontrolled social revolution abhorred by the American elite. Hemingway
establishes the conflict between nature and society rather quickly;
near the beginning of the novel, Henry sincerely regrets succumbing
to the Fitzgeraldian pleasures of the debased city (drunkenness, prostitution,
etc.) rather than following the priest’s advice and visiting the
Abruzzi (13). The Abruzzi described is very similar to Jefferson’s
ideal, where the beauty of nature surrounds the visitor, tradition is
always honored, and the peasants feed you and “all called you
‘Don’” (73). The paradise of the Abruzzi, vaguely
reminiscent of a feudal state, provides an example of Jefferson’s
quietly acceptant underclass of society.
The breakdown of the Italian army during the retreat from Caporetto
stands in stark contrast to the quiet pastoral of the Abruzzi. Replete
with scenes of humanity at its most depraved, the retreat brings wounded
men finished off at the side of the road, Henry’s fellow soldiers
being killed by their own pickets, and finally, the systematic execution
of officers by enlisted men for improbable charges of treason. In Hunt’s
estimation, this disintegration of order is exactly the situation feared
by the American elite. The loss of control by those rightfully in power,
lack of respect for private property, and arbitrary systems of justice
typify the social revolution that American ideology defines as antithetical
to American notions of a pure revolt. While not a social revolution
in scope, the rebellion depicted here is one clearly based in the disorder
that the pastoral ideal is intended to control.
The Italian army, however, is not confined by a pastoral ideology. Hemingway’s
various characters speak endlessly of the mismanagement of the war and
the draconian administration of the country and army: “There is
a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize
anything and never can. That is why we have this war” (51). While
this is quite a simplification of Marx’s value system, the lower
classes, holding emergent values of dissatisfaction and unrestricted
by pastoral ideology, rebel against the source of their oppression—the
elite classes of residual control (or the officers, their battlefield
representatives). The elite fear such a revolution for an obvious reason:
these soldiers, unhindered by ideological snares, are easily able to
effect change, or at least exact revenge upon those they perceive to
be their oppressors. The revolt Hemingway portrays reflexively confirms
the power of pastoral ideology over America; while Tom wades through
red tape on the proper route of social change, the Italian army, however
misdirected, actively creates it.
More important than the Italians’ lack of a pastoral ideology
are Hemingway’s comments on this ideology. After escaping his
execution, Henry asserts that “I was not against them. I was through.
I wished them all the luck. There were the good ones, and the brave
ones, and the calm ones and the sensible ones, and they deserved it.
But it was not my show any more” (232). Hemingway’s protagonist
comments neither for nor against the war and simply avoids it altogether
by escaping to a pastoral paradise in Switzerland. Henry has no investment
in any emergent values of revolt; the dubious values of the retreating
men put him at risk for his life. For this reason, one cannot make a
case for his ideological rejection of the revolt—the circumstances
in which he left the army make this obvious.
While his escape comes under extreme circumstances, Henry nevertheless
retreats to a setting familiar to American perceptions. Henry and Catherine
are served by the Swiss in a situation similar to the Abruzzi; they
also live on the money Henry receives through “sight drafts,”
a means of forcing his family, whom he refuses to contact, to pay for
the life of luxury that he leads. Again, those creating the “paradise”
live in the residual comfort provided by an unrealistically classless
society. Henry rejects an unproductive war and an unacceptable revolt
for the familiar ideological territory of a utopic pastoral space. Nonetheless,
Hemingway demonstrates the uselessness of a pastoral utopia through
the death of Catherine; her child, in effect a product of the war, proves
the inability of America’s promised space to provide an escape
from the corrupt world and a basis for bucolic happiness, much less
a social revolution. Henry’s desertion provides a simple solution
to a confrontation with antipastoral values. When participating in such
a revolution, however, Hemingway’s characters struggle with a
more difficult ideological quandary.
Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls describes the Spanish
Civil War, another class-based revolt, although much more involved than
the retreat from Caporetto. In this novel, however, the reader finds
a protagonist deeply involved in the proceedings. Robert Jordan’s
mental struggles over the nature of his participation in the war provide
a closer look at the ideological workings of the American mind than
do the thoughts of Tom Outland or Frederick Henry.
Jordan, an American, fights for the Republicans in a civil war which
unfolds in a much uglier manner than the uprising portrayed in A
Farewell to Arms. Pilar, the partisan camp’s leader, describes
a revolt found in the nightmares of America’s residual elite.
The rebels’ initial attack on the fascists opens with finishing
off the survivors and ends with the execution, by running a gauntlet
of the town’s peasants, of all known fascists, whether active
in the fascist cause or not. The peasants aren’t revolting for
any particular idealistic defense of their natural state; they are simply
following the mob, killing innocent elite such as Don Guillermo, who
“was a fascist but otherwise there was nothing against him,”
with the farm implements of pastoral society (116). The uprising degenerates
into a drunken mob murdering the rich because of their class status.
This scene perfectly describes the social upheaval that Hunt positions
the American elite as trying to avoid: an uncontrolled rebellion, carried
out by the very subjects at the base of the controlling propaganda of
American consciousness. The Spanish Civil War is not simply a military
revolt in which a few officers are arbitrarily killed; this revolution
degenerates into large-scale executions based on property and class
which American ideology cannot tolerate, no matter what the cause. And,
as Hemingway illustrates through omission, no cause seems to exist.
The reader sees none of the social conditions before the war and hears
nothing of any crimes committed by the executed fascists.
Thus, the Spanish Civil War supplies the heretically anti-American context
in which Robert Jordan must rationalize his participation through familiar
ideological terms. The majority of Jordan’s thoughts not involving
his mission concern his reasons for fighting. Initially, Jordan states
that “he fought now in this war because it had started in a country
that he loved and he believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed
life would be unbearable for all those people who believed in it”
(163). Jordan fights only for the liberty of the land and the people,
just as the ideal American revolutionaries did in 1776—not the
various Spanish political agendas of mob violence. His continuous efforts
at rationalization of a conflict that the American elite would abhor
demonstrate the effect of Hunt’s pastoral ideology on Jordan’s
mind. For the American revolutionary, a civil war based on class struggle
is an aberration and requires constant psychological reaffirmation of
the pastoral ideals previously instilled in him.
Jordan restates his stereotypically American ideals later in the novel:
“You’re not a real Marxist and you know it. You believe
in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. You believe in Life, Liberty and
the Pursuit of Happiness. Don’t ever kid yourself with too much
dialectics. They are for some but not for you. You have to know them
in order not to be a sucker. You have put many things in abeyance to
win a war. If this war is lost all of those things are lost” (305).
Here, Jordan rejects the radical political ideas that drive the revolution
in favor of America’s pastoral mission statements. Ironically,
the first slogan Jordan states came into existence during the French
Revolution, the first social rebellion to fall short of America’s
revolutionary requirements (Hunt 97–100). Jordan’s confusion
as to the correct path of the pastoral revolution leads him into an
argument Hunt would agree with—dialectics (and ideologies?) “are
for some but not for you. You have to know them in order not to be a
sucker” (305). While Jordan cannot adequately enunciate the catchphrases
of American ideology, his argument for the rejection of Marxist politics
can be easily applied to the Jeffersonian clauses in which he supposedly
believes. Jefferson and Adam’s perfect revolution causes mass
confusion for those participating in revolts based in reality. The ideological
constructs designed to control revolutionary impulses prevent Jordan
from justifying his participation in his own terms and force him into
agonized contemplation rather than action or, at the very least, enjoyment
of his ephemerally beautiful surroundings. Jordan’s confusion
exemplifies the suppression, by America's residual elite, of emergent
values through control of an ideology so publicly entrenched that it
renders impotent the majority of latent revolutionaries.
Hemingway also provides the reader with an inside look at the privileged
elite, something not seen in the other works, which Jordan tolerates
with considerable naïveté. Jordan’s experiences at
Gaylord’s, the officer’s bar, prove initially shocking but
later comforting. Here, Jordan finds that appearances have no basis
in reality—“the Peasant” was never actually a peasant;
those who speak most vehemently against class privilege enjoy fine food,
drink, and women – and he accepts it all a little too lightly:
“Well, some day they would tell the truth to every one and meantime
he was glad there was a Gaylord’s for his own learning of it”
(230). In these lines, Jordan almost laughably defers his high-minded
visions of liberty for immediate satisfaction of knowledge and his baser
appetites. He trusts in the fallacy that someday things truly will be
“better” for the underclass—either the Republican
elite will reveal their privileges (the same advantages for which the
fascists were executed) or all will share in these privileges. Jordan’s
illogical thought process fails to eliminate these obviously ridiculous
interpretations.
Robert Jordan exists in an odd position—through the medium of
Gaylord’s, he is a participant in both the privileged control
of the residual elite (or at least their Russian and Spanish counterparts,
whose values are not residual in Marx’s strictly American sense)
and the ideological servitude of the emergent revolutionary. Hemingway’s
protagonist is more immersed in Hunt’s pastoral ideology than
even Tom Outland, who rejects societal requirements for an individual
pastoral paradise; Jordan continually endeavors to put a pastoral spin
on the revolution, yet quickly defers his pastoral dreams for immediate
material satisfaction. Jordan aspires to the perfect revolution that
American ideology requires of him and, as an ideal pastoral subject,
quickly consents to the privileges necessary to the elite’s comfort,
quietly accepting that the pastoral paradise will exist in spite of
obvious class inequalities. No matter the nature of his commitment to
the freedom of the Spanish people, Jordan could never revolt in America
because of his artificially created love of American pastoral tradition.
Even in a foreign revolution, Jordan accepts the need for a pure revolutionary
ideology and the deferral of immediate pastoral satisfaction; he is
in no position to create a rebellion on Tom Outland’s scale, much
less that of the Spanish Civil War, in America.
Hemingway’s Robert Jordan exemplifies the average American confronted
with an impure, non-pastoral revolution antithetical to the foundation
of American beliefs. Jordan shows no ability to consistently enunciate
his political beliefs; he couches his reasons for war in ill-defined
pastoral terms and disagrees with any social agenda traditionally abhorred
in America. He is not a Communist, only one fighting for what he “believes”
in. However, Jordan is blindly complacent in accepting the corruption
of Gaylord’s as a contemporary, necessary evil. He waits for the
self-deferred utopia, just as all citizens steeped in American pastoral
ideology do. While Frederick Henry rejects a dangerous situation for
a pastoral utopia (an easy decision based on survival rather than ideology,
although his choice of locale is undoubtedly based on pastoral thinking),
Jordan clearly reflects the confusion that Hunt’s ideologies intend
to create. In Robert Jordan, Hemingway shows that the pastoral ideologies
with which the American citizen grows up bring no lasting answers to
questions concerning political change and check the process of revolutionary
thought.
Marx’s theory of the empty pastoral ideal, when incorporated with
the political theories of Michael Hunt concerning the ideologies that
prevent social change in America, creates a very powerful analytical
tool. As depicted in these modernist texts, a revolution with the purist
pastoral ideals of American readings of the War for Independence cannot
succeed; the ideological foundation of American consciousness precludes
change hazardous to the class structure. Cather’s The Professor’s
House bears out the impossibility of creating a workable pastoral
politics and exposes the inherent contradictions of a theoretically
pastoral nation centered on a socially indolent Washington. Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms depicts the inability of the unlikely natural
paradise to provide for and protect its inhabitants from the realities
of a world unrestrained by a repressive pastoral ideology. And finally,
For Whom the Bell Tolls evinces the confusion and deferred
dreams of the American citizen; the pastoral ideologies prevalent in
American society provide Jordan, faced with social struggle, with no
sustainable and contextually relevant course of action. This treatment
is a purely literary analysis using conditions a century old. Nonetheless,
the lessons learned in Hemingway and Cather’s novels, and more
importantly in Marx and Hunt’s theories, are invaluable to us
today, if only as a model of how not to act. As Hunt has proven,
redundant and regressive ideologies lay at the heart of American thought,
and through their characters’ inabilities and mistakes, Hemingway
and Cather have alerted us to the pitfalls we must avoid when conceptualizing
change in contemporary, ideological America.
Works Cited
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Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Simon and
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Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Simon
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