QUEER HARMONIOUS RELATIONSHIPS IN FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS: A YIN-YANG COSMOLOGICAL APPROACH

Abstract

Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls often leaves readers with the strong sense that his understanding of love is that it is always short-term and incomplete. However, the sexual and spiritual “oneness” between Maria and Robert Jordan illustrates a Hemingway who is more willing to believe in the positive value of human relationships in the twentieth century. Drawing upon this, I see the possibility of applying the diverse characteristics of yin and yang into the Maria-Jordan-Pilar relationship as well as their connections with nature. Through focusing on the sheng (transformation) between the unfixed qi (energy) of yin and yang, I uncover a more dynamic and multi-dimensional aspect of love and human life that lies in this novel.

Utilizing the reader-response perspective, I begin my presentation by analyzing Maria’s psychiatric distress through the lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine. I suggest that the killing of her parents and the gang rape she suffers at the hands of the fascists create a strong sense of injustice inside Maria, thus stagnating the qi in her lungs, which results in the disharmony of the Po (the corporeal spirit) inside her. Then, I suppose that it is through several acts of sexual intercourse between Maria and Jordan outside, surrounded by nature that ratchet down, clarify, and clear the negative emotions that are contributing to the imbalances and the distress within Maria.

In the Chinese philosophical view, the relationship between Pilar and Maria is like the pairing of you (to have) and wu (to lack), as Maria symbolizes Pilar’s you while Pilar the wu of Maria. This interconnection between the two leads to the conception that Pilar’s self-salvation can be achieved through the salvation of Maria, which can be completed through the sexual-spiritual meditations with Jordan. After several sexual encounters, this process finally comes to fruition when Jordan encounters death. Through Jordan’s death, Maria then is spiritually transformed into a yinyang ren: a person who has an equal amount of both feminine and masculine qualities. In a sense, this spiritual androgynization of Maria can be seen as a sort of immortality.

Regarding Pilar’s androgynous qualities, I see Pilar as a model of yinyang ren (gender nonconforming) who liberates the human species from the dualistic gender binary into a more fluid one. In addition, it is through the deep interaction with nature that Pilar comes to cultivate her androgynous qualities. Furthermore, Anlselmo’s perception of humanity is relevant to Lao Zi’s philosophical view, in which the fulfillment of oneself is neither based on weapons nor killing. As Lisa Tyler suggests, war perverts human fertility by replacing life with death. This leads to the idea that by re-emphasizing transformation through reproduction, “life” can be revitalized. This reading becomes possible through Pilar’s unperturbed attitude towards the prospect of Maria’s pregnancy even though Maria might have lost her reproductive capability.

At last, the oneness between Jordan and nature is accomplished by his touching the pine needles and pine trunk with his hands, looking into the clouds in the sky, and feeling his own heart beating against the forest. As Jordan’s awareness towards nature develops and increases over the course of the text, these movements can thus be seen as the final cultivation towards a state of immortality and, beyond that, towards a kind of cosmic renewal. In short, Jordan’s immortal state of shen is achieved through the transformation and union of jing (essence) and qi (energies) with nature and of course, Maria.