![]() “Punctual literature,” as Heffernan calls it, is a narrow category, especially when it comes to World War II, for practical reasons: it isn’t easy to write and publish while being bombed. Best of all, you must read the literature that was written and published while the events of the period were still unfolding. For a fuller understanding of any historical period, you must read the literature it produced. Heffernan proposes that academic and popular histories, diaries, and journalistic accounts offer only a blinkered view of the past. In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, the Dartmouth literary scholar James A.W. You also have something that you won’t find in any history of the Spanish Civil War. The final component is the reek of a brothel, which Pilar describes in a lengthy speech of unapologetic precision, ending with an invitation to “wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe through it.” Combine all that and you have, finally, the smell of a death foretold. Add to this the odor of dead chrysanthemums. The first element of it, she tells him, “is the smell that comes when, on a ship, there is a storm and the portholes are closed up.” Another note can be tasted by kissing the mouth of an old woman in Madrid who, in the predawn fog, descends upon the slaughterhouse to drink the blood of the murdered beasts. He demands that Pilar describe this alleged stench of preordained death in precise terms. Jordan himself refuses to believe such sorcery when he hears of it from Pilar, the guerrilla band’s matriarch. It is the smell of a death foretold: the odor given off by a person, like Robert Jordan, who knows he will soon die. Not the smell of putrefaction, though the novel is littered with rotting corpses. ![]() ![]() And if the novel has a smell, it’s the smell of death. If the novel has a flavor, it’s that of the “bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing” absinthe Jordan has smuggled in a leather flask from his previous life. If the novel has a sound, it is the roar of the fascist bombers flying low over the guerrillas’ cave. If a single image can stand for Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is the one that begins and ends the novel: the American guerrilla fighter Robert Jordan prone on the pine-needled floor of a forest near Segovia, awaiting the appearance of enemy soldiers.
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