ABSTRACT
Does the title of Herbert’s poem assert the impossibility of communicating a secure meaning-the unattainable river Jordan of the exiled chosen people-and thereby entrap us in the ultimate epistemological conundrum? Or does it refer, at the more mundane end of the hermeneutic spectrum, to seventeenth-century slang in which ‘a Jordan’ equalled a chamber-pot? The hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan, is a professor of Spanish, holder of a ‘true, but painted chair’, with a speciality in the seventeenth century, the celebrated ‘Golden Age’ of Iberian literature. The character is based upon several American intellectual warriors who fought and died in the Lincoln and Washington Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.1 His university, somewhere in the mid-west, is (surprisingly) enlightened enough, not only to employ him in teaching Spanish literature, but also to allow him indefinite leave from it to fight in Spain.
