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In the wake ofthe French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) wrote Armance; or, Scenes from a Parisian Salon in 1827 (1 827), his first major novel. Its protagonist, Octave Vicomte de Malivert, is tormented by a terrible secret, the nature of which he continually promises to reveal to his cousin Armance. Two weeks after their marriage, he writes her a letter and commits suicide. After reading this letter, Armance withdraws into a cloister, leaving Octave's "unspeakable" secret unrevealed to the reader. It is only extratextually, in a letter Stendhal wrote to Prosper Mérimée, that the hero's secret malady is identified as sexual impotence. This curious omission has generated much critical debate, and modern critics tend to hail Armance's cryptic silence as a sign of its prescient modernity (Waller I 30).
A century after Stendhal wrote Armance, following World War I, Ernest Hemingway published his first important novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Its protagonist, Jake Barnes, suffers from a mysterious war wound that impedes the consummation of his affair with Lady Brett Ashley. During one remarkable scene, Jake examines his mutilated body in a mirror, arouses the reader's curiosity, but obstinately refuses to satisfy the reader's gaze: "Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny" (38). The nature of this mysterious wound, which like Octave's in Armance has become notorious in critical circles, is described by Hemingway in a letter to Thomas Bledsoe: Jake's wound was modeled on that of a young soldier whose "penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact" (Letters 745).
The objective of this essay is threefold:first,to suggest a deliberate case of influence where Hemingway turned to Stendhal in order to find a way of expressing his own postwar trauma without having to write explicitly about the war; second, to examine how these previously unlinked textual gaps are used as complex metaphors to indicate a range of failures stemming from a misguided ethos of masculinity; and third and most important, to show that by signaling The Sun Also Rises's close kinship with Stendhal's Armance, Hemingway is making a much larger claim about war and the psycho-social scars marking its victims. In other words, while demonstrating the truth of Gertrude Stein's...