Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal by Jean-Jacques Hamm (review)

Stendhal’s America, but also about the context of French opinion generated as a response to the new American democracy, a context that extends beyond Stendhal alone. Boston University (MA) Dorothy Kelly HAMM, JEAN-JACQUES. Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal. Paris: Champion, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7453-1807-7. Pp. 280. 55 a. In Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal Jean-Jacques Hamm proposes a comprehensive exploration of the multiple facets of a novel that has often been read as a roman à clef to which a letter from Stendhal to Mérimée supposedly gives the key: the hero Octave de Malivert’s impotence. Having extensively studied and written about Stendhal, Hamm refuses this—and indeed all—univocal interpretations of Armance. His thesis is that in Armance, Stendhal’s least appreciated but most original work, the author successfully inaugurates a new approach to writing, where the protagonist’s secret becomes the secret of the novel. Just as Octave never reveals what underlies his inscrutable behavior toward Armance, the woman he loves, so too the text withholds meaning—evoking, sketching, then abandoning explanations, but, in the end, preserving a core of silence that is its most defining feature. It is up to the reader to choose from the half-formulated meanings proposed, or to accept, as does Hamm, that the secret of Armance is that there is no secret. To explore the poetics of concealment through partial revelation, Hamm orients his analysis around the question that one of Octave’s perplexed rivals asks him: “Que diable es-tu?” Five major chapters form the armature of Hamm’s insightful study. “Obliques” treats the palimpsests, fissures, precautions and ambiguities attendant upon the genesis of Armance. “Protagonistes” exposes the limits of a hermeneutics of character, through in-depth consideration of psychological duality, intertextual influences, points of view, transparencies and opacities in the presentation of love and sexuality (both Octave’s and Armance’s). “Représentations ” probes strata of narration in Armance: theatrical aspects, realistic elements, physical dimensions of closed spaces and dynamic movements of escape, archetypal underpinnings. “Ecritures” offers micro-analyses of Armance’s prose—its erudition, its figures of omission, its “style vrai,” its multiple modes of irony. “Extérieurs” explores relations between Stendhal and his public, the influence of Armance on other writers, and ultimately the construction of Stendhal as an author, by this work. Hamm convincingly concludes that Armance is an open synthesis, a work that creates a new form for the novel, complete without imposing closure, suscitating with its reader a “conversation infinie” that valorizes freedom—its own, its author’s, and its reader’s. Hamm brilliantly orchestrates references to an exceptionally broad range of critical studies (including English language ones), detailed objective analyses (of the numerical kind enabled by computer), and lucid, personal readings. Readers of this volume will come away with the conviction that Armance is a major, innovative novel. Their understanding of its strategies of secrecy, which constitute strategies of freedom, will enrich their readings of all of Stendhal’s fiction. Smith College (MA) Mary Ellen Birkett 164 FRENCH REVIEW 84.1 ...