Armance, ou la liberté de Stendhal (review)

Jean-Jacques Hamm's study of Armance demonstrates a detailed knowledge of Stendhal's first novel and the extensive corpus of scholarship attempting to solve its "mystery." Although Hamm's voice is sometimes lost amid the considerable number of critical conversations he invokes, he adeptly illustrates the reader's dilemma in navigating a text that resists a definitive interpretation, examining many possible (contradictory) readings of Armance without definitively choosing one. Stendhal, Hamm reiterates, puts silence and secrecy at the center of his novel, refusing to provide the reader with adequate clues as to why Octave flees his marriage and commits suicide; it is thus the reader's task to confront this hermeneutic void, try without success to fill it, and ultimately accept the novel's many possibilities, multiple meanings, and inherent unknowability. While effectively summarizing the critical debate surrounding Octave's supposed impotence, Hamm's book challenges certain critical traditions that characterize Armance as a failed masterpiece and accuse its heroine of coldness and insipidity (9). Hamm seeks to carve out a place for Armance in literary history, arguing that it "inaugurates" the era of the plural text (26) and that it is unique among pre-twentieth century novels (80). He goes on to show that Armance is historically significant in that it breaks with eighteenth-century French literature founded on the confessional rhetoric of the plaidoyer, a narrative strategy giving the reader supposedly transparent access to the protagonist's darkest secrets. Stendhal, Hamm argues, plays with such a convention by delaying the revelation of Octave's secret and making it ultimately inaccessible to the reader.

Hamm divides his book into five sections, which deal respectively with the creation of the novel, its characters, its diegetic "stratum," Stendhalian writing, and the text's reception. The first section offers a pertinent history of the circumstances under which the novel was written and an analysis of the novel's problematic title and avant-propos. It also calls into question Stendhal's letter to Mérimée wherein he explains that Octave suffers from babilanisme or fiasco (impotence), and analyzes the novel's epigraphs, notes, and marginalia. The second section examines the protagonists, their secrets, and the erotic nature of their relationship. The third section considers the novel's theatricality (theaters within the novel as well as the novel's ties to theatrical literature), its secondary characters, the plot's historical context, the representation of various places, and mythological intertext. The fourth section incorporates cryptographic readings based on Stendhal's fascination with code and includes meditations on the deliberately "unfinished" nature of the novel (its lack of resolution), its style, and the various types of irony it employs. The final section reflects on Stendhal's vision of his readership, presents a brief history of Armance's critical reception, and contemplates the author's relationship to his text.

The overarching theme of Hamm's analysis is Armance's lack of a single interpretive "key." Although both dense and elliptical, with many digressions punctuating his principal lines of thought, Hamm's book effectively stages the reader's dilemma when faced with a text that encourages interpretation while simultaneously frustrating it. Hamm explores potential "keys" to Octave's strange behavior, possible explanations of which include not only impotence, but also homosexuality and melancholy, all the while acknowledging that there can be no ultimate answer and that "the secret of the hero becomes that of the novel" (80). The suggestions of melancholy and homosexuality present intriguing alternatives to the generally accepted interpretation of Octave's plight, yet they are not entirely convincing. Hamm's queer reading of the text points to the sexually ambiguous figure of Byron (whose portrait appears at a critical moment and to whom the avant-propos alludes), Octave's morbid attachment to his mother, his violent encounters with other men, his narcissism, and his strange desire to be killed by a young hunter (un "enfant chasseur," 77). It fails, however, to take into account a major stumbling block to...