something was up. The oddity of the name, the way it calls attention to a physical problem, suggests that
this aspect of his identity will come into play. Indeed, Oedipus’s feet are damaged from the thong that
was put through his Achilles tendons when, as an infant, he was sent away to die in the wilderness. His
parents, fearing the terrible prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, have him taken
out to the country to be killed. Knowing how hard it will be for their servant to be the agent of death,
they intend for the infant to be left on a mountain where he will perish of exposure. Just to be safe, they
cause his feet to be lashed together so he doesn’t get up and crawl away. Later his feet will become a
piece of evidence proving that he is in fact the doomed infant. You might think that his mother, Jocasta,
would be well advised either (a) never to remarry, or (b) to avoid marrying anyone with damaged ankles,
but she chooses option (c) instead, thereby providing us with a plot. Quite lucky for Sophocles, if
catastrophic for poor Oedipus. His scars speak of his personal history, which of course is hidden from
him until it is revealed during the course of the play. Moreover, they address the personality of his
parents, especially Jocasta, who tried to elude the curse, and of Oedipus himself, who seems never to
have inquired as to how he came to have these scars. This lack of inquisitiveness is diagnostic, since the
basis of his downfall is his inability to know himself.
Something more modern? Sure. Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises. Modern enough? The novel,
which deals with the generation that was damaged in so many ways by World War I, is an ironic
reworking of the wasteland motif. Like T. S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece The Waste Land, it presents a
society that has been rendered barren—spiritually, morally, intellectually, and sexually—by the war. Such
a treatment is not at allp. 197surprising, given the death and destruction of millions of young, virile males.
Traditionally, the wasteland myth concerns the struggle, the quest, to restore fertility. This quest is
undertaken by or on behalf of the Fisher King, a character who exhibits physical damage in many
versions. That’s the original. Hemingway’s Fisher King? Jake Barnes, newspaper correspondent and
wounded war veteran. How do we know he’s the Fisher King? He goes fishing. Actually, his fishing trip
is quite extensive and, in its own way, restorative. It is also highly symbolic. And what, you ask, is the
wound that makes him right for the role? This is tricky, since Jake, who narrates, never says. There’s
only one thing, though, that can make a grown man, looking at himself in the mirror, weep. In real life,
Hemingway’s own wound was in the upper thigh; in the novel, he moved it just north. Poor Jake, all the
sexual desire and none of the ability to act upon it.
So what’s going on here? Character differentiation, certainly. The missing member sets Jake apart from
everyone else in the novel, or any other novel I know of, for that matter. It also sets up parallels to the
operative wasteland myth. Perhaps a touch of Isis and Osiris thrown in; Osiris was torn apart, and the
goddess Isis succeeded in reassembling him except for the part that makes Jake Barnes resemble him
(the Osiris myth is an Egyptian fertility myth). Priestesses of Isis took human lovers as symbolical
stand-ins for the damaged Osiris, not unlike the way Lady Brett Ashley in the novel takes other lovers
because she and Jake cannot consummate their passion. But chiefly, the injury is symbolic of the
destruction of possibilities, spiritual as well as procreative, accomplished by the war. When millions of
young men die in war, they take with them not merely reproductive possibilities but also tremendous
intellectual, creative, and artistic resources. The war was, in short, the death of culture, or at least of a
very great chunk of it. Moreover, those who survived, like Hemingway and his characters, were badly
p. 198damaged from the experience. The Great War generation probably suffered greater psychic
damage and spiritual displacement than any other in history. Hemingway captures that damage three
times over: once in the Nick Adams stories culminating in “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925), where Nick
goes off alone to Michigan’s then remote Upper Peninsula on a fishing trip to repair his broken psyche
after the horrors of his war experience; a second in Jake Barnes’s war wound and the fractured festivities
in Pamplona; and a third in Lieutenant Frederic Henry’s separate peace, broken by his lover’s death in
childbirth in A Farewell to Arms. All three cover the same ground of mental damage, spiritual despair,
the death of hope. Jake’s wounding, then, is personal, historical, cultural, mythic. That’s a lot of impact
for one little piece of shrapnel.