Romancing the Wound: Hemingway and the Screenplay of The Sun Also Rises

The Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia holds three drafts for the screenplay of the 1957 film of The Sun Also Rises . Hemingway read Peter Viertel's second attempt at a working script—the one titled "Revised Temporary"—and penciled in over fifty critical comments on it. Hemingway was most aroused by the choice of one word—"impotent." Jake Barnes "was not impotent," Hemingway wrote, but the film as produced stuck with the word. When it came to clarifying the nature of Jake's wound, Viertel was later to write, "we were never really able to solve this problem." All along, however, Hemingway had meant to confer upon his hero a problem that has no name. Hemingway sentenced Jake Barnes to a wound that resists signification in order to remind us of the deep pleasure we take in wound-hunting, especially when searching for The Wound that (may have) shaped the author himself.