Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures)

Roche

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

volume 38

“[Roche’s book] will make an important contribution to Hugo studies and, more broadly, to our understanding of nineteenth-century French fiction. The author has addressed a critical question that earlier scholarship had failed to ask: why does Hugo develop character as he does?” —Kathryn M. Grossman, author of The Early Novels of Victor Hugo and Figuring Transcendence in “Les Misérables”

ABOUT THE SERIES Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures publishes studies on topics of literary, theoretical, or philological importance that make a significant contribution to scholarship in French, Italian, Luso-Brazilian, Spanish, and Spanish American literatures. ISBN–13: 978-1-55753-438-5 ISBN–10: 1-55753-438-1

Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

CHARACTER AND MEANING IN THE NOVELS OF VICTOR HUGO

Victor Hugo’s lasting appeal as a novelist can be attributed in large part to the unforgettable characters that he created, yet the most criticized and least understood element of his fiction has been character. Isabel Roche’s Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo seeks to unravel this paradox through a comprehensive re-evaluation of the creation and role of character in Hugo’s five major novels: Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les Misérables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L’Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (1873). With an approach that combines attention to genre, narratology, and reader-response criticism, as well as consideration of Hugo’s own critical and philosophical writings, Roche explores the ways in which Hugo’s novels eschew the realist notion of the representable individual in favor of a new—and surprisingly modern—kind of fiction in which character serves a conceptual, nonpsychological function. Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo provides a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances that characterize both Hugo’s novel writing and the nineteenth-century French novel, and will thus appeal to the specialist and nonspecialist alike.

D

CHARACTER AND MEANING IN THE NOVELS OF VICTOR HUGO

Isabel Roche

CHARACTER AND MEANING IN THE NOVELS OF VICTOR HUGO

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures Editorial Board Patricia Hart, Series Editor Jeanette Beer Paul B. Dixon Benjamin Lawton

Howard Mancing Floyd Merrell Allen G. Wood

Associate Editors French

Spanish and Spanish American

Paul Benhamou Willard Bohn Gerard J. Brault Mary Ann Caws Milorad R. Margitic; Glyn P. Norton Allan H. Pasco Gerald Prince David Lee Rubin Roseann Runte Ursula Tidd

Maryellen Bieder Catherine Connor Ivy A. Corfis Frederick A. de Armas Edward Friedman Charles Ganelin David T. Gies Roberto González Echevarría David K. Herzberger Emily Hicks Djelal Kadir Amy Kaminsky Lucille Kerr Alberto Moreiras Randolph D. Pope Francisco Ruiz Ramón Elzæbieta Sk¬odowska Mario Valdés Howard Young

Italian Fiora A. Bassanese Peter Carravetta Franco Masciandaro Anthony Julian Tamburri

Luso-Brazilian Fred M. Clark Marta Peixoto Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg

volume 38

CHARACTER AND MEANING IN THE NOVELS OF VICTOR HUGO

Isabel Roche

Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright ©2007 by Purdue University. All rights reserved. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Design by Anita Noble Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roche, Isabel, 1970– Character and meaning in the novels of Victor Hugo / Isabel Roche. p. cm. — (Purdue studies in Romance literatures ; v. 38) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-55753-438-5 (alk. paper) 1. Hugo, Victor, 1802–1885—Characters. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. I. Title. PQ2302.R63 2006 843'.7—dc22 2006019449

For Jack

Contents viii List of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 13 Part 1 Appearance 15 Chapter One The Archetype Transformed 33 Chapter Two Hugo Novelist 53 Part 2 Reappearance 55 Chapter Three Hugo and Type Character 70 Chapter Four Character as Template 102 Chapter Five Reconfigurations 125 Part 3 Disappearance 127 Chapter Six The Poetics of Death 151 Chapter Seven Decoding Social Exclusion 179 189 227 235

Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index

vii

List of Abbreviations HQR L’Homme qui rit LM Les Misérables ND Notre-Dame de Paris QVT Quatrevingt-treize TM Les Travailleurs de la mer

viii

Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to Claudie Bernard of New York University, who, as my dissertation director, was tireless in her commentary and served as a model for sound practices. Charles Affron and Nancy Regaldo, also of New York University, were wonderful resources, and the gift of their time was much appreciated. I’ve been fortunate to engage in intense conversation and lively debate about Hugo, character, and fiction with colleagues, students, and friends, and I thank them collectively for helping me to shape and sharpen my thinking. In particular, I’d like to recognize the ongoing support of Nicole Desrosiers. Her encouragement and friendship have been invaluable. An earlier version of Part 1, Chapter 2 (“Hugo Novelist”) was published as “Inscribing His Ideal Reader(ship): Victor Hugo and the Shaping of le lecteur pensif,” in French Forum 28.2 (Spring 2003): 21–34 © University of Nebraska Press. It is published here with permission of the University of Nebraska Press. My family has always been the center of everything. My husband, Steve, deserves special mention for signing on— without complaint—for a lengthy cohabitation with Victor Hugo. Caroline helped in ways that only she could. But my largest debt is to my grandfather, Benedict Sohm, whose generosity and intellectual curiosity were unparalleled. The wings of his pride carried me every time I felt the weight of seeing this project to the end.

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Introduction

As the overwhelming success of the 2002 bicentennial of Victor Hugo’s birth confirms, none of the distinct personae that Hugo has come to be known by, whether it be the young royalist and romantic poet, the exiled republican, or the genteel, whitehaired grandfather, shows any signs of fading away. Indeed, after two hundred tumultuous years characterized by a vacillation between equally intense periods of hugolâtrie and hugophobie, Victor Hugo remains the frequent subject of headlines. His life and his work continue to fascinate, both in France and abroad. The musical version of Les Misérables had a sixteen-year run on Broadway—the second longest in Broadway history—and Disney’s 1996 animated version of The Hunchback of NotreDame, which sparked a heated polemical debate in France about liberties of adaptation, enjoyed such commercial success that it was followed by a sequel in 2002. Hugo’s name is still hotly evoked in the ongoing death penalty debate in France. There are currently more than thirty French and American Web sites devoted to Hugo, and a recent query on eBay came up with over one hundred offerings for Hugo-related memorabilia for sale.1 This public interest has been matched, since the 1950s, by renewed and steady scholarly interest in Hugo’s body of work. Groundbreaking studies published in the 1960s, such as Pierre Albouy’s La Création mythologique chez Victor Hugo (1963), Richard B. Grant’s The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth, and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo (1968), and Jean Gaudon’s Le Temps de la contemplation (1969), paved the way for new or expanded methodological approaches in Hugo scholarship. The 1969 publication of Jean Massin’s chronological Œuvres complètes edition provided an invaluable tool for 1

Introduction critics working on Hugo’s poetry, theater, and especially his novels. Deemed “ce terrain vierge et fertile” by Georges Piroué in his 1964 Victor Hugo romancier ou les dessus de l’inconnu (11), Hugo’s novels have profited perhaps the most from this reinvigorated scholarship. In addition to a multitude of important articles published in the past forty years on various aspects of Hugo’s novels,2 Grant’s 1968 study, Henri Meschonnic’s Ecrire Hugo (1977), and Victor Brombert’s seminal Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984) have also widely contributed to our comprehension of Hugo’s fictional corpus. Other book-length studies, such as Kathryn Grossman’s The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics of Harmony (1986) and Figuring Transcendence in “Les Misérables”: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime (1994), Anne Ubersfeld’s Paroles de Hugo (1985), David Charles’s La Pensée technique dans l’œuvre de Victor Hugo (1997), Laurence Porter’s Victor Hugo (1999), and Myriam Roman’s Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique: Du “drame dans les faits” au “drame dans les idées” (1999), have also greatly helped to flesh out important thematic and ideological concerns in Hugo’s fiction. In the wake of this critical renaissance—which shows no signs of stopping and also includes Graham Robb’s 1997 Victor Hugo: A Biography and Jean-Marc Hovasse’s 2001 Victor Hugo: I, Avant l’exil (1802–1851), rich and insightful texts that bridge both the popular and scholarly revival—it is important to ask ourselves why Victor Hugo still matters. Why, whether adored or despised in the waves of praise and disdain subsequent to his 1885 death, has Hugo never been treated with indifference? For from Jean Cocteau’s famous “Victor Hugo est un fou qui se prenait pour Victor Hugo” (“Le Mystère laïc” 28), to François Mauriac’s 1952 declaration that Hugo is “au seuil de sa vraie gloire. Son purgatoire est fini,”3 the one thing that Victor Hugo has never ceased to do—as a human being, as a public figure, and as an author—is to have an effect upon people. The key to this hold lies in many ways in the universality and ultimate accessibility of the message that Hugo and his works project. Indeed, Hugo’s staying power owes much to the adaptability of this message, to its ability to be condensed into core, transmittable truths. Yet as scholars studying Hugo’s poetry, theater, and novels have endeavored over time to

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Introduction uncover, nothing about Victor Hugo’s body of work is uncomplicated. For behind the immediate accessibility and the famous use of antithesis lies a world of gray in which spiritual, moral, and political clarity are far from given. For no element of Hugo’s corpus is this perhaps more true than for his novelistic efforts, as each work—from the 1823 Han d’Islande to the 1874 Quatrevingt-treize—is built upon Hugo’s own uneasy and continuous ideological grappling with the fundaments of time, history, individual and collective destiny, and the nature of progress. This study proposes a re-evaluation of an aspect of Hugo’s fictional enterprise that has long been overlooked, discounted, or denigrated: that of character. For while Hugo’s lasting appeal as a novelist can in large part be attributed to the unforgettable characters that he put into place, from Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and Frollo, to Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, Gwynplaine, and Gauvain, character has paradoxically been the most criticized element of both Hugo’s fictional and dramatic writings. From Goethe, who described the characters of Notre-Dame de Paris as “lifeless lay figures pulled about by wires [. . . whose] wood and steel skeletons support mere stuffed puppets with whom the author deals most cruelly, jerking them into the strangest poses, contorting them, tormenting and whipping them, cutting up their bodies and souls,”4 to Georg Lukács, who stressed the lack of verisimilitude intrinsic to Hugo’s characters, Hugo’s concept of character has historically been evaluated (and devaluated) largely by way of the realist movement that steadily took hold of the literature of Hugo’s century.5 Modern critics have since drawn attention to the important distinctions between Hugo’s fiction making and nineteenthcentury realism, recognizing that Hugo’s novels are derived from a mixture of modes, and that his characters are not psychological, but rather archetypal or stock figures more typical of the romance genre or melodrama. Brombert, for example, notes at the outset of Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel that “to judge Les Travailleurs de la mer or Les Misérables by the standards of the French realist novel from Balzac to Zola is to miss the surprisingly modern nature of his fiction making, which undermines and decenters the subject, using characters and plot to achieve the effects of visionary prose narrative” (1).

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Introduction Yet despite this trend toward separating Hugo’s characters from a context that was not their own, judgments based on pervasive realist aesthetics have at times persisted, as witnessed by Grant’s assertion that “Hugo was not a good creator of character, and it is typical of his lack of understanding of human complexity that he does not seem to realize that one cannot live a role fully and yet remain unchanged by it” (The Perilous Quest 186). A desire to get to the heart of lingering misconceptions and lacunae relative to Hugo’s characters was the catalyst for this book, which proposes a comprehensive reevaluation of the creation, role, and meaning of character in Hugo’s five major novels—Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les Misérables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L’Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (1874).6 For even if the majority of critics and Hugo scholars have, like Brombert, come to the conclusion that “the dramatic and psychological power of Hugo’s novels depends in large part on the creation of archetypal figures” (1), the significance, consequences, and reverberations of Hugo’s appropriation—and transformation—of the archetypal model of character in his fiction have yet to be brought fully into focus. Indeed, while many of the critics mentioned above (and particularly Brombert, Ubersfeld, Grossman, and Roman) treat character insightfully and in detailed analysis in their works, character is not the focal point of their inquiries.7 For all that has been compellingly proposed and argued about Hugo’s fiction and about his characters, a basic, fundamental question remains stubbornly unanswered: Why does Hugo create characters in the manner that he does? Using Hugo’s own very particular interest in how his readers understood his novels as its starting point, this study explores the ways in which Hugo, from his earliest conception of the novel, eschews what would come to be known as the realist notion of the representable individual in favor of a new kind of fiction in which character serves a conceptual, nonpsychological function. Through this exploration of Hugo’s vision of character, I strive to open a window into a greater understanding of the complexities and nuances that characterize both Hugo’s novel writing and the nineteenth-century French novel. For although the theoretical study of character has today more

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Introduction or less reached a critical impasse, the models proposed for understanding character by different schools of criticism have done much to advance our understanding of the workings of character in fiction.8 If none has, in the end, succeeded in reaching a comprehensive understanding of character, the theoretical contributions made to the study of character by narratology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and especially by reader-response criticism have been invaluable, and have all to some degree informed my work here. The renewed twentieth-century interest in character and character theory that has led to these contributions was in large part sparked by Vladimir Propp’s 1928 Morphologie du conte, in which the author presented a functional typology of the Russian fairy tale. Propp’s conception of character as a participant can be traced as far back as Aristotle’s “Poetics,” in which characters are essentially viewed as plot products.9 Other earlytwentieth-century Russian formalist critics, such as Tomashevsky, also worked to flesh out and develop function-oriented theories that classified characters according to their role in the text.10 French structuralists of the 1960s and 1970s integrated the formalists’ initial premises into various refined or synthesized models. A. J. Greimas simplified in his Sémantique structurale (1966) the character roles outlined in Propp’s morphology into six actant functions: sujet/objet; destinateur/ destinataire, and opposant/adjuvant, while Claude Brémond, in his Logique du récit (1973) also builds on Propp’s model in expanding it to include the anthropological dimensions of the system of language that makes up the text. The semiotic approach, advanced by Philippe Hamon in his influential essay “Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage,” proposes that characters should be interpreted as textual signs, “destinés à assurer la lisibilité du texte” (144). Hamon’s method of analysis divides characters in literature into three principal categories: personnages-référentiels, who correspond to people in the outside world (i.e., historical figures or social types); personnagesembrayeurs, who serve as the spokesperson for the author; and personnages-anaphores, who have a cohesive function in organizing a given text. In this way, Hamon takes more generally into account the entire system of characters at work in a given text, exploring both their actions and interactions.11

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Introduction The limitations of formalist, structuralist, and semiotic approaches have been well documented in that they fail to address the psychological essence of character as well as its historical limitations and constraints. This shortcoming is acknowledged by Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov in their article entitled “Personnage,” in which they concede that “refuser toute relation entre personnage et personne serait absurde: les personnages représentent des personnes, selon des modalités propres à la fiction” (Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage 286). Vincent Jouve also draws attention to the nature of this stumbling block: “L’immanentisme absolu mène à l’impasse. Le personnage (bien que donné par le texte) est toujours perçu par référence au-delà du texte—il réfère et renvoie à un monde posé hors langage” (L’EffetPersonnage dans le roman 11). Opposing methods, however, which have tried to view personnage precisely through its relation to personne, have not met with any greater success. On the contrary, these dynamic views of character, which consider character to be both imbedded in the text and completely detachable from it, to have a certain exterior autonomy, have brought the debate away from the text itself.12 Similarly, advances in psychoanalytical criticism, while certainly serving to illuminate both the relationship between a text and its reader (particularly in Freudian analysis) and the relationship between authors and the characters that they put into place, have nonetheless proved far less useful in evaluating characters’ relationships to the text.13 Reader-response criticism has perhaps the most successfully supplemented and built on the linguistic approach, in focusing its attention on the role of the reader.14 This approach, finetuned most recently by Jouve, asserts that the “figures construites par le texte ne prennent sens qu’à travers le lecteur, c’est le sujet lisant qui donne vie à l’œuvre” (13). In this way, character is seen as a point of communication between the text and the reader: it is a dynamic, active product or production of the reader’s interaction with the text. As Jouve specifies, “L’œuvre se prête [. . .] à différentes lectures, mais n’autorise pas n’importe quelle lecture. La liberté du lecteur est ellemême codée par le texte: il est difficile de savoir ce que chacun en fait, mais non comment chacun en use. La construction des

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Introduction signifiés, si elle appartient bien au destinataire, se fait sur la base des indications textuelles” (15). While emphasis is thus placed on the reader’s role in constructing character, the text nonetheless remains the base for this communication, as textual indications and coding guide and indeed determine the reader’s construction of character. Using an approach that combines attention to genre, narratology, and reader-response criticism with consideration of Hugo’s own critical and philosophical writings, my examination of character in Hugo’s fiction focuses on the way in which Hugo’s characters, although drawn from the archetypal quest model, are from their earliest incarnations transformed and redefined. In isolating and observing similarities both among Hugo’s characters and among his major novels, I work to develop a clearer understanding of the foundation of character for Hugo, which resides not in its true social or historical believability but in its ability to project an ideological discourse on history and society as a whole and in its ability to convey universal truths. To this end, the book is divided into three defining and organizing parts—Appearance, Reappearance, and Disappearance—each of which concentrates on an aspect of character that will allow us to flesh out its ultimate meaning in Hugo’s fictional universe.15 The first part, Appearance, traces in Chapters 1 (“The Archetype Transformed”) and 2 (“Hugo Novelist”) the important link between Hugo’s novels and the romance and melodramatic traditions, outlining the presence of archetypes, archetypal situations, myth, and melodramatic devices and elements in Hugo’s fiction.16 Yet Hugo’s relation to these modes veered away from traditional uses, as he did not use archetypes and melodramatic elements in his fiction to reinforce ethical truths (i.e., a postrevolutionary desire for moral imperatives to bolster social norms—villains punished through death, heroes rewarded, etc.), but rather to complicate and challenge them. This tradition of moral transparency is complicated in Hugo’s novels through the use of character. It is effectuated both through the way in which the characters are composed (as irreconcilable dialectical oppositions exist not only among the characters but within the characters themselves) and through their itineraries during the texts, itineraries that progressively drain the majority

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Introduction of the characters from the novels and subvert archetypal roles, as heroes commit suicide, adversaries go free, and children vanish. In this way, the semiotic process through which characters take on meaning through the progressive completion of the name assigned to them is paralleled by a simultaneous process of thematic depletion, as a great number of Hugo’s characters are discharged of both their fictional identities and roles during the course of their itineraries, which often culminate in their (anonymous) death and erasure from the fictional worlds that are put in place in the novels. Hugo’s connection to his reader is additionally explored in Chapter 2. For as Hugo repeatedly affirms in his own commentary, he has a keen interest in the (ideal) reader envisioned for his works. Financially stable and secure in an era when writers were increasingly forced to take into account commercial concerns, Hugo was able to subordinate the real nineteenth-century reader to this ideal one, and his novels are encoded with elements pushing this reader (le lecteur pensif) to go beyond what is simply presented on the diegetical level and play an active role in uncovering the larger meanings in his novels. Both the destabilized quality of the narration and the multiple digressions that Hugo inserts in his novels serve to encourage the reader’s “thoughtful” involvement. In this way, the reader is prodded by Hugo to reach a higher level of understanding and experience, one that does not so much change, but rather enriches his or her interpretation of actions, settings, and events, and allows for a greater comprehension of the many layers in each of Hugo’s novels, including and especially those related to character. The second part of the study, Reappearance, begins with a discussion of the concept and practice of type character in the nineteenth century and looks specifically in Chapter 3 at Hugo’s very particular conception of type (“Hugo and Type Character”). Chapter 4 (“Character as Template”) categorizes the primary reappearing types in Hugo’s novels, organizing them into three major categories based on their level of characterization, their accessibility to the reader, and their complexity. The first category comprises characters who are the least developed, highly symbolic in nature, and marked primarily by one defining trait or quality that is reinforced throughout their

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Introduction presence in the story. The second category groups the character of the hero’s adversary, who is double in nature but is rigidly locked into this duality and is faced as a result with a dilemma that he or she is unable to resolve and that most often leads to death. The third studies Hugo’s protagonists, the characters who attain a true level of complexity through their traversal of the novel, whose double, polarized natures are emphasized throughout their itineraries and who undergo a metamorphosis or transfiguration as depicted through a process of crisis and conversion that allows for the eventual reconciliation of their oppositions (through their deaths) outside the social world portrayed. Chapter 5 (“Reconfigurations”) first examines the principle of continuation in Hugo’s fiction. For while the worlds of these novels—which take us from medieval France, to post-revolutionary France, to Restoration France, to late seventeenthcentury England, to revolutionary France—were never unified by Hugo in the way that Balzac formalized the Comédie humaine or in the way that Zola preconceived Les RougonMacquart, the striking structural and contextual similarities among them invite us nonetheless to read them in light of each other. Yet in the end, Hugo’s novels do not so much cumulatively add up to a cohesive whole as repeatedly retell the same story, each building upon similar thematic and ideological concerns. This philosophy of repetition and continuation was acknowledged by Hugo near the end of his career (“Dans mon œuvre, les livres se mêlent comme les arbres dans une forêt”17 ) and had been announced as early as in the preface to his famously unperformable play Cromwell (1827), in which he boldly and confidently affirmed that the author planned only to “corriger un ouvrage [. . .] dans un autre ouvrage” (3: 86).18 This method indeed suggests that Hugo already viewed each subsequent work in his career as an opportunity to attempt to rework and clarify the organizing principles of its predecessor.19 The second part of the chapter turns to the significance of the presence of two other character patterns in Hugo’s fiction: historical figures and collective characters. For in the same way that Hugo used archetypes and melodramatic elements in his fiction to complicate and challenge ethical truths, these repeated and reconfigured character patterns are

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Introduction additionally put into place—on the largest level—to complicate and challenge the reader’s understanding of both the real historical and social world and the historical and social worlds put into place in the novels. Part 3 of the study, Disappearance, works to uncover in Chapters 6 (“The Poetics of Death”) and 7 (“Decoding Social Exclusion”) the significance of the spectacular, self-imposed deaths of Hugo’s heroes that conclude the novels, examining the ways in which the collapse of the archetypal model on which Hugo’s characters are based is further complicated by their progressive dispossession, depletion, and erasure from the texts. These deaths point to one of the major stakes in Hugo’s fiction, as they are rooted in the characters’ fundamental inability to maintain connections to other characters or to escape from exclusion (be it personal or societal) through the formation or forging of new connections. In this way, character is used in Hugo’s fictional enterprise to project a social discourse spanning the forty-three years that separate Notre-Dame de Paris and Quatrevingt-treize on the necessity of connection or inclusion to survival, whether it be based on familial inclusion as figured through kinship (founded on blood ties), on spiritual adoption, or on another form of reciprocal connection or affection. Indeed, Hugo’s novels—for all of the humanitarian discourse that can be found in them—do little in the end to either restore or build faith in the ordered, existing social world. On the contrary, each, while promulgating the possibility of moral ascendancy, simultaneously and repeatedly puts into question through the characters’ exclusion the imperatives of not only the historical and social world depicted, but of history and society as a whole. The progressive textual depletion of character is the motor that propels this vision, as the great majority of Hugo’s characters only find acceptance, transcendence, and reconciliation of their internal oppositions, affirmation, and indeed a kind of completion outside of this social world. Chapter 7 concludes this exploration of death in Hugo’s novels with a study of the contexts into which Hugo’s characters are placed, examining specifically the heroes’ relationships to their surroundings. Called “cette sorte de personnage muet” (3: 63) by Hugo in the preface to Cromwell, place figures promi-

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Introduction nently in the configuration of each of his novels as the social exclusion of the majority of Hugo’s characters is in large part mirrored by a spatial one. The social space of each novel is explored through the study of open and closed spaces inscribed in the novels, as open space highlights the Hugolian hero’s exclusion, and closed (social) space is most often closed off to the hero. Hugo’s simultaneous use of vertical space—which exceeds the limitations of linear space—is also examined. As we will see, vertical spatial organization is in the end valorized as the descents and ascents of the Hugolian hero operate in direct relation to his ultimate depletion from and transcendence of the social world of the novel into the vast—and unrepresentable—expanses of the universe. On the largest level, this process of simultaneous reduction and expansion is at the core of both Hugo’s conception of character and of his conception of the novel, as Hugo, long before character is formally called into question by the twentiethcentury mort du personnage, decentralizes and destabilizes in his fictional works the notion of character as representation in a way that is ultimately very modern. While Hugo shares with the realist novelists of his century a sharp critical eye for the limitations and failings of the contemporary social world, his characters are in no way sociologically or psychologically determined; on the contrary, by composing them in a manner that draws attention to what is “unreal” about them, by making them the means—and not the ends—for the transmission of a larger message, Hugo liberates his characters from the finite boundaries of the text itself. My conclusion accounts for the modernity of this vision, and discusses the amazing popular heritage of Hugo’s fictional characters, who, precisely as a result of their often-derided composition, have enjoyed a strong and sustained afterlife in fresh and new contexts and media. Larger than life by design—not by flaw—Hugo’s characters provide us not only with much pleasure, but, as I hope this study will elucidate, fertile ground for inquiry into larger and essential questions about character-making in nineteenthcentury French fiction and about the ways in which character generates meaning. For through his characters, that message in which Hugo so firmly believed will continue to be borne forward to each new generation.

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Part 1 Appearance

Chapter One

The Archetype Transformed

In his review of Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, which appeared in the first edition of La Muse française in July of 1823 and was later reworked and republished in Littérature et philosophie mêlées (1834), Hugo provides us with his earliest musings on the novel as a genre. In the review, he both praises Scott’s epic and colorful conception of the form and proposes and promotes—in terms that would become representative of Hugo’s inflated rhetoric—his own developing vision of what the novel should be: “Après le roman pittoresque, mais prosaïque, de Walter Scott, il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque, mais poétique, réel, mais idéal, vrai, mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère” (5: 131). This new novel to be created would take a very different direction in Hugo’s fictional endeavors from the novels of another Scott admirer, Balzac, who, in the 1842 “Avant-Propos” that outlined the unification of his past and future works into the Comédie humaine, focused his praise on Scott’s ability to paint the “infinie variété de la nature humaine” (11).1 While Balzac used Scott’s example to chronicle the “social species” that generated “l’histoire oubliée par tant d’historiens, celle des mœurs” (1: 12), setting himself up as the secretary who would transcribe the truths of French society, Hugo drew from the model of Scott the notion of a kind of refracted realism through which universal truths were amplified and rendered clear by the novelist’s art. The role of the novelist, as Hugo conceived of it, was thus to: [. . .] exprimer dans une fable intéressante une vérité utile. Et, une fois cette idée fondamentale choisie, cette action

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Chapter One explicative inventée, l’auteur ne doit-il pas chercher, pour la développer, un mode d’exécution qui rende son roman semblable à la vie, l’imitation pareille au modèle? Et la vie n’est-elle pas un drame bizarre où se mêlent le bon et le mauvais, le beau et le laid, le haut et le bas, loi dont le pouvoir n’expire que hors de la création? (5: 129–30)

This concept of an all-encompassing art was further developed in Hugo’s celebrated romantic manifesto, the preface to his unperformable play Cromwell (1827), in which human and literary history is divided into three principal periods: les temps primitifs, les temps antiques, and les temps modernes. The modern period (which spans the entire Christian era) is characterized by the drame, a form that embraces and exposes the dualism inherent to the human condition, thus incorporating all elements of the real. Included in and essential to this totalizing vision is the representation of the grotesque: “le plus riche source que la nature puisse ouvrir à l’art” (3: 54). The grotesque, says Hugo, which was in its infancy during ancient times, comes into its own during the modern period with writers like Shakespeare, who used it to render the sublime more intense: “Il semble [. . .] que le grotesque soit un point de départ d’où l’on s’élève vers le beau avec une perception plus fraîche et plus excitée” (3: 54). This requirement for totality, however, in no way implies one of true “reality.” Distinguishing between “truth” in representation and “reality” itself, Hugo demarcates his unique conception of the depiction of the real in affirming that “l’art ne peut donner la chose même” (3: 70). As he specifies, “Il faut donc que le drame soit un miroir de concentration qui, loin de les affaiblir, ramasse et condense les rayons colorants, qui fasse d’une lueur une lumière, d’une lumière une flamme” (3: 70). The principal function of the drame for Hugo is, in this way, to condense and amplify the real so as to yield from it greater truths. While the purpose of the preface to Cromwell was primarily to meditate on the conditions necessary to a theatrical renaissance in the nineteenth century, the overarching artistic conceptions it presented were in no way limited to the theater. The preface also contained the seeds for what would germinate and grow into many of the organizing principles of Hugo’s lyrical and fictional writings, such as man’s inherent duality, the coex16

The Archetype Transformed istence of antitheses in the universe, the tension between cyclical and progressive notions of time and history, and the essential and prophetic role of the poet-author. This overlap is underscored by Hugo’s very definition of the term drame, which calls for the erasure or blurring of lines between genres so as to create a “poésie complète” (3: 58). Drame thus signifies for Hugo a totalizing form in which everything is seen and can take place, where “le poète remplisse pleinement le but multiple de l’art, qui est d’ouvrir au spectateur un double horizon, d’illuminer à la fois l’intérieur et l’extérieur des hommes” (3: 71) and where “Comme Dieu, le vrai poète est présent partout à la fois dans son œuvre” (3: 72).2 Even prior to putting these germinating theoretical ideas on paper in La Muse française and the preface to Cromwell, Hugo set a number of them into motion in his Scott-inspired first novel, Han d’Islande, published in January of 1823.3 Set in faroff Norway, Han d’Islande interweaves the stories of an Icelandic monster, a young couple frustrated in love, a wrongly imprisoned count’s battle to free himself and clear his name, and a miners’ rebellion. Neither Scott’s influence upon Hugo nor that of the tradition of the roman noir went unnoticed in the commentary on this, one of the first “historical” novels introduced into French literature.4 As Hugo himself confirmed in the preface to the anonymous first edition, Scott’s trademark local color (couleur locale) was zealously depicted, or perhaps, more accurately, parodied (“La partie pittoresque de son roman a été l’objet d’un soin particulier; qu’on y rencontre fréquemment des K, des Y, des H et des W [. . .]” [2: 86]), and gothic elements, such as torture, mutilation, skulls, cadavers, and gory morgue scenes, are multiplied throughout the novel. The influence on the novel of Hugo’s own difficult romance with Adèle Foucher has also been well documented and has often been used as guide for reading the love story of Ordener Guldenlew and Ethel Schumacker. Hugo alluded to this personal dimension of the novel in a letter to Adèle of February 16, 1822: “Je voulais peindre une jeune fille, qui réalisât l’idéal de toutes les imaginations fraîches et poétiques [. . .]; c’est toi, mon Adèle bien-aimée, que je voulais peindre [. . .]. Je voulais placer près de cette jeune fille un jeune homme, non tel que je suis, mais tel que je voudrais être” (2: 1168). Yet for all of these

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Chapter One outside forces that converge in inspiring the text, the nascent Hugolian concept of the all-encompassing novel, the drame in which the narrator-guide is the interpreter of the universe, remains at the center of the multilayered Han d’Islande. Indeed, many core features of what will come to be representative of Hugo’s fictional world—whether manifest or latent—are present in the novel, from the duality of the title character, Han, who is in a certain sense redeemed by his paternal love, to the incorporation of the grotesque through the portrayal of evil in its purest undiluted forms, to the narrator’s presentation and interpretation of the strangeness of this far-off world in acting as guide to and translator of the Norwegian landscape for the uninitiated reader, to the ideological tension between collective and individual destiny and progress. Han d’Islande, lambasted by both Stendhal and Lamartine in separate reviews, met with neither critical nor real public success.5 But whatever the critical reaction, it is clear that with this first fictional endeavor, Hugo set himself apart—if not yet in terms of aesthetics or poetics then already in practice—from what was developing around him in the domain of the novel. Writers such as Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, and Benjamin Constant had tested the waters of this unproven form with success in the first decades of the century with works such as Atala (1801), René (1802), Delphine (1802), and Adolphe (1816), leading critics like Nodier and Bonald to advance the idea that the novel was the perfect form for depicting the new French society that had emerged following the French revolution. In this way, the new and serious French novel was to put society under a microscope, focusing on and revealing its moral and ideological underpinnings. At the same time, the momentum of the romantic rage for Scott propelled the genre of the historical novel into vogue, reinforcing the notion that the novel could have instructive and even moral dimensions and thus be a positive, beneficial force. The 1820s were as a result a time of both theoretical inquiry about the novel and its role and practice by authors such as Vigny (Cinq-Mars 1826), the stillunknown Balzac (Les Chouans 1829), and Mérimée (Chronique du règne de Charles IX 1829) that combined to spark a major rehabilitation of the form and forge the path (or paths) for its dominance in the middle of the century.6 Hugo, in his next two

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The Archetype Transformed fictional endeavors, Bug-Jargal and the extremely successful Notre-Dame de Paris, continued, however, to turn away from the depiction of contemporary French society, the historical novel à la Scott, and true genre distinction, canvassing more sweeping concerns and conceiving of his novels as the place where poetry, theater, and prose converged and melded into the totalizing whole outlined in his early commentary on the genre. This Hugolian novel, with its gaze turned outward toward universal truths rather than inward toward the changes occurring in French society, had its closest origins in the romance tradition of medieval courtly literature, in which societal and ethical truths were reinforced through the clear triumph of good over evil. Fundamental to the romance was its focus on the individual hero who grows in self-knowledge and achieves fulfillment in overcoming a series of obstacles.7 Indeed, just as in the romance, at the core of Hugo’s totalizing vision of the novel is a heroic quest that gives the narrative’s disparate elements their cohesion in propelling each hero toward both a personal goal and a larger ideal. Richard B. Grant draws attention to this motif at the beginning of his study of image, myth, and prophecy in Hugo’s narratives, observing that “In one way or another, the path that the hero chooses, the obstacles that he faces, and the goal that he seeks will form the guiding threads of the narrative” (The Perilous Quest xiv). The connections, both direct and indirect, to mythical patterns, as well as the overwhelmingly dialectical nature of Hugo’s characters, also attest to the strong influence of the romance tradition, which had been reincarnated most recently and notably into the popular English gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.8 In his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye advances a theory of fictional modes in Western literature based on the mimetic quality of the work, arguing that all literary genres are derived from an archetypal quest-myth that connects individual patterns and imagery to timeless universal forms. In this way, the structural principles of literature “are to be derived from archetypal and anagogic criticism, the only kinds that assume a larger context of literature as a whole” (134). Frye characterizes the romance mode as the area lying between myth (in which structural principles are isolated) and naturalism (in

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Chapter One which the same structural principles fit into a context of plausibility). This mode—which, like the romance genre that he defines in the study’s fourth essay, is indeed the most appropriate to discussions of Hugo’s work—has the tendency “to displace myth in a human direction and yet, in contrast to ‘realism,’ to conventionalize content in an idealized direction” (137). The displacement of myth is effectuated precisely through the earthly “quest” of the hero or protagonist, which is linked to myth by “some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like” (137). In Frye’s schema, both the romance mode and the romance genre9 are populated by stereotypical, mythically based characters, or archetypal figures. These figures are prototypes (an original pattern of a class of things) that represent the typical and essential elements shared by all varieties of that class. As Frye goes on to specify: “The essential difference between the novel and romance lies in the conception of characterization. The romancer does not attempt to create ‘real people’ so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes” (304). The archetypal figure of the romance thus does not represent personae or social masks or specific, life-like characters, but can be understood on the simplest level as containing a number of essential characteristics that are primitive and universal rather than sophisticated or individual. The archetype, which is most often of a dialectical nature, is thus devoid of any real psychological depth or coherence. While Hugo’s characters and their textual itineraries do not all fit neatly into Frye’s proposed outline of the romance mode or genre, the romance quest, with its journey, struggle, and ultimate exaltation of the archetypal hero, is indeed present in all of Hugo’s fictional undertakings, with an implicit mythical pattern operating within the world of human experience depicted. Han d’Islande, for example, gains much of its unity from the quest motif that winds its way through the novel. In order to prove himself worthy of Ethel, Ordener sets out to regain from the monstrous Han the papers that confirm Schumacker’s innocence. This quest takes him from forest, to sea, to battle with the monster, to prosecution for treason, to near death.10 Yet no sooner is this quest motif established in Hugo’s first novel than

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The Archetype Transformed it is complicated and redirected in favor of a less clear resolution. For although Ordener and Ethel are united at the novel’s close through the literal fusion of their two families into future generations (“De l’alliance d’Ordener et d’Ethel naquit la famille de Danneskiold” [2: 420]), the social order thus reestablished, the results of the quest itself are far from black and white, and its very purpose is called into question. This ambiguity is observed by Kathryn Grossman, who specifies that “Ordener’s whole quest is, in fact, useless because Han has never possessed Schumacker’s papers. Their opposition does not revolve around Gill’s skull, nor does the young hero emerge victorious from their duel” (Early Novels 32). Indeed, it is clear that Ordener falls short of fulfilling the role of the fearless hero performing great feats; he is often obtuse and gauche, and the papers that he spends the majority of the novel looking for turn out to have been right in front of him the whole time.11 In addition, Ordener’s adversary, the eponymous Han, dies of his own choice after voluntarily turning himself in to the authorities, not as a result of being brought down, captured, and slain by the young hero. The quest motif is in this way used in the novel for other purposes than the simple reinforcement of moral imperatives. In Hugo’s second novel, Bug-Jargal, the story of a violent slave revolt that takes place in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti) in 1791, both the imperatives of the quest and the hero’s archetypal role are similarly muddied, this time by the actions of the good-hearted but wavering Léopold D’Auverney, whose misjudgments cost—among other things—the life of the selfless and fraternal Pierrot, also known as Bug-Jargal, a prince who has fallen into slavery. Like Ordener, D’Auverney does not so much act but is acted upon; but unlike Ordener, he ends up the victim of his own lack of insight. It is Bug who is in many ways presented as the novel’s true hero as a result of his universal, mythical qualities and sublime self-sacrifice. Victor Brombert draws attention to this shift in observing that “The truly remarkable feature of Hugo’s slave hero is that he [. . .] affirms through his example the ethics of universal man” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 22). Yet any sacrifice on Bug’s part is proven to have been in vain. For as the novel’s concluding note informs us, not only have Bug and Marie died

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Chapter One as a result of the slave revolt, but also Thadée and Rask, as well as D’Auverney, who, to drive home the failure of the insurrection for all involved, is condemned—after having been killed in battle—as an “ennemi de la patrie” (2: 704) by the newly installed Revolutionary government. Any reinforcement of moral clarity as filtered through the fulfillment of the hero’s quest itinerary is accordingly and unfailingly compromised. Grant points to the implications of D’Auverney’s opaque role by noting that “All romance tales, if one look carefully enough, tend to project mythic plots. It is any variation in the pattern that is important. Here the variation is this very confusion of roles which in turn is caused by the weakening of the traditional hero. [. . .] in Bug-Jargal a clear, vital center is lacking” (The Perilous Quest 26). This central ambiguity is additionally noted by Grossman: “The dyslexic Léopold fatally mistakes friends and foes and ends in misery [. . .] Léopold remains impenetrable to his peers, his political opponents, and his military superiors alike” (Early Novels 80). As in Han d’Islande, Hugo’s appropriation and transformation of the romance model in Bug-Jargal clearly has another aim. What other purposes does Hugo have in mind? In looking at the ways in which Hugo continues to appropriate and transform the romance model and archetypal hero in his five subsequent novels—Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Misérables, Les Travailleurs de la mer, L’Homme qui rit, and Quatrevingttreize—we will see that Hugo repeatedly uses character and the quest motif not, as in the romance genre, to affirm ethical truths and reinforce social norms, but rather to complicate and challenge them. While critics such as Grant, Brombert, and Grossman have done much to point out the deviations from the traditional quest motif in Hugo’s novels, confirming that Hugo reconstructs the model in favor of one of his own design, the connection between character and the breakdown of the clarity of the romance model in Hugo’s novels can profit from further exploration. Figured through a system of depletion, in which clear moral imperatives are diluted both through the protagonists’ double natures and the doubling of characters and then dissipated as the characters are removed from the fictional worlds of texts through their deaths (as opposed to one of completion, in which characters take on meaning through the

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The Archetype Transformed fulfillment of their textual roles), character is not, as early critics argued, the weakest part of Hugo’s fictional enterprise, but, in fact, the key to it, as the erosion of the romance model and its figures reflects a vision of the social world in which moral and functional categories no longer hold.

Transformation of the Romance Model Whether explicit, as in Les Travailleurs de la mer, or implicit, as in Notre-Dame de Paris, each of Victor Hugo’s major novels sets into motion a heroic quest to fulfill a goal or an ideal typical of the romance. From Quasimodo’s struggle to shelter and protect the persecuted Esmeralda, to Gilliatt’s Herculean effort to salvage Lethierry’s lost steamboat, la Durande, each of Hugo’s protagonists are defined by a central pursuit that furnishes the novel with unifying threads. In this way, Jean Valjean takes up in Les Misérables the benevolent Bishop Myriel’s challenge, seeking his redemption through good deeds and actions; Gwynplaine in L’Homme qui rit endeavors, following the restoration of his birthright and his seat in the House of Lords, to counter the blind rigidity of societal systems and forces; and the noble Gauvain in Quatrevingt-treize strives to quell the royalist uprising in his native Vendée so as to bring his republican vision to fruition. Also as in the romance, in which, as Frye advances, we find “Jung’s libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively” (304), the natures and roles of Hugo’s heroines and villains are on a first level clearly established, with the “villain” functioning as the character (or characters) who oppose the hero in his quest, and the heroine (whether she is real or figurative) presented as the quest’s reward or prize.12 Both these central characters and those who surround them in minor roles are, as Frye qualifies for the romance, “stylized figures” (304) created through three principal characterization methods that put their archetypal qualities into motion. The first is by a narrative strategy that constantly seeks to insert characters into the general or larger archetypal category to which they belong. In this way, the names (noms propres) that are attributed to the characters are used less than general appellations, and characters are most often situated in relation to the timeless

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Chapter One universal group into which they fall. In Quatrevingt-treize, for example, Michelle Fléchard is rarely designated by either her first or last name; rather, she is nearly uniformly referred to as la femme or la mère, which underscores both her categorical role as a French peasant woman and her central, archetypal role of mother.13 Similarly, in Notre-Dame de Paris, Claude Frollo is more often referred to as l’archidiacre or le prêtre than Claude, Frollo, or Claude Frollo, which serves to highlight both his functional and categorical roles.14 Descriptions of characters frequently reinforce these types of generalizing references in situating the character directly in relation to his or her corresponding mold or context based on personality traits, physical characteristics, or social composition. In this way, for example, in Quatrevingt-treize Cimourdain is characterized by the narrator as being “de ces hommes qui ont en eux une voix, et qui l’écoutent” (15: 347); in Les Travailleurs de la mer Clubin is described as belonging to “une des variétés de l’honnête homme, et une des plus appréciées” (12: 609); and in Les Misérables Fantine is depicted as “un de ces êtres comme il en éclôt, pour ainsi dire, au fond du peuple” (11: 136).15 The second way in which archetypal qualities are transposed onto Hugo’s characters is through a characterization technique that leaves the characters primitively sketched in terms of their overall physical descriptions in favor of one or two dominating physical aspects or personality traits used to give the character its unity throughout the text. The character thus becomes identifiable to the reader—and to the novel’s other characters— by the mention or display of this particular characteristic. Examples of this include Frollo’s baldness in Notre-Dame de Paris (“le personnage au front chauve” [4: 66]) through which the priest’s identity is revealed on several occasions during the course of the novel; Jean Valjean’s unusual strength and charitableness in Les Misérables, which often serves to unmask him to Javert (for example, it is when Valjean becomes known as “le mendiant qui fait l’aumône” [11: 365] that Javert first becomes suspicious that he is still alive); and Gauvain’s physical stature and angelic beauty in Quatrevingt-treize, which make him easily recognizable to those around him (“Sa haute taille dans cette clarté le faisait visible aux hommes de la barricade” [15: 407]; “Son cou blanc faisait songer à une femme, et son

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The Archetype Transformed œil héroïque et souverain faisait songer à un archange” [15: 508]).16 The third method used by Hugo to render his characters archetypal is their direct and indirect relation to myth and mythical patterns. This is achieved in two principal ways. The first is through the direct relation of characters to mythical figures. For example, Gilliatt, whose heroic undertaking to rescue la Durande in Les Travailleurs de la mer is described as a “lutte de Rien contre Tout, cette Iliade à un” (12: 752), feels the “fierté de cyclope, maître de l’air, de l’eau et du feu” (12: 688) when able to start a fire from raw materials upon the reef where the steamboat is trapped. In Quatrevingt-treize, Gauvain’s name is that of a virtuous medieval knight, and we learn in a chapter entitled “Un coin non trempé dans le Styx” (II, I, 3) that Cimourdain “était le Pygmalion d’une âme” (15: 350). These references not only provide the reader with essential implicit information, such as the extent of Gilliatt’s physical and mental prowess, Gauvain’s inherent goodness, and Cimourdain’s deep and unwavering love for the Gauvain that he helped to shape, but also serve to reinforce the characters’ representative natures and qualities through their relation to myth that belongs to collective consciousness.17 In this, Hugo veers away from ingraining his characters with any kind of personal psychology in favor of implanting an overarching metaphysical psychology in his novels that highlights the universality of his characters.18 The second way in which Hugo uses myth to render his characters archetypal is through the heroes’ quest itineraries, which are characterized by a series of actions that often culminate in some type of descent that is mythical in nature: Quasimodo swoops down from the protected enclave of the cathedral to save Esmeralda; Jean Valjean (who has already “risen” from the dead in his entrance into the convent) drags a dying Marius through the Parisian sewers; Gilliatt battles the octopus in its underwater lair; Gwynplaine discovers his true identity of Lord Clancharlie in the torture chamber beneath the Southwark prison; and Gauvain descends to the dungeon of his ancestral home, la Tourgue, in order to free Lantenac. In this descent, the hero is challenged—whether physically, morally, or ideologically—and always emerges victorious from the struggle.

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Chapter One In “Chaos vaincu: Victor Hugo et le roman initiatique,” Léon Cellier sharpens our understanding of the mythical quest patterns in Hugo’s fiction by fleshing out the romantic novelists’ appropriation of myth: “Les romantiques ont tourné autour de l’idée d’œuvre initiatique, c’est-à-dire d’une action montrant l’âme soumise à une série d’épreuves et qui finit par accéder à un stade supérieur” (214).19 Such initiating trials and tribulations are figured precisely through the kind of “itinéraire difficile” (218) that traverses Hugo’s novels through the romance quest motif. In this way, Cellier specifies that Gwynplaine in L’Homme qui rit, whose childhood trek through Portland is likened to the “travail d’Hercule” (14: 110), has to navigate “un triple labyrinthe: celui de Portland, celui de Weymouth et celui de Melcomb-Regis” (218) so as to be permanently joined with Dea and attain salvation. Yet unlike the romance, which invariably results in the hero’s success and assured survival, the outcome of this initiation quest—le salut— can only come through the hero’s death: “Mourir pour renaître, telle est la grande loi initiatique” (218).20 The hero’s death is central to the transformation of the romance model in Hugo’s novels, as the quest’s completion is not rewarded through the clear reestablishment of the order of the black-and-white romance world as a result of the hero’s victory, but through the hero’s individual, private, moral, and often anonymous ascendancy in death. While Hugo, in a prefatory project for L’Homme qui rit, countered the charge that his novels were fatalistic (“Il [l’auteur] pense, quant à lui, que la série de ses œuvres est une série d’affirmations de l’Ame” [14: 387]), the deaths of Hugo’s heroes—whether or not they promulgate the possibility of personal ascension and triumph through salut—nonetheless point to the breakdown of the moral transparency and precision inherent to the romance. Rather than culminating with the hero’s reintegration into society, the hero’s quest culminates in his recognition of his irresolvable disharmony with the world around him: Hugo’s heroes die because they can only find acceptance, transcendence, affirmation, and a kind of completion that has been denied to them outside of the perimeters depicted in which good and evil have lost their sharpness and comprehensibility. As Brombert establishes, there is in Hugo’s novels “une stratégie

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The Archetype Transformed consistant à déplacer le héros traditionnel au profit d’une nouvelle conception du héros et de l’épopée” (“Victor Hugo: La Fin du héros ou l’éclipse du père” 11), one in which the hero’s inability to integrate is emphasized. This inherent discord is underscored by the fact that Hugo’s protagonists’ deaths are in every case self-imposed: Quasimodo, whom we discover in the last chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris, “avait disparu de Notre-Dame le jour de la mort de l’égyptienne et de l’archidiacre” (4: 341), is found two years later at Montfaucon, and, as the narrator informs us: “il était évident qu’il n’avait pas été pendu” (4: 342); Jean Valjean, following Cosette’s marriage to Marius, literally wills himself to die at the close of Les Misérables; Gilliatt and Gwynplaine both choose to commit ocean suicides at the conclusions of Les Travailleurs de la mer and L’Homme qui rit; and Gauvain is voluntarily guillotined in the final passage of Quatrevingt-treize for his decision to free Lantenac. This new and redefined conception of the hero, which is solidified by the hero’s death, is put into motion from the outset of each novel. For at the same time that he establishes the recognizable and universal natures typical of romance characters, Hugo additionally displaces the archetypal model by instilling within his protagonists a central (irreconcilable) duality not typical of one-dimensional romance characters. This double nature is clearly tied to Hugo’s notion of the totalizing drame, in which, as he outlines in the preface to Cromwell, the unyielding depiction of the sublime and the grotesque are central in revealing the two inherent sides of man: “La poésie née du christianisme, la poésie de notre temps est donc le drame; le caractère du drame est le réel; le réel résulte de la combinaison toute naturelle de deux types, le sublime et le grotesque, qui se croisent dans le drame, comme ils se croisent dans la vie et dans la création” (3: 60). As the sublime and the grotesque are simultaneously present in each and every man, any true representation must embrace this “poésie [. . .] dans l’harmonie des contraires” (3: 60). Hugo thus traces the birth of the allencompassing drame to the “jour où le christianisme a dit à l’homme: ‘Tu es double, tu es composé de deux êtres’ [. . .]” (3: 59) from whence nothing else mattered except “cette lutte de tous les instants entre deux principes opposés qui sont

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Chapter One toujours en présence dans la vie, et qui se disputent l’homme depuis le berceau jusqu’à la tombe” (3: 60). In this, the presence of the sublime and the grotesque is synonymous with that of good and evil in man. The clarity of the archetypal and mythical nature of Hugo’s heroes is thus blurred by the presence of this duality or antithesis (the homo duplex), against which they struggle throughout their trajectories. For Quasimodo and Gwynplaine, whose external disfigurements clash with their internal makeup, this duality is figured through physical polarity; for Gauvain, whose republican and royalist sides are strongly incompatible, it is figured through political polarity; for Gilliatt, in whom nature and society clash, it is figured through societal polarity; and for Jean Valjean, in whom lives the saint and the convict, it is figured through moral polarity.21 Indeed, as in Hugo’s conception of realism, in which core truths are condensed and amplified, the dialectics of the romance schema are also condensed and amplified in Hugo’s novels so as to freely coexist within Hugo’s heroes. In this way, the protagonists face a double bind as they struggle against both their external opposition to society and their internal oppositions that together create an “abîme intérieur” (Albouy, La Création mythologique 191). As Albouy observes, “Aux yeux de Hugo, en effet, le monde intérieur s’égale et est semblable au vaste univers” (191). This is equally as true for Gwynplaine, who perfectly incarnates the beau and the laid (“Derrière ce rire il y avait une âme” [14: 183]), as for Jean Valjean, who “avait cela de particulier qu’on pouvait dire qu’il portait deux besaces; dans l’une il avait les pensées d’un saint, dans l’autre les redoutables talents d’un forçat” (11: 356), as for the noble Gauvain, who has in his “cerveau d’aristocrate [. . .] l’âme du peuple” (15: 349).22 This double nature or central duality is further complicated by the doubling of characters, both through the multiplication of the romance schema’s participants and the transmutation of opposing characters in each other. While the romance schema operates principally on the above-mentioned model of hero, heroine, and villain, Hugo—all while he sets this basic configuration into motion on a first level—renders it opaque through the doubling of certain characters’ roles. This is effectuated, for example, in Les Misérables through the presence of

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The Archetype Transformed a secondary hero in the form of Marius, whose itinerary echoes numerous elements of that of Jean Valjean. Similarly, the role of heroine in Les Misérables is also complicated by the multiplication of female figures in Fantine, Cosette, and Eponine. The clear-cut romance role of villain is compromised as well in Hugo’s novels by its division into two distinct and important characters: the villain and the adversary. These divided roles are assumed respectively by Phoebus and Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris; by Thénardier and Javert in Les Misérables; by Clubin and the octopus in Les Travailleurs de la mer; by Barkilphedro and Josiane in L’Homme qui rit; and by l’Imânus and Lantenac in Quatrevingt-treize. While the actual villain—defined by his irremediable moral decay—has, in the end, little or no physical contact or any kind of true conflict with the hero, the composition of the hero’s adversary serves to complicate and to subvert further the romance model as the adversary often shares a profound and significant connection to the hero. For example, in Quatrevingt-treize, Lantenac and Gauvain are bound by their common blood and heritage, while Frollo and Quasimodo are bound through the ties of adoption in Notre-Dame de Paris. In Les Misérables, parallel origins directly relate Javert, issue of a family of misérables (“Javert était né dans une prison d’une tireuse de cartes dont le mari était aux galères” [11: 169]), to the former convict Jean Valjean, while in L’Homme qui rit monstrous natures—be they real or inflicted by others—link Josiane and Gwynplaine (“Le monstre que tu es dehors, je le suis dedans” [14: 316]). Finally, in Les Travailleurs de la mer, Gilliatt and the octopus are both similarly isolated and misunderstood on land and in the sea.23 Just as the adversary’s opposition to the hero is not clearly demarcated, his destiny signals another transformation of the schematized outcome of the romance model. Although Frollo and the octopus are killed by Quasimodo and Gilliatt respectively, Javert and the Marquis de Lantenac are set free by Jean Valjean and Gauvain, and Josiane is removed from the mix. The destinies of these three characters are thus at odds with the archetypal romance model, for instead of being eliminated by the hero, they are either released or ultimately dismissed by him. And while Frollo is killed by Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, both Quasimodo’s remorse (“Oh! tout ce que j’ai

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Chapter One aimé!” [4: 341]) and the fact that Frollo has succeeded in orchestrating Esmeralda’s death serve to subvert this victory. In fact, the adversary is removed in each of Hugo’s novels from the hero’s direct path; yet this removal of the hero’s primordial obstacle in no way guarantees his success in the social world of the novel. On the contrary, the removal of the adversary and of other potential obstacles to the hero’s “victory” underscores in the end the erosion of the quest motif. For example, with no adversary in his way, there is no real reason why Jean Valjean should not assume his place in Cosette’s new life in Les Misérables, or for Gilliatt not to make good on Mess Lethierry’s marriage promise in Les Travailleurs de la mer. But the closer the protagonist comes to the quest’s goal, the more its logical (anticipated) outcome is blurred. In this way, at the moment when the uprising in Vendée has been crushed through Lantenac’s capture at the conclusion of Quatrevingt-treize, Gauvain cannot be satisfied with its result: subordinating political imperatives to human ones, Gauvain makes the decision to assume Lantenac’s place both in the dungeon and at the guillotine.24 This profoundly moral choice—made at his own peril—highlights Gauvain’s struggle with his greatest adversary: society and unyielding societal forces, as he is unable to equate Lantenac’s self-sacrificing act of freeing the Fléchard children with its political compensation. In each of Hugo’s novels, the disappearance of the fictional adversary and limited interaction with the character of the villain serve to underscore the hero’s greater opposition to and powerlessness against the adversary of the world around him, which he is unable to change and in which true moral imperatives no longer hold. Anne Ubersfeld has observed a similar pattern in Hugo’s theatrical corpus: “le véritable adversaire du héros n’est pas un autre être ou ses propres passions, mais un univers solide à quoi il se heurte rudement” (Le Roi et le bouffon 588). As Ubersfeld specifies, the solitary nature of the hero’s struggle against society and social forces is amplified by the fact that the actantial role of support character (adjuvant) is rarely assigned by Hugo in his novels and plays (404). Accordingly, his theatrical and fictional heroes are alone in combating the social and historical world into which they are inserted. The particular importance of the hero’s struggle against the larger forces of the universe

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The Archetype Transformed and the extent to which this struggle is best captured by the novelistic form is additionally highlighted by Hugo himself in prefatory commentary to L’Homme qui rit, and is once again figured through his conception of the drame: “Il y a deux sortes de drame: le drame qu’on peut jouer, et le drame qu’on ne peut pas jouer. Ce dernier participe de l’épopée. Aux personnages humains il mêle, comme la nature elle-même, d’autres personnages, les forces, les éléments, l’infini, inconnu” (14: 388). Hugo’s heroes are thus not only incapable of changing the world around them, but the abîme intérieur created by their oppositions is also unable to be reconciled in this world. In this way, Gwynplaine’s prophetic speech to the House of Lords in L’Homme qui rit (“Mylords, je viens vous apprendre une nouvelle. Le genre humain existe” [14: 348]) falls on deaf ears, when, despite a profound effort to control his face-altering rictus, he breaks into laughter: “La contagion fut immédiate. Il y avait sur l’assemblée un nuage; il pouvait crever en épouvante, il creva en joie. Le rire, cette démence épanouie, prit toute la chambre” (14: 350). Incapable of seeing beyond his deformed face, the Lords ignore Gwynplaine’s message, and he is all but ousted from his newly recovered seat as a peer. Similarly, in Les Travailleurs de la mer, Gilliatt, in whom nature and society are at odds, is unable to make good on the quest’s completion and reward when he overhears, upon his return to Guernsey, Déruchette’s declaration of love for Ebenezer. Literally transformed by nature during the course of his three-month rescue mission of la Durande (“Il était [. . .] en haillons, les coudes percés, la barbe longue, les cheveux hérissés, les yeux brûlés et rouges, la face écorchée, les poings saignants [. . .]. Quelquesunes des pustules de la pieuvre étaient encore visibles sur ses bras velus” [12: 775]),25 Gilliatt’s ability to integrate into the social world of the novel is ever more remote, and after assuring both Déruchette’s marital happiness with Ebenezer and the reconstruction of la Durande, he drowns himself. Opposed to a world that has lost its moral certitude, in which society itself has become the heroes’ greatest and most forceful and persistent adversary, and powerless to reconcile their internal oppositions within the confines of this world, Hugo’s protagonists are progressively drained from the fictional worlds of these five novels. The anonymous nature of their deaths—as

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Chapter One no physical or commemorative trace remains of Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, or Gwynplaine26—completes the subversion and indeed effectuates a collapse of the archetypal model, in which both the hero’s concrete identity and the collective memory of him are essential, unifying components. While the protagonists’ deaths, as Cellier proposes, do constitute a kind of “rebirth,” as it is through their deaths that they are able to find acceptance, transcendence, reconciliation of their internal oppositions, affirmation, and a kind of completion,27 what is nonetheless left at the close of Hugo’s novels is a vision of a social world that does little to gain our faith. Instead, we are reminded by each novel that historical existence—with its blindness, limitations, failures, and shortcomings—is incompatible with or at the very least less significant than the realization of individual moral potential.

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Chapter Two

Hugo Novelist

Smudging the Lines: Melodrama and Morality The unraveling of the archetypal romance model is mirrored and magnified by the transfer and subversion of codes and elements of another mode into Victor Hugo’s novels, that of melodrama, which took root in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a stage form in which moral imperatives were emphasized and reinforced through the polarized representation of good and evil. In this ethical or didactic goal, romance and melodrama function similarly, with the quest motif of romance generally replaced by the sensational elements and effects of melodrama. The advent and rise of melodrama is outlined by Peter Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination: The origins of melodrama can be accurately located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath. This is the epistemological moment which it illustrates and to which it contributes: the moment that symbolically, and really, marks the final liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch), the shattering of the myth of Christendom, the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society, and the invalidation of the literary forms—tragedy, comedy of manners—that depended on such a society. (14–15)

As a result of the radical transformation of established social and political structures, melodrama, “from its inception takes as its concern and raison d’être the location, expression, and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths” (15). Through the lucid and resolute depiction of the absolute triumph of

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Chapter Two virtue over vice, of good over evil, of right over wrong, theatrical melodrama thus assumed the role of transmitting and reaffirming (as the tragedy and the comedy of manners had done before it) core, collective, societal truths and norms in an era that was trying to compose and impose a new conception of social order.1 Frye, among others, has argued this didactic, communal, reaffirming purpose of melodrama: “In melodrama, two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience” (47). The essential elements of this conception of melodrama as a mode are also highlighted by Christopher Prendergast, who affirms that “The dominant function of melodrama appears [. . .] to be that of making available an uncomplicated moral reading of the universe, and of locating the subject in a secure world of moral representations, free from doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity” (Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama 8).2 Melodrama thus seeks to relocate and center an affirmation of ethical values around an individual or individuals; in this way, historical and social evils are evacuated in a cathartic resolution that clearly restores good over evil. From its earliest uses, however, while melodrama not only took hold of the stage but increasingly served to dramatize novels as well, it simultaneously took on a pejorative connotation based on low-grade theater and fiction that over-inflated dramatics.3 Some of the most potent criticisms of Hugo’s early novels concerned their excessively “melodramatic” aspects. Han d’Islande, with its overt villainy, the persecution of the noble (and innocent) Count Schumacker, and coups de théâtre, was criticized for engaging in emotionalism; while Bug-Jargal was disparaged for the overblown and implausible romantic and political rivalry of D’Auverney and Bug.4 Much of Hugo’s theater of the 1830s was similarly criticized for melodramatic elements and for rigid antithetical structures.5 For example, a review of Angelo, Tyran de Padoue that appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1835 (“Pourvu qu’il ait à sa disposition une salle gothique et une demi-douzaine de pourpoints brodés, il ramène à tout propos son éternelle antithèse de la passion dans le vide, de la magnanimité dans l’humiliation”6) disparages Hugo’s play for its formulaic nature. Yet Hugo’s theater did little—despite all it shared with the conventions and external trappings of melodrama (i.e., hyper34

Hugo Novelist bole, antithesis, exaggerated gesture, coups de théâtre, symbolic objects, emotionalism, polarization, etc.)—to achieve the desired effects of melodrama, to make “operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era” (Brooks 15). On the contrary, from Le Roi s’amuse to Lucrèce Borgia, in spite of the presence—and in some cases the dominance—of melodramatic dialectics and devices that prepare the audience for an outcome in which good will triumph over evil, Hugo’s plays most often have ambiguous or even immoral conclusions. For example, the King’s inappropriate behavior toward Blanche in Le Roi s’amuse and, moreover, the absence of accountability for it was seen as scandalously immoral; while Hernani’s actions and their consequences were criticized for their lack of clear motivation (or polarization, to employ a term more commonly associated with melodrama). Pixérécourt, a popular author of boulevard melodrama, indeed lamented the immorality of Hugo’s theater and of romantic drama in general, disassociating himself from it in claiming that: “in modern dramas, you find only monstrous crimes that revolt morality and one’s sense of shame.”7 Hugo repeatedly took the opportunity to react to such accusations of undercutting moral and ethical conclusions—as well as to those of outright immorality—in his prefatory commentary, drawing attention to the instructive benefits of theater, as, for example, in the preface to Angelo, Tyran de Padoue: “On ne saurait trop le redire, pour quiconque a médité sur les besoins de la société, auxquels doivent toujours correspondre les tentatives de l’art, aujourd’hui plus que jamais le théâtre est un lieu d’enseignement” (5: 268–69). Such overt didacticism, however, must not be taken at face value, as Hugo used it at least in part as a way of thwarting the censorship that had plagued several of his earlier plays.8 More important for our purposes is Hugo’s statement that there was something to be learned from the drame, which “doit donner à la foule une philosophie, aux idées une formule, à la poésie des muscles, du sang et de la vie, à ceux qui pensent une explication désintéressée, aux âmes altérées un breuvage, aux plaies secrètes un baume, à chacun un conseil, à tous une loi” (5: 269), as it underscores his belief in the kind of “realism” that he outlines in the preface to Cromwell, in which universal truths were to be condensed, amplified, and transmitted to the public 35

Chapter Two through the author-poet’s art. In this way, the outcomes of Hugo’s plays can indeed be seen as providing us with a vision of the world that takes as its “concern and raison d’être the location, expression, and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths” (Brooks 15); yet these outcomes do not so much purge social evil, as in traditional melodrama, as meditate upon its historical conditions and manifestations. Ubersfeld argues that this significantly altered outcome— which shies away from the reinforcement of bourgeois morals in favor of a “mise en question de l’histoire, du discours historique racontant le travail des hommes sur l’histoire” (Le Roi et le bouffon 535)—is achieved in large part in Hugo’s theater through the profound rewriting of melodramatic codes. Not only is the simple and rigid actantial model to which melodrama principally conforms inverted in Hugo’s plays (i.e., the pure jeune fille is never pure, the opposant largely goes unpunished or indeed triumphs, the adjuvant is not rewarded for his efforts to aid the hero, the hero-subject is double, etc.), but coded melodramatic structures or elements (i.e., kinship mysteries, the temporary persecution of the good and innocent) and their consequences often do not correspond. As a result, the very ideology of melodrama is pulverized, with social evil, far from being removed by a natural catastrophe or the like, bursting rather into moral paradox (Ubersfeld, Le Roi et le bouffon 553). The moral legibility that Brooks identifies as central to true melodrama is in this way invariably compromised. For as Hamon specifies: “un texte est lisible (pour telle société à telle époque donnée) quand il y aura coïncidence entre le héros et un espace moral valorisé reconnu et admis par le lecteur” (“Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 153). Brooks argues that melodrama as a mode is equally applicable to the novel as it is to the theater (13), and in Hugo’s case it is easy to bridge the two, as a similar rewriting of melodrama codes can indeed be observed in all of his novels.9 This adaptation is figured principally through the deflation of the hero’s conflict with the villain (opposant), who represents true moral decay, and through the textual rewriting and reversal of coded melodramatic expectations. The former is achieved by the inclusion of characters unambiguously defined by a distinct

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Hugo Novelist moral villainy. From Phoebus in Notre-Dame de Paris and Thénardier in Les Misérables, who both suffer from a complete lack of integrity, to Clubin in Les Travailleurs de la mer and Barkilphedro in L’Homme qui rit, morally bankrupt figures who mask themselves in honesty, to l’Imânus in Quatrevingttreize, whose moral abjection and cruelty know no bounds, the character of the villain is distinctly present in each of Hugo’s novels. Yet instead of being an obstacle in the hero’s path, this character has minimal contact with the protagonist, who may not even be aware of his villainy. Such is the case of Barkilphedro, who portrays himself as acting in Gwynplaine’s best interest and suffers no repercussions for any of the harm that he inflicts, as well as that of Phoebus, whose contact with Quasimodo is extremely limited. Even when the villain is punished, as in the case of Clubin, who in a melodramatic twist clearly gets what he deserves when he is killed by the octopus, or in that of l’Imânus, who is killed in the storming of la Tourgue by the republican troops, the villain’s lack of interaction with the hero nonetheless undermines the melodramatic function of their conflict. For if, as Ubersfeld argues, the principal task of the hero in melodrama is the “réhabilitation du passé” (Le Roi et le bouffon 546) through the restoration of social order as figured through the triumph of the hero over the villain, the deflation in this schema of the villain’s role and meaning through his ultimate insignificance to the hero leads not only to its reversal, but to the transfer inward of the melodramatic impulse, as it is the hero who subsequently serves as the receptacle for the interplay of opposing forces. In this way, the protagonist is no longer the beacon of moral clarity, but rather the meeting place of the very manichaeistic forces that define melodrama on the macro level. In sacrificing logical coherence, that is to say, any kind of true psychological unity, to lyrical coherence (in which the grotesque is only comprehensible when directly opposed to the sublime), Hugo thus denies the possibility of resolution in his fictional worlds. As we have already seen in the discussion of the transformation of the romance model, Hugo’s protagonists find resolution outside of the boundaries of the fictional world. It is thus that Quasimodo’s deformity literally disappears as his skeleton, when touched, disintegrates into dust. Similarly,

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Chapter Two Gauvain, whose separation by the guillotine into the two distinct parts of head and body underscores the fractured noble and republican that resides within him, is fused into a harmonious whole as his soul is freed from Earth and flies toward the light. What is left behind, what remains of this world, is a vision that is morally ambiguous. The social order in jeopardy at each of Hugo’s novel’s beginning remains so at its closure: nothing of consequence has changed.10 Lamartine astutely observed the elements of what would become this pattern in his review of Notre-Dame de Paris upon its publication in 1831: Je viens de lire Notre-Dame de Paris; le livre me tombe des mains. C’est une œuvre colossale, une pierre antédiluvienne [. . .] grand, fort, profond, immense, ténébreux comme l’édifice dont vous en avez fait le symbole [. . .]. Seulement c’est immoral par le manque de Providence assez sensible; il y a de tout, dans votre temple, excepté un peu de Religion, la Religion, ce ciel bleu de toutes les scènes morales.11

In this way, Hugo’s fiction, rather than reinforce bourgeois order, questions its validity. In addition, the truths and imperatives of history and society are questioned as Hugo’s protagonists become increasingly alienated from the social worlds depicted, preferring exclusion and often death to the societal order and conformity traditionally embraced by melodrama. The second way in which Hugo’s novels subvert the melodramatic mode is through the textual reversal of coded melodramatic expectations, as standard elements of melodrama, such as hidden identities, recognition scenes, the unjust persecution of the innocent, and the rewards of virtue, are incongruous with their consequences. As a result, melodramatic moments in Hugo’s novels, instead of reaffirming moral clarity, most often yield instability and uncertainty. For example, the recognition scene in Notre-Dame de Paris between la Paquette and Esmeralda, her long-lost daughter who was kidnapped by gypsies at birth, does not serve to right the wrong and reunite mother and daughter as it is coded to do, but leads instead directly to Esmeralda’s subsequent recapture, and to both of their deaths, as Esmeralda is taken away to be hanged and la Paquette dies of grief.12 The fate envisioned by Paquette immediately after recognizing Esmeralda as her daughter

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Hugo Novelist (“Nous allons être heureuses” [4: 327]) is thus inverted and refigured in favor of an outcome that blurs any kind of moral resolution, as underscored by Paquette’s plea to the arresting officers: “Qui est-ce donc qu’on appelle le bon Dieu?” (4: 333). In Les Misérables, another melodramatic structure, the identity mystery is similarly reversed in relation to Jean Valjean. Whereas the restoration of a character’s true identity is by and large synonymous in melodrama with the restoration of social order and equity (as he or she generally reclaims rightful social status), the identity mystery in Les Misérables is reversed as the discovery of Jean Valjean’s true identity is always undesirable. It is precisely Valjean’s decision to no longer hide his name (revealing himself to both Javert in exiting the sewer with Marius, and to Marius himself once he has married Cosette) that completes his self-dispossession and assures his death. Identity (“un nom c’est un moi” [11: 960]) serves in this way to jeopardize rather than assure social status in the novel. Finally, although the persecution of innocence seems to be rectified at the end of Quatrevingt-treize through the reuniting of Michelle Fléchard and her three young children, the melodramatic device and its desired purging effect is nonetheless deflated by the fact that Fléchard’s suffering—as well as that of the royalist and republican troops—has been in vain since nothing has been gained by it. Without a doubt, the decidedly static nature of the war from the novel’s beginning to its end undermines any personal or political victories, and Fléchard is no better off at the novel’s closure than she is when we first encounter her wandering the forest with her children. On the contrary, Fléchard and her children find themselves at the end of the novel in the same precarious and vulnerable position they were in at its inception as there is no progression in the war and thus no resolution of the dangerous political situation. In this way, the “happy ending” to the personal narrative is effectively undercut. In the end, as Brooks observes, the novelistic form in many ways surpasses the theater as the more logistically sound medium for the reworking of the melodramatic mode as “In the novel, the struggle of ethical imperatives will open up convincing recesses in a world that no longer need be realized through visual simulacra, but in words alone” (109). As does Brooks,

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Chapter Two Prendergast points to the fact that Hugo was not alone in his appropriation and transformation of melodrama. Indeed, a number of nineteenth-century novelists, such as Balzac, Dickens, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, and Henry James, all altered the conventions of melodrama in their writing “to support a serious and important artistic aim” (15), their work displaying “just this kind of transforming relationship between their own creative vision and the strategies of popular writing” (15). As Prendergast concludes in his analysis, these writers used melodrama as a way to cope with the tensions and pressures of pleasing the untutored demands of the new commercial reading public that had emerged in the nineteenth-century (16). While Hugo, too, certainly profited from melodramatic devices to capture readers’ interest, what set him apart from these other writers was his financial disconnection from the daily concerns and constraints of popular writing and from the demands of the changed and changing reading public. This autonomy gave Hugo the ability to work toward the fulfillment of his early desire to “faire un public,”13 to write not for the real nineteenthcentury reader, but for an ideal and idealized one who would “decode” and decipher the transformations effectuated in his novels and profit from their larger meanings.

Le lecteur pensif In the fifty-one years that separated the publication of Han d’Islande from that of Quatrevingt-treize, Hugo’s use of the novelistic form in many ways punctuated rather than propelled his writing career, as his fictional undertakings were far less frequent, in terms of his total output, than his poetic or dramatic efforts. This can at least in part be explained—in reference to Hugo’s early novels and in spite of his endorsement of the genre in his article on Scott—by the lingering reluctance of an ambitious young writer to practice his craft in a form that had yet to be fully legitimized. The period of silence that followed his first three novels, which were written in an eight-year period, is, however, more difficult to elucidate, as thirty-one years separated Notre-Dame de Paris from the much-anticipated Les Misérables in 1862. Indeed, as the novel as a genre gained momentum and legitimacy in France in the 1830s,

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Hugo Novelist 1840s, and 1850s, as the roman feuilleton emerged and quickly gained popularity in newspapers like Le Siècle and La Presse, bringing a new and more accessible mass-produced kind of literature to a changed and changing nineteenth-century reading public, Hugo made and sustained his sizable fortune writing plays and poetry, keeping ideas for novels tucked away in his carnets personnels, aware of and concerned perhaps as early as the 1830s about the new kinds of artistic constraints being imposed on novelists dependant on their pens and—more and more—on the reading public.14 Hugo’s veering away from the novel form just as it became wildly popular speaks to a certain wariness on his part, at once of the vogue of the roman historique that took off on the heels of Scott (he later claimed to have never written one),15 of the growing popularity of realist novels, and of the production and mass consumption of literature through serial novels, which were gaining in popularity and targeted a different, less sophisticated kind of reader.16 That Hugo had little interest in pursuing the writing of historical or serial novels, or both (as they in many cases intersected), is not, however, surprising. His commentary in his review of Scott’s Quentin Durward about the “other novel yet to be created” (“un autre roman [. . .] plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque, mais poétique, réel, mais idéal, vrai, mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère” [5: 131]) had already set him apart from the direction or directions that would be taken by his contemporaries. What also needs to be taken into account is that there was something else that set Hugo apart from his contemporaries by the end of the 1830s: the success he had already attained as a writer and the financial independence that this success allowed him. Indeed, after an unstable childhood in which his family’s money concerns were real and constant, and the lean years of the 1820s (nonetheless subsidized by one of the last pensions royales awarded), Hugo’s desire for financial security and the stability it ensured was realized in the 1830s through his careful management of both his theatrical productions and the publication and re-publication of earlier works. As Allen notes, Hugo was not only the most successful of the romantic authors who found themselves faced with the challenges of a new literary marketplace,

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Chapter Two he was phenomenally so: “From an obscure poet on a 3,200 franc pension in 1823, he rose to such wealth and prominence that he was accorded a chair at the Académie française in 1841” (Popular French Romanticism 97). The effects of Hugo’s careful self-management and of his understanding of the business of literature—and especially strategies for publication that continued to assure his financial independence throughout his long career—have in many ways been under-explored in terms of their relevance to his body of work. For unlike the great majority of his contemporaries whose status had changed and who became more and more dependant on commercial concerns, Hugo’s rare success story put him in the position not only to write what he wanted when he wanted, but increasingly to cultivate, inscribe, and write for a desired, ideal, and idealized reader(ship). Even before his financial security was assured, Hugo’s desire to have active, engaged readers is witnessed by strategies of paratextual prodding, as in Han d’Islande, when, in the final epigraph, the novel’s darkest gothic elements are ironically turned on their head: “Ce que j’avais dit par plaisanterie, vous l’avez pris sérieusement” (2: 417). This directive both warns the reader against a stock or literal interpretation of the novel and prompts the reader to recalculate his or her understanding of the text. Similar calls pushing readers to engage their intellect followed, as in the notice added to the 1832 edition of Notre-Dame de Paris in which Hugo justifies the reintegration into this edition of three allegedly “lost” chapters of the novel—“Impopularité” (IV, 4), “Abbas beati Martini” (V, 1), and “Ceci tuera cela” (V, 2). In this notice, a greater reward is promised to those who look beyond the story being told on the diegetic level so as to apprehend the novel’s greater truths and larger ideology, as filtered through the additional discourse on art, history, and philosophy provided in the “recovered” chapters: Sans doute ces chapitres retrouvés auront peu de valeur aux yeux des personnes [. . .] qui n’ont cherché dans NotreDame de Paris que le drame, que le roman. Mais il est peutêtre d’autres lecteurs qui n’ont pas trouvé inutile d’étudier la pensée d’esthétique et de philosophie cachée dans ce livre, qui ont bien voulu, en lisant Notre-Dame de Paris, se

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Hugo Novelist plaire à démêler sous le roman autre chose que roman, et à suivre, qu’on nous passe ces expressions un peu ambitieuses, le système de l’historien et le but de l’artiste à travers la création telle quelle du poète. (4: 22)

While it is well known that these chapters were never in fact lost, but rather held back by Hugo so as to ensure the commercial success of his novel, what is most interesting here is that Hugo deliberately draws attention in this notice to two possible readings (and readers) of Notre-Dame de Paris: one typical and ordinary and the other informed and enlightened. In ironically opposing the “wise” tendencies of the average reader with the more risky tendencies of the exceptional one, he again solicits the active and engaged participation of a desired destinataire. Parallel encouragement of this kind can also be observed in Hugo’s theater of the 1830s. For example, in his preface to Ruy Blas (1838), Hugo specifically appeals to “attentive minds” to use the narrative and compositional elements of the play as a springboard for the formulation of larger ideas: “Qu’on nous permette donc de passer, sans nous appesantir autrement sur la transition, des idées générales que nous venons de poser, et qui, selon nous, régissent l’art tout entier, à quelques-unes des idées particulières que ce drame, Ruy Blas, peut soulever dans les esprits attentifs” (5: 671). Unlike the most popular feuilletonistes of the 1840s and 1850s—Dumas, Sue, and Soulié—whose paychecks and livelihood depended on the commercial success of their novels and thus on the readers themselves, and unlike Balzac, Stendhal, and later Flaubert, who considered themselves to be the creators of “serious” literature but who in living off their writing were still no less dependant on the actual reading public, Hugo was increasingly able in all of the genres in which he wrote to shape his conception of this ideal reader.17 In doing so, he promoted the existence of virtual equivalents for whom reading his works would be like reading a translation of their own unformed thoughts and of a common soul. More than two decades after the publication of Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo passionately declares his inherent complicity with this reader—the only one with whom he now dialogued—in the preface to his 1856 Les Contemplations: “Prenez donc ce miroir, et regardez-vous-y. On se plaint quelquefois des écrivains qui disent moi. 43

Chapter Two Parlez-nous de nous, leur crie-t-on. Hélas! quand je vous parle de moi, je vous parle de vous. Comment ne le sentez-vous pas? Ah! insensé, qui croit que je ne suis pas toi!” (9: 60). Les Misérables, published in ten volumes printed by the Belgian publishers Lacroix and Verboeckhoven in 1862, in many ways put this aim to the test, as Hugo had written a serious popular novel not only about but also for the masses. Begun in 1845 under the working title of Jean Tréjean, which would later be changed to Les Misères before becoming Les Misérables prior to its publication, Hugo’s longest and best-known novel continued in the tradition of the police or crime novel, forged among others by Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (published in four parts from 1838 to 1847), and Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (published serially in the Journal des débats from June 1842 to October 1843). The overwhelming commercial success of Sue’s increasingly socially oriented serial certainly had been registered by Hugo, and similarities between Sue’s characters and those who populate Les Misérables, such as the virtuous convict and the prostitute in stories that are governed by themes of paternity, crime, and redemption, have been duly remarked. Yet while strong similarities between the two novels are impossible to overlook, including those concerning the kinds of characters they put into place, these similarities are in the end more superficial than significant. For despite the claims that Hugo cashed in on the triumphant elements of serialization that Sue had mastered so well, Hugo’s novel is profoundly different from Sue’s evolving serial, both in its message and in the execution of its message. Sue—whose own very particular social conversion and evolution during the course of writing Les Mystères de Paris has been documented—can be seen as having modified both his personal convictions and his story in large part as a result of the interactive exchange that occurred with his readers during the course of the serial, ending up with a far different novel from the one that he undertook for his initial, upper-class readers who wanted the opportunity to peer in on the social depths of Paris. Hugo, on the other hand, envisioned Les Misérables from the beginning as a story that would resonate for les esprits attentifs, the enlightened masses, in making them acutely aware—as was he—of the gravity of his

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Hugo Novelist century’s greatest and most challenging social problems. This didactical element of his project is delineated in the epigraph to Les Misérables: [. . .] tant que les trois problèmes du siècle, la dégradation de l’homme par le prolétariat, la déchéance de la femme par la faim, l’atrophie de l’enfant par la nuit, ne seront pas résolus; tant que, dans de certaines régions, l’asphyxie sociale sera possible [. . .] tant qu’il y aura sur la terre ignorance et misère, des livres de la nature de celui-ci pourront ne pas être inutiles. (11: 49)

While the commercial triumph and popularity of Hugo’s novel is in many ways linked to his successful execution of this preconceived vision, the commercial triumph and popularity of Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris is based—quite differently—on its interactive quality, on the novel’s amorphous adaptability to its readers’ expectations and to readers’ externalized involvement with it over a fifteen-month period.18 The overwhelming success of serial novels such as Les Mystères de Paris was something that Balzac (who was largely unsuccessful as a serialist and who died twelve years prior to the publication of Les Misérables) had lamented. For after publishing one of the first serial novels, La Vieille Fille, in La Presse in October of 1836, Balzac—already a well-known but not a wealthy novelist—was plagued in subsequent serial publications by problems stemming from the new reading public and the industrialization of literature, as sales volume—for the first time—had serious repercussions on writers and on their craft. Although he craved financial as well as critical success as a writer, Balzac, as he complained in letters to his longtime confidante and future wife Mme Hanska, was largely unwilling to lower himself or to imitate Sue in order to attain it (Prendergast 36), and became increasingly resentful as his career progressed of both unappreciative readers—many of whom found boring the long descriptive passages so important to the overall coherence and meaning of his novels—and of the large-scale popularity attained by writers such as Sue.19 In opposition to Balzac, who was thus at the mercy of his publishers in his desire to be taken seriously and to write serious literature, Hugo—who had amassed by the 1840s a fortune

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Chapter Two large enough to permit him to dismiss daily financial concerns—was significantly able to stand fast against his publishers, particularly during the raging fury over his payment for Les Misérables for which he refused to come down in price.20 His financial status allowed him in this way to hold firm to the notion shared with Balzac that serious writers—which Hugo had succeeded in establishing himself to be—should earn large amounts of money, and Hugo was conscious of the fact that the bigger the advance, the more the publishers would work to disseminate the novel so as to be able to render their investment profitable.21 While reactions to Les Misérables immediately of course compared it to that other great “social novel” of the nineteenth century—Sue’s—and while the argument that Hugo was liberally inspired by certain successful elements of Sue’s novel cannot be disputed, Les Misérables is nonetheless a profoundly different kind of novel, in no way informed by its readers’ ongoing, interactive participation, but rather by their reconstructive, active decoding of its narrative elements. In addition to the paratextual prefatory commentary in which Hugo calls for a different kind of reader, such as in the examples cited above, his desire to engage this ideal reader is increasingly promoted within his novels as well, principally through the use of two narrative techniques: first, through a process of destabilizing the narration so that the narrator alternates between directing the reader’s interpretation of the text and complicating it through lapses in omniscience; and secondly, through the inclusion in Hugo’s novels of long and seemingly disconnected digressions that not only countered prevailing notions of unity in the novel but challenged the idea of the novel as a strictly linear form. The first technique—which is essential in informing the reader’s understanding of character—pits the strong, authoritative presence of an omniscient force who governs and guides the reader’s reading (“Le lecteur peut choisir; quant à nous, nous inclinerions à croire tout simplement qu’il était de mauvaise humeur, parce qu’il était de mauvaise humeur” [ND, 4: 147]; “Nous pouvons affirmer à nos lecteurs que la timidité n’était ni la vertu ni le défaut du capitaine” [ND, 4: 176]), and at times even dictates it (“Ce n’est pas ici que nous entreprendrons de développer cette figure singulière” [ND, 4: 309];

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Hugo Novelist “N’accusons pas ces pauvres enfants” [LM, 11: 978]; “On se tromperait si l’on concluait du mot ci-dessus qu’il ne voulait point marier sa nièce” [TM, 12: 587]), against the ultimate “limitations” of the same force.22 Indeed, in spite of the direction taken in the realist novel by Stendhal and Balzac, in which the narrator’s authoritative voice rarely wavers, and in spite of the bold claims made by Hugo in the preface to Cromwell that it was time for “ un drame enfin où le poète remplisse pleinement le but multiple de l’art, qui est d’ouvrir au spectateur un double horizon, d’illuminer à la fois l’intérieur et l’extérieur des hommes” (3: 71), the Hugolian narrator nonetheless very consciously swings back and forth between moments of overomniscience and lapses in this omniscience that undermine the narrative voice and distance the author from his creations.23 In this way, for example, in L’Homme qui rit, the narrator at the same time knows far more than the characters are able to know themselves (“le proscrit consolé dans sa tombe, l’héritier rendu à l’héritage [. . .]; voilà ce que Barkilphedro eût pu voir dans l’événement dont il triomphait; voilà ce qu’il ne vit pas” [14: 275]) and is unable to know everything about them, as with the young Gwynplaine during his initial trek to Weymouth: “Sa stupéfaction se compliquait d’une sombre constatation de la vie. Il semblait qu’il y eût de l’expérience dans cet être commençant. Peut-être jugeait-il déjà” (14: 59). References to this selectively limited omniscience can be found in each of Hugo’s novels, from Notre-Dame de Paris, in which the narrator feigns a “powerlessness” to translate Frollo’s inner state (“Que se passait-il en ce moment dans l’âme obscure de l’archidiacre? lui et Dieu seul l’ont pu savoir” [4: 210]), to Les Travailleurs de la mer, in which the narrator makes known his inability to see into Déruchette’s heart (“Elle ne connaissait peut-être pas le sens du mot amour” [12: 578]), to Quatrevingt-treize, in which Lantenac’s inner depths are never accessed (“Tous étaient sauvés, en effet, excepté le vieillard. Mais personne n’y songeait, pas même lui peut-être” [15: 479]). Piroué has dubbed this illusion of narrative limitation “inviolabilité,”24 and Brombert makes similar reference to this created effect of autonomy: “His particular type of omniscient perspective posits the essential mystery of fictional characters. [. . .] It is as though Hugo the author believed in the

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Chapter Two inviolability of his own characters; he comments, observes, and judges—but he remains outside them” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 124–25). While the implementation of this technique indeed allows Hugo to instill his characters with mystery and even sanctity, the destabilized narration that results from the narrator’s shifting omniscience also serves quite deliberately to force the reader’s hand: it enters the reader into an act of dynamic participation that pushes the reader to connect the dots between what the Hugolian narrator reveals and what the narrator quite purposefully shrouds or veils. The second narrative technique employed by Hugo that promotes the reader’s active involvement in his novels is the use of digressions that add another destabilizing dimension to the narrator’s voice through the enlargement of the narration’s scope and changes in register and tone. From the above-cited “lost” chapters reintegrated into Notre-Dame de Paris, to the chapters on Waterloo, the convent, the gamin, the origin of slang, and the Paris sewer system in Les Misérables, to “L’Archipel de la Manche” which precedes and prepares for Les Travailleurs de la mer, to the chapters on the history of the House of Lords in L’Homme qui rit, to the chapters that introduce and describe the Convention in Quatrevingt-treize, these digressions, which often abruptly cut the narrative thread and rhythm to address at length issues of historical, sociological, or philosophical interest, are, however, in no way extraneous; on the contrary, they are an essential opening into Hugo’s ideological concerns. The history of the digression, which can be traced as far back as Homer and was espoused over the centuries by writers such as Montaigne, Pascal, Rabelais, Honoré d’Urfé, Marivaux, and Diderot, is outlined by Jean Gaudon in “Digressions hugoliennes.” While the use in fiction of long, disjointed digressions à la Scudéry fell into disfavor with the advent of a new aesthetics of the novel at the end of the seventeenth-century and remained unpopular during the course of the eighteenth century, a new, more integrated type of digression—practiced in large part by Balzac—found its way back into the nineteenth-century novel. Gaudon specifies that “Ce nouveau type de digression, qui ne met pas apparemment en cause la conception monocentrique du roman, est, au dix-neuvième siècle, l’arme la plus

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Hugo Novelist efficace que possède l’écrivain pour redonner au romanesque son autonomie perdue” (vii). Hugo, however, largely veered away from this well-integrated, psychological digression that was put into practice by Balzac and his successors in which “donner à voir est à peu près synonyme de donner à comprendre” (viii) in favor of a realignment and renewal with the more traditional, disjointed type of digression in his novels, one that required its reader to situate and decode its significance both in relation to the other digressions presented in the work and in relation to the narrative itself. Although this choice met with a certain amount of resistance, most famously from Flaubert in an assessment of Les Misérables (“Et les digressions! Y en a-t-il! Y en a-t-il!”25), Hugo’s espousal of the traditional extradiegetical digression was in no way a regression; on the contrary, Hugo uses the digression intentionally to multiply both levels of information and perspectives and to push the reader to uncover their relevance. As early as the orchestrated reintegration of the chapters of Notre-Dame de Paris, and specifically that of “Ceci tuera cela” that announces and apologizes to its (female!) readers for its interruption of the narration to meditate on the future of both the real and “paper” monument (“Nos lectrices nous pardonneront de nous arrêter un moment pour chercher quelle pouvait être la pensée qui se dérobait sous ces paroles énigmatiques de l’archidiacre: Ceci tuera cela. Le livre tuera l’édifice” [4: 136]),26 Hugo affirmed his belief in the relevance of this additional dimension to his work that reflected the complicated philosophical and aesthetic totality he strove to create. In an 1862 letter to Lacroix in which he gave specific directives for the upcoming publication of Les Misérables, Hugo made an even more direct reference to the vast system of interrelated parts that for him composed the novel, likening his latest work to a mountain that could only be understood with the proper perspective and through careful reconstruction of its components: “Ce livre est une montagne; on ne peut le mesurer, ni même le bien voir qu’à distance” (11: 1146). Although widely varying in subject, scope, and tone, the digressions that Hugo intersperses in his novels are thus a calculated part of the larger whole that is to be (re)constructed by the reader, of its overall unity, and are central to the thematic

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Chapter Two and especially to the ideological organization of his fictional worlds. Founded on a complex and dynamic system of interdependence, the Hugolian digression, as Michel Collot observes, is based in this way on a principle of organic rather than rational unity: Pour Hugo, comme pour les Baroques, unité n’égale pas simplicité, mais implique au contraire complexité [. . .]. A la tyrannie d’un centre unique, ils préfèrent le dynamisme résultant de la concurrence de plusieurs foyers d’organisation, à la hiérarchie des plans leur interférence mouvante, à un ordre analytique fondé sur la distinction des parties, un ordre synthétique dont les composantes s’interpénètrent. (“L’Esthétique baroque dans L’Homme qui rit” 110)

Allusions to this complex system at work are also made by Michel Butor, who labels Hugo’s digressions “des foyers d’énigmes,” advancing that “Hugo ne se contente pas [. . .] de nous proposer une solution vraisemblable du mystère; [. . .] il veut relier ce pli à d’autres plis, faire apparaître le nœud, le cœur de toutes ces distorsions, la puissance d’aberration qui est à l’œuvre” (“Victor Hugo romancier” 221). In Hugo’s novels subsequent to Les Misérables, the digressions can be seen as becoming less separated and more clearly integral to the narrative, as in the discourse on the House of Lords in L’Homme qui rit, which is linked to Gwynplaine’s introduction and ineffective speech there, or in the chapters on the Convention in Quatrevingt-treize, which blends the narrative tale into the larger History that serves as the novel’s frame; yet they are no less expansive. As Hugo continues to enlarge the totality he wishes to create, the reader is invited to participate in a multileveled dialogue that cannot be contained by the boundaries of the novel. Through the implementation of these two narrative techniques that serve both to destabilize and to multiply the levels and the scope of the narrative voice, the narrator creates a panorama that forces the reader—who is faced with these different levels of narration—to uncloak for him or herself the multiple and sometimes opposing layers of meaning in Hugo’s novels. As were his characters, the outwardly incongruous structures of Hugo’s novels were often (and increasingly) criticized; yet

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Hugo Novelist Hugo’s financial stability and the autonomy that it engendered enabled him to avoid dependence—both financial and artistic— on the consumer reading public or on the critical reception of his novels. Instead, Hugo was steadily and independently able to shape a desired destinataire for the kinds of works he wanted to write, as it is this ideal (and idealized) reader—aptly and succinctly christened le lecteur pensif by Hugo in a prefatory project for L’Homme qui rit—who would be able to decode and apprehend (“démêler sous le roman autre chose que le roman” [4:22]) the vision and understanding of not only the changed and changing nineteenth century but of the unfolding of time itself and of the limits of official history that is projected in Hugo’s novels. The dedication of all of his works to this reader (the entire proposed dedication reads “Il n’y a de lecteur que le lecteur pensif. C’est à lui que je dédie mes œuvres. Qui que tu sois, si tu es pensif en lisant, c’est à toi que je dédie mes œuvres” ([14: 387]) can be seen as the ultimate expression of Hugo’s call for this virtual reader to come forth. The insistence on the reader’s “pensif” quality, referenced twice in the dedication, emphasizes Hugo’s desire that his reader not only read but read into what he writes so as to cull the larger meanings inscribed there and to understand that it is only on the span of these larger meanings that his writing achieves its true sense. For as Roland Barthes advances, any and all attention to or emphasis on “thoughtfulness,” which is a “sign of nothing but itself” always serves to underscore the existence of a text’s unspoken “plenitude” (S/Z 216–17). It is not insignificant to note that in the writing of his last three novels, Hugo moved farther and farther away from concerns about his readership and concerns about corresponding commercial success. Jottings in an 1869 carnet reveal a degree of disillusionment relative to critical reception (“J’ai voulu abuser du roman [. . .]. J’ai voulu forcer le lecteur à penser à chaque ligne. De là une sorte de colère du public contre moi” [14: 1518]), but it is tempered by an even stronger faith in his artistic and ideological mission: “Si je croyais avoir tort, je me tairais, et ce me serait agréable. Mais ce n’est pas pour mon plaisir que j’existe” (14: 1517). With no intentions of stopping, Hugo enters into an increasingly sustained dialogue between

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Chapter Two himself and his ideal “thoughtful” reader, continuing to grapple with the questions that traverse his entire body of work relative to the human condition, collective and individual destiny, history, and progress. While this insular movement speaks on the one hand to Hugo’s unyielding belief in the message that he had to bear (perhaps better known today as Hugolian megalomania), that this message could be born speaks on the other to the financial freedom, security, and indeed luxury that Hugo’s success as a writer had brought him. It is in the balance of the two that his concept of le lecteur pensif takes on its true meaning. As we will see in Part 2 of this study, Reappearance, Hugo’s conception of the novel and the particular rapport he put into place with his reader converge in the characters that he composes and redistributes in his works.

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Part 2 Reappearance

Chapter Three

Hugo and Type Character

From Flaubert’s sharp judgment that Les Misérables put into place “des types tout d’une pièce comme dans les tragédies [. . .] des mannequins, des bonshommes en sucre,”1 to Théophile Gautier’s observation that “Hugo ne prend de l’histoire que les noms des temps, que les couleurs générales [. . .] Peut-être ferait-il mieux encore de ne pas mettre de nom du tout et d’appeler ses personnages le Duc, la Reine, la Princesse et ainsi de suite,”2 to Zola’s commentary on Hernani and Ruy Blas that “le manque d’humanité des personnages saute aux yeux” (“Nos auteurs dramatiques” 586), the characters that Victor Hugo created in his fictional and dramatic works were uniformly denigrated during the course of the nineteenth century by his contemporaries for their contradictions, exaggeration, lack of originality and psychological depth, and above all, their invraisemblance. This critical consensus was succinctly resumed by Francisque Sarcey in a review of Hugo’s theatrical works that appeared in the June 24, 1867, edition of Le Temps: “Tout l’art de Victor Hugo consiste à mettre violemment ses personnages dans une position où il puisse aisément, lui poète, s’épancher en odes, en élégies, en imprécations [. . .] ce sont des costumes pittoresques, plutôt que des hommes de chair et d’os” (Quarante ans de théâtre. Feuilletons dramatiques 4: 2). Commentary of this nature, on the largest level, points to the tendency of nineteenth-century critics to evaluate (and devaluate) Hugo’s novels and plays—in spite of the fact that they looked to the realist movement for neither inspiration nor application—in light of the realist criteria that gradually supplanted the aesthetics of classicism and then romanticism in France during the course of the nineteenth century.

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Chapter Three First introduced in France in the 1820s as a term describing the literary technique concerned with the careful depiction of detail and local color (couleur locale) that was practiced by Hugo and other romantic writers, realism as a concept and a movement evolved with Balzac, Stendhal, and followers such as Champfleury, Duranty, and the Goncourt brothers into a literary school that took as its concern the truthful and objective portrayal of the “real” contemporary world and its inhabitants. Although specific visions of what realism was and should be were not always cohesive—leading to a variety of different and sometimes even competing “realisms” in the mid-nineteenthcentury—the movement nonetheless steadily took hold. By the beginning of the 1860s, the decade during which Hugo’s Les Misérables was published, literary realism, additionally bolstered by its convergence with the artistic realist movement practiced by Courbet and a number of newly discovered Dutch artists, had firmly taken root in France. While Hugo remained faithful throughout his career as a novelist to the technique of the realist detail (le petit fait vrai) and to the portrayal of the local color that he had admired in the works of Walter Scott and other romantic writers (as witnessed, for example, in his minutely detailed account of the lifestyle and customs of the Channel Islands’ residents in “L’Archipel de la Manche,” his long introductory section to Les Travailleurs de la mer), his early conception of the drame— described in the preface to Cromwell as “un miroir de concentration” (3: 70) in which universal, core truths were reflected, condensed, and amplified—diverged, however, strongly from the tenets of impartiality and objectivity envisioned and promoted by the proponents and practitioners of the realist movement.3 Furthermore, Hugo’s romantic conception also diverged from the larger tradition of classicism (with its formal and psychological imperatives) from which the realist movement had in large part evolved. Hence a possible explanation can be seen for many of the less than positive assessments of Hugo’s theatrical works and novels, and especially for the negative reaction to his characters, who were criticized precisely for their exaggerated, larger-than-life qualities. Max Bach confirms this hypothesis about the unfavorable critical reception of the characters of Les Misérables: “Malgré l’aventure libératrice du roman-

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Hugo and Type Character tisme, la suprématie du classicisme français reste évidente. Les critiques jugent encore en fonction d’une littérature essentiellement psychologique enfermée dans des limites étroites, gouvernée par certaines règles absolues” (“Critique et politique” 604). This assessment is echoed by Albouy, who observes that the majority of criticism of Hugo’s characters as “simplistes” or “invraisemblables” “renvoie à une certaine tradition de la psychologie littéraire, celle du roman d’analyse, de Mme de La Fayette à Radiguet” (Mythographies 154).4 Critical judgments by evolving and increasingly pervasive realist standards were not, however, solely responsible for Hugo’s reputation as a poor creator of character. Unfolding and often incongruous conceptions during the nineteenth century of the function and functioning of character in literature, and especially that of type character, also served to complicate the evaluation of Hugo’s dramatic and fictional works. Charged with two accepted and concurrent meanings—a character defined by the sum of its general characteristics, and the ideal, exemplary representation of a group5—the meaning of type character for Hugo and his contemporaries was in no way fixed. From Charles Nodier’s 1830 essay “Des types en littérature,” which emphasized the individuality and unique qualities of literary characters so memorable that they became types, to Balzac’s 1842 “Avant-Propos” to the Comédie humaine, which outlined his vision of type character as the embodiment and representation of social traits, to Taine’s 1865 La Philosophie de l’art, which declared that classical literary types would never cease to be renewed, comprehension of the relationship between individual characters and their universal meaning vacillated widely, as the above-cited criticisms of Hugo’s works illustrate. While Flaubert’s harsh assessment of Les Misérables scolds Hugo for creating theatrical types in a novel (“types tout d’une pièce comme dans les tragédies”), thus implying that the novel should require different types altogether, Gautier’s review (“Peut-être ferait-il mieux encore de ne pas mettre de nom du tout et d’appeler ses personnages le Duc, la Reine, la Princesse et ainsi de suite”) denounces the too-general nature of Hugo’s dramatic characters, who, in his opinion, lacked a necessary uniqueness and individuality. Conflicting or disconnected opinions and emphases such as these were common not

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Chapter Three only in judgments of Hugo’s writing, but more generally in the literary criticism of Hugo’s entire period, during which the theater, spurred on by romantic tenets, moved away from the principles of the comedy and tragedy of the classical era and thus the recognizable, psychological types that had populated it (les caractères). At the same time, the novel, previously situated as a minor genre, came into its own as the literary form most suited to the depiction of modern times and of modern man, giving rise to the creation of a whole new group of exemplary type characters to be classified, interpreted, and evaluated. These important developing generic trends, coupled with the lack of a common understanding of what type was and what its universal significance should be, resulted in many cases in the misuse or overuse of the term, as underscores Sainte-Beuve’s exasperated declaration in his January 2, 1865, Nouveaux Lundis that “type” was “un assez vilain mot” that had lost all meaning (9: 246).6 Uncertainty about the functioning of type character was not, however, new to the nineteenth century and its criticism. On the contrary, Patricia Ward has highlighted the fact that critical concern surrounding the relationship between the individual and the general in reference to character is “one of the most enduring problems of literary theory,” reaching as far back as the Poetics in which Aristotle makes a distinction between the type characters of comedy and the individualized, historical characters of tragedy, equating “the representative characters of comedy with the probable and universal, while the specific historical characters of tragedy deal with the particular and the possible” (“Nodier, Hugo, and the Concept of the Type Character” 944). While this distinction was subsequently repeated throughout the centuries, for example, by Diderot, who reiterates, in his Entretiens sur le fils naturel, Aristotle’s basic premise in arguing that “le genre comique est des espèces et le genre tragique est des individus” (qtd. in Ward 944), it was indeed complicated during the nineteenth century by the falling into disfavor of classical genres, such as the tragedy and the comedy to which Aristotle’s premise most directly applied, and by the simultaneous rise of the novel, for which there were no clear postulates.

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Hugo and Type Character In the early part of the century, the increasingly divergent nineteenth-century trends toward romanticism (which would slowly lose momentum as the century progressed) and realism (which would dominate the second half of the century) further complicated a general understanding of the function of type character in the novel by each focusing on and emphasizing one of the term’s meanings. Romantic writers, in the tradition of Mme de Staël and German romantics such as Schiller who wrote on the aesthetics of genius and originality, grounded their conception first in the genius of the artist, who is divine in his creative abilities for invention (originality in mimesis), and second in the exemplarity that they viewed as the essential criteria for becoming a type. In this, the romantic concept of type is paradoxically founded on a certain kind of individualization: a “type” is an individual who takes on universal characteristics and proportions not through his “general, representative nature” but “historically because his individuality makes him recognizable to all subsequent generations” (Ward 946). The romantic type is thus exemplary and in many ways ideal rather than real, and often embodies in this exemplarity a scope and a significance that goes beyond simple representation and is fused with the mysteries and essence of man. This romantic conception is treated in detail by Nodier (who is believed to have reintroduced the term “type” into France) in his 1830 essay: Si vous voulez reconnaître à des signes sûrs dans le poète l’invention et le génie, qui sont la même chose, arrêtez-vous à celui dont les personnages deviennent des types dans toutes les littératures, et dont les noms propres deviennent presque toujours des substantifs dans toutes les langues. C’est qu’en effet le nom d’une figure typique n’est plus étiquette bannale [sic] qu’on attache au socle d’un buste ou aux plinthes d’un bas-relief; c’est le signe représentatif d’une conception, d’une création, d’une idée.7 (187–88)

Realist writers, on the other hand, basing their conception in large part on the theoretical statements outlined by Balzac in his “Avant-Propos” to the Comédie humaine, conceived of type not in ideal or individualized but rather generalized social and

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Chapter Three scientific terms. René Wellek calls attention to this distinction in “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship”: “Parallel with this [romantic] development the term ‘type’ emerges as meaning ‘social type.’ It replaced the older word ‘caractère,’ which had assumed the meaning of individual character and lost the association with Theophrastus and La Bruyère” (243). Although Balzac’s realistic or scientific conception and creation of type was tinged (and sometimes even greatly tainted) with aspects generally associated with the highly individualized romantic version (and more generally romanticism itself), such as symbolic importance and insertion into mythical patterns, his followers, as noted by Peter Demetz, nonetheless “preferred to fasten their thought to his scientific rather than to his romantic concept of the type” (“Balzac and the Zoologists: A Concept of the Type” 398). The origins of such a scientific conception of type can in large part be traced to the natural sciences of the eighteenth century, as practiced by Buffon, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,8 and the influence of the intersection of science and literary theory on the project that Balzac describes in his “AvantPropos” has indeed been well documented. Like the scientist, or more specifically the zoologist, whose task it is to catalogue and categorize the species of the animal world through the isolation of their common traits, Balzac proposes that it is the novelist’s job to complete a similar task: “Si Buffon a fait un magnifique ouvrage en essayant de représenter dans un livre l’ensemble de la zoologie, n’y avait-il pas une œuvre de ce genre à faire pour la Société?” (8). In this way, Balzac applies a scientific model of type so as to uncover and examine recurrent human characteristics. As Balzac specifies later in the “Avant-Propos,” a project of such proportions—which will provide his readers with “la somme des types” of their generation—is no small undertaking. Whereas the “typical literary character of the past was intuitively ‘conceived,’ [. . .] the new writer [Balzac] ‘composes’ his types ‘par la réunion des traits de plusieurs caractères homogènes’” (Demetz 407). The recurring emphasis on the detachment and methodical qualities of the “scientific” method served at once to legitimize Balzac’s grand and ambitious project for the still-unproven novel by grounding it in a well-respected and empirical field of inquiry,

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Hugo and Type Character and to impose—and in many ways concretize—a conception of type as a general, representative, and often unexceptional character that would, in the works of Balzac’s followers and successors, emerge as one of the norms of realist fiction.9 These new and characteristically “unexceptional” type characters put into place by realist writers were profoundly linked to the immediate historical present of the nineteenth century. In this way, for example, as Philippe Dufour has noted, the type of the “jeune homme” has a (social) signification in the works of Balzac that is different from its signification in the works of Flaubert. In Balzac’s novels, in which the social mobility and upheavals of the Empire and Restoration play a great role, the “jeune homme” is the “figure exemplaire de l’être en devenir,” while in Flaubert’s novels he is “un raté qui n’échappe pas à son identité,” as “sous le Second Empire, les jeux sont faits, la nouvelle société s’est définie et les rôles se figent” (Le Réalisme 27). Thus in this realist framework, not only is type less stable than in the classical model (as the identity of the type character is not fixed) but the focus shifts from universally representative human qualities to extremely particular social and historical ones generated and perpetuated by the environment depicted. As a result, the number of “types” are greatly multiplied, as illustrates Balzac’s commentary on his task in the “AvantPropos” to the Comédie humaine: “Ce n’était pas une petite tâche de peindre les deux ou trois mille figures saillantes d’une époque, car telle est, en définitif, la somme des types que présente chaque génération et que La Comédie humaine comportera” (18).10 Yet for all its differences from the classical conception of type character, the realist conception of type—although greatly changed in terms of both the number of mutations of a given type and the social relevance of these mutations—nonetheless does not in essence stray from the classical notion of type character as representation (caractère). In contrast, the romantic conception of type—while it sometimes renewed classical type characters, such as les amants, le jeune premier, le père—nevertheless constitutes a more complete break with the classical conception. Indeed, although the romantic vision of type, particularly as advanced by Nodier, situates type characters (exemplary in their distinct individuality) both in relationship to

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Chapter Three the larger movements of history and in relationship to core (ahistorical) universal human qualities, it goes beyond the principal limitations of representation, embodying at the same time “myths, ideas, essences, principles, tendencies, forces, and powers that greatly strain the narrow human form in which they [the characters] are forced to fit” (Demetz 408).11 As realism began to inform the century’s perception of its literature, it is not surprising that realist “scientifically ordered” sociological types who had relevance in the real world became increasingly well-received by readers and critics alike. Indeed, proponents of realism argued that their strength and hold were drawn precisely from their social bearing. For example, Félix Davin, one of Balzac’s closest friends, argued in his introduction to the fourth edition of Balzac’s Etudes philosophiques (1834) that the emergence of middle-class type characters in Balzac’s novels affected readers in a way romantic, overblown types à la Scott no longer could.12 Types that were more romantic in nature were increasingly cited and dismissed for their (social) irrelevance, and fictional characters came more and more under the scrutiny of realist standards of vraisemblance. It is not insignificant that contemporary reviews of Les Misérables—which was published only five years after Madame Bovary (1857)—were most critical of the characters who fulfilled what were interpreted as romantic type roles, such as Marius, who was seen as “le plus nul de tous les personnages, l’éternel jeune premier, mannequin niais” (Bach, “Critique et politique” 604), or Cosette, who was dismissively declared by one reviewer as “insignifiante, gauche, guindée” (604). 13 Tellingly, the least criticized of the novel’s characters were those that merged the romantic with the social. Although M. Gillenormand was still censured as being exaggerated (“une satire un peu trop poussée de l’Ancien Régime” [604]), he was nonetheless fairly well received, as was the character of Javert, who was deemed “original,” and as were the novel’s children— the young Cosette, Eponine, Azelma, Gavroche, and the two unnamed Thénardier brothers, all portrayed in their social misery—relative to whom Hugo was championed as “le chantre des enfants” (604). The gradual acceptance of realist fiction as a norm and the standards of evaluation it created for characters in novels thus

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Hugo and Type Character had a profound effect on both initial assessments and reassessments of Hugo’s fictional characters, and not only those of Les Misérables, as both Hugo’s earlier and later novels were similarly reproached throughout the century for their lack of vraisemblance and for the exaggerated, unbelievable, puppetlike characters that they put in place.14 Although Hugo never formally entered the arena in the nineteenth-century debate on type character relative either to his early conception of the “new” novel that he envisioned or to his own dramatic and fictional endeavors, commentary that he offers in the unclassifiable and often-dismissed essay William Shakespeare (1864) provides us nevertheless with a window into Hugo’s understanding of the function and functioning of character in literature—and more importantly in his own body of work— and holds the key to both Hugo’s link to the romantic conception of type character and his divergence from it. While the theoretical stance presented by Hugo in the preface to Cromwell in 1827 had served to clarify and distinguish his artistic conceptions from those of his early contemporaries, the theoretical stance of William Shakespeare served on the contrary to highlight Hugo’s progressive alienation from a second generation of contemporaries, as underscores an extremely negative May 2, 1864, article written by A. de Saint-Valry that appeared in the Empire newspaper Pays upon the essay’s publication: “Ce qui m’a le plus frappé dans la lecture de cet ouvrage tumultueux et confus, c’est de sentir presque à chaque page à quel point son auteur était loin, et par les procédés de sa critique et par la forme de son style, du tempérament intellectuel et de la nature morale des générations actuelles.”15 Hugo’s literal distance from his critics and his compatriots— he had been in exile since 1851 and would not return until the fall of the Empire in 1870—was in this way matched and increasingly surpassed by a symbolic one, as Hugo became more and more disconnected—politically, ideologically, and artistically—from the generation of realist writers and critics who had come to the forefront in France (and the nascent naturalists who were not far behind), for whom Hugo represented outdated romantic grandeur.16 The strongly unfavorable reaction to William Shakespeare can be seen as a starting point for the critical “hugophobie”

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Chapter Three that originated during last forty years of the nineteenth century, and little of Hugo’s subsequent work—including Les Travailleurs de la mer, L’Homme qui rit, and Quatrevingttreize—recovered during his lifetime from this descent. Although Hugo’s popular success never really wavered (as witnessed, for example, by his 1885 state funeral), his critical reputation as an overblown and outdated romantic (fueled by implicit critiques of his political positions) steadily took hold, as indicates Zola’s assessment of the still-living writer: Sans doute, Hugo nous a donné un certain drame, mais ce drame est mort; sans doute, il a légué son procédé à beaucoup de nos jeunes poètes, mais ce procédé les a tués [. . .] quant à dire que Victor Hugo a créé le roman moderne, cela est une aimable fantaisie, car Les Misérables ne sont qu’un enfant tardif à côté de La Comédie humaine. (“Nos auteurs dramatiques” 612)

While Hugo’s dramatic and poetic works, and especially his novels, have since been elevated from the irrelevance and mediocrity to which Zola condemns them here, the whole of William Shakespeare, as a result of both its convoluted discourse and its inaccuracies, remains viewed more as a prime example of Hugo at his most unrestrained and effusive than as a theoretical text with important implications for our understanding of his work. This reputation is doubtlessly merited in terms of Hugo’s analysis of Shakespeare’s works, as he is suspected of not even having read many of the plays that he analyzes (in great detail!). Yet behind Hugo’s laudatory and indisputably flawed critical evaluation of Shakespeare’s body of work (as well as of the corpuses of Hugo’s other preferred literary “geniuses” such as Homer, Dante, Aeschylus, and Cervantes) can be found significant insights into Hugo’s conception of the creation of character, and specifically that of type character. Indeed, William Shakespeare, in spite of its shortcomings and flaws, contributes, as Ward argues in her essay, “incisive statements on some of the major issues in nineteenth century criticism, including the type” (950). For when stripped of the verbose rhetoric that encases it, the core of Hugo’s discussion of type character in the essay provides us with a highly mythical, symbolic, and unique vision of type that in many

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Hugo and Type Character ways builds on the theoretical premises that he had put forth in the preface to Cromwell.17 Concentrated in the second book of the second section of William Shakespeare (entitled “Shakespeare—Son œuvre, les points culminants”), Hugo’s vision of type, as filtered through his detailed examination of the historical “geniuses” that create such characters, initially focuses, in the tradition of Nodier and other romantics writers, on type as being exemplary in both its individuality and its resemblance to humanity. As Hugo immediately sets forth: “Le propre des génies du premier ordre, c’est de produire chacun un exemplaire de l’homme” (12: 243). From this, Hugo goes on to reveal what he sees as the function of this continuously growing series of “exemplary examples,” whose purpose it is to provide a lesson for future generations: “Cette séries d’exemplaires de l’homme est la leçon permanente des générations; chaque siècle y ajoute quelques figures, parfois faces en pleine lumière et rondes bosses, comme Macette, Célimène, Tartuffe, Turcaret et le neveu de Rameau, parfois simples profils, comme Gil Blas, Manon Lescaut, Clarisse Harlowe et Candide” (12: 243). Like Nodier before him, Hugo sees, as Ward specifies, “the creative power of the genius, a power analogous to that of God, as evidenced by the creation of types. These types are living individuals of universal import as they become a part of an evolving historical tradition” (951).18 In this understanding, type conciliates individuality with psychological and universal modes of representation. Parallels with Nodier’s essay, as well as with other romantic conceptions of type, are, however, quickly supplanted in Hugo’s presentation by echoes of ideas introduced in the preface to Cromwell about the drame. Like the condensing and amplifying function of the drame, charged with making from “une lueur une lumière, d’une lumière une flamme” (3: 70), character is envisioned by Hugo in William Shakespeare as a compact and compressed version of man: “Les types sont des êtres. Ils respirent, ils palpitent, on entend leurs pas sur le plancher, ils existent. Ils existent d’une existence plus intense que n’importe qui, se croyant vivant, là, dans la rue. Ces fantômes ont plus de densité que l’homme” (12: 245). Hugo thus shifts the focus of his understanding from the individuality and uniqueness of the

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Chapter Three type as rendered through the artist’s inspired genius to an inherently universal magnification central to the type. The origins of the basic composition of type are in this way explained and justified through Hugo’s tracing of all characters back to a central (divine) source: “De la création divine directe sort Adam, le prototype. De la création divine indirecte, c’est-à-dire de la création humaine, sortent d’autres Adams, les types” (12: 244). Further emphasis on the magnified universality inherent to type (“un type ne reproduit aucun homme en particulier; il ne se superpose exactement à aucun individu; il résume et concentre sous une forme humaine toute une famille de caractères et d’esprits. Un type n’abrége pas, il condense. Il n’est pas un, il est tous” [12: 244]), additionally underscores Hugo’s ultimate and decisive difference from the realist conception of type in which the sociologically and psychologically determined personnage vraisemblable is most often situated somewhere in the murky and complicated middle of absolute good and absolute evil. Remaining faithful to the understanding of mimesis in literature already presented in the preface to Cromwell (“l’art ne peut donner la chose même” [3: 70]), Hugo chooses rather to condense and amplify man’s essential, opposing qualities. Furthermore, while type for Hugo is linked on a first level to a process similar to that of the “scientific” model in which traits are isolated and redistributed into one character, it is, however, in no way socially determined. Indeed, the universal qualities central to Hugo’s vision of type are not based upon social traits but rather his belief in a basic human composition (the homo duplex) with its inherent dualities of beau and laid, sublime and grotesque: “Les types [. . .] sont de l’idéal réel. Le bien et le mal de l’homme sont dans ces figures. De chacun d’eux découle, au regard du penseur, une humanité” (12: 245–46). As Albouy confirms, “il pense définir bien l’humanité en opposant, face à face, les deux extrémités contraires, et en renforçant, si l’on peut dire, ces extrémités: cet extrême qui est le grotesque et cet extrême qui est le sublime, fournissent, dans leur contraste, la vérité totale de l’homme” (La Création mythologique 182). In this way, Hugo’s view of type—which is always based on a variation of the configuration of “Adam [. . .] le prototype” (12: 244)—is pro-

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Hugo and Type Character foundly archetypal in nature as each type reaches back to the basic mystery of man: “Le fruit contient le mystère de l’arbre, et le type contient le mystère de l’homme. De là cette vie étrange du type” (12: 245). The metaphysical aspects of type are valorized through this link to the core myths of humanity, in which the demarcation between real and ideal are constantly blurred. Whereas type in the works of Balzac and of his realist successors functions through the insertion of distinct social types (who have been observed and “catalogued” as genuine examples) into the society that has forged them, type, in Hugo’s conception, functions rather through the transposition of archetypal, myth-based characters into a historically determined world.19 The resulting narrative meditation thus subordinates current (social and historical) imperatives to a-chronological ones; instead of focusing inward on contemporary society, it focuses outward on the cyclical and unchanging role of society and its imperatives in the universal history of man. In this way, the type character, as Hugo specifies, does not imitate or resume the real but amplifies it through its imagined significance: Une leçon qui est un homme, un mythe à face humaine tellement plastique qu’il vous regarde, et que son regard est un miroir, une parabole qui vous donne un coup de coude, un symbole qui vous crie gare, une idée qui est nerf, muscle et chair, et qui a un cœur pour aimer, des entrailles pour souffrir, et des yeux pour pleurer, et des dents pour dévorer ou rire, une conception psychique qui a le relief du fait, et qui, si elle saigne, saigne du vrai sang, voilà le type. (12: 245)

Hugo’s conception of type is an invaluable tool in our understanding of the construction and role of character in his fiction, as Hugo, in all of his novels, envisioned and created his characters—even those of the socially oriented Les Misérables—in general rather than social terms. Even prior to William Shakespeare, Hugo had called attention to the bold outlines of this vision of type in reference to Les Misérables, when he summarized the essence of the then-entitled Les Misères in the following manner: “Histoire d’un saint, Histoire d’un homme, Histoire d’une femme, Histoire d’une poupée.”20 Hugo thus conceived of the characters of his novel first and foremost as

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Chapter Three universal figures that would in turn embody the historical and social truths of Myriel, Jean Valjean, Fantine, and Cosette. In this way, they are charged with universal, archetypal significance that continuously serves to link them to Hugo’s metaphysical vision of man’s mystery and meaning. Out of all the critics who reviewed and wrote on the novel following its publication, Baudelaire was among the few who did not dwell upon its “realist” shortcomings and failures, and came perhaps the closest to understanding this very particular view of character: C’est un roman construit en manière de poème, et où chaque personnage n’est exception que par la manière hyperbolique dont il représente une généralité [. . .] il faudrait chercher beaucoup, et longtemps [. . .] pour trouver dans un autre livre des pages [. . .] où est exposé, d’une manière si tragique, toute l’épouvantable casuistique inscrite dès le Commencement dans le cœur de l’Homme universel.21

In Hugo’s vision, the romantic’s discerning comprehension of the occurrence of type in nature and the genius’s creative powers in unmasking its meaning are synthesized as characters are presented and magnified from the inside out. The next chapter will propose categories that subdivide type character as created by Hugo in each of his five major novels into three principal reappearing groups, all of which are based upon Hugo’s very personal “conception psychique” (12: 245) of primal, archetypal traits (“le bien et le mal de l’homme” [12: 246]) concentrated in each character. The first category of type comprises the least developed and most symbolic characters, in whom one pole of their essential duality—be it the good or the evil—is consistently reinforced throughout their presence in the novels through reference to a dominant trait. The second category of type includes those characters in whom the primal, archetypal traits of good and evil are sharply defined and rigidly set, provoking most often in them a dilemma that causes these extremes to either explode or implode and leads to their deaths. The third category of types contains the most developed characters in Hugo’s novels—his héros doubles—in whom Hugo’s homo duplex is fully explored throughout their traversal of the

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Hugo and Type Character novel, both through an internal struggle, which is characterized by a process of crisis and conversion, and an external struggle that they undertake against the society into which they are inserted.22 As we will see, the similar redistribution of these type characters from novel to novel with the recurring inquiry that it generates is essential to the canvassing of Hugo’s principal ideological concerns.

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Chapter Four

Character as Template

Group 1: The Symbolic Type From Phoebus in Notre-Dame de Paris, to M. Myriel in Les Misérables, to Ebenezer and Déruchette in Les Travailleurs de la mer, to Dea in L’Homme qui rit, to Michelle Fléchard in Quatrevingt-treize, the characters in the first grouping of the Hugolian type are all continuously and consistently figured on the narrative level through a central composing element that radiates from them: Phoebus embodies bourgeois mediocrity, Myriel saintly goodness, Ebenezer decency, Déruchette innocence, Dea purity, and Michelle Fléchard maternal sacrifice and devotion. Defined principally by this one dominant trait, characters such as these, as E. M. Forster famously advanced, can be labeled “flat” characters because they are “constructed round a single idea or quality [. . .] easily recognized whenever they come in” (Aspects of the Novel 67–68). Such characters, as Forster specifies, are “easily remembered by the reader afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable for the reason that they were not changed by circumstances” (69).1 The homo duplex central to Hugo’s vision of type is tipped largely to one pole in favor of either the sublime or the grotesque, as characters belonging to this group present a condensed and amplified version of one side or the other. This is achieved both through the elevation of their principal trait above all others (as revealed through the characters’ histories and trajectories) and the characters’ complete transparency (which is often reinforced by narrative insistence upon their clarity and by a certain amount of narrative “guidance” as to the correct way to interpret them). Conceived chiefly as an abstraction, this character fulfills above all else in Hugo’s novels a symbolic function, often reinforced

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Character as Template by the character’s correspondingly symbolic name. For not only does the nom propre create a “référence prospective, d’horizon d’attente pour ‘prévoir’ le personnage [. . .] renvoyant à tel ou tel contenu moral, esthétique, caractériel, idéologique” (Hamon, “Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 149), it also, as Roland Barthes asserts, must be “interrogé soigneusement, car le nom propre est, si l’on peut dire, le prince des signifiants; ses connotations sont riches, sociales et symboliques” (“Analyse textuelle” 34). Indeed, each onomastic selection (called “l’impératif catégorique du personnage” by Léo Spitzer [Etudes de style 19]) must always be carefully examined in reference to its overt or covert motivation. In Hugo’s case, and for this first group of characters in particular, this motivation can be often understood in terms of a general symbolism that serves to highlight the defining trait (positive or negative) that is underscored.2 At the summit of the high end of characters who belong to this first category is the saintly Bishop Myriel from Les Misérables, whose (hi)story opens the novel. From his decision to change his residence from the Episcopal palace to the adjoining hospital so as to give more space to the sick, to his austere management of his finances to maximize contributions to those in need, to his visits to a group of mountain bandits and a dying conventionnel, everything that the reader learns about Myriel prior to Jean Valjean’s arrival in Digne is designed to reinforce his goodness and prefigure its continuation in his intersection with Valjean.3 This goodness is figured both indirectly through the actions that are recounted and directly through the complete transparency with which he is described, primarily from the inside out: “ce qui éclairait cet homme, c’était le cœur” (11: 90–91). This functioning of this type of transparency is explored by Jouve, who distinguishes between fictional characters who are “retenus” (“qui nous apparaissent [. . .] ‘de l’extérieur,’ comme dans la réalité”) and those who, as the characters belonging to this first category, are transparent or “livrés,” to whom the reader has complete access (L’Effet-Personnage dans le roman 176–77). This access, which focuses the reader’s attention on a character’s internal composition or makeup, often purposefully shrouds or neglects a character’s external characteristics. In this way, for example,

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Chapter Four the bishop’s physical description and other concretizing details are almost exclusively downplayed by Hugo, as attention is generally drawn to the external aspects of transparent characters only when it adds to or reinforces the character’s symbolic importance. The narrator goes to great lengths to assure the reader’s comprehension of Myriel’s goodness, both in “guiding” the reader’s interpretation of the events that are reported relative to Myriel, such as in his above-mentioned visit to the dying conventionnel G. (“On risquerait fort de se tromper si l’on concluait de là que monseigneur Bienvenu fût ‘un évêque philosophe’ ou ‘un curé patriote.’ Sa rencontre, ce qu’on pourrait presque appeler sa conjonction avec le conventionnel G., lui laissa une sorte d’étonnement qui le rendit plus doux encore. Voilà tout” [11: 83–84]), and in placing the reader in a privileged position that renders the bishop’s inherent goodness indisputable even at moments when it is misperceived by others in the novel, as in the episode in which he arrives in Senez on a donkey, scandalizing the town’s residents who think that he has the vanity to imitate Christ.4 The one and only luxury that Bishop Myriel allows himself—his silver (“Je renoncerais difficilement à manger dans de l’argenterie” [11: 68–69])—is sacrificed without hesitation for the greater good of the social category—“les pauvres”—in which the then-unknown Jean Valjean belongs, as indicates the bishop’s commentary to Madame Magloire upon the discovery of its theft: “Je détenais à tort et depuis longtemps cette argenterie. Elle était aux pauvres. Qui était-ce que cet homme? Un pauvre évidemment” (11: 122). The bishop’s silver serves in this way as the literal and symbolic catalyst for Valjean’s redemption and new life, as it is with the money that he earns from it that Valjean re-creates himself as M. Madeleine, and through its memory that he tries to live in Myriel’s image. The fusion of the silver’s material importance and its donor’s symbolic importance for Valjean is sealed by Myriel’s final pronouncement of the trade of the silver for his soul: “Jean Valjean, mon frère, vous n’appartenez plus au mal, mais au bien. C’est votre âme que je vous achète; je la retire aux pensées noires et à l’esprit de perdition, et je la donne à Dieu” (11: 123). Although Myriel is never again figured in the narrative (other than indirectly though Jean Valjean’s mourning fol-

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Character as Template lowing the news of the bishop’s death), this exchange will come to serve as one of the novel’s guiding threads as Valjean seeks to fulfill his “promise” to Myriel.5 As André Brochu observes, “Mgr. Myriel est anti-romanesque. Aussi ‘meurt’-il tout de suite [. . .] Myriel se tient au seuil des Misérables mais il n’y entre pas. Il est le seuil, la porte par où doit passer Valjean pour accomplir son destin romanesque” (Hugo: Amour, crime, révolution: Essai sur “Les Misérables” 60). The static and punctual nature of Myriel’s role thus further reinforces his symbolic importance. Also situated at the high end of the scale of the sublime in Hugo’s novels are mothers and children. Mothers, such as Michelle Fléchard in Quatrevingt-treize, Paquette de Chantfleurie in Notre-Dame de Paris, and Fantine in Les Misérables, are defined in relation to their principal trait of self-sacrifice, presented as the ultimate form of maternal sublimation. The archetypal maternal qualities of instinctive love and protection are transposed onto each of these mothers, whose love for their children is unconditional and so fierce that they are regularly likened to animals in their primal relationship to their children. Paquette, for example, is described as a “mère tigresse” (4: 330) in the scene in which Esmeralda (following their brief reunion as mother and daughter) is taken away to be hanged. She is further likened, at the end of the same scene, to “une bête sur sa proie” (4: 335) in her effort to protect her daughter. This analogy between maternity and animality, which the nineteenth-century study of physiology theorized as joined through their opposition, is similarly presented in Les Misérables in which the narrator equates the “mère qui retrouve son enfant” to “le tigre qui retrouve sa proie” (11: 366), and is even more explicitly developed in Quatrevingt-treize in which Michelle Fléchard is separated from her three young children for the majority of the novel: “La maternité est sans issue; on ne discute pas avec elle. Ce qui fait qu’une mère est sublime, c’est que c’est une espèce de bête. L’instinct maternel est divinement animal. La mère n’est plus femme, elle est femelle” (15: 415). In this, the extremes of the grotesque (animality) and the sublime (divinity) are joined and even fused together through the woman’s transcendent role as a mother. In fact, not only is Fléchard defined uniquely by her maternity (referred to

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Chapter Four throughout the narration principally as “la mère” and with repeated attention drawn to the symbol of her breast6), but she is significantly described in her three-month search for her children as becoming increasingly animal-like. This transformation is effectuated both through her rapid physical degeneration (“inquiétante à voir [. . .] effarée [. . .] ayant une anxiété fauve, et si effrayée qu’elle était effrayante” [15: 449]) and through her actions, such as the blood-curdling scream she lets out when she sees her children in the burning tower: “Ce cri de l’inexprimable angoisse n’est donné qu’aux mères. Rien n’est plus farouche et rien n’est plus touchant. Quand une femme le jette, on croit entendre une louve; quand une louve le pousse, on croit entendre une femme” (15: 475).7 Motherhood in Hugo’s novels is thus equated not only to a transformation, but a complete and sublime transfiguration from which there is no return (“Vous n’avez pas eu d’enfants, moi j’en ai eu. Cela fait une différence. On ne peut pas juger d’une chose quand on ne sait pas ce que c’est” [QVT, 15: 415]). This transfiguration authorizes a mother to go to any length in the name of her children, including prostitution, presented in Hugo’s novels as the ultimate maternal sacrifice. Fantine, for example, progressively sells her hair, teeth, and body in her endless effort to pay for her daughter to live with the Thénardier family. In fact, the downward spiral of physical and moral reduction in Cosette’s name is such that, upon her death, Fantine no longer bears any resemblance to herself: she is buried in a “fosse commune” as an unknown and unidentified “fille publique” (11: 252). Similarly, Michelle Fléchard is forced to turn to prostitution as a means to the end of finding her children: Elle pensait [. . .] à tout ce qu’elle avait souffert, à tout ce qu’elle avait accepté; aux rencontres, aux indignités, aux conditions faites, aux marchés proposés et subis, tantôt pour un asile, tantôt pour un morceau de pain, tantôt simplement pour qu’on lui montre sa route [. . .] tout lui était bien égal pourvu qu’elle retrouvât ses enfants. (15: 445)

The toll taken on these women by prostitution is rendered clear through their physical alteration: they wear prostitution like a mark, but it is a mark that their sublime state of maternity is 74

Character as Template capable of washing away, if given the opportunity. Paquette, who is described as having “de jolie dents” prior to turning to prostitution to support herself, becoming “toute à tous” (4: 157), is described as beautiful again after the birth of her daughter (thus redeemed by her maternity), and then is again physically altered after young Agnès’s kidnapping (“le lendemain, ses cheveux étaient gris” [4: 161]), following which she completely degenerates into the recluse de la Tour Roland. Fantine as well, becomes beautiful again through the misery of her maternal sacrifice (“la grande douleur est un rayon divin et terrible qui transfigure Les Misérables” [11: 183]), and Michelle Fléchard is retransformed after being reunited with her children, when she is “jetée sans transition de l’enfer dans le paradis” (15: 479). Yet while maternity thus authorizes—and often demands—this ultimate sacrifice, it does not guarantee resolution or rewards, as Michelle Fléchard is the only mother in Hugo’s novels whose children are restored to her. In the end, what is accentuated in each of these cases is the nature of the mother’s transfiguration, which is propelled by unwavering love for and devotion to the child or children she has borne.8 The children who populate Hugo’s fictional world, who include René-Jean, Gros-Alain, and Georgette of Quatrevingttreize as well as Gavroche, the two unnamed younger Thénardier brothers, the young Cosette, and the young Eponine from Les Misérables, are themselves defined by the central trait of innocence, and everything that is revealed about them works toward emphasizing this inherent state and its relation to the sublime.9 For the children of Quatrevingt-treize, their innocence is in large part transmitted through the complete transparency with which childhood sensory-related reactions are rendered. For example, when taken hostage by Lantenac’s troops, the Fléchard children remain profoundly unaware of the grave danger around them at la Tourgue, both during the bloody battle (Georgette responds to the first sounds of canon fire by lifting her head, delightedly saying “Poum!” [15: 443] and immediately falling back asleep), and during the near-fatal fire, which Georgette finds “joli” (15: 478). While the disconnected nature of the children’s reactions serves on a first level to heighten the tension of the events at hand, this inability to equate events and their meaning correctly highlights on a second level the

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Chapter Four distance between their world and the adult world, accentuating their profound innocence. The presentation of the Fléchard children’s thoughts and often indecipherable form of language (which is almost animal-like in nature) adds to this emphasis as the narrator repeatedly underscores the undeveloped (read innocent) nature of the child’s mind, thus stressing its proximity to the divine/sublime: “Le murmure de l’enfant, c’est plus et moins que la parole [. . .]. Ce bégaiement se compose de ce que l’enfant disait quand il était ange” (15: 435); “Comment les idées se décomposent-elles et se recomposent-elles dans ces petits cerveaux-là?” [15: 438]).10 In addition, the insurmountable distance between these two worlds also reinforces the symbolic nature of the children’s tale within the novel, which, as Brombert observes, offers “a double perspective on the historical moment” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 216). While René-Jean, Gros-Alain, and Georgette are reunited with their mother at the end of Quatrevingt-treize, thus keeping their state of innocence at least temporarily intact, the children of Les Misérables are forever separated or estranged from their mothers and live in a constant state of flux. The effects of this lack of maternal love and/or protection upon of the childhood state of innocence are emphasized through the radical physical transformations that they undergo. The young Cosette, for example, degenerates, in the hands of M. and Mme Thénardier, from the physically beautiful child entrusted by Fantine (“L’enfant de cette femme était un des plus divins êtres qu’on pût voir” [11: 152]) into the “petite figure sombre [. . .] maigre et blême” whose “grands yeux enfoncés dans une sorte d’ombre profonde étaient presque éteints à force d’avoir pleuré” (11: 318) whom we later encounter. Similarly (and inversely), Eponine degenerates later in the novel from the beautiful and healthy child portrayed at the Thénardiers’ inn into the “triste créature, sans nom, sans âge, sans sexe” (11: 543) viewed by Marius several years later at the Gorbeau tenement house. This external transformation thus translates an internal turmoil and vulnerability.11 Yet while their vulnerability (as created through their social oppression) has a profound effect on the physical attributes and textual trajectories of these children, it is, like a mother’s prostitution, a mark that covers or clouds the child’s inherent state of innocence rather than one that

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Character as Template erases it. Indeed, the inherent goodness of these children is never put into question, and is reinforced time and time again through commentary by the narrator that opposes them in their sublime innocence to the adult world, as, for example, in the following description of Cosette: “L’enfant ouvrit les yeux, de grands yeux bleus comme ceux de sa mère, et regarda quoi? Rien, tout, avec cet air sérieux et quelquefois sévère des petits enfants, qui est un mystère de leur lumineuse innocence devant nos crépuscules de vertus” (11: 154–55). Childhood thus signals a privileged moment during which any layers that have come to cloud innocence can still be peeled away. Through no character, however, is the inherent goodness of the child rendered more clear in Les Misérables than through the Thénardier sons, and specifically through the character of Gavroche, who fulfills the double role of the child and the incarnation of the (romantic and social) type of the Parisian gamin.12 From his introduction in the novel, when the unnamed Gavroche—described as the “petit abandonné” (11: 305)—is crying in some unknown part of the Thénardier inn, it is clear that he is neither loved nor wanted by his parents. As a result, Gavroche (“un garçon bruyant, blême, leste, éveillé, goguenard, à l’air vivace et maladif” [11: 444]) is forced to live in an unreal state of boy-man (“cet enfant était bien affublé d’un pantalon d’homme” [11: 443]), in a window that has not yet been closed by the inevitable social repercussions of his state.13 He is defined by both his state of innate goodness—exemplified, above all, through the “adoption” later in the novel of his two unknown younger brothers—and his moral clarity—exemplified through his ability to read others clearly—as illustrates his denouncing of Javert at the barricades when Gavroche, after counseling Enjolras to “Fiez-vous aux petits, méfiez-vous des grands” (11: 781), informs him of what no one else has seen: that Javert is not a comrade but a police official. Gavroche’s radiant death on the barricades while collecting unused shells from dead bodies (“cette petite grande âme venait de s’envoler” [11: 850]) serves to lock him permanently into this childhood state of innocence. As Pierre Laforgue observes, Gavroche “porte en lui le mythe et en cela il n’y a que lui qui puisse opérer le dépassement du roman vers son au-delà poétique ou son en deçà idéologique” (Gavroche: Études sur “Les

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Chapter Four Misérables” ix).14 Indeed, this death, as well as that of Eponine on the barricades and the disappearance of their two younger brothers following their gamin initiation, not only underscores the danger of being without maternal protection in Hugo’s novels, but in limiting—or eliminating—the characters’ textual itineraries, guarantees that they will forever represent the sublime state that they incarnate.15 The next group of types that are situated in proximity to the sublime in Hugo’s novels are his heroines. These virginal women, of whom the most perfect embodiment is the ethereal Dea of L’Homme qui rit, are defined by their state of physical and moral purity. This state is constantly reinforced in the novels through reference to their internal and external beauty. Dea, whose name—chosen for her by her adopted father, Ursus— signifies “goddess” in Latin, is repeatedly described in terms of her physical beauty. Particular emphasis is concentrated on her eyes, the symbol—paradoxically, as she is blind—of her complete transparency: “La petite fille trouvée sur la femme morte était maintenant une grande créature de seize ans, pâle avec des cheveux bruns, mince, frêle, presque tremblante à force de délicatesse et donnant la peur de la briser, admirablement belle, les yeux plein de lumière, aveugle” (14: 184). While Dea’s physical beauty is significant, it is, however, forever overshadowed by her moral beauty. For not only is the reader privy to all of Dea’s thoughts and feelings, but Dea additionally has the ability—through her blindness—to see clearly into others. In this way, she alone is able to see Gwynplaine’s beauty (“C’est que Dea, aveugle, apercevait l’âme” [14: 186]) and to detect any falseness around her, as illustrate both the scene in which Ursus tries to conceal Gwynplaine’s absence (“Etait-ce la faute de sa ventriloquie? Non certes. Il avait réussi à tromper Fibi et Vinos, qui avaient des yeux, et non à tromper Dea, qui était aveugle [. . .] chez Dea, c’était le cœur qui voyait” [14: 295]) and the scene at the end of the novel in which she recognizes Gwynplaine intuitively upon his return: “elle tourna vers lui son doux visage, et fixa sur les yeux de Gwynplaine ses yeux pleins de ténèbres et de rayons, comme si elle le regardait. C’est toi! dit-elle” (14: 379). Dea’s angelic, pure nature is also underscored through her complete lack of understanding of sexuality and sexual desire.

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Character as Template Opposed in the novel in every way to the charnel Duchess Josiane, Dea’s virginal innocence (“Dea ignorait ce que c’était qu’un baiser” [14: 189]) is characteristic of all of Hugo’s heroines, who are situated at the brink of the dangerous zone of womanhood. In Les Travailleurs de la mer, the narrator makes clear reference to the precariousness of the virginal state: “une vierge est une enveloppe d’ange. Quand la femme se fait, l’ange s’en va” (12: 577).16 As with the Hugolian child, the limited textual itinerary and the outcome reserved for Hugo’s heroines work toward solidifying her in the moment before her untainted, angelic state comes to its conclusion, thus crystallizing her as a symbol of purity. In this way, Dea, who is already physically weakened from her near-death as an infant, becomes mortally ill as a result of Gwynplaine’s absence (“Gwynplaine n’est plus là. C’est à présent que je suis aveugle. Je ne connaissais pas la nuit. La nuit, c’est l’absence” [14: 376]) and is only able to “consummate” her relationship with him in the hereafter (as indicated by the title of the chapter in which they both die, “Non. La-haut” [II, Conclusion, 4]). Similarly, Esmeralda (“d’une beauté si rare qu’au moment où elle parut à l’entrée de l’appartement il sembla qu’elle y répandait une sorte de lumière qui lui était propre” [4: 179]) is hanged in Notre-Dame de Paris with her virginity still intact, and Déruchette, who, like Dea, is completely unaware of her own sexuality or of the power of sexuality, sets sail with Ebenezer on the Cashmere at the end of Les Travailleurs de la mer prior to the consummation of their union. This limitation of the heroine’s itinerary in a way that disallows her to be sexualized can be additionally observed in Bug-Jargal, in which D’Auverney and Marie are (textually) separated by the events of the slave rebellion prior to consummating their marriage, and in Han d’Islande, in which the marriage of Ordener and Ethel closes the novel. The innocence of Hugo’s heroines is thus preserved and emphasized throughout their static and largely passive textual representation.17 Of all the heroines who populate Hugo’s novels, Cosette is the only one whose transformation to womanhood is figured in the text. Following her marriage to Marius, the narrator informs us that: “L’amour, c’est le creuset sublime où se fait la fusion de l’homme et de la femme; l’être un, l’être triple, l’être final,

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Chapter Four la trinité humaine, en sort” (11: 949). Yet as Albouy observes, “Hugo célèbre l’union nuptiale de Marius et de Cosette avec des accents religieux. L’amour accomplit le mystère de la rencontre de l’âme et de la chair, le saint mystère de l’incarnation et de la maternité” (La Création mythologique 205). The religious and mystical overtones given to the consummation of their marriage (“Les mariés disparurent. Un peu après minuit, la maison Gillenormand devint un temple. Ici, nous nous arrêtons. Sur le seuil des nuits de noce un ange est debout, souriant, un doigt sur la bouche” [11: 948]) thus disallow Cosette, even subsequent to her passage to womanhood, from becoming (dangerously) sexualized. On the contrary, as a selfdefined “Madame toi” (11: 945) to Marius, she becomes increasingly static and passive. Moreover, like the other characters in this category who are situated in proximity to the sublime, and specifically like the Hugolian child, Hugo’s heroines are often rendered through ornithological metaphors that underscore the close vertical relationship between the purity of their souls and the divine realm. Esmeralda, for example, is described in an encounter with Phoebus as having “le regard troublé d’un oiseau qui cède à la fascination d’un serpent” (4: 179), while Cosette (who is at times called “l’Alouette”) and Déruchette are linked not only by their names (which suggest the small and diminutive) to the ornithological, but also through recurring imagery. Cosette, both in her physical attributes and in her personality, is repeatedly likened to a bird, and Déruchette is overtly figured as being birdlike: “Un oiseau qui a la forme d’une fille, quoi de plus exquis! Figurez-vous que vous l’avez chez vous. Ce sera Déruchette” (12: 577). Certain of Hugo’s secondary heroes also belong to this first category of type that is tipped toward the sublime, and, as in the case of Hugo’s heroines, they are similarly depicted in relation to their physical assets and to their moral purity, which radiates from the inside out. Enjolras of Les Misérables, who is described as “angéliquement beau” (11: 482) with “ses lèvres de vierge” (11: 785), is so dedicated to the cause of les amis de L’ABC that the narrator tells us that he “ne semblait pas savoir qu’il y eût sur la terre un être appelé la femme” (11: 483). He is rendered just prior to his death at the barricades as forever fixed in this beauty that underscores his inherent goodness: “Sa

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Character as Template beauté, en ce moment-là, augmentée de sa fierté, était un resplendissement [. . .] il était vermeil et rose” (11: 870). Mabeuf, who like Enjolras is a virgin, is embued with a similar innocence (“Le père Mabeuf n’avait pas entièrement perdu sa sérénité d’enfant” [11: 738]; “Du reste, il n’avait jamais réussi à aimer aucune femme autant qu’un oignon de tulipe” [11: 509]) and purity, his own “causes” limited to horticulture and reading: “M. Mabeuf avait pour opinion politique d’aimer passionnément les plantes, et surtout les livres” (11: 509). As Mabeuf’s textual trajectory attests, his innocence and purity never waver despite the hardships he endures. His death on the barricades—while perceived as politically symbolic by those around him—further reinforces on the largest level his innate goodness. In Les Travailleurs de la mer, Ebenezer Caudray is depicted as both handsome and devout (with “le front religieux” and a “visage [. . .] angélique” [12: 781]) and his devotion is repeatedly underscored. Not only does he try to befriend the social recluse and outcast, Gilliatt, who has saved his life, but he is prepared to sacrifice his love for Déruchette in favor of “conscience” and “duty” when he discovers that Déruchette’s uncle wishes her to marry Gilliatt.18 As the primary function of these characters is to exemplify the moral purity that is figured through their innocence, purity, or devotion, these characters of the secondary hero are largely transparent, functional, and, above all, static. On the opposite end of the scale in this first category of types are Hugo’s villains, who are equally “flat” or static and in whom the opposite side of the homo duplex—the grotesque or the laid—is exclusively emphasized. As Albouy observes: “Par le bas [. . .] l’humanité touche à l’animalité qui pénètre en elle. Il est des hommes brutes qui sont véritablement des bêtes” (La Création mythologique 197). These characters—Phoebus in Notre-Dame de Paris, Thénardier in Les Misérables, Clubin in Les Travailleurs de la mer, Barkilphedro in L’Homme qui rit, and l’Imânus in Quatrevingt-treize—are all rendered as animals or even monsters defined by their irremediable moral decay. Just as the positive symbolic characters’ external features in most cases complement their internal makeup, those of Hugo’s villains correspondingly underscore their true moral ugliness. Thénardier’s deceptiveness, for example, goes as far

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Chapter Four as being ingrained in his physical makeup (“Le Thénardier était un homme petit, maigre, blême, anguleux, osseux, chétif, qui avait l’air malade et qui se portait à merveille, sa fourberie commençait là” [11: 305]); Clubin is described as being “petit et jaune” (12: 605); Barkilphedro is presented as having “le corps obèse et le visage maigre. Torse gras et face osseuse [. . .] les ongles cannelés et courts, les doigts noueux, les pouces plats, les cheveux gros, beaucoup de distance d’une tempe à l’autre, et un front de meurtrier, large et bas” (14: 162); and l’Imânus is depicted as having “sur sa face la lueur hideuse, et presque surnaturelle, d’une âme à laquelle ne ressemblait aucune autre âme humaine” (15: 405).19 In addition to these external complements to their interior makeup, the narrator repeatedly presents these characters through the optic of their animal sides.20 Phoebus, subsequent to being stabbed by Frollo and caught in a compromising situation with Esmeralda, is described as, in the words of La Fontaine, being “honteux comme un renard qu’une poule aurait pris” (4: 238), while Barkilphedro, is compared to a cat (“l’envieux chasse pour son propre compte, comme le chat” [14: 162]) and is referenced with adjectives such as “féroce” and “vénéneux” (14: 162), which underscore his bestial side. L’Imânus, as Albouy mentions, surpasses the animal comparison, likened in the novel through both his description and his very name to a demonic being: “Il possède ‘la laideur surhumaine, et quasi divine’ que, ‘dans l’épouvante,’ l’homme prête au ‘démon,’ au ‘satyre,’ à ‘l’ogre’” (La Création mythologique 202). The purely evil side of the good/evil dialectic is even further reinforced in these characters—regardless of progressions in certain of their textual itineraries from life to death—through their moral immobility, as none has any redeeming qualities or the possibility for redemption. In this way, Phoebus is criminally unaware of the irreversible consequences that his thoughtless and selfish actions have on Esmeralda; Thénardier is never successfully punished for any of his criminal activity or misdeeds; Clubin and Barkilphedro largely succeed in carrying out their elaborate projects of deceit; and l’Imânus avenges his dead family through the mass extermination of others. Each of these villains, as Brochu observes, is figured, from his intro-

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Character as Template duction to his resolution in the novel, in reference to a voracious appetite that is fueled by his hate, or in Phoebus’s case, by his complete and condemnable indifference to others: “Tout malfaiteur, dans l’œuvre hugolienne, tend à s’identifier symboliquement au monstre vorateur. Le malfaiteur est, ontologiquement, un affamé” (95). No matter what the outcome of his itinerary, the villain’s “hunger” is indeed never satiated: Barkilphedro’s games of deception and manipulation multiply indefinitely; Thénardier sets sail for America so as to continue his swindling in the fertile land of the “New World”; Phoebus marries but will surely continue his romantic conquests; l’Imânus designs his last act—the fire that he purposely and maliciously sets in the tower—to “devour” as many people as possible; and Clubin (who is himself devoured by the octopus) dies with Mess Lethierry’s fortune—his literal meal ticket— strapped to him. Each of these characters is thus crystallized in the state of moral ugliness by which he is defined, as the negative pole of the homo duplex that he represents is steadily reinforced through his composition and textual itinerary.

Group 2: The Discordant Double The second category of type character in Hugo’s novels comprises those characters instilled with a central, irreconcilable duality. These characters, most of whom fulfill the narrative role of the hero’s adversary and in whom the archetypal qualities of good and evil are both clearly outlined and at odds, are most often faced with a dilemma, or undergo a crisis or moment of possible conversion (spiritual, ideological, moral) that causes their internal antithetical extremes to either explode or implode, resulting often in their deaths. Like Hugo’s protagonists, these characters, who include Frollo of Notre-Dame de Paris, Javert of Les Misérables, the octopus of Les Travailleurs de la mer, Josiane of L’Homme qui rit, and Cimourdain of Quatrevingt-treize, engage in an external solitary struggle against society: Frollo is misunderstood by all those with whom he comes into contact, whether they are erudite or belong to the populace; Javert, who “personnifiait [. . .] la justice, la lumière et la vérité dans leur fonction céleste d’écrasement du mal” (11: 246), devotes his austere life to the

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Chapter Four eradication of crime and social ills; the octopus is seen as detestable both by men and within the system of the ocean; Josiane is opposed, through her physical difference, to all those around her at the court; and Cimourdain—who incarnates a political extreme—is at odds with both the beliefs of the side that he opposes and the more clement beliefs of Gauvain. Yet unlike the Hugolian hero, the character of the hero’s adversary undergoes an internal struggle that does not result in any real transcendence of his or her condition as—whether the adversary lives or dies—there is no reconciliation of his or her internal oppositions and thus no possibility of personal ascension or salvation. On the contrary, their inability to reconcile their oppositions or a potentially transformational realization with their system of beliefs crystallizes the rigidity of the characters belonging to this category: in this way, Frollo dies trapped in a tortured state between priest and demon; Javert is unable to integrate Jean Valjean’s selfless act of benevolence toward him into his strictly encoded value system; the octopus (although killed by Gilliatt) remains in its larger, natural context the “hypocrite” (12: 741) of the ocean; Josiane banishes Gwynplaine after learning that he is unable to complement her disharmony; and Cimourdain is unable to assimilate the incompatible concepts of justice and love in his relationship with his spiritual son Gauvain.21 Unlike the symbolic type characters in Hugo’s novels, who are transparent in every way from their first introduction into the text so as to constantly reinforce the side of the universal man that is emphasized in them, the characters belonging to this second category are presented rather with an increasing degree of transparency. In this way, their opposing poles are steadily pushed toward a moment of crisis. The convergence of Frollo’s internal oppositions, for example, builds over the course of the novel, and is revealed little by little to the reader. While Frollo’s actions, from the outset, are either directly or indirectly presented in a way that renders his identity clear, such as in the first failed abduction attempt of Esmeralda, or when he follows his brother, Jehan, and ends up discovering the spot where Phoebus and Esmeralda are to meet, the reasons for Frollo’s actions are not initially explained to the reader, and are often additionally clouded by the narrator’s shifting omni-

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Character as Template science: “Quelle secrète pensée faisait sourire sa bouche avec tant d’amertume au même moment où ses sourcils froncés se rapprochaient comme deux taureaux qui vont lutter? [. . .] Quel était ce feu intérieur qui éclatait parfois dans son regard [. . .]?” (4: 126). Moreover, armed for the first half of the novel with only the knowledge that Frollo suffers from certain “symptômes d’une violente préoccupation morale” (4: 126), the reader, when finally learning of Frollo’s secret and burning passion for Esmeralda, does so only indirectly, as he is spied upon in the “Anankè” chapter by Jehan, who overhears Frollo’s reference to a fly caught in a spider’s web as “Pauvre danseuse” (4: 201). This indirect revelation serves to intensify the depth of Frollo’s growing obsession, which he initially refuses to acknowledge even to himself. Indeed, it is not until the novel’s eighth book that Frollo’s irreconcilable oppositions are directly outlined—by Frollo himself—in his passionate confession to Esmeralda in her cell: “Oh! aimer une femme! Être prêtre! Être haï! L’aimer de toutes les fureurs de son âme [. . .] et la voir amoureuse d’une livrée de soldat! [. . .] N’avoir réussi qu’à la coucher sur le lit de cuir” (4: 233–34).22 Once openly revealed to the reader, the discord caused by Frollo’s internal turmoil is made transparent through the description of his exterior physical turmoil, which is perceived by other characters as largely bestial in nature. Following Frollo’s confession of love to her, Esmeralda observes that he has “du sang après les ongles” (4: 234), and Gringoire, when he sees Frollo in the street, notices that he is like a starved animal, “bien changé, pâle comme un matin d’hiver, les yeux caves, les cheveux presque blancs” (4: 271). Just prior to his death, this physical transformation is pushed to its extreme, as Frollo, while watching Esmeralda’s hanging, surpasses the bestial and reaches monstrosity: “Au moment où c’était le plus effroyable, un rire de démon, un rire qu’on ne peut avoir que lorsqu’on n’est plus homme, éclata sur le visage livide du prêtre” (4: 339). Although Frollo literally tries to hold on to life, clinging to the cathedral and falling in stages from one level to the next after Quasimodo sends him over its edge, he is unable to do so as the duality that resides within him yields no place for reconciliation. This finality is underscored by Grossman, who notes that: “Frollo’s eventual fall [. . .] recapitulates then

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Chapter Four the trajectory of his life as he descends from the sublime to the bestial to eternal damnation” (The Early Novels of Victor Hugo 186). Like the remains of his body, which the narrator tells us are spread out at the bottom of the tower, “n’ayant plus forme humaine” (4: 341), Frollo’s soul—the essential element that must remain intact for salvation to occur for Hugo’s characters—has also lost its human form, thus excluding him in the implosion of his oppositions from any possibility of salvation. Indeed, as in the alchemy he studies, Frollo is literally transformed (changed from one form to another) through his obsession with Esmeralda, and in the process of this spiritual crisis his fatal duality is cemented. For all of the characters who fall within the perimeters of this category, transformation in Hugo’s fictional universe results in an implosion or explosion of a character’s duality, whereas transfiguration (as seen, for example, in the case of the character of the mother) is required for salvation. The possibility of salvation is similarly denied to Javert of Les Misérables, who is indeed transformed—but not transfigured—by Jean Valjean’s release of him at the barricades as his internal duality (“ce saint Michel monstrueux” [11: 246]; “cette figure où se montrait ce qu’on pourrait appeler tout le mauvais du bon” [11: 246]) converges in a way that negates his understanding of his existence.23 This duality can be traced to Javert’s origins, as the future policeman is born in a prison, and has from the beginning “une inexprimable haine pour cette race de bohèmes dont il était” (11: 169). The rigidity that characterizes Javert’s social and personal systems of beliefs, which ultimately leads through its disharmony to his ideological dilemma and self-imposed removal from each system, is put into action very early in the novel. Javert’s demand for the appropriate punishment—his dishonorable dismissal from his post—after admitting that he has “falsely” denounced M. Madeleine as the convict Jean Valjean (“J’ai souvent été sévère dans ma vie. Pour les autres. C’est juste. Je faisais bien. Maintenant, si je n’étais pas sévère pour moi, tout ce que j’ai fait de juste deviendrait injuste. Est-ce que je dois m’épargner plus que les autres? Non.” [11: 195]) announces, for example, the severity and inflexibility of the standards to which he holds himself throughout the novel.24

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Character as Template Javert’s inability to discern justice and injustice other than within the narrow confines of his system of beliefs manifests itself on a first level through the transparency with which he is able to “see” into others: Il semblerait en effet qu’il existe dans certains hommes un véritable instinct bestial, pur et intègre comme tout instinct, qui crée les antipathies et les sympathies, qui sépare fatalement une nature d’une autre nature, qui n’hésite pas, qui ne se trouble, ne se tait et ne se dément jamais, clair dans son obscurité, infaillible, impérieux, réfractaire à tous les conseils de l’intelligence et à tous les dissolvants de la raison [. . .].25 (11: 168)

It is additionally figured through the transparency with which he himself is increasingly rendered: Javert’s physiognomy, for example, like Frollo’s, serves to mirror the way in which his internal oppositions affront each other. As the narrator informs us shortly after Javert’s initial introduction: “Javert n’avait rien dans l’âme qu’il ne l’eût aussi sur le visage” (11: 191). Furthermore, during the course of his trajectory, he goes from being physically (dynamically) described primarily in terms of his bestial side as the righteous (and self-righteous) “hunter” of criminals (depicted, for example, as having “des mains énormes” [11: 170] and “un mufle de bête fauve” [11: 169]), to being physically (statically) described as a “statue” following his release by Jean Valjean and subsequent recapture of him.26 This literal petrifaction mirrors the rigidity with which he opposes the possibility that things are not as he has always understood them to be: “Sa suprême angoisse, c’était la disparition de la certitude” (11: 913). Indeed, it is Javert’s ultimate refusal (in the chapter “Javert déraillé” [V, IV, 1]) to accept that the beliefs around which he has constructed his existence may be misfounded that leads to his suicide. For although Javert, as a result of his admiration for a convict, “était forcé de reconnaître que la bonté existait” (11: 913), the narrator informs us that “Il était moins le transfiguré que la victime de ce prodige” (11: 915; emphasis mine). Thus unable to make any kind of sense out of the new system in which he has unwittingly engaged himself through his reciprocation of Jean Valjean’s act (“Une chose l’avait étonné, c’était que Jean Valjean lui eût fait grâce,

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Chapter Four et une chose l’avait pétrifié, c’était que, lui Javert, il eût fait grâce à Jean Valjean” [11: 912]), he makes the only choice available to him and removes himself from the system altogether. Like Javert, Cimourdain of Quatrevingt-treize is rigid in his refusal to accept the possibility of the existence of a system of beliefs outside the narrow confines of his own; also as with Javert, this rigidity, which results from the discord between his internal oppositions of good and evil, leads as a result of his moral dilemma to his self-imposed removal from the personal and political systems within which he operates. From his first introduction, Cimourdain’s disharmonious composition is rendered clear to the reader: “Quelques-unes de ces popularités étaient malfaisantes; d’autres étaient saines. Une entre toutes était honnête et fatale: c’était celle de Cimourdain” (15: 345). Indeed, even as Cimourdain’s identity is subsequently masked, as, for example, in his trip to Vendée, during which he is reintroduced as “un homme à cheval” and “ce voyageur” (15: 399), his identity is nonetheless made recognizable through an unusual mixture: the innkeeper observes that the openly brash republican (wearing a “cocarde tricolore” in the dangerous zone of “haies et coups de fusil, ou une cocarde était une cible” [15: 399]) has “l’air d’un prêtre” (15: 400).27 Cimourdain’s double nature is further elucidated and magnified following his reunion with Gauvain, as the two engage in a prolonged mental battle over the best way to end the rebellion. In this struggle, both Cimourdain’s central duality (“Il y avait dans Cimourdain deux hommes, un homme tendre, et un homme sombre” [15: 412]; “Ajoutons que celui des deux qu’on appelait ‘le féroce’ était en même temps le plus fraternel des hommes” [15: 417]) and his dualism in his external (moral) opposition to Gauvain and external (political) opposition to Lantenac are increasingly exposed.28 In the chapter “Après Cimourdain juge, Cimourdain maître” (III, VII, 4), this disharmony takes on its final form, as Cimourdain, who has already, in his role of “judge,” made the political decision to execute Gauvain, has the authority as Gauvain’s spiritual father to pardon him. Cimourdain’s struggle to keep control of the republican camp following the pronouncement of Gauvain’s sentence mirrors his own ideological struggle through the explosion of untenable oppositions (“Voilà qui est fort! Notre chef, notre brave chef, notre jeune

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Character as Template commandant, un héros! [. . .] Cimourdain ose le condamner à mort! Pourquoi? Parce qu’il a sauvé un vieillard qui avait sauvé trois enfants! Un prêtre tuer un soldat!” [15: 500]) and his inability to reconcile his paternal desire to save Gauvain (“une mère regardant son nourrisson dormir n’aurait pas un plus tendre et plus inexprimable regard” [15: 501]). His rigid political ideology and role is in this way forever crystallized. Although able to carry out his duty, Cimourdain is unable to survive the ultimate confrontation of discordant duality, and thus in executing his political obligation he simultaneously “executes” his personal one, shooting himself in the heart—the area of his body infiltrated not by Gauvain’s clemency but by his filial admiration and love—at the same moment as his young disciple’s head falls.29 Unlike Frollo, Javert, and Cimourdain, the other characters who comprise this second category of type in Hugo’s fiction, the octopus of Les Travailleurs de la mer and the Duchesse Josiane of L’Homme qui rit, do not have textual itineraries that result in the ultimate clash of their dualities; rather, their dualities subsist at the novels’ ends. The octopus, although killed by Gilliatt, survives nonetheless in nature as a species that is at once horrific (“quelque chose d’inexprimable”; C’était plus qu’horrible, c’était sale” [12: 695]) and necessary to the universe in its role in cleansing creation (“Toute la nature que nous avons sous les yeux est mangeante et mangée. [. . .] Notre vie est faite de mort. Telle est la loi terrifiante” [12: 743]), and Josiane is last seen in the novel banishing Gwynplaine from her sight and withdrawing into her private chambers. Yet these characters are no less rigidly—or eternally—trapped between the irreconcilable oppositions of sublime and grotesque than Frollo, Javert, and Cimourdain; on the contrary, the octopus is figured eternally in reference to the larger (natural) system in which “tous les êtres rentrent les uns dans les autres” (12: 743) and the last words that the narrator pronounces relative to the Duchesse Josiane (“La portière de la galerie se referma sur elle” [14: 319]) suggest that Josiane is literally enclosed in just as narrow a web of contradictions as the other characters in this category, effectively excluding any possibility of resolution. While the duality of the octopus is more general and abstract as a result of its direct relation to natural processes, it nonetheless

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Chapter Four incarnates the qualities of the satanical woman that are more fully developed in Josiane. The sexual and physical antithetical contradictions of Josiane are underscored and emphasized from her introduction in the novel: “Josiane, c’était la chair [. . .] toute la vertu possible, sans aucune innocence” (14: 144); “La duchesse Josiane avait cette particularité [. . .] qu’un de ses yeux était bleu et l’autre noir. Ses prunelles étaient faites d’amour et de haine, de bonheur et de malheur. Le jour et la nuit étaient mêlés dans son regard” (14: 148). Her “monstrous” interior (she specifically defines herself to Gwynplaine as the monster on the inside that he is on the outside) is increasingly revealed through allusions to both her animal-like side (“Les caresses peuvent rugir. En doutez-vous? Entrez chez les lions. L’horreur était dans cette femme et se combinait avec la grâce. Rien de plus tragique. On sentait la griffe, on sentait le velours. C’était l’attaque féline, mêlée de retraite” [14: 317])30 and to her “supernatural” qualities. These qualities are highlighted in both her physical portrait (“elle était très grande, trop grande” [14: 144]; “Ses cheveux avaient des frissons de crinière; sa robe se refermait, puis se rouvrait; rien de charmant comme ce sein plein de cris sauvages, les rayons de son œil bleu se mêlaient aux flamboiements de son œil noir, elle était surnaturelle” [14: 317]) and in paratextual references, such as in the title (“La Titane”) given to the book (II, VII) in which the moral struggle or combat between the two “monsters” Josiane and Gwynplaine occurs.31 That Josiane banishes Gwynplaine after being informed that he is the husband destined for her (“Ah! Vous êtes mon mari! Rien de mieux. Je vous hais” [14: 319]) cements the impossibility of any reconciliation of her disharmony, as she is incapable of finding the external state of chaos that she seeks to match her internal one. Indeed, even after the Duchesse Josiane is last seen enclosing herself in her chambers, she continues to be referenced in the novel by her incompatible animal and mythical poles, as reveal Gwynplaine’s thoughts of her while contemplating suicide: “Malheur! Malheur! Que tout ce qui l’avait fasciné était effroyable! Cette Josiane, qu’était-ce? Oh! l’horrible femme, presque bête, presque déesse” (14: 368). The central irreconcilable oppositions of the homo duplex are thus as rigidly crystallized in the octopus and in Josiane as they are in the rest of the characters in this category of discor-

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Character as Template dant doubles. In every case, the characters are unable to reconcile their duality in a way that allows for any kind of conversion or resolution that would lead to salvation. They thus remain—whether they live or die—locked into a state of permanent disharmony.

Group 3: Les héros-doubles In this third and final major category of type characters in Hugo’s fiction, which is composed of the héros-doubles of his novels, the reconciliation impossible to the characters of the second category is realized as each of Hugo’s heroes undergoes a conversion (or series of conversions) that leads to transfiguration and thus allows for the possibility of personal transcendence and reconciliation of his internal oppositions through death. These characters—Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, Gwynplaine, and Gauvain—are the most developed in Hugo’s novels and come the closest to meeting Forster’s equally famous criteria for a “round character” in fiction: “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way” (78). Indeed, these characters are proportionally the least transparent in terms of their motivations and actions during the course of their textual itineraries. They are also those in whom the dual composition of the homo duplex is fully explored, both through the internal struggle of their oppositions, which will be ultimately reconciled in death as a result of their transfigurations, and through their external struggle against society itself, which will invariably end in failure. Unlike the symbolic type characters in Hugo’s novels, who are static in their representation and reinforcement of one specific pole of the homo duplex, and unlike the second category of Hugo’s type characters, the discordant doubles, who are rigid in their duality, the Hugolian heroes are characterized by a moment or several moments of crisis and conversion. Often surprising in nature, these moments result in a transfiguration or series or transfigurations that secure the deferred reconciliation of the heroes’ oppositions through death. Quasimodo in this way is transformed—and indeed transfigured— by Esmeralda’s gesture of kindness toward him during his torture on the pillory. Jean Valjean, from his initial “pact” with Myriel,

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Chapter Four to the Petit-Gervais episode, to his self-denunciation before the Arras court after wrestling with the value of his freedom against that of an innocent man, to his decision to save Marius, to his renunciation of all contact with Cosette in her new life, undergoes a series of trials, conversions, regressions, and reconversions during the course of his itinerary. Gilliatt is similarly faced with a number of trials, such as the risky salvage of la Durande, his near-death battle with the octopus, the fateful storm that threatens to undermine the rescue, and the rejection of his prize for the ship’s return—marriage to Déruchette. Gwynplaine is also repeatedly put to the test, from his initial trek from Portland to Weymouth with Dea, to his “temptation” by Josiane, to his speech to the House of Lords in which he sacrifices his newly discovered power to give voice to the people, to his death by drowning. Finally, Gauvain is transfigured by Lantenac’s selfless gesture in freeing the Fléchard children at his own expense, and in turn frees his imprisoned royalist uncle and assumes his place and fate.32 While this moment or these moments—most often characterized by an act or acts of self-sacrifice—do not serve to reconcile the hero’s central duality during the course of his textual representation, they pave the way, as Cellier argues, for his access through death to “un stade supérieur” (“Chaos vaincu: Victor Hugo et le roman initiatique” 214) in which the character’s soul is restored to a state of (original) harmony and completion. In this way, Hugo’s vision of man’s mystery and man’s ultimate meaning is delineated and revealed through the struggle as well as through the ultimate salvation and elevation of each Hugolian hero.33 The incompatible poles of sublime and grotesque or good and evil as figured through the physical, political, societal, or moral duality of these characters are established early in their textual itineraries, with the grotesque side often reinforced through descriptions that underscore their proximity to the animal. Quasimodo, for example, is portrayed from the beginning to the end of Notre-Dame de Paris in terms of a physical incompleteness that leaves him literally suspended between the states of man and animal. From a child in whom could only be seen “une forêt de cheveux roux, un œil, une bouche et des dents. L’œil pleurait, la bouche criait, et les dents ne parais-

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Character as Template saient demander qu’à mordre” (4: 113) to his adult life in which “à force de sauter, de grimper, de s’ébattre au milieu des abîmes de la gigantesque cathédrale, il était devenu en quelque façon singe et chamois” (4: 119), Quasimodo is defined through his animal-like strength and through his animal-like mentality, which is a result of his incomplete mental faculties and a conditioned response to the (unkind) way in which he has been treated. Similarly, in Les Misérables, reference is made to Jean Valjean’s animal-like side: he has the ability to climb “par la seule force musculaire” (11: 356) and is said to have, in the scene in which he saves the convict suspended from the ship in Toulon, “l’agilité d’un chat-tigre” (11: 301). His unusual strength (“il était d’une force physique dont n’approchait pas un des habitants du bagne” [11: 114]) is also referenced as being animal-like in nature in scenes such as the rescue of the père Fauchelevent and his descent into the sewers with Marius. For Gilliatt, whose physical portrait underscores from the beginning his “aspects sauvages,” his three-month epic struggle to salvage la Durande renders him more and more bestial, both physically and mentally as his disconnection from the human world manifests itself: “Les oiseaux, de leur côté, ses cheveux étant hérissés et horribles et sa barbe longue, n’en avaient plus peur; ce changement de figure les rassurait; ils ne le trouvaient plus un homme et le croyaient une bête” (12: 702). For Gwynplaine, the desire that he feels for Josiane awakens primal, animal-like sexual urges in him (“Il lui sembla que, pour la première fois de sa vie, il venait de voir une femme. [. . .] Il venait de voir plus et moins qu’une femme, une femelle” [14: 231]) against which he struggles during the course of novel.34 In a parallel development, the simultaneous proximity of these characters to the sublime, or their potential proximity to the sublime, is also established in varying degrees early in their textual itineraries. For example, although Quasimodo’s soul is in a dormant or buried state prior to Esmeralda’s gesture of kindness (the narrator informs us that “il est certain que l’esprit s’atrophie dans un corps manqué”35 [4: 119]), his potential proximity to the sublime is nonetheless revealed through his love for both his adoptive father, Claude Frollo, and the cathedral itself, as manifested in his (misplaced or displaced)

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Chapter Four ardor for her bells: “Il les aimait, les caressait, leur parlait, les comprenait” (4: 120). In Les Misérables, demonstrations of Jean Valjean’s malevolence or potential for it are in the same way justified by the narrator as being the result of his societal and emotional exclusion (“Jean Valjean n’avait jamais rien aimé. [. . .] Au bagne il était mauvais, sombre, chaste, ignorant et farouche” [11: 341]). Valjean’s “pact” with Myriel (“N’oubliez jamais que vous m’avez promis d’employer cet argent à devenir honnête homme” [11: 123]) opposes, however, his previous behavior to his awakened soul, giving rise to the “lutte colossale [. . .] engagée entre sa méchanceté à lui et la bonté de cet homme” (11: 127) that becomes the novel’s principal thread. In both Les Travailleurs de la mer and L’Homme qui rit the proximity of Gilliatt and Gwynplaine to the sublime is rendered through the complete purity of their souls. For Gilliatt, it is figured through his childlike innocence that excludes from the beginning any comprehension of the functioning of the social or emotional spheres of the novel. This is witnessed, for example, by the error Gilliatt commits in the novel’s opening scene in assessing Déruchette’s gesture of writing his name in the snow as one of love: “Gilliatt avait entendu sa mère dire que les femmes pouvaient être amoureuses des hommes, que cela arrivait quelquefois. Il se répondait: Voilà. Je comprends, Déruchette est amoureuse de moi” (12: 600). For Gwynplaine, it is figured through direct reference to the disharmony between his fully developed and unmaimed interior and his artificially altered exterior: “Derrière ce rire il y avait une âme” (14: 183).36 Finally, in Quatrevingt-treize, the proximity of Gauvain to the sublime is rendered through the dangerously clement behavior he undertakes in the war, clemency born of his stronger belief in moral imperatives than in political ones. In a way that foreshadows his (criminally clement) behavior in releasing Lantenac, Gauvain makes no secret of this stance in a heated discussion with Cimourdain: “La tour du Temple! J’en ferais sortir le dauphin. Je ne fais pas la guerre aux enfants. [. . .] Mon maître, je ne suis pas un homme politique” [15: 417]).37 This central opposition of universal man that is developed in each of Hugo’s heroes builds in each novel toward the moment (or moments) of crisis that results in his final conversion or transfiguration. Even Quasimodo—with his limited capaci-

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Character as Template ties—undergoes what can be seen as a complete mutation when Esmeralda acts in the opposite way from what he expects during his torture on the pillory: Il ne douta pas qu’elle ne vînt se venger aussi, et lui donner son coup comme tous les autres. [. . .] Elle s’approcha, sans dire une parole, du patient qui se tordait vainement pour lui échapper, et, détachant une gourde de sa ceinture, elle la porta doucement aux lèvres arides du misérable. [. . .] Alors, dans cet œil jusque-là si sec et si brûlé, on vit rouler une grosse larme qui tomba lentement le long de ce visage difforme et longtemps contracté par le désespoir. C’était la première peut-être que l’infortuné eût jamais versée. (4: 171–72)

In addition to solidifying the Christian and, in this case, specifically biblical frame of reference (as Esmeralda imitates Mary Magdalene’s gesture to Christ during his torture and crucifixion), her reaction to Quasimodo’s thrice repeated cry (“A boire!” [4: 171]) releases Quasimodo’s soul from its initial state of dormancy and allows for its subsequent expansion. Indeed, as the narrator informs us in the scene in which Quasimodo swoops down from the cathedral to save Esmeralda from being hanged, his internal mutation and awakening has visible external manifestations, and goes as far as to transform Quasimodo’s physical state: “son œil de gnome, abaissé sur elle, l’inondait de tendresse, de douleur et de pitié, et se relevait subitement plein d’éclairs [. . .] car en ce moment-là Quasimodo avait vraiment sa beauté” (4: 247). While Quasimodo’s transformation or mutation is the result of Esmeralda’s act, which is carried out upon him, the moment or moments of crisis and conversion for Hugo’s other heroes are rendered more actively. Jean Valjean’s primary conversion, for example, is the result of his internal oppositions waging moral combat on the terrain of his conscience,38 which has been awakened by Myriel’s good deed toward him and sharpened by the Petit-Gervais episode, in which Valjean immediately regresses in stealing the little boy’s coin following his departure from Digne. As this important scene illustrates, Myriel’s act of liberating Jean Valjean from his former life does not result itself in his immediate conversion; it is rather

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Chapter Four Valjean’s gradual comprehension of what Myriel has asked of him that alters Jean Valjean and his future. This becomes clear during Valjean’s deliberation over the fate of the falsely accused Champmathieu. As the narrator specifies: “Ce que l’évêque avait voulu faire de lui, il l’exécuta. Ce fut plus qu’une transformation, ce fut une transfiguration” (11: 202). The magnitude of this epic struggle between good and evil that takes place in the courtroom scene is illustrated both through the repeated use of antithesis (“Rester dans le paradis et y devenir démon! Rentrer dans l’enfer et y devenir ange!” [11: 211]) and through the physical toll that this process of deliberation takes on Jean Valjean: “Il était très pâle et il tremblait légèrement. Ses cheveux, gris encore au moment de son arrivée à Arras, étaient maintenant tout à fait blancs. Ils avaient blanchi depuis une heure qu’il était là” (11: 237). The outcome of the crisis— Valjean’s decision to denounce himself before the court and take the place of Champmathieu—is the first of many active decisions that he makes at his own peril in his progressive path toward redemption. As Albouy observes: “Les souffrances de Jean Valjean ont ceci de particulier, que c’est lui-même qui se les inflige. Son bourreau, c’est sa conscience” (La Création mythologique 301). Just as in Quasimodo’s conversion, Jean Valjean’s repeated self-sacrifice is also characterized by Christian parallels and references: “La vie elle-même de Jean Valjean, tout entière consacrée à l’expiation, devient comme une imitation de Jésus souffrant” (Albouy, La Création mythologique 301). Another character in Les Misérables who can be seen as undergoing several conversions during the course of his textual itinerary is Marius, a secondary hero who, on a first level, fulfills the narrative role of the jeune premier (“un beau jeune homme” [11: 517]) through his courtship of Cosette. Marius is, however, as a result of his conversions, more complex than the other characters of the jeune premier in Hugo’s novels (Ordener, Phoebus, Ebenezer) and straddles in this way the first and third categories of type. Indeed, Marius undergoes, prior to meeting Cosette, an important political conversion in the name of his rediscovered father and his country (“Il s’aperçut alors que jusqu’à ce moment il n’avait pas plus compris son

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Character as Template pays qu’il n’avait compris son père” [11: 470]), shifting definitively from royalist to republican. Subsequent to his marriage to Cosette, Marius undergoes a second important moral conversion in the name of his father-in-law, after discovering Valjean’s role in saving his life: “Marius était éperdu. Il commençait à entrevoir dans ce Jean Valjean on ne sait quelle haute et sombre figure. Une vertu inouïe lui apparaissait, suprême et douce, humble dans son immensité. Le forçat se transfigurait en Christ. Marius avait l’éblouissement de ce prodige” (11: 990). While Marius rejoins the other jeunes premiers in that he survives the closure of the novel, his political and moral transformation, if not transfiguration, simultaneously associates him with the other characters in this category. Analogous to Jean Valjean’s important moral crisis in Les Misérables is Gauvain’s ideological crisis in Quatrevingt-treize (presented in the chapter entitled “Gauvain pensif” [III, VI, 2]) in which the battleground is displaced from the external setting of la Tourgue to the internal setting of Gauvain’s own conscience: “Sa rêverie était insondable. Un changement à vue inouï venait de se faire. Le marquis de Lantenac s’était transfiguré. Gauvain avait été témoin de cette transfiguration. [. . .] Jamais il n’aurait, même en rêve, imaginé qu’il pût arriver rien de pareil” (15: 482). Gauvain’s own personal reevaluation and transfiguration is emphasized not only through his actions as he releases Lantenac and assumes his place and punishment, but through the change in his discourse as he subordinates the political opposition that has divided them to moral and human imperatives based on the contagious potential of the sublime: Un héros sortait du monstre; plus qu’un héros, un homme. Plus qu’une âme, un cœur. Ce n’était plus un tueur que Gauvain avait devant lui, mais un sauveur. [. . .] Lantenac venait de le frapper d’un coup de foudre de bonté. Et Lantenac transfiguré ne transfigurerait pas Gauvain! Quoi! Ce coup de lumière serait sans contre coup! (15: 485)39

In this, Gauvain makes good on his earlier words to Cimourdain (“Mon maître, je ne suis pas un homme politique” [15: 417]), choosing humanity over history. The limitations inherent to the historical moment that is represented have been

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Chapter Four observed by Sandy Petrey, who asserts that “[. . .] Historical understanding is inferior. To attain salvation in Quatrevingttreize is to rise above the universe of quatre-vingt-treize” (“Quatrevingt-treize: Children Belong with Their Mother” 177). This immanent salvation as a result of Gauvain’s transfiguration is made clear in his death scene, in which the young republican hero is described in hyperbolic terms (“jamais il n’avait apparu plus beau” [15: 508]) and as being in a dreamlike state of tranquility (as highlighted by the light of the setting sun, which “le mettait comme dans une gloire” [15: 508]). This confidence underscores both Gauvain’s belief in the decision that he has made and the reconciliation that it will allow him outside of the historical and political world represented in the novel. Lantenac, although he can be seen as a round character in that he surprises in his act of saving the children, and transformational in his very decision to do so, nonetheless spans several categories of classification as he is neither strictly symbolic, discordantly double, nor truly transfigured. Indeed, although Lantenac’s spontaneous decision to free Michelle Fléchard’s children is perceived by Gauvain as a transfiguring action, it is clear that this decision does not in any way alter his system of beliefs, or, consequently, his future actions in the war, as reveals his long speech to Gauvain: “Monsieur le vicomte, vous ne savez peut-être plus ce que c’est qu’un gentilhomme. Eh bien, en voilà un, c’est moi [. . .] ça croit en Dieu, ça croit à la tradition [. . .] à la fidélité, à la loyauté, au devoirs envers son prince, au respect des vieilles lois” (15: 491). In this way, Gauvain’s “tempête sous un crâne,” although rhetorically similar to Jean Valjean’s, is ultimately quite different: “The reformed thief condemns himself to assure the safety of an innocent sheep; the Republican general condemns himself so that the wolf will continue to have free run of the fold” (Petrey, “Quatrevingt-treize” 174).40 That Hugo’s heroes are proportionately the least transparent of his characters is exemplified in the moments or scenes of crisis and conversion in L’Homme qui rit and, especially, in Les Travailleurs de la mer, in which the heroes each come to decisions that are profoundly personal in nature and that are not directly explained by the narrator to the reader: Gwynplaine

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Character as Template abandons his newly found title of Peer to try to reclaim the life from which he was literally removed, and Gilliatt, following his battle with the octopus and the near impossible retrieval of la Durande, refuses to accept Déruchette as his compensation in spite of Mess Lethierry’s promise that she’ll marry the man who brings the ship back. Gwynplaine’s internal oppositions become even more untenable after he is restored to his birthright: “Deux spectres, l’adversité et la prospérité, prenant possession de la même âme, et chacun la tirant à soi. Partage pathétique d’une intelligence, d’une volonté, d’un cerveau, entre ces deux frères ennemis, le fantôme pauvre et le fantôme riche. Abel et Caïn dans le même homme” (14: 340). His decision to flee the House of Lords and renounce his wealth and power emphasizes the social disharmony that compounds his physical disharmony.41 His complete failure in the social sphere, as illustrated by the futility of his discourse to the House of Lords, thus signals the end of his period of temptation (which is simultaneously sexual and social) and propels his desired redemption through a return to the familial sphere that he previously occupied: “Il avait quitté [. . .] le vrai pour le faux, Dea pour Josiane, l’amour pour l’orgueil, la liberté pour la puissance, le travail fier et pauvre pour l’opulence pleine de responsabilité obscure, l’ombre où est Dieu pour le flamboiement où sont les démons, le paradis pour l’olympe!” (14: 367). Furthermore, this realization is magnified by the way in which Gwynplaine literally strips himself of everything connecting him to the social realm while trying to recover his family: during his frantic efforts to locate the Green-Box he throws off his cloak, which indicates his social position, and strips himself of his title, money, and power in willing it to Lord David in a suicide note.42 For Gilliatt, his victory over the octopus and—by extension—nature serves literally as the catalyst for his metamorphosis. Not only has he been physically altered (hair, skin, and eyes) by nature during his ordeal at the Douvres, but he is also physically marked or scarred by his encounter with the octopus, which leaves suction burns all over his body.43 The manifestations of this altering (quasi-sexual) experience are clear as Gilliatt awakens after this event as if he has been reborn in perfect complicity with the elements of nature against which

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Chapter Four he had previously struggled: “Un soupir souleva la poitrine de Gilliatt. Il vivait. Le soleil continua ses caresses, presque ardentes. Le vent, qui était déjà le vent de midi et le vent d’été, s’approcha de Gilliatt comme une bouche, soufflant mollement” (12: 753). His subsequent rejection of his reward for the safe recovery of the steamboat—Déruchette’s hand in marrriage—exemplifies the irrevocable nature of this transfiguration, from which Gilliatt cannot return. Instead, he first removes himself as an obstacle and then solely effectuates Déruchette and Ebenezer’s marriage, providing consent, rings, and a dowry, and organizing the ceremony as well as their transportation off the island.44 Gilliatt’s conversion thus does not allow for the reconciliation of his oppositions in the world depicted, but only—as with the rest of the héros-doubles—in a world beyond, as indicates the final image of Gilliatt presented by the narrator: L’œil de Gilliatt [. . .] restait fixe. Cet œil fixe ne ressemblait à rien de ce qu’on peut voir sur la terre. Dans cette prunelle tragique et calme il y avait de l’inexprimable. Ce regard contenait toute la quantité d’apaisement que laisse le rêve non réalisé; c’était l’acceptation lugubre d’un autre accomplissement. (12: 793)

Just as with that of Gilliatt, the process of crisis and conversion that occurs for each of Hugo’s heroes is profoundly personal and often cryptic in nature, at once in its realization and in its comprehensibility. Moreover, this enigmatic quality is accentuated by the fact that the characters who surround the protagonists are in nearly every case mystified by the heroes’ acts and actions: Esmeralda never really understands what she has released in Quasimodo; Marius and Cosette cannot comprehend Jean Valjean’s final acts of self-sacrifice in the context of the new life that is available to him; Ebenezer and Déruchette are baffled by what Gilliatt has done to effectuate their union; Ursus is so amazed by Gwynplaine’s return and immediate disappearance that he loses consciousness; and Gauvain’s selfcondemnation for the act of releasing Lantenac is not understood by the large majority of the republican forces, who, just before Gauvain is put to death, are on the verge of rebelling against Cimourdain’s order. In this way, personal conversion— 100

Character as Template which subordinates all other imperatives to individual moral ones—both illustrates the hero’s isolation from the social world that is itself no longer morally transparent and allows for a deferred reward realized through his death and removal from the fictional world of the novel, as it is only in death that the hero is able to find acceptance, transcendence, and a kind of completion through the reconciliation of his internal duality. Type, in Hugo’s fiction, thus functions through the transposition of archetypal characters (in whom the opposing composition of the homo duplex is explored to varying degrees) into a historically determined social world. The similar redistribution of characters from novel to novel and the recurring inquiry that it generates serve as a springboard for the canvassing of Hugo’s principal ideological concerns. The exploration of Hugo’s very particular process of reconfiguration and continuation as well as of two other important character patterns—those of historical and collective characters in Hugo’s novels—will be the next step in our endeavor to sharpen our understanding of the significance of Hugo’s appropriation and transformation of the archetypal model in his novels. For as we will see, these repeated and recomposed character patterns are put in place to complicate and challenge the reader’s understanding of both the real historical and social world and the worlds depicted in Hugo’s novels.

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Chapter Five

Reconfigurations

Variation and Continuation Unlike Balzac, who linked his past and future novels together in the 1842 “Avant-Propos” to the Comédie humaine, or Zola, who structured in advance from outlines and a fictional family tree a unified series of novels to be called Les RougonMacquart, Hugo never formally connected his fictional works. Indeed, Hugo seemingly never sought to officially relate his novels, either along the way à la Balzac or in a preconceived project à la Zola, so as to emphasize a particular and welldemarcated social or historical vision. While Balzac’s Comédie humaine promised, with its pyramidal structure, a process of overarching scientific observation and the explanation for historically contained social groups, and Zola’s Les RougonMacquart proposed a model of experimentation linked to the natural sciences that would allow for an understanding of the particular period of the Second Empire, Hugo’s fictional world—which takes us from Iceland, to England, to Haiti, to various periods of post-revolutionary France—is both geographically and chronologically disharmonious. Furthermore, while Balzac and Zola each heavily relied on systems of recurring characters as an essential element of their projects of unification, using these characters to give memory and weight to their fictional universes, none of Hugo’s characters reappears from novel to novel. Yet in spite of the fact that Hugo’s novels lack the formal and structural unity of those of Balzac and Zola, they can nonetheless be seen as being as tightly wound together as the fictional worlds that Balzac and Zola created. Many Hugo scholars, from Albouy, to Piroué, Grant, Meschonnic, Brombert, Ubsersfeld, and, more recently,

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Reconfigurations Roman, have established and regrouped the strong ties that not only link together Hugo’s fictional works, but also link his fiction to his poetry and theater. Meschonnic, for example, observes that Hugo’s project is one of “une poétique du continu, pour une métaphysique du continu” (12–13). Brombert similarly asserts that “Hugo’s unwillingness to establish fixed boundaries between genres and to see art as simply reflecting a stable reality helps blur the line of demarcation between his poetry and prose, between his novels and his other works” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 10). While this interweaving can be traced on a first level to the concepts of the all-encompassing drame and of totality set forth by Hugo in the preface to Cromwell, it serves, on a second level, to indicate the extent to which the large-scale preoccupations central to Hugo’s thought—such as his grappling with the imperatives of time, history, individual and collective destiny, and the nature of progress—rarely wavered during his long career, despite the rapid change and upheaval (be it political, social, or literary) that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Hugo himself confirmed the highly connected nature of his works when he likened, late in his career, his body of work to a forest, in which “les livres se mêlent comme les arbres.”1 He had already, in the 1827 preface to Cromwell, divulged the “author’s” desire to rework and clarify the organizing principles—as well as any faults or oversights—of one work only in its successor: “C’est sa méthode de ne corriger un ouvrage que dans un autre ouvrage” (3: 86), intimating that the direction and content of his future writing would be guided, and in many ways governed, by what had preceded it. As we just saw in the study of the three principal categories of type character, this kind of unification, which is not formal but rather compositional and ideological, results in a different kind of whole than in the formally unified novels of Balzac and Zola, one that is not cumulative, but rather repetitive, as Hugo’s corpus seeks continually to repose the same driving or orienting questions through their repeated interplay and reconfiguration. As Grant notes, Hugo’s “universe is, to use one of his own images, a vast ocean under whose surface lies a dazzling array of forms, repeated over and over in almost, but not quite, identical manner” (The Perilous Quest xiv). Meschonnic further underscores

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Chapter Five the unique and complex nature of this deep connection that exists among Hugo’s novels: C’est pour lui une œuvre totale, qui brise et qui fond tous les genres: roman et “autre chose que le roman,” drame, esthétique, philosophie, épopée. [. . .] De ce syncrétisme sort un “genre” nouveau, qui ne s’est pas renouvelé hors de Hugo. A l’intérieur de cet univers homogène, chaque œuvre est ouverte et fermée, selon sa complexité profonde, chaque œuvre est un système mais orienté. (46–47)

In the same way, Piroué highlights the significance of the repetitive quality that defines Hugo’s novels: “Son œuvre est réitérative. Répétition et renouvellement. Tel roman dit tout, trace la courbe achevée d’une destinée refermée sur elle-même, mais aussitôt recommencé, un autre roman le dit d’autre manière, dans une autre gamme de couleurs. Si bien que ressemblance et dissemblance se confondent, qu’unité et foisonnement vont de pair” (17), while Roman draws attention to “la réitération des situations,” noting that “d’un roman à l’autre, se mettent en place des scenes archétypales” (576).2 While critics who espouse Freudian interpretation—most notably Charles Baudoin—have seen these repeating patterns in Hugo’s work as a window that opens into the complexity of Hugo’s relationships with his brothers, mother, and father,3 they also have distinct independent value in terms of our understanding of Hugo’s project as a writer and particularly as a novelist. Indeed, that Hugo—all while shifting the placement, shape, and size of the pieces—invariably returns to and rebuilds the same larger puzzle confirms not only the profound connection that binds his novels but his difference from other nineteenth-century writers, as Hugo’s vision was not contained (or restrained) by the parameters of the historical moment in which he lived. While he may have shared with his contemporaries a desire to take the nineteenth century to task, to depict openly its flaws, lacks, and contradictions, Hugo did not restrict his inquiry to the world that was before his eyes. On the contrary, Hugo’s vision is defined by its expansiveness and very inability to be limited, by its need to see and connect a particular historical moment to all of history.

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Reconfigurations Hugo addressed aspects of this repetition and reconfiguration of philosophical and ideological concerns in some of his prefatory commentary. For example, in the preface to Les Travailleurs de la mer, he directly relates the very particular ideological content of the novel to that of his two preceding ones (“Un triple anankè pèse sur nous, l’anankè des dogmes, l’anankè des lois, l’anankè des choses. Dans Notre-Dame de Paris, l’auteur a dénoncé le premier; dans Les Misérables, il a signalé le second; dans ce livre, il indique le troisième” [12: 551]), and in the preface to L’Homme qui rit he specifically outlines the correlation between the novel and two other envisioned novels, La Monarchie (which was abandoned), and Quatrevingt-treize (“Le vrai titre de ce livre serait L’Aristocratie. Un autre livre, qui suivra, pourra être intitulé La Monarchie. Et ces deux livres, s’il est donné à l’auteur d’achever ce travail, en précéderont et en amèneront un autre qui sera intitulé: Quatrevingt-treize” [14: 27]). In this way, Hugo acknowledges not only the larger thematic continuity that exists among his novels (envisioning them as a series of series) but the continuation of ideas that are transmitted and recast from one novel to the next. One of the primary ways in which this large-scale continuity is created is through the repeated linking of the universal message of each of Hugo’s novels to the (social) world from which he writes, as a dynamic panoramic vision that highlights the transformational properties of time is created through the constant opposition of the fictional world put in place to the actual one in which the authorial voice is situated. This relationship is inscribed in Notre-Dame de Paris, for example, in the first line of the text: “Il y a aujourd’hui trois cent quarantehuit ans six mois et dix-neuf jours que les parisiens s’éveillèrent au bruit de toutes les cloches sonnant à grande volée dans la triple enceinte de la Cité, de l’Université et de la Ville” (4: 25). In Les Travailleurs de la mer, the link between past and present is referenced even before the beginning of the novel proper, in “L’Archipel de la Manche” (“Aujourd’hui, constatons-le, les îles normandes, qui possèdent chacune leur collège et de nombreuses écoles ont d’excellents professeurs” [12: 531]), and in Quatrevingt-treize, it is addressed as early as

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Chapter Five the second paragraph of the novel: “Ces bataillons, faits si vite, furent si bien faits, qu’ils servent aujourd’hui de modèles” (15: 288). In the creation of this panorama, the narrator has the additional function of highlighting the relationship between these two points of reference through the indication of what has been forgotten as a result of the passage of time. The narrator is thus, as we are told in Les Misérables, responsible for recounting what has been lost from a collective memory as, “L’histoire néglige presque toutes ces particularités, et ne peut faire autrement; l’infini l’envahirait. Pourtant ces détails, qu’on appelle à tort petits,—il n’y a ni petits faits dans l’humanité, ni petites feuilles dans la végétation,–sont utiles. C’est de la physionomie des années que se compose la figure des siècles” (11: 134). The narrator assumes in this way the role of translator for the reader of what has been transformed or erased by the passage of time, and in this creates a sustained dialogue between this transformed or forgotten past and the present of the author. As Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson observes in reference to time in Notre-Dame de Paris, “Not withstanding the subtitle of 1482, this is manifestly a novel of 1830. [. . .] NotreDame de Paris inscribes the present [. . .] he does not construct a past that exists on anything resembling its own terms. Nor does he claim to do so. Quite to the contrary, and throughout the novel, he insists upon the living present” (Paris as Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City 155–56).4 While transformations due to the passage of time are regularly noted in each of Hugo’s novels,5 even more common are indications of complete and irreversible erasures: “Il ne reste aujourd’hui qu’un bien imperceptible vestige de la place de Grève telle qu’elle existait alors” (ND, 4: 59); “Il y a trente ans, ce quartier disparaissait sous la rature des constructions nouvelles. Aujourd’hui il est biffé tout à fait” (LM, 11: 353); “Ce quai, les Bravées, la maison, le jardin, les ruettes bordées de haies, la plupart même des habitations environnantes, n’existent plus aujourd’hui” (TM, 12: 591); “Les comprachicos, ou comprapequeños, étaient une hideuse et étrange affiliation nomade, fameuse au dix-septième siècle, oubliée au dix-huitième, ignorée aujourd’hui” (HQR, 14: 44–45); “Cette ruine est aujourd’hui tout à fait démolie, et il n’en reste aucune

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Reconfigurations trace” (QVT, 15: 423). This insistence on the eroding or eroded relationship between past and present in Hugo’s novels thus highlights both the transformational properties of time and the limitations of the possibility of an inherited, collective understanding of history, setting the narrator up in the role of double historian as he is responsible both for transmitting to the reader the (fictional) “très véridique histoire” (ND, 4: 35)6 and restoring and interpreting the “real” historical link between the fictional world and the world from which Hugo writes. In this role, the narrator is bolstered not only by his ability to know and relate or translate the codes of both worlds, but by his ability to re-create the facts and minutia of the “History” of the fictional world in a way that forces the reader—inside of a larger system of historical reference with which he or she is more or less familiar—to rely upon an intimate and remote system of reference that is reestablished and decoded by the narrator. Unlike in his other destabilized functions (discussed in Chapter 2), the narrator in this does not waver as he ultimately brings the panoramic vision created in each novel back to its point of origin, secures its sense, and links it through the concerns expressed to the novels that precede it. The narrator, as a result, is on the largest level charged with creating continuity among the novels through this repeated and very conscious insistence on the (destructive) effects of the passage of time. In the end, however, nothing signals the continuity among Hugo’s novels as much as the patterns of repetition that exist among his characters. As we saw in the first part of this study, the collapse of the archetypal model leads in each of Hugo’s novels to the progressive depletion of the hero’s fictional identity and to the restructuring of textual roles during the course of his itinerary. In consequence, the conflicts between the hero and his adversary and between the hero and the villain are both deflated or even in some cases eclipsed so as to draw attention to the hero’s larger opposition to and isolation from society. As we just saw, the similar and often identical compositions of Hugo’s fictional characters additionally allow them to be subdivided into three principal categories (symbolic characters, characters who are unable to transform, and the héros doubles) based on their different levels of characterization, their accessibility, and their grade or degree of complexity. This

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Chapter Five combination of analogous roles and itineraries and the repetition of characters’ compositions not only points to but indeed confirms the presence of a larger, conceptual template from which all of Hugo’s novels were drafted, one that assured the continuity of his ideological imprint in spite of the notable exterior variations among the novels. Character in this way has a unique, independent function in Hugo’s novels. While reappearing characters in the fictional worlds of Balzac and Zola are reinserted into different novelistic configurations through which the characters and the novels take on a cumulative importance that serves to reinforce a particular social or historical vision,7 the reconfigured versions of the same characters that are categorically repeated in Hugo’s fictional world inversely take on through their repetition an independent importance as agents of the larger, universal vision that Hugo seeks to project. The final two character groups to be explored in this second part of the study—the historical figure and the collective character—will further emphasize the workings of the processes of reconfiguration and continuation in Hugo’s novels.

The Historical Figure “Le roman historique est un très bon genre, puisque Walter Scott en a fait; et le drame historique peut être une très belle œuvre, puisque Dumas s’y est illustré; mais je n’ai jamais fait de drame historique ni de roman historique” (14: 1254). Despite this now-famous disclaimer made by Hugo in an 1868 letter, all of his novels qualify as historical both by contemporary and modern definition. For in addition to its historical backdrop, each novel seeks, with a distanced eye, to reflect upon and elucidate the period in question, to express and explain the importance of specific historical moments to the unfolding of time itself. Yet the nature of Hugo’s novels, which almost always denounces existence that is based on collective historical imperatives in favor of individual moral ascendancy, betrays a highly charged and complicated understanding of history that renders classification less evident. In view of Hugo’s problematical relationship to the genre, how can we understand the presence of historical figures in his fiction, ranging from King Louis XI in Notre-Dame de Paris, to Napoléon in Les

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Reconfigurations Misérables, to members of the English aristocracy in L’Homme qui rit, to Marat, Robespierre, and Danton in Quatrevingt-treize? Just as the genre of the historical novel, propelled by the vogue of Walter Scott, provided the yet-unproven form as a whole with the weight and legitimacy that would help it to dominate the nineteenth century, the historical figures that populated historical novels lent—by their presence alone— veracity to the events and periods portrayed. For as Hamon advances, the inscription of the historical name carries with it a decidedly referential function, one that softens the demarcation between history and novel: “ces noms [. . .] demandent [. . .] à être reconnus (ils font alors appel à la compétence culturelle du lecteur)” (“Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 127–28). Yet from the earliest French historical novels, a divergence occurs between those who, in following Scott’s lead, relegate historical characters primarily to the background, and those who aim to put them in the foreground; between those who privilege referential inscription, such as Balzac in the large majority of his novels, and those who privilege historical figures as characters to mold and develop. In this second category fall, for example, authors such as Vigny, who expressly declares in “Réflexions sur La Vérité dans l’Art,” his preface to Cinq-Mars (1826), a project of putting “les hommes dominants de leur histoire” “[. . .] sur le devant de la scène, je les fis principaux acteurs de cette tragédie” (23–24). While novelists such as Vigny, and later Dumas, who made the aesthetic choice to privilege the novelists’ subjective truths surrounding both historical characters and history itself over historical fact, fueled the momentum of the historical novel, the dangers— both ideological and pragmatic—of the practice of foregrounding historical figures have been well noted.8 Hugo, in the same letter to his editor cited above, would seem to situate himself in this debate on the side of the referential, declaring that: “Quand je peins l’histoire, jamais je ne fais faire aux personnages historiques que ce qu’ils ont fait, ou pu faire, leur caractère étant donné, et je les mêle le moins possible à l’invention proprement dite. Ma manière est de peindre des choses vraies par des personnages d’invention” (14: 1254). Yet here again, Hugo’s statement is problematic, as his practice in reality diverges from both those mentioned above. For if

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Chapter Five the historical figures inscribed in his novels can be seen, on a first level, as elements of Hugo’s own particular brand of realism, this function is, on a second level, quickly reversed by other needs, as the referential veracity of these historical figures is in the end compromised in favor of both emphasis on their larger symbolic value (thus inserting them into the more general category of symbolic type characters studied in Chapter 4) and emphasis on the symbolic reinterpretation of historical periods and events. These opposing functions can already be witnessed in NotreDame de Paris, for which, as the novel’s subtitle of 1482 indicates, the final year of the reign of Louis XI provides the framework. Referenced in relation to the workings of the court system and his power in the novel’s opening pages (“Il y avait à peine deux jours que la dernière cavalcade de ce genre, celle des ambassadeurs flamands chargés de conclure le mariage entre le dauphin et Marguerite de Flandre, avait fait son entrée à Paris, au grand ennui de Monsieur le cardinal de Bourbon, qui pour plaire au roi, avait dû faire bonne mine à toute cette rustique cohue de bourgmestres flamands” [4: 26]), and in relation to his imminent death in its closing pages (“Louis XI mourut l’année d’après, au mois d’août 1483” [4: 341]), the King—tyrannical, arrogant, and cruel—is on the one hand very much an element of the local color that Hugo carefully seeks to establish, while the fictional characters of Quasimodo, Claude Frollo, and Esmeralda and their textual itineraries are given primacy. Yet Louis XI’s interactions with the novel’s characters, his forays into the fiction, are of the deepest symbolic importance. It is a disguised Louis XI who is witness to Frollo’s melancholy assertion, while looking alternately at an open book and the great cathedral of Notre Dame, that “le livre tuera l’édifice” (4: 135). While Frollo laments, in the chapter entitled “Ceci tuera cela,” the invention of the printing press in predicting that it will reduce the Church’s theocratic stronghold, the narrator views the printing press positively as a democratic invention that will serve to enlighten the masses. Implicit in this notion of inevitable enlightenment are the political dimensions of the more accessible printed word, a form of progress that will propel the masses out of the darkness and tyranny of the Middle Ages, out of the despotic reign of the

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Reconfigurations King on whose very ears this prediction has not haphazardly fallen. Yet while the novel announces in this way a world about to change, this change has not yet occurred, and the oppressive weight of historical existence on the individual is figured through the “decisions” made by Louis XI from the wings of the novel. In favor of the uprising of the populace when he believes it to serve his own purpose, that of eradicating the provost system, the King is merciless upon discovering that les truands, in their effort to save Esmeralda, have attacked the cathedral of Notre Dame, that is to say, the house of God and— by divine right—that of the King himself. From his apartment above the newly constructed prison of the Bastille, Louis XI quickly and decisively quells the mutiny, giving the order for Esmeralda to be hanged (“Il faut pourtant que cette femme soit pendue” [4: 312]) and charging Phoebus with restoring order to the city (“Vous ferez sonner le tocsin. Vous écraserez le populaire. Vous pendrez la sorcière. C’est dit” [4: 313]). These decisions on the King’s part indeed determine the novel’s final course in setting off a chain of events: Esmeralda’s death triggers Frollo’s death at Quasimodo’s hand as well as Quasimodo’s subsequent death. These decisions also, we are encouraged to understand, have a hand in the course of history itself. For while the populace is once again subjugated, its uprising forgotten and even erased (the narrator notes that “Les rois comme Louis XI ont soin de laver vite le pavé après un massacre” [4: 338]), each effort at rebellion can be seen as a step toward things to come as another, more significant uprising in the larger framework of history is referenced, and the potential of this group to bring about change is deferred to a future moment. As Maître Jacques Coppenole predicts in no uncertain terms to the King: “l’heure du peuple n’est pas venue chez vous” (4: 310). This direct allusion to the year of 1789—when the French Revolution would erupt with the storming of this same prison—reminds us that in time the people will become a (political) force great enough to bring down the monarchy. The march of time alone, however, is never enough to ensure progress. Written during the Restoration, the novel is ripe with unease over the notion of advancement. Through the

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Chapter Five numerous narrative interventions that refer the reader to recent or “present” history—including the July Revolution of 1830 during which Hugo was at work on the novel—the dangers of blind temporal progress, of the unfolding of one regime into the next, are underscored. Using a technique that firmly opposes the technique used in the majority of historical novels— in which the author strives to render time timeless, to transport the reader in time in a way that makes him unaware of the temporal abyss—the narrator repeatedly draws attention to the differences between these two eras, to the great divide between then and now, each signifying steps on the way to a future moment in which true progress would be realized.9 Decisive, narrative intervention on the part of historical figures can also be observed in L’Homme qui rit and Quatrevingttreize. In L’Homme qui rit, the reigning monarch, Queen Anne, motivated by jealously for her (fictional) half-sister Josiane (“Pour une reine laide une jolie duchesse n’est pas une sœur agréable” [14: 156]), intentionally substitutes the horrifically deformed Gwynplaine for Lord David as Josiane’s future husband: “Anne, suffisamment informée de la difformité de Gwynplaine, ne voulant point faire tort à sa sœur, à laquelle avaient été substitués les biens des Clancharlie, décida, avec bonheur, que la duchesse Josiane serait épousée par le nouveau lord, c’est-à-dire par Gwynplaine” (14: 273). Both this substitution and the restoration of Gwynplaine’s true aristocratic identity have irreversible consequences for Gwynplaine, who is ripped from his protective adopted family and thrust into a world in which his mutilated face can only bring him failure, as witnessed by his speech to the House of Lords (“Mylords, je viens vous apprendre une nouvelle: le genre humain existe” [14: 348]), a similar kind of prediction of things to come in a deferred history, which falls—at least for the time being—on deaf ears. In Quatrevingt-treize, Robespierre’s direct command to Cimourdain upon his being named the delegate of the Comité de salut public in Vendée (“Il n’y a pas un moment à perdre. Demain vous recevrez votre commission en règle, signée de tous les membres du Comité de salut public. [. . .] Nous savons qui vous êtes. Vos pouvoirs sont illimités. Vous pouvez faire Gauvain général ou l’envoyer à l’échafaud” [15: 365]) renders explicit the weight of historical imperatives on personal ties.

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Reconfigurations The former priest is charged not only with the responsibility for his beloved pupil Gauvain’s success or failure, but with the responsibility for his life or death—a responsibility that he is forced to bear in condemning Gauvain to death at the novel’s close. In all of these cases, the nature of the historical figures’ interaction with the fictional characters suggests an impotency, an inability to escape from the path of the rolling stone of historical advancement. The historical figures serve as elements of a symbolic reinterpretation in which historical facts and events are subordinated to a larger view, one that underscores the profound and continuous movement and momentum of history and its troubled relationship to progress. Hugo assigns in this way re-created meaning to these characters so as to change the lens through which historical understanding is filtered.10 This practice is illuminated in the third book of the conclusion to William Shakespeare, entitled “L’Histoire réelle: Chacun remis à sa place,” in which Hugo declares that “Que l’histoire soit à refaire, cela est évident. Elle a été presque toujours écrite jusqu’à présent au point de vue misérable du fait; il est temps de l’écrire au point de vue du principe” (12: 315). In this privileging of principle over fact, the historical figure is necessarily deflated in reference to his or her real historical actions and significance and expanded in reference to his or her symbolic or metaphorical value as part of the larger meaning of history. For, paradoxically, at the same time as the historical figures in Hugo’s novels draw attention to the real, thus anchoring for the reader history as it has been understood and transmitted, they are also evoked for the opposite effect, to draw attention precisely to what is unreal about them, to illustrate the ways in which they have taken on meaning that surpasses their ability to serve as a real point of reference. Thus although historical figures are always, as Hamon contends, examples of “personnages-référentiels” (126),11 Hugo increasingly seeks in his novels to highlight the ways in which historical figures exceed the real that their very presence serves to signify. This expanded dimension is, for example, accentuated by Hugo in the reliquat to Quatrevingt-treize in reference to Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and Mirabeau: “Ni Robespierre, ni Danton, ni Marat, ni même Mirabeau, n’existent par eux-mêmes.

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Chapter Five Insistons-y, il est presque inutile de les juger comme hommes. Autant juger les pierres que jette une fronde. Qui est responsable? La fronde? Non. Pas même la fronde. Qui donc?… Le bras. Allez chercher ce bras au fond de l’infini” (15: 517–18). It is in this way that Hugo’s practice, although similarly condemned by Lukács for its “decorative subjectivization and moralization of history” (The Historical Novel 77), differs from not only Vigny’s, but also very clearly from Balzac’s, for whom historical figures help to equalize “novel and history” (Barthes 102). While historical figures are similarly nonfictionalized in both Hugo’s and Balzac’s novels, the marginalization of historical characters in Balzac’s works, in which they are referenced largely in passing and primarily in relation to their oblique connection to the fictional characters of La Comédie humaine, serves above all to call to mind and reinforce a real, historical framework known and understood by the reader. As Barthes specifies, “It is precisely this minor importance which gives the historical character its exact weight of reality [. . .] for if the historical character were to assume its real importance, the discourse would be forced to yield it a role which would, paradoxically, make it less real. [. . .] like ancestors who are contradictorily famous and absurd, they give the novel the glow of reality, not of glory: they are superlative effects of the real” (102).12 That the historical figures in Hugo’s novels exceed the parameters of this referential function, taking on mythical and symbolic dimensions designed to inform our understanding of history itself, is nowhere clearer than in Les Misérables, in which Jean Valjean’s fictional path and itinerary are given in relation (often figured through chronological parallels) to that of Napoleon, who, we learn in the first chapter of the second book of the novel, passed seven months earlier along the same roads through Digne that Jean Valjean takes upon his release from the chain gang: “D’où venait-il? Du midi. Des bords de la mer peut-être. Car il faisait son entrée dans Digne par la même rue qui sept mois auparavant avait vu passer l’empereur Napoléon allant de Cannes à Paris” (11: 93). This Napoleon, although he figures in several anecdotal encounters in the novel, is from the beginning presented by Hugo above all as a larger-than-life symbol of the complex and concealed mean-

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Reconfigurations ings of history. He is repeatedly referenced and characterized in this way in terms of his epic proportions: he is “ce grand bûcheron de l’Europe” (11: 256) and “le Michel-Ange” of the war (11: 284), drawn from “cette classe de grands hommes matériels qu’on peut appeler les géants de l’action” (11: 261), and fated to fall because “l’excessive pesanteur de cet homme dans la destinée humaine troublait l’équilibre. [. . .] Il gênait Dieu” (11: 273). As Brombert observes, Napoleon is presented as “the prodigious architect of a collapse, as a dark genius committed to violence, destruction, and ultimate catastrophe” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 96). Napoleon is thus represented in the novel not to perpetuate the myths surrounding his popularity, or to provide merely a historical reference point for the fictional itinerary of Jean Valjean, but to shed light on his larger (clouded) importance in the unfolding of the past into the future: “Cette figure a été longtemps toute dans la lumière; cela tenait à un certain obscurcissement légendaire que la plupart des héros dégagent et qui voile toujours plus ou moins longtemps la vérité; mais aujourd’hui l’histoire et le jour se font” (11: 262). It is in this way, as Roman observes, that he is paradoxically inserted into the text “au moment même où il ne coïncide plus avec la marche de l’Histoire, à l’instant où ce qui est historique, c’est justement la disparition du grand homme, ‘l’évanouissement de Napoléon’” (262). This redefined nature and role of the historical character provides us with yet another example of how Hugo as a novelist swims in so many ways against the current of nineteenthcentury French fiction, creating in the process historical characters, who, in their final and most static incarnation in Quatrevingt-treize, are conscious of their own mythical and symbolic value, of the way in which they must be necessarily dehistoricized in relation to real actions so as to be reinserted into a larger understanding of the passage of time, history, and progress, as Marat indicates in a speech directed at Robespierre and Danton: “A nous trois, nous représentons la révolution. Nous sommes les trois têtes de Cerbère. De ces trois têtes, l’une parle, c’est vous, Robespierre; l’autre rugit, c’est vous, Danton” (15: 357).13 As a result, any kind of real analysis of the social and political conflicts between the three is—as with the inscription of the other historical figures in Hugo’s novels and

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Chapter Five particularly that of Napoleon—in the end subordinated to a sweeping view of the ways in which these historical figures are surpassed by their own symbolic value and mythology. Historical characters serve in this way, when present in Hugo’s novels, to point repeatedly to the function and functioning of the larger movements of history itself.

The Collective Character The final reappearing character pattern to be explored—that of the collective character—also belongs on the largest level to the more general category of symbolic type already studied. From les truands in Notre-Dame de Paris to les amis de l’ABC in Les Misérables, to the people (le peuple) in L’Homme qui rit, to the republican and royalist forces in Quatrevingt-treize, this character—defined first and foremost by its dynamic quality—reappears in a reconfigured version from novel to novel, and is, from its initial inscription to its final reference in the text, always presented in a state of motion or action. Yet while the dynamic nature of this group points on a first level to its link to the notions of momentum, evolution, and progress, the transformational properties and continuous flux of this collective character situate it in a larger cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction, and point on a second level to a certain uneasiness on Hugo’s part concerning the realization of this progress. Never completely separated from the confusion and even blindness that is inherent to it, this force, in spite of an evolution that can be observed from novel to novel, is repeatedly used by Hugo to highlight the inadequacies and dangers of blind temporal progress. As early as Han d’Islande and Bug-Jargal, Hugo showed interest in depicting a collective group whose function would be greater than simply providing the novels with a certain degree of local color. Indeed, not only does a collective character figure prominently into the plot of each novel, with a miners’ revolt at the center of Han d’Islande and a slave uprising serving as the catalyst for much of the action of Bug-Jargal, but this group is tied to each novel’s larger message about the passage of time and the meaning of the passage of time in relation to progress. In this, the collective group portrayed in each

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Reconfigurations novel—the rebelling Norwegian miners in Han d’Islande and the rebelling slaves of Santo-Domingo in Bug-Jargal—is instilled with and in the largest sense defined by the central Hugolian duality of sublime and grotesque: it is, on the one hand, sublime in its potential for bringing about change, and consequently progress, and, on the other, incapable of fully comprehending this potential and quick to degenerate into an unfocused mob that engages instead in gratuitous violence. Thus in Han d’Islande, while the miners—who are tricked by Musdoemon into rebelling against the King in the name of Schumacker—are presented on one level as a positive unified force in their potential to bring about progress through their challenge to an unjust taxation (“Nous sommes les mineurs royaux. Nous nous révoltons pour qu’on nous délivre de la tutelle” [2: 304]), they are, on another, presented during the battle as having degenerated into an unruly mob that becomes so violent and ferocious that “le même cri trahison! vengeance! était vomi par toutes les bouches [. . .] l’on préfère à sa vie la mort d’un ennemi que l’on ne connaît pas, où l’on marche avec indifférence sur des amas de blessés et de cadavres parmi lesquels le mourant se réveille, pour combattre encore de sa morsure celui qui le foule aux pieds” (2: 339). Correspondingly, in Bug-Jargal, while the slaves’ uprising is clearly linked to a potential progress through the mistreated black slaves’ desire to put an end to their suppression,14 the slave revolt quickly unravels into vengeful mob violence, as the struggle on both sides rages out of control: “La révolte a commencé cette nuit à dix heures du soir parmi les nègres de l’habitation Turpin. [. . .] Ils ont incendié toutes les plantations et massacré les colons avec des cruautés inouïes. Je vous en ferai comprendre toute l’horreur par un seul détail. Leur étendard est le corps d’un enfant porté au bout d’une pique” (2: 610). The resolution of each novel—in which order is ultimately restored—caps or limits the inquiry into the inherent and disturbing duality of the collective force. The unjust tax is repealed at the end of Han d’Islande, signaling the victory of the miners (“Athanase Munder eut aussi sa joie. Il obtint la grâce de ses douze condamnés, et Ordener y ajouta celle de ses anciens confrères d’infortune, Kennybol, Jonas et Norbith, qui retournèrent libres et joyeux annoncer aux mineurs pacifiés que

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Chapter Five le roi les délivrait de la tutelle” [2: 419]), and at the end of Bug-Jargal, the slave rebellion has been squelched by the French troops. Yet in spite of these resolutions, Hugo’s discomfort with the capacity of the collective force for blind and gratuitous violence leaks into these early novels. This discomfort is witnessed, for example, in Bug-Jargal by Bug’s plea to the cruel and merciless Biassou for temperance and the end of the vengeful, gratuitous acts that he is responsible for committing: “Comment avait-vous pu, dit Pierrot, adhérer à ces horribles représailles? Écoutez-moi, Jean Biassou: ce sont ces cruautés qui nous perdront notre juste cause” (2: 669–70).15 This double nature of the collective character is magnified in Notre-Dame de Paris, in which the inquiry into the duality of the collective group—les truands—is not contained as it is in Han d’Islande and Bug-Jargal by the restoration of order. On the contrary, while Louis XI succeeds in locally supressing and even erasing the assault made by les truands on the cathedral of Notre-Dame, reference (both oblique and direct) to 1789, when the collective force will become a political force capable of destroying the monarchy, defers to a future moment their sublime potential to effectuate change. In this way, just as Quasimodo is only (and literally) “half-made” in the novel, unable to fully comprehend and process what goes on around him, the plèbe in Notre-Dame de Paris is figured as being only partially formed mentally, yet to take on the better-defined ideological shape of the peuple of the French Revolution. Les truands are thus depicted in a largely negative fashion, constantly referred to as a swarming and unruly mob. 16 Significantly, the least developed element of les truands is their communicative abilities. This is highlighted by both the degree of confusion that surrounds them (they are often depicted in darkness) and their inability to use language effectively as a tool or resource, as indicates the preparation scene for the storming of the cathedral: “La Cour des Miracles était tout à fait obscure. Il n’y avait pas une lumière. Elle était pourtant loin d’être déserte. On y distinguait une foule d’hommes et de femmes qui se parlaient bas. On les entendait bourdonner, et l’on voyait reluire toutes sortes d’armes dans les ténèbres” (4: 283). Their inability to communicate effectively is further emphasized during the attack on the cathedral, in which les

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Reconfigurations truands work against Quasimodo in their common goal of saving Esmeralda from being hanged. The large-scale confusion, which results in Quasimodo helping the archers du roi in their search for Esmeralda (“Quasimodo les y aida, sans se douter, le pauvre sourd, de leur fatales intentions; il croyait que les ennemis de l’égyptienne, c’étaient les truands” [4: 336]), can be traced on many levels to the breakdown and failure of a common language (“Alors ce fut un hurlement prodigieux où se mêlaient toutes les langues, tous les patois, tous les accents” [4: 294]) and thus to the literal and conceptual (mis)understanding of their common goal. That the peuple—who has the potential and the capacity to bring about change—needs a voice in order to effectuate this change, and not only a voice but a leader or a translator for what they are unable to comprehend, is an idea expressed by Hugo not only through the portrayal of les truands in NotreDame de Paris but, in a more abstract way, through his vision of himself and his own particular role vis-à-vis this group, whom he saw as in need of direction and guidance in order to exist on an ideological level that would elevate it from the grotesque to the sublime. Hugo specifically addresses the writer’s role in the ideological construction of the peuple in William Shakespeare: “Ici trois questions: Construire quoi? Construire où? Construire comment? Nous répondons: Construire le peuple. Le construire dans le progrès. Le construire par la lumière” (12: 273). In this way, as Nelly Wolf postulates, “représenter le peuple était une obligation liée à la définition même du rôle de l’écrivain” (Le Peuple dans le roman français de Zola à Céline 12). Albouy confirms this assessment of the nineteenth-century writer and specifically Hugo’s role in noting that “Le peuple est, pour lui, une masse passive et inférieure et l’on ne saurait rien attendre de son initiative; le progrès est l’affaire des génies, des hommes-idées, le peuple n’étant que matière à progrès, simple appel à la pitié et à l’amour” (Mythographies 274); while Ubersfeld draws attention to Hugo’s belief in not only the inherent, but the deferred potential of this force: Le peuple pour Hugo [. . .] il est masse obscure en qui réside la force, peuple-océan, peuple-lion, défini par le

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Chapter Five système métaphorique de la force aveugle et sublime [. . .]. Mais défini par des formules infra-humaines, le peuple est informe encore, non encore sujet d’une activité historicopolitique; sujet virtuel, non sujet réel. De là le renvoi au futur du peuple comme existant.17 (Le Roi et le bouffon 87)

Yet despite the belief expressed by Hugo in William Shakespeare and elsewhere that the peuple could—and would—be elevated from the blindness and darkness of the “canaille” (“Le canaille, c’est le commencement douloureux du peuple” [12: 271]), the collective group in Hugo’s novels, even when provided with a leader and voice to translate its transformative powers—such as the voices of Enjolras in Les Misérables, of Gwynplaine in L’Homme qui rit, and of Gauvain in Quatrevingt-treize—still remains largely unsuccessful, regardless of its dynamic nature, in effectuating any type of real or lasting change. Indeed, in each case, both the voice and the force itself are ultimately rendered mute: Enjolras and les amis de L’ABC are all quieted in death at the barricades toward the end of Les Misérables (“Cris, coups de feu, piétinement farouche. Puis le silence. La barricade était prise” [11: 871]); Gwynplaine’s speech to the House of Lords (“Je suis celui qui vient des profondeurs. [. . .] Moi, je ne suis rien, qu’une voix. Le genre humain est une bouche, et j’en suis le cri” [14: 348– 49]) is literally drowned out by the Lords’ laughter at the sight of Gwynplaine’s horrific deformity; and Gauvain’s release of Lantenac requires in turn that his message (“Qu’est-ce que tout cela? C’est la famille, c’est l’humanité, c’est la révolution. La révolution, c’est l’avènement du peuple; et, au fond, le Peuple, c’est L’Homme” [15: 486]) be silenced by his death by way of the guillotine, thus ensuring the continuation of the Vendée rebellion as the progress made by the republican troops through Lantenac’s capture is erased.18 Thus even when provided with a “voice” to translate and verbalize its ideology—whether it be Hugo’s own in critical texts like William Shakespeare or the fictional ones he creates through Enjolras, Gwynplaine, and Gauvain—the ultimate and inescapable ineffectiveness of the collective character betrays an uneasiness on Hugo’s part about its capacity for progress at the moment at which it is situated.19 A clue in deciphering this apparent contradiction in Hugo’s ideology perhaps lies in the imagery that Hugo frequently uses 120

Reconfigurations to describe the collective force, as the ocean is often evoked in reference to the collective group portrayed. Defined by Hugo both in terms of its flux and its transformational properties and most often viewed in relation to the larger all-inclusive cyclical process of deconstruction and reconstruction (“Il n’y a pas d’interruption dans la création; point d’arche brisée; point de lapsus; un fait et ses dépendances embrassent toute la nature; la chaîne est plus ou moins longue, mais ne se rompt jamais. [. . .] L’univers a le nécessaire et n’a que le nécessaire” [12: 808]), the ocean’s dynamic natural qualities underscore the fact that forward and backward are inextricably—yet not always comprehensibly—tied. Metaphors linking the collective groups portrayed to the ocean indeed abound in each of Hugo’s novels. These metaphors suggest not only the correspondence between this force and these properties of the ocean, but that on the heels of the sublime potential of the collective force is always the danger of its inherent inability to see where its motion will take it. Brombert observes that the water imagery used in relation to the plèbe in Notre-Dame de Paris accentuates the threat of blindness and violence that is tied to this group, which is described in terms of its “flot irrésistible” (4: 284): Their forward march is [. . .] overwhelming. Recurrent water images—river, ocean, tides—suggest relentless flux and ineluctable historical processes. The opening pages describe the crowd in front of the Palais de Justice in terms of sea, waves, swells, and currents that ceaselessly assault the “promontories” of the houses. (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 70)

Similarly, in Les Misérables the narrator likens the peuple on the day of an insurrection to the rising swells of the ocean, in which the momentum of violence pushes the collective force wildly forward, but also pulls it back as a result of cyclical law. As a result, as René Journet and Guy Robert note, “Si la notion de peuple est en somme assez claire, la représentation de l’action révolutionnaire est moins nette” (Le Mythe du peuple dans Les Misérables 87). While ocean imagery thus emphasizes both the transformational properties of the collective force and the workings of the larger cycles of the universe (we learn, for example, in the opening

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Chapter Five pages of “L’Archipel de la Manche” that what the ocean has created, the ocean will take away: “L’Atlantique ronge nos côtes. [. . .] Chaque jour un pan de la terre normande se détache et disparaît sous le flot” [12: 515]), it also in the end emphasizes, through the taming or mastery of the ocean (such as in Gilliatt’s successful rescue of la Durande), the real potential for deliberate, ideological progress of a well-formed collective force that does not act on impulsive violence but rather on educated and mediated foresight. Indeed, the only way in which the ideological peuple that Hugo envisions can advance is through its intelligence, in using both reason and moral truth to overcome historical blindness. Hugo subordinates in this way real social issues to “la diffusion de la lumière parmi les masses, la lumière étant participation simultanée au savoir et à la vie morale” (Journet and Robert 87). Through education and moral conviction and fortitude, the peuple can advance in an ideological and philosophical way; yet the fact that this advancement, which propels the past into the future not simply temporally but philosophically and ideologically, is largely deferred in Hugo’s novels points to Hugo’s belief that the potential of not only the (particular historical) collective groups that he portrayed in his novels—but of the peuple as he dreamed it to be—had yet to be realized.20 Each of the character patterns studied here in Part 2—from the three categories of Hugolian type character, to the historical figure, to the collective character—are essential to our understanding of both Hugo’s conception of the function of character and of his fictional project as a whole, as character repeatedly serves in a unique way as the vehicle for Hugo’s meditation on the role of society and its imperatives in the universal history of man. Just as the reappearance of similar character patterns can be traced from novel to novel, another common link among many of Hugo’s characters and in particular among his heroes—their deaths and erasures from the fictional worlds of the novels—can also be traced, and will serve as the subject of the last part of this study: Disappearance. In this final section, we will explore the ways in which the encoded familial isolation of each of Hugo’s heroes paves the way for both his inability to establish and sustain personal

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Reconfigurations connections in the world of the novel and for his removal from this world through death. For it is only in leaving this world that Hugo’s heroes find acceptance, transcendence, and indeed a kind of completion and connection.

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Part 3 Disappearance

Chapter Six

The Poetics of Death

The phenomenon of effacement in Victor Hugo’s novels has generated a great deal of attention from scholars. Indeed, from Suzanne Nash, who remarks that “time [in Hugo’s novels] repeatedly and persistently wipes away the original message” (“Les Contemplations” of Victor Hugo: An Allegory of the Creative Process 26), to Brombert, who asserts that “effacement [in Hugo’s works] is always part of a process of transformation” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 91), to Claudie Bernard, who observes that “le travail de l’écriture est indissociablement annihilateur et productif” (“Les Travailleurs de la mer et le travail du texte” 45), scholars have examined the ways in which the fiction of each histoire (story) is ultimately submerged through a process of effacement into the surrounding Histoire (history) chosen as the novel’s frame or setting. This critical attention to effacement has, however, been centered primarily on the textual return to the page blanche and its relevance to the writing process itself, on the ways in which novels that open “with an explicit reference to textuality also imply from the outset the disintegration of the text” (Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 144). There remains in Hugo’s novels another level of effacement to be examined: that of the majority of the system of characters.1 For each of Hugo’s novels puts into place a vast canvas of characters who—in addition to the protagonists—die, fall away, or simply disappear from the texts. Indeed, in opposition to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine or Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, in which, as we saw in Part 2, the reappearing character performs a unifying function in providing overarching weight and memory that accumulates from text to text, in Hugo’s fictional world, it is the

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Chapter Six repeated pattern of the disappearing or effaced character that provides an overarching unifying thread among the novels.2 It is not, of course, uncommon for characters in novels to die, to disappear from the text, or to be no longer spoken of once they have served their narrative, thematic, or symbolic purpose. Many nineteenth-century novels—and especially those of Balzac and Zola—are replete with just such plotdictated deaths, departures, or dismissals. Hugo’s novels, as well, contain a certain number of plot-dictated deaths or disappearances. For example, in Hugo’s first novel, Han d’Islande, Gill Stadt’s death, which occurs prior to the actual events of the novel, is a necessary catalyst for Han’s fury and wrath throughout the story; similarly, in Bug-Jargal, the murder of D’Auverney’s uncle is an important element in terms of both the representation of the violent slave revolt and Habibrah’s personal revenge. In Les Misérables, the death of the brokenhearted Pontmercy sparks Marius’s political and personal conversion and sets up the conflict with his grandfather Gillenormand, and the character of Tholomyès is effectively dismissed from the novel after having served the purpose of seducing and impregnating Fantine. Clubin’s death in Les Travailleurs de la mer is the mechanism that puts into motion Gilliatt’s Herculean attempt to rescue la Durande; while the Comprachicos’ collective death in L’Homme qui rit allows for their important final-hour confession of Gwynplaine’s true identity. Just as in the ends that befall more traditional nineteenth-century fictional characters, the characters’ itineraries are closed in these cases in a way that leaves their identities intact as they become part of the collective memory of both the text and of the readers’ (re)construction of it. In this way, the characters’ deaths serve to reinforce their psychological and representative qualities. Yet what is striking upon a closer look at Hugo’s novels is the large number of non plot-dictated deaths that take place or are recounted, as the self-imposed natures of these deaths, the connection between death and the characters’ identities, and the very particular narrative self-consciousness about these deaths all point to a redefined notion of the role of character in Hugo’s fiction, one in which character serves a conceptual rather than a representative or psychological function.

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The Poetics of Death For from Hugo’s protagonists—Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, Gwynplaine, and Gauvain—to the majority of their adversaries—Frollo, Javert, the octopus—to a multitude of central characters—Esmeralda, Paquette, Jehan Frollo, Myriel, Fantine, Eponine, Gavroche and his two younger brothers, Mabeuf, Gilliatt’s mother, Clubin, Rantaine, Dea, and Cimourdain—to collective characters—les truands, les amis de l’ABC, the Comprachicos, the royalist and republican forces—the greater part of characters introduced in Hugo’s novels are also removed from the texts, leaving at the novels’ closures only a small and very select handful to survive. The removal of the majority of Hugo’s characters from the worlds of the novels through death or disappearance is the culmination of a progressive process of depletion that begins with the conscious dispossession of their fictional identities and ends with their complete erasure from the fictional worlds, down to the elimination of their very names. Jean Valjean’s reason for abandoning the Fauchelevent name in Les Misérables—“Un nom, c’est un moi” (11: 960)—serves in this way as the overarching rationale for the removal of Hugo’s characters from the fictional worlds that he puts into place. For from the very start, as these characters take shape and weight, as they expand before us, the majority of them simultaneously begin to retract: whether they are killed or die of their own volition, whether they are lost or forgotten, they somehow, in the end, come undone. The semiotic process through which the characters take on meaning (“la première apparition d’un nom propre non historique introduit dans le texte une sorte de ‘blanc’ sémantique qui [. . .] va se charger progressivement [. . .] de signification” [Hamon, “Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 128]) is in this way paralleled by a thematic process of progressive discharge and reduction, which culminates in the characters’ ultimate effacement from the worlds of the novels. This third and final part of this study explores these processes, looking at how Hugo uses character to propel his vision of the historical and social world as well as a humanitarian discourse on the necessity of connection and inclusion for survival. In this, we are once again reminded of both Hugo’s difference from his contemporaries and the ultimate modernity

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Chapter Six of his vision as he dismisses the sociological and psychological determinism that embodies the bulk of nineteenth-century fictional characters in favor of a conceptual and transcendent understanding of man and his moral relationship to the universe. In this chapter, we will explore how the collapse of the archetypal model (as outlined in Chapter 1) is magnified not only by transposition of characters into a morally illegible social world but by the central lack common to these characters: their isolation, which is rooted in their fundamental inability to connect or maintain connections to others or to escape from exclusion—personal or social—through the formation or forging of new ties. For as the narrator informs us in L’Homme qui rit: “seul a un synonyme: mort” (14: 362). In this way, the effacement of character in Hugo’s novels, in addition to underscoring the irrevocable subversion of the archetypal model in his works, serves to highlight the imperative need for human connection, whether it be based in true kinship (founded on familial ties), spiritual adoption, romantic love, or another form of reciprocal association.

The Hero’s Familial Void The repeated absence of certain characters in Hugo’s novels, namely, the absence of the protagonists’ mothers and fathers— who in every case are either unknown, dead, or never mentioned—has both individual and cumulative importance in Hugo’s fiction. While a number of critics working on Hugo’s novels have linked these absences—and particularly the absence of the father in Hugo’s novels—to Hugo’s complex relationship with his own father and to the Freudian notions of parricide and “family romance,”3 this pattern of encoded genealogical isolation has an independent importance on the narrative level. The lack of a familial structure and the social vulnerability that it engenders set the stage for the heroes’ disconnection or inability to connect to others and contributes to their deaths and removals from the fictional world. As we saw in Chapter 4, the character of the mother—when present in Hugo’s novels—is symbolic in nature and characterized by her ferocious maternal devotion and willingness for self-sacrifice, as she will go to the extreme—and often does—

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The Poetics of Death to protect her children. In this way, for example, in Notre-Dame de Paris Paquette is likened in the passage in which her daughter is taken away to be hanged to a “mère tigresse” (4: 331); in Les Misérables, Fantine progressively and literally sells herself (hair, teeth, and body) in order to pay for her daughter to live with the Thénardier family; and in Quatrevingt-treize Michelle Fléchard—who is near-mortally wounded by the royalist troops and endures both starvation and prostitution—has no thought from the moment that she is separated from her children other than that of being reunited with them (“tout lui était bien égal pourvu qu’elle retrouvât ses enfants” [15: 445]).4 For Hugo’s protagonists, however, this living mother who is willing to sacrifice all in the name of protecting her child is never allowed. The heroes’ mothers are either already dead when the novels begin, as is the case for Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (“Sa mère s’appelait Jeanne Mathieu [. . .]. Il avait perdu en très bas âge [. . .] sa mère [. . .]. Sa mère était morte d’une fièvre de lait mal soignée” [11: 108]), for Gilliatt in Les Travailleurs de la mer (“La femme vieillit, l’enfant grandit. Ils vivaient seuls, et évités. Ils se suffisaient. [. . .] L’enfant devint un adolescent, l’adolescent devint un homme, et alors, les vieilles écorces de la vie devant toujours tomber, la mère mourut” [12: 560]), for Gwynplaine in L’Homme qui rit (“laissant derrière lui cet enfant, orphelin [. . .] de mère” [14: 142]), and for Gauvain in Quatrevingt-treize (“sa mère était morte” [15: 350]), or never even named, as is the case for Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, who is identified only as an “enfant trouvé” (4: 162). In a corresponding manner, Hugo’s heroes never have access to their (biological) fathers in the worlds depicted.5 Indeed, just as the protagonists’ mothers are either dead or unknown, the protagonists’ fathers are similarly deceased, as in Les Misérables (“son père s’appelait Jean Valjean ou Vlajean. [. . .]. Son père [. . .] s’était tué en tombant d’un arbre” [11: 108]), L’Homme qui rit (“Lord Clancharlie aurait eu cinquante-neuf ans au moment de son mariage, et soixante à la naissance de son fils, et serait mort fort peu de temps après” [14: 142]), and Quatrevingt-treize (“son père était mort” [15: 350]), or unknown, as in Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Travailleurs de la mer, in which Gilliatt’s and Quasimodo’s

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Chapter Six biological fathers are neither named nor mentioned.6 Furthermore, any kind of substitute paternal relationship into which the hero is inserted during the course of his itinerary also erodes. In this way, Quasimodo, whom Frollo adopts at a very young age (“Il fit vœu dans son cœur d’élever cet enfant” [4: 117]), throws the priest from the cathedral at the novel’s conclusion as a result of his involvement in Esmeralda’s hanging; Ursus, who symbolically adopts Gwynplaine after he arrives in Weymouth with Dea (“Bien, Homo. Je serai le père et tu seras l’oncle” [14: 128]) sees his adoptive family unravel after introducing Gwynplaine and his act to London; and Cimourdain, who serves as Gauvain’s preceptor and spiritual father (“Quelquefois le précepteur est plus père que le père [. . .] cet élève, cet enfant, cet orphelin, était le seul être qu’il aimât sur la terre” [15: 349–50]), is forced to order Gauvain’s execution after Gauvain releases Lantenac and jeopardizes the Republic’s victory in Vendée.7 This radical collapse of both the real and surrogate paternal structure is additionally underscored in several of Hugo’s novels by the disconnected nature of the hero’s name in relation to his lineage or ancestry. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Quasimodo’s name, for example, is not derived from the patronymic order but rather from physical or religious characteristics (“Il baptisa son enfant adoptif, et le nomma Quasimodo, soit qu’il voulût marquer par là le jour où il l’avait trouvé, soit qu’il voulût caractériser par ce nom à quel point la pauvre petite créature était incomplète et à peine ébauchée” (4: 117). In Les Travailleurs de la mer, the fact that the name attributed to Gilliatt is nothing more than a local approximation (“Elle avait un nom quelconque dont la pronunciation guernesiaise et l’orthographe paysanne avaient fait Gilliatt” [12: 559]) highlights his familial disconnection and isolation from any kind of lineage or genealogical stability. While in L’Homme qui rit, the mysterious name of “Gwynplaine”—the origins of which remain unknown (“On m’appelle Gwynplaine” [14: 184])—is the only name that the protagonist attaches to himself, even after having his true lineage revealed: “Je suis Lord Clancharlie, mais je reste Gwynplaine” (14: 352).8 Thus unlike the fictional world of Balzac—in which characters not only reappear in multiple novels but often share famil-

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The Poetics of Death ial ties9—or of Zola—which is founded, as illustrates the subtitle of “Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire,” on the fictional ties of the Rougon-Macquart family—the fictional world of Hugo is based on the categorical absence of family. Indeed, Hugo’s heroes, who are categorically denied access to known or unknown mothers and fathers, are often expressly described in terms of their complete and definitive familial isolation.10 Gauvain, for example, is figured in Quatrevingt-treize not only as being an “orphelin” (15: 350), but as living in a near vacuum of familial absence: “Il n’avait pour veiller sur lui qu’une grand-mère aveugle et un grandoncle absent. La grand-mère mourut; le grand-oncle, chef de la famille, homme d’épée et de grande seigneurie, pourvu de charges à la cour, fuyait le vieux donjon de famille, vivait à Versailles, allait aux armées, et laissait l’orphelin seul dans le château solitaire” (15: 350). Similarly, in Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is not only without his parents, but all traces of the family that he left behind have completely vanished by the time that he is released from prison: “On s’informe à Faverolles. La famille de Jean Valjean n’y est plus. On ne sait plus où elle est. Vous savez, dans ces classes-là, il y a souvent de ces évanouissements d’une famille. On cherche, on ne trouve plus rien. Ces gens-là, quand ce n’est pas de la boue, c’est de la poussière” (11: 193). In the cases of Quasimodo and Gilliatt, this familial vacuum is compounded by the mysterious nature of their origins, as they lack not only ties to the past but also a personal history. No explanation is ever furnished by the narrator for the reasons for Quasimodo’s substitution for the kidnapped baby Esmeralda, and Gilliatt’s biological tie to his mother—the only family that he ever had—is expressly put into question by the novel’s narrator: “On contait dans le pays qu’une femme, qui avait avec elle un petit enfant, était venue vers la fin de la révolution habiter Guernesey. Elle était anglaise, à moins qu’elle ne fût française [. . .]. Elle vivait seule avec cet enfant qui était pour elle, selon les uns un neveu, selon les autres un fils, selon les autres rien du tout” (12: 559). Yet even when the hero’s mysterious origins are uncovered or revealed, as is the case for Gwynplaine, whose birthright as Lord Clancharlie and corresponding wealth and power are restored in a way that

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Chapter Six negates his upbringing as Gwynplaine (“Lord Fermain Clancharlie, ceci est l’instant décisif. Le destin n’ouvre point une porte sans en fermer une autre. Après de certains pas en avant, un pas en arrière n’est plus possible. Qui entre dans la transfiguration a derrière lui un évanouissement. Mylord, Gwynplaine est mort” [14: 281]), the hero is unable to reintegrate into his true familial structure. On the contrary, this revelation of his familial origins works against Gwynplaine (“Il avait quitté le réel pour le chimérique, le vrai pour le faux” [14: 367]) as it precipitates the removal of his surrogate family from his life and leaves him, ultimately, on the brink of suicide. In his effort to regain what he has lost, Gwynplaine subsequently sheds the Clancharlie name both literally (in leaving pieces of his Lord’s attire behind as he searches for the Green-Box) and officially (in the note that he writes in which he wills everything to Lord David), but his surrogate family is already in ruin: Ursus and Homo have been run out of the Inn Tadcaster, and Dea is near death.11 Hugo’s heroes are thus deprived in each novel of both existing familial ties and sustainable surrogate familial ties. This encoded familial isolation has a direct impact on the heroes’ social identities, as indicated by the often disconnected nature of Hugo’s onomastic choices. It also prepares for their increasing social isolation during the course of their itineraries, as the vulnerability this isolation engenders paves the way for the heroes’ inability to connect to another or others, and thus for the progressive narrative dispossession of their fictional identities and ultimately for their deaths. This lack of a sustainable personal and genealogical “history,” combined with the heroes’ inability to generate their own during the courses of the novels, will result in each of Hugo’s heroes being erased from “History” itself.

Disconnection and Depletion The hero’s death (studied in Part 1) is central to the transformation of the archetypal model in Hugo’s novels, as the completion of the romance quest is not rewarded through the clear reestablishment of order with the triumph of good over evil, but through the hero’s private—and most often anony-

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The Poetics of Death mous—personal ascendancy through his self-imposed death. In this, a new conception of the hero is put into motion, one in which the hero’s greatest opposition is not his textual adversary (as the hero repeatedly emerges victorious from this struggle), but the larger forces of the universe as figured through a larger, unsuccessful struggle against a society that has lost its moral transparency. Yet while it is the hero’s struggle against these larger forces that leads to his death in Hugo’s novels, it is his inability to connect himself to society that cements his depletion and effacement from the world of the novel. As early as Han d’Islande and Bug-Jargal, Hugo draws particular attention to the presence and absence of connective structures and their effect on characters’ itineraries and outcomes. In Han d’Islande, for example, Ordener, who goes up against both his absent (real) father and Levin de Knud, his spiritual or adoptive father, in trying to win the hand of their enemy’s daughter, is nonetheless willing to risk losing Ethel during Schumacher’s trial rather than see Ethel’s familial ties eradicated as a result of Schumacher’s (unjust) conviction: “D’ailleurs, que deviendra mon Éthel si on lui enlève son père [. . .] que deviendra-t-elle, sans soutien, sans secours, seule” (2: 374–75). In Bug-Jargal, Bug, who is the sole survivor of his aristocratic family that was sold into slavery, sacrifices himself in his (fraternal) efforts to restore the union of Marie and D’Auverney. Yet this union—which is significantly never consummated12—is only fleetingly restored. Marie, as the final note to the novel informs us, “n’avait été sauvée de l’incendie du fort Galifet que pour périr peu de temps après dans le premier incendie du Cap” (2: 702), and D’Auverney—along with his faithful sergeant Thadée and Bug’s faithful dog Rask—has perished in battle. These deaths, which on a first level point to Hugo’s very particular appropriation and transformation of the archetypal model, additionally serve to highlight the vulnerability and expendability of characters who have not been able to maintain or create familial or personal ties in the novel.13 Beginning with Notre-Dame de Paris, a character’s inability to create sustainable connections can be more explicitly seen as the link between his or her death and his or her deliberate effacement from the world of the novel. Indeed, the entire novel

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Chapter Six can be seen as turning around characters’ desires—and failures—to connect to another, from Gringoire’s need early in the novel to marry Esmeralda so as to (literally) survive in the Cour des Miracles, to Paquette’s desire to be reunited with her longago abducted daughter, to Frollo’s ever-growing obsession with Esmeralda, to Quasimodo’s profound aspiration to save and protect Esmeralda from the world, to Esmeralda’s wish to replace her unknown mother through a romantic “fusion” with Phoebus, as she reveals during the seduction scene: “Que m’importe l’amulette! Que m’importe ma mère! C’est toi qui es ma mère, puisque je t’aime” (4: 214).14 For no character in the novel, however, is this desire—and its failure—greater than for Quasimodo, whose true familial origins, as mentioned above, are never identified. He is introduced rather as an “enfant trouvé” (4: 162) abandoned at the cathedral’s doors after having been switched by gypsies with the baby Esmeralda. Adopted by Frollo, who has himself been orphaned and charged with the care and upbringing of his younger brother Jehan following their parents’ death (“aîné, chef de famille à dix-neuf ans” [4: 116]), Quasimodo is taken into the family and raised by Frollo as a “sacrifice” in his brother’s name, so as to atone for any errors that he might commit. Although an adoptive paternal bond is forged with Frollo (“Il y avait pourtant une créature humaine que Quasimodo exceptait de sa malice et de sa haine pour les autres [. . .] c’était Claude Frollo” [4: 122]; “Rien de comparable à l’empire de l’archidiacre sur le sonneur, à l’attachement du sonneur pour l’archidiacre” [4: 123]), and a “maternal” protective bond with the cathedral itself (“La cathédrale ne lui était pas seulement la société, mais encore l’univers, mais encore toute la nature” [4: 120]; “l’édifice maternel” [4: 120]), this tie slowly unravels as the instinctual affection that Quasimodo has for Frollo (“Quasimodo aimait l’archidiacre comme jamais chien, jamais cheval, jamais éléphant n’a aimé son maître” [4: 123]) and for the cathedral (as additionally witnessed by his ardor for her bells) is supplanted by his feelings of love for Esmeralda following her unexpected gesture of kindness toward him while he is being tortured. That Quasimodo’s feelings are utterly unreciprocated by Esmeralda results in the grim realization of his prediction to

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The Poetics of Death her following her rescue and harbor in the cathedral: “On vous tuerait et je mourrais” (4: 258). Yet Esmeralda’s subsequent recapture by Frollo and her death lead not only to Quasimodo’s death but to his total and anonymous removal from the world of the novel as his skeleton, recognizable by its deformed quality (“il avait la colonne vertébrale déviée, la tête dans les omoplates, et une jambe plus courte que l’autre” [4: 342]), completely disintegrates into dust in the novel’s closing passage. This decisive effacement—which removes every last trace of Quasimodo from the fictional world of the novel—is the result not only of Esmeralda’s death, but of Quasimodo’s progressive disconnection from her and invisibility to her. Quasimodo’s corresponding depletion and retraction is figured first through Esmeralda’s inability to look beneath his monstrous exterior (“Elle vit à cette lucarne un objet qui l’effraya, la malheureuse figure de Quasimodo. Involontairement elle referma les yeux, mais en vain; elle croyait toujours voir à travers sa paupière rose ce masque de gnome, borne et brèchedent” [4: 259]), and secondly through her love for Phoebus, which ultimately leaves her indifferent to Quasimodo and to his desire to connect to her in some capacity (“Nous devons dire qu’elle était peu affligée de cette absence volontaire du pauvre bossu” [4: 265]).15 Unable to form any kind of true or lasting connection to Esmeralda in the world depicted in the novel, Quasimodo is steadily and increasingly isolated from this world. His isolation takes on its final form in the scene in which he irrevocably and literally severs his ties to both Frollo and the cathedral, throwing the priest to his death from the towers of Notre-Dame as a result of Frollo’s pleasure in witnessing Esmeralda’s hanging. Quasimodo’s disconnection from Frollo in favor of the tie that he sought to form with Esmeralda is highlighted in this scene by Frollo’s insignificance to him. He is so mesmerized by the sight of Esmeralda’s lifeless body that he ignores the priest’s struggle not to fall: “Quasimodo n’eût eu pour le tirer du gouffre qu’à lui tendre la main, mais il ne le regardait seulement pas. Il regardait la Grève. Il regardait le gibet. Il regardait l’égyptienne” (4: 339). Quasimodo’s final lament, uttered while looking down at Frollo’s mutilated body and out at Esmeralda’s lifeless corpse—“Oh! tout ce que j’ai aimé” (4:

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Chapter Six 341)—illustrates both his personal loss and his failure to sustain or form a connection, as does the title of the novel’s last chapter—“Mariage de Quasimodo”—which points to the fact that it is only subsequent to his removal from the world of the novel that a sort of personal and sentimental completion can occur, through both the literal erasure of his oppositions and his “marriage” in death to Esmeralda. In Les Misérables, the effacement of characters from the fictional world of the novel occurs in direct proportion to their lack of familial and social identity, as witnessed first and foremost by Jean Valjean’s itinerary. Early in the novel, we learn of the decomposition of Jean Valjean’s own family: after having lost his parents at a very young age, he assumes the role of a surrogate father figure for his sister’s children following the death of her husband. It is this role of father and the ensuing responsibility for the family’s welfare that leads to the famous theft—a loaf of bread—that sends Valjean to the chain gang for nineteen years. Significantly, as the narrator informs us in the chapter entitled “Jean Valjean” (I, II, 6), without Valjean in the role of surrogate father to this family, it cannot hold, and steadily disbands following his imprisonment for the theft until it has disappeared: “Plus rien n’arriva d’eux à lui; jamais il ne les revit, jamais il ne les rencontra, et dans la suite de cette douloureuse histoire, on ne les retrouvera plus” (11: 111). As with Frollo and Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, an adoptive tie is formed, following Fantine’s death, between Valjean and Cosette: La destinée unit brusquement et fiança avec son irrésistible puissance ces deux existences déracinées, différentes par l’âge, semblables par le deuil. L’une, en effet, complétait l’autre. L’instinct de Cosette cherchait un père comme l’instinct de Jean Valjean cherchait un enfant. Se rencontrer, ce fut se trouver. Au moment mystérieux où leurs deux mains se touchèrent, elles se soudèrent. Quand ces deux âmes s’aperçurent, elles se reconnurent comme étant le besoin l’une de l’autre et s’embrassèrent étroitement.16 (11: 342)

Not only does the formation of this adoptive tie to Cosette save her from a life of misery with the Thénardier family, it saves Valjean in many ways from himself. Serving as both father and

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The Poetics of Death mother to Cosette, he begins to experience love for the first time: “Tout ce qu’il y avait de passionné et d’affectueux en lui s’éveilla et se précipita vers cet enfant [. . .] car c’est une chose bien obscure et bien douce que ce grand et étrange mouvement d’un cœur qui se met à aimer” (11: 342).17 This love, which, as the narrator informs us, both makes Valjean strong (“Il aima, et il redevint fort [. . .] grâce à elle, il put continuer dans la vertu” [11: 343–44]) and instills him with a desire to live (“il n’apercevait aucune raison de ne pas vieillir très vieux maintenant que cette enfant l’aimait” [11: 343]), is, however, destined to be replaced by another tie that can be lasting to her: that of Marius. Indeed, Valjean’s lament after learning of Cosette and Marius’s secret courtship (“Je ne suis que le père, je n’existe plus” [11: 810]) illuminates for the reader his recognition and understanding of the transitory nature of the adoptive tie that he has forged with Cosette.18 For as the succession of identities assumed and subsequently abandoned by Jean Valjean during the course of the novel attest, he is unable to forge lasting relationships as a result of his true identity, which he is constantly trying to erase, to turn into, in his words, a “moi effacé” (11: 208). In this way, the Fauchelevent name, which serves Jean Valjean the longest and was given to him by Fauchelevent himself (who created a safe place for Jean Valjean and Cosette precisely in making them “brother” and “niece” at the convent), can no longer be borrowed by Valjean once he recognizes that its purpose has been served. In fact, once he recognizes that Cosette no longer needs him the way that he has come to need her, he ceases to bury his true (social) identity at all. First, although physically unrecognizable, he identifies himself directly to Javert when bringing Marius out of the sewers. This is followed by a full confession of his criminal past to Marius immediately following the young couple’s wedding. Jean Valjean then begins a process of slowly disappearing from Cosette’s new life with the Gillenormand family, telling her: “Ne m’appelez plus père. [. . .] Appelez-moi monsieur Jean. Jean, si vous voulez. [. . .] Puisque vous êtes madame Pontmercy, je puis bien être monsieur Jean” (11: 970). This “puisque” highlights the causal nature of Cosette’s marriage, linking Jean Valjean’s resumption of his true identity and his ultimate disappearance through his death to his own familial

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Chapter Six disconnection. As he tells Marius, “Je ne suis d’aucune famille, moi. Je ne suis pas de la vôtre. Je ne suis pas de celle des hommes. Les maisons où l’on est entre soi, j’y suis de trop. Il y a des familles, mais ce n’est pas pour moi [. . .]. Ai-je eu un père et une mère? J’en doute presque” (11: 958).19 Expendable in the social and familial exclusion that magnifies the breakdown of an unambiguous moral world, the character of Jean Valjean thus takes on meaning in the novel through the depletion of both his real and assumed names to the point that he is rendered completely anonymous and can be absorbed into the cosmic whole, where his condition will be transcended. Valjean’s very reason for abandoning the Fauchelevent name—“Fauchelevent a eu beau me prêter son nom, je n’ai pas le droit de m’en server; il a pu me le donner, je n’ai pas pu le prendre. Un nom, c’est un moi” (11: 960)— underscores this fundamental dispossession central to the majority of Hugo’s heroes. To this end, all traces of individuality are erased from him as well, as highlights the final image that the novel presents of Valjean—his tombstone—which cements the double effacement of name (“on n’y lit aucun nom” [11: 997]) and identity, as the verse written on it that describes his life as he lived it has also become illegible.20 In Les Travailleurs de la mer, Gilliatt’s social and familial isolation, which progressively lead to his effacement from the world of the novel, are emphasized from the novel’s opening passage, in which three passing individuals on a snow-covered road on Christmas Day are described precisely in terms of their disassociation: “Dans tout le tronçon de route qui sépare la première tour de la seconde tour, il n’y avait que trois passants, un enfant, un homme, et une femme. Ces trois passants, marchant à distance les uns des autres, n’avaient visiblement aucun lien entre eux” (12: 555). The disconnection of the male “passant”—Gilliatt—is soon elaborated upon, as the narrator makes reference to both his mysterious origins and his social isolation following his mother’s death (“Sa tristesse [. . .] l’attira vers les choses et loin des hommes, et amalgama de plus en plus cette âme à la solitude” [12: 560]). Indeed, Gilliatt’s familial and social isolation are presented in this way as being proportionally created and related, with his familial isolation serving as the catalyst that puts his larger-scale social iso-

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The Poetics of Death lation into motion: “Cette mort fut pour le survivant un accablement. Il était sauvage, il devint farouche. Le désert s’acheva autour de lui. Ce n’était que l’isolement, ce fut le vide. Tant qu’on est deux, la vie est possible. Seul, il semble qu’on ne pourra plus la traîner” (12: 560).21 It is Gilliatt’s very inability as a loner and outsider to understand the social (in)significance of Déruchette writing his name in the snow that sparks his quest to rescue la Durande so as to have Déruchette’s hand in marriage.22 For while the two are synonymous for Mess Lethierry (“Durande et Déruchette c’est le même nom. [. . .] il donnât ce nom aux deux choses qu’il aimait: Durande à la galiote, Déruchette à la fille” [12: 586]), Gilliatt renounces his double victory prize (“Tu l’épouseras! [. . .] la fille [. . .] la machine. Les deux. Il sera deux fois mon gendre” [12: 774]) upon learning that Déruchette is in love with Ebenezer. Not only does this renunciation reverse the typical outcome of the archetypal quest motif, as all obstacles in Gilliatt’s path have been eliminated, but it also guarantees, in ensuring the romantic union of Déruchette and Ebenezer, Gilliatt’s own removal from the world of the novel. The opposition between Gilliatt’s thoughts prior to learning that Déruchette wishes to marry Ebenezer (“Si quelque chose de semblable à une pensée parvenait à poindre dans son esprit, c’était ceci, que Déruchette était là, qu’il n’y avait besoin de rien de plus, et que l’éternité commençait” [12: 767]) and his actions after he learns that she loves Ebenezer and cannot be his (“Quelqu’un qui eût cherché Gilliatt dans l’angle du mur, ne l’y eût plus trouvé” [12: 769]) underscores the difference between the result of successful romantic connection in the novel (eternity) and the absence of it (disappearance). Indeed, from this point forward in the novel, Gilliatt does everything in his power to assure the success and happiness of the romantic couple (from deceiving Mess Lethierry about the organization of the wedding ceremony to providing the ring and dowry) and to discharge himself of his own existence and identity (from his avowal to Déruchette that he will not get married to his solitary and anonymous suicide by drowning). Gilliatt’s ultimate and literal disappearance into the waters of la Manche—which occurs at the exact moment that the boat carrying Déruchette and Ebenezer to their future disappears into the horizon—is

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Chapter Six thus the direct result of Gilliatt’s “rêve non réalisé” (12: 793) with Déruchette as he submits to “un autre accomplissement” (12:793) through his death, one that will allow for ascendance, transcendence, and completion only beyond the world of the novel.23 Gwynplaine’s death at the end of L’Homme qui rit similarly results from the hero’s inability to forge a lasting connection to the social world or within the social world depicted in the novel, in which the adoptive family of Ursus, Homo, Gwynplaine, and Dea is destroyed and eliminated. Indeed, although adoptive ties are created between Ursus and Homo and the two parentless children (“Voilà que j’ai de la famille à présent! Fille et garçon. [. . .] Adoption. C’est dit” [14: 128]),24 and between Dea and Gwynplaine themselves from the moment that Gwynplaine saves her life as an infant (“Cette orpheline avait cet orphelin. Cette infirme avait ce difforme. [. . .] Deux lacunes se combinaient pour se compléter” [14: 188–89]), these ties are irreparably unraveled during the course of the novel in large part as the result of the revelation of Gwynplaine’s true familial and aristocratic ties. His ultimate separation from his adoptive family leads directly to its demise, as without Gwynplaine in it, the idyllic family created at the beginning of the novel comes apart.25 First, Dea’s already dangerously frail condition (“Il ne lui faudrait pas une secousse. La fêlure grandirait bien vite” [14: 235]) weakens dramatically upon learning of Gwynplaine’s disappearance: “Je sais. Il nous a quittés. Il est parti. Je savais bien qu’il avait des ailes. [. . .] A quand moi?” (14: 295). Then, Ursus is persuaded that Gwynplaine is dead, and is effectively forced to close up the Green-Box and leave England under the threat that Homo will be killed.26 Similarly, without the adoptive family who can see beyond the horror of his deformity, Gwynplaine, in spite of his existing aristocratic family in the form of his half-brother Lord David Dirry-Moir and Josiane, the wife that the Queen has destined to him, is slowly forced out of the world of the novel. His inability to be seen and heard by the Lords, whom he tries to engage in employing a humanitarian, familial discourse (“Vous n’êtes pas méchants. Vous êtes des hommes comme les autres, ni meilleurs, ni pires. [. . .] Vous êtes pères, fils et frères, donc vous êtes souvent attendris. Celui

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The Poetics of Death de vous qui a regardé ce matin le réveil de son petit enfant est bon. Les cœurs sont les mêmes” [14: 350]), results in nothing less than Gwynplaine’s abandonment of both his status and power so as to resume his former life. Although Gwynplaine— after having contemplated suicide—is briefly reunited with his adoptive family, the damage of their separation is too great for their connective ties to be maintained in the world of the novel. Dea expires in front of Gwynplaine and Ursus, and Gwynplaine voluntarily removes himself from this world, following Dea immediately into death: “Il tomba. La nuit était épaisse et sourde, l’eau était profonde. Il s’engloutit. Ce fut une disparition calme et sombre. Personne ne vit ni n’entendit rien” (14: 384). For it is only in death that the romantic couple of Gwynplaine and Dea can form a permanent connection as their human, corporal conditions are transcended, as witnessed by Dea’s exclamation “Lumière! [. . .] Je vois!” (14: 383) and Gwynplaine’s first real “smile.” Although the connection that Gauvain seeks to maintain in Quatrevingt-treize is not a romantic one, but rather an abstract filial one to “La République” for whom he wages the war in Vendée, his inability to keep his allegiance to this tie—as a result of his decision to subordinate political imperatives to larger moral ones—leads no less to his removal from the world of the novel through his death. While this death—unlike the deaths of Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, and Gwynplaine—is not anonymous, as Gauvain is guillotined as an example before all of the republican forces, his textual itinerary and all of the “History” that is implicated in it (including la Tourgue) is nonetheless consciously folded into the larger History of 1793.27 This large-scale erasure of Gauvain and his personal story is set up from the beginning of the novel as issue of his precarious familial fracture. For not only is Gauvain an orphan whose parents have long been dead, he is the grandnephew of the leader of the royalist forces. Indeed, from the reductive description of the war by the innkeeper, who figures it precisely in terms of the familial conflict (“Un ci-devant contre un ci-devant” [15: 400]), to the warrant signed by Gauvain and read by Lantenac upon his arrival on the French coast (“L’identité du ci-devant marquis de Lantenac constatée, il sera immédiatement passé par les armes.—Signé: le chef de bataillon, commandant la

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Chapter Six colonne d’expédition, Gauvain” [15: 331]), to the battle at Dol (“Quelqu’un en effet visait Gauvain, c’était Lantenac” [15: 407]), to Gauvain’s pledge to Cimourdain that he will have Lantenac killed upon his capture despite their familial connection (“Lantenac est un étranger. Lantenac n’a pas d’âge. Lantenac appelle les Anglais. Lantenac est l’ennemi de la patrie. Le duel entre lui et moi ne peut finir que par sa mort, ou par la mienne” [15: 418]), the irrevocable political line of demarcation separating and isolating the grand-nephew from the great-uncle is rigidly drawn. In the same way, the ideological line separating Gauvain from his spiritual father Cimourdain is figured beginning in the scene in which Cimourdain (“l’inexorable”) is charged with overseeing Gauvain (“le clément”) in Vendée: “Mais il a un défaut! [. . .] Lequel? [. . .] La clémence” (15: 364). As the battle intensifies, this dangerous ideological battle, the result of which is prefigured by Cimourdain’s response to Marat (“Et que ferais-tu donc d’un chef républicain qui mettrait en liberté un chef royaliste? Je [. . .] le ferais fusiller” [15: 364]), increases proportionally, as witnessed by the growing divergence between Cimourdain and Gauvain in matters concerning the war: “Dans le triomphe qui s’ébauchait, deux formes de la république étaient en présence, la république de la terreur et la république de la clémence, l’une voulant vaincre par la rigueur et l’autre par la douceur” (15: 416). While the physical battle at la Tourgue is a decisive success for the republican camp, paralyzing the royalist forces with Lantenac’s capture, this mental battle results in the unraveling of the spiritual tie between Cimourdain and Gauvain as Cimourdain is forced to condemn Gauvain to death for having released Lantenac and having compromised or—at the very least—undermined the Republic’s victory in Vendée. Gauvain’s betrayal of Cimourdain and on a larger level of the Republic itself thus guarantees and cements his removal from the world of the novel through his death by the guillotine. That Gauvain himself calls for his own death (“Je suis coupable. [. . .] Quand le coupable reconnaît sa faute, il sauve la seule chose qui vaille la peine d’être sauvée, l’honneur” [15: 497]) emphasizes not only the breakdown of the archetypal model but highlights his belief (and Hugo’s) in the importance

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The Poetics of Death of a larger human family that cannot be divided. For not only has Gauvain gone against the King (father) in fighting on the side of the Republic, he has compromised the Republic (mother) in subordinating her success to the imperatives of humanity, in which he comes to believe above all else: Est-ce donc que la révolution avait pour but de dénaturer l’homme? Est-ce pour briser la famille, est-ce pour étouffer l’humanité, qu’elle était faite? Loin de là. C’est pour affirmer ces réalités suprêmes, et non pour les nier, que 89 avait surgi. Renverser les bastilles, c’est délivrer l’humanité; abolir la féodalité, c’est fonder la famille. (15: 486)

Indeed, while Gauvain’s final cry—“Vive la République” (15: 509)—points to his unwavering belief in the Republic and its potential, his self-imposed death nonetheless points to the fact that this moment has not yet arrived. It is thus only in death that Gauvain—like all of Hugo’s heroes who precede him— can find resolution and indeed both the reconciliation of his internal oppositions and the erasure of the external societal oppositions that he confronts in the novel.28 In addition to the circumstances that produce and surround the hero’s death, the disconnection of Hugo’s heroes is emphasized in these novels through two other textual strategies: attention to the hero’s chaste and virginal state, which effectively precludes any offspring from being born to the hero and thus contributes to his total removal from the fictional world, and the failure in each novel of speech (la parole) as a method of communication that leads to understanding, comprehension, compassion, and thus connection. The resulting disconnection encoded by the hero’s virginity and his failure to communicate compounds his already tenuous and disintegrating position in the social world depicted. From Quasimodo to Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, Gwynplaine, and Gauvain, attention is drawn in each of Hugo’s novels both to the hero’s chastity and to his discomfort (ranging from unease to outright fear) with his own sexuality. This discomfort—and its link to the heroes’ virginity—is indeed significant. Moreover, as Brombert asserts, “the obsessional nature of sexuality in Hugo’s writings remains a subject largely unexplored” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 194). Gauvain is the only 145

Chapter Six one of Hugo’s heroes who is presented without specific references to a sexual awakening or amorous longings, as he is so deeply involved in the war and so committed to the Republic’s victory in Vendée that he doesn’t waver from this goal. Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, Gilliatt, and Gwynplaine, on the other hand, are all more or less explicitly referenced in Hugo’s novels by way of both their virginity and their latent and largely untapped sexuality, as they are most often so inexperienced in this uncharted territory that they are unable to comprehend the feelings that come alive inside them. In this way, for example, the virginal Quasimodo is figured as being as sexually incomplete as he is physically incomplete, as witnessed by the scenes that depict his ardor for the cathedral’s bells, and particularly for the one that is called “Marie.” Jean Valjean is expressly described in Les Misérables as a virgin soul who has never loved a woman. His feelings for Cosette can thus be understood in terms of his more general awakening to the range of emotions engendered by love, such as those of jealousy and rage witnessed in the “Buvard/Bavard” chapter (IV, XV, 1). Gilliatt’s virginity and sexual fears are underscored not only in the scene in which he sees the naked women bathing in the sea (“Il s’aperçut qu’une femme nue lui faisait horreur” [12: 599]) but in greater detail through his sexually charged encounter with the octopus in which the sea monster threatens to kill Gilliatt through penetration. Finally, Gwynplaine, whose sexual longings are the most directly rendered, struggles with unchaste urges toward his beloved Dea (“Puis un beau jour, Dea étant encore petite, Gwynplaine s’était vu grand, et c’est du côté de l’homme qu’avait commencé la honte” [14: 190]) and toward the Duchess Josiane (“Et ce contre-sens poignant se retournait sans cesse malgré lui dans son esprit: voir auprès de lui, à sa portée, dans la réalité étroite et tangible, l’âme, et dans l’insaisissable, au fond de l’idéal, la chair” [14: 232]).29 Hugo’s virginal heroes are thus in no way asexual in their virginity; on the contrary, the very deliberate tension created by their (overt or covert) sexual longings serves both to add to their social and familial isolation and to emphasize the heroes’ inability to connect to another as these longings remain openly unfulfilled.30 Just as the heroes’ virginity and unfulfilled sexual longings compound their disconnection from the worlds of the novels,

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The Poetics of Death their inability to communicate in a way that leads to any type of understanding or connection also accentuates their disconnection from the worlds depicted. The hero is either defined by some type of communicative exclusion from the novel’s beginning to its end that directly and continuously hinders his ability to relate and connect to others, as is the case for Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, and Gilliatt, or he is able to speak—and speak well—but is not understood by those he addresses, as is the case for Gwynplaine and Gauvain. In both scenarios, the ultimate emptiness of the heroes’ communicative efforts, which in every case, as Ubersfeld observes, are destined not to be heard (“La première des caractéristiques du discours hugolien, c’est d’être un discours sans destinataire ou parlé à qui ne peut ou ne veut entendre, autrement dit, la parole est dite à des oreilles inexistantes, mortes, ou bouchées” [Le Roi et le bouffon 536]), gradually prepares for the heroes’ final disappearance into silence. From Quasimodo’s first introduction in Notre-Dame de Paris, we learn of his complete inability to communicate with others through language. It is only with Frollo, through “un étrange dialogue de signes et de gestes” (4: 67) that Quasimodo is able to communicate at all, as his deafness has led him to a “silence qu’il ne rompait guère que lorsqu’il était seul” (4: 119). Evidence of the assertion that “la parole humaine pour lui, c’était toujours une raillerie ou une malédiction” (4: 120) is furnished in the courtroom scene, in which the breakdown of communication between the deaf judge and Quasimodo results in Quasimodo’s double sentence (two hours of torture instead of one). It is only as a result of Quasimodo’s desire to make a connection to Esmeralda that he attempts to communicate with her through words. Yet this communication does not allow for any kind of comprehension; it is plagued with awkwardness and misunderstandings that stem from Quasimodo’s mental lack and inability to express himself. This lack is witnessed in the scene in the cathedral in which Quasimodo endeavors to speak with her: “Ecoutez-moi, dit-il avec effort, j’ai quelque chose à vous dire.—Elle lui fit signe qu’elle l’écoutait. Alors il se mit à soupirer, entr’ouvrit ses lèvres, parut un moment prêt à parler, puis il la regarda, fit un mouvement de tête négatif, et se retira lentement, son front dans la main, laissant l’égyptienne

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Chapter Six stupéfaite” (4: 262). The silence that is consciously observed in the scene in which Quasimodo sees Esmeralda’s lifeless body from afar and throws Frollo from the cathedral (“C’était quelque chose d’effrayant que le silence de ces deux hommes” [4: 340]) further emphasizes the failure of both Quasimodo’s attempt to connect to Esmeralda and of his relationship with Frollo, as well as the corresponding isolation that is the result of the breakdown of language as a means of communication in the novel.31 For Jean Valjean in Les Misérables and Gilliatt in Les Travailleurs de la mer, it is their social and familial exclusion that proportionally engenders their communicative exclusion. As the narrator informs us, Jean Valjean, during his time on the chain gang, “parlait peu. Il ne riait pas. Il fallait quelque émotion extrême pour lui arracher, une ou deux fois l’an, ce lugubre rire du forçat” (11: 114). It is only in the (rare) moments when he is able to escape this exclusion, such as during his time as M. Madeleine and during his life with Cosette as Ultime Fauchelevant, that Valjean, enveloped in clear social identities, is able to communicate effectively. As Valjean’s disconnection from the world of the novel progresses subsequent to Cosette’s marriage and his revelation of his true identity to Marius, he slowly ceases to speak altogether.32 With Cosette’s arrival at his deathbed, Valjean is once again able to articulate and verbalize his thoughts; yet it is too late for him to recover his voice more than temporarily as the breakdown of connection is finalized and completed through his death.33 Gilliatt, on the other hand, remains silent from the beginning of Les Travailleurs de la mer to the end. Indeed, from the novel’s opening pages, in which he is described as “un homme de songes” and as being “pensif” (12: 569), to its closing pages, in which he refuses with a simple “non” (12: 772) Mess Lethierry’s proposal that he marry Déruchette and captain la Durande, Gilliatt speaks as little as possible.34 Even in his one substantial discourse, delivered to the departing Déruchette immediately following her marriage to Ebenezer, Gilliatt’s inability to connect through the use of language is emphasized as he tries in vain to explain the origins of his feelings for her, as is the more general failure of language as a means of communication in the novel: “Le jour qu’il y a eu ce malheur, vous étiez

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The Poetics of Death assise dans la salle basse, vous avez dit une parole. Vous ne vous souvenez pas, c’est tout simple. On n’est pas forcé de se souvenir de tous les mots qu’on dit. [. . .] La chose remonte à un jour où il y avait de la neige. [. . .] C’est comme ça que ça s’explique” (12: 788).35 While both Gwynplaine and Gauvain are more refined and articulate in their speech, its ultimate emptiness and failure contribute no less to their removal from the worlds of the novels. Gwynplaine is warned by Ursus long before his ascension to Lord about the dangers of the social compassion and the social discourse that have awakened inside him: “Quant au monde, il est ce qu’il est; il n’a pas besoin de toi pour aller mal. N’en prends pas souci. Ne t’occupe pas de ce qui est dehors. Laisse l’horizon tranquille. Un comédien est fait pour être regardé, non pour regarder” (14: 205). This discourse serves in the end, in spite of Gwynplaine’s best intentions (“Je serai éloquent” [14: 285]), to alienate Gwynplaine from his newfound equals as his speech before the Lords endeavors precisely to speak for those who have no “voice”: “Le peuple est un silence. Je serai l’immense avocat de ce silence. Je parlerai pour les muets. Je parlerai des petits aux grands et des faibles aux puissants. [. . .] Je serai le Verbe du Peuple” (14: 364). That this discourse falls upon deaf ears in the session at the House of Lords as a result of Gwynplaine’s deformity (“Ses paroles voulaient agir dans un sens, son visage agissait dans l’autre; situation affreuse” [14: 351]) cements his disconnection from both the Lords and from his rediscovered blood family, as Gwynplaine realizes that his words will never be understood by them and flees the palace in search of his adoptive family.36 In the same way, Gauvain’s efforts in Quatrevingt-treize to transmit his vision through communication also fall short, as witnessed by his long discourse to Cimourdain subsequent to his arrest for freeing Lantenac. Defined by his actions (clemency, fairness, goodness) rather than his words throughout the novel, Gauvain speaks little prior to the announcement of his condemnation to death. Indeed, even in the scene in which he frees Lantenac, Gauvain simply listens to Lantenac’s long discourse on his unwavering belief in the monarchy and releases him with a three-word response: “Vous êtes libre” (15: 494).37 Once condemned, however, Gauvain engages in his cell in an

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Chapter Six ideological debate with Cimourdain, who, despite Gauvain’s elaboration of a vision of what the Republic should be (“Mettre tout en équilibre, c’est bien; mettre tout en harmonie, c’est mieux. Au-dessus de la balance il y a la lyre. Votre république dose, mesure et règle l’homme; la mienne l’emporte en plein azur; c’est la différence qu’il y a entre un théorème et un aigle” [15: 502]), remains rigidly set in his understanding of the Republic and in his notion of duty. This insurmountable ideological divide irreparably fractures Gauvain’s connection to Cimourdain (“J’existe par vous. Je n’étais qu’un seigneur, vous avez fait de moi un citoyen; je n’étais qu’un citoyen, vous avez fait de moi un esprit” [15: 501]), thus additionally guaranteeing through the ineffectiveness of communication Gauvain’s removal from the world of the novel. The subversion of the archetypal model is thus compounded in each of Hugo’s novels, first by the hero’s encoded familial void, then by his inability to connect to another or others, and finally through repeated reference to his virginal state and to his failure to communicate effectively. All of these elements coalesce to effectuate the hero’s progressive dispossession of his fictional identity and his depletion from the worlds of the novels. As we will see in the next chapter, this effacement is echoed in various degrees in the itineraries of many of the secondary and even minor characters that Hugo puts in place, enlarging in this way his commentary on the necessity of human connection.

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Chapter Seven

Decoding Social Exclusion

Multiplication and Amplification If the effacement of character in Hugo’s novels serves on a first level to highlight the marginality and exclusion of the heroes in a world that has lost its moral transparency, it serves on a second level, through a process of multiplication and repetition, to accentuate the marginality and exclusion of the mass of others that these heroes come to represent. Indeed, the plural quality of many of the titles of Hugo’s novels—Les Misérables, Les Travailleurs de la mer, Quatrevingt-treize—points to a larger fusion of the novels’ heroes with both other central characters and a multitude of additional characters that Hugo puts in place, as well as with the innumerable anonymous background figures that populate each work.1 These characters mirror the heroes on varying levels in their exclusion, and serve to enlarge the scope of Hugo’s vision and his commentary on the importance of human connection, which itself serves to link the particular historical moment of each novel to the larger vision of History and of the meaning of the passage of time that Hugo seeks to project. In none of Hugo’s novels is this more clearly delineated than in Les Misérables, which works entirely around the stark opposition between those who have established connections (and specifically established family and familial ties), such as Félix Tholomyès and the Gillenormand family, those who are able to create them, such as Marius and Cosette, and the large percentage of characters who do not have any family, do not succeed in forging any lasting connections, and who subsequently disappear from the world of the novel. We have already seen the ways in which Jean Valjean’s familial void and failure to

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Chapter Seven sustain his connection to Cosette directly inform his complete removal from the fictional world. This process of effacement is, however, in no way isolated: many of the characters with whom he comes into contact during the course of the novel have origins and trajectories that echo Valjean’s on varying levels, with disconnection—in this case, familial disconnection— serving as the common denominator among them. In this way, for example, we learn early on of Fantine that “On ne lui avait jamais connu ni père ni mère. Elle se nommait Fantine. Pourquoi Fantine? On ne lui avait jamais connu d’autre nom” (11: 136). Without her own family or family ties, Fantine seeks to establish them with the pleasure-seeking student Félix Tholomyès, who in turn abandons Fantine precisely because he does have an established family to whom he can and must return. As the letter left behind by Tholomyès and his three friends at the moment when they take their final leave from their lovers tersely states: “Sachez que nous avons des parents. Des parents, vous ne connaissez pas beaucoup ça” (11: 150). Tholomyès and his friends cannot take seriously women without fathers and mothers and dowries and family histories. Tholomyès thus leaves Fantine (and the novel) to assume the life and role that he was born into, his future so clearly established that the narrator confidently informs us of it in advance (“Nous n’aurons plus occasion de parler de M. Félix Tholomyès. Bornons-nous à dire que, vingt ans plus tard, sous le roi Louis-Philippe, c’était un gros avoué de province, influent et riche, électeur sage et juré très sévère; toujours homme de plaisir” [11: 154]), while Fantine, conversely, without a family or any kind of resources, assumes the life that she was born into: one of descending social misery.2 In the chapter entitled “Une mère qui en rencontre une autre” (I, IV, 1), Fantine makes a second attempt to create familial ties, not for herself, but for her daughter, Cosette. Unable to support Cosette alone, Fantine is drawn in by what she mistakenly interprets as a loving family unit at the Thénardiers’ inn. After deeming Mme Thénardier “une bonne mère” and seeing Cosette playing with the two Thénardier daughters like “trois sœurs” (11: 154), she makes the decision to entrust Cosette to the Thénardier family. Once separated from her daughter, Fantine’s descent intensifies, and upon her death, she is

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Decoding Social Exclusion returned to the only “mère” she will ever know—the earth— as, in spite of Jean Valjean’s instructions to the contrary, she is anonymously “jetée à la fosse publique” (11: 252). Fantine’s physical effacement, begun with the selling of her hair, teeth, and body so as to support Cosette in her new life and completed through her death, is thus the final step in the erasure of her identity and her story as she is buried as an unknown and unidentified “fille publique” (11: 252). Javert, who tracks Jean Valjean relentlessly from the time he first comes into contact with the ex-convict in Montreuil to the moment of his own self-imposed removal from the world of the novel through suicide, is similarly presented as being without family and without the possibility of creating familial ties. Indeed, although Javert is opposed to Jean Valjean in the role of the hero’s adversary, we learn early on of their analogous familial isolation, as Javert has lost all contact with his family, consisting of a mother who was “une tireuse de cartes” and a father who “était aux galères” (11: 169). Javert’s familial disconnection, which is additionally highlighted by references to his virginity, not only complicates through this parellel the antithetical relationship with Valjean prescribed by the romance model, but serves to compound his ideological crisis and disappearance from the novel, as Javert is unable to integrate Valjean’s gesture of letting him go at the barricades into his rigid system of beliefs. The result—Javert’s anonymous suicide (“L’ombre seul fut dans le secret des convulsions de cette forme obscure disparue sous l’eau” [11: 917])—thus links Javert through his death to the multitude of characters unable to survive in the fictional world depicted. Moreover, the direct link between disconnection and removal from the world of the novel is also rendered in Les Misérables through the doubling or echoing of minor characters in one another, which has a rippling, expansive effect that melds the individual disappearance of character with a growing collective void. Gavroche, the incarnation of the Parisian gamin who is almost completely cut off in the novel from his biological Thénardier family (he is indeed described from his first unnamed introduction as “le petit abandonné” [11: 305]) and is removed from the fictional world through his anonymous death on the barricades, is echoed, for example, by

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Chapter Seven his message-bearing friend Navet, and is doubled, literally, by his two unnamed—and unknown—brothers whom he takes under his wing after haphazardly discovering them wandering the streets of Paris. Although Gavroche frames his “adoption” of the two boys in familial terms (“Vous êtes donc sans père ni mère?” [11: 677]), this redistributed biological family nonetheless cannot hold, and all three ultimately disappear.3 Similarly, Azelma, the Thénardiers’ younger daughter, becomes a substitute for the dead Eponine, who dies, as her final words reveal, precisely because she is unable to forge a desired romantic connection to Marius: “Et puis, tenez, monsieur Marius, je crois que j’étais un peu amoureuse de vous” (11: 804).4 Furthermore, la Magnon, who is jailed for her money-making scam, doubles Mme Thénardier as the mauvaise mère, and Mabeuf (whom the narrator informs us has no family and “n’avait jamais réussi à aimer aucune femme” [11: 509] and dies alone and unknown, mistaken for a “vieux conventionnel”) provides in his relationship with Marius an echo of the relationship between Myriel and Jean Valjean, as in both cases one man is a catalyst for change in the life of the other. In this way, this process of multiplication and repetition builds a momentum that propels the narrator’s early lament forward over the novel like an ominous message: “O marche implacable des sociétés humaines! Pertes d’hommes et d’âmes chemin faisant!” (11: 117). Enjolras, the leader of the barricades who can also be seen as the clear precursor for the character of Gauvain in Quatrevingt-treize, is also notably figured as being without a family in the novel, and “ne semblait pas savoir qu’il y eût sur la terre un être appelé la femme” (11: 483).5 This isolation is further magnified by the specifically familial discourse that winds its way into the barricades. Indeed, we are directly told that many of the amis de l’ABC are either only children, thus with limited familial ties, like Enjolras or Jean Prouvaire, or orphans, like Feuilly, and that none is married. It is the relationship between them that serves as their unique tie, making them “une sorte de famille, à force d’amitié” (11: 482), and this “familial” relationship is further emphasized by reference to a common “blood” (“le pur sang des principes coulait dans leurs veines” [11: 488]). But like the Republic that they desire,

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Decoding Social Exclusion it is too soon for this ideological family to take on its true shape, and, with the exception of Marius, who is more circumstantially than ideologically tied to them, all of the amis de l’ABC die at the barricades. While accepting their own deathsentences, however, the men, and specifically Combeferre, speak out against the sacrifice of those with families, insisting that such men put their familial duty above their ideology and leave the barricades before it is too late. This lengthy discourse filters the entire social problematic of the novel through the presence or absence of the family structure, with absence being the catalyst that propels toward misery: “Quand on soutient ses proches de son travail, on n’a plus le droit de se sacrifier. C’est déserter la famille, cela. Et ceux qui ont des filles, et ceux qui ont des sœurs! Y pensez-vous? Vous vous faites tuer, vous voilà morts, c’est bon, et demain? Des jeunes filles qui n’ont pas de pain, cela est terrible. L’homme mendie, la femme vend” (11: 830). This order is subsequently reiterated in no uncertain terms by Marius, who, believing that Cosette is lost to him forever, situates himself on the side of those who can stay and fight precisely because they have no familial ties to protect: “Il y en a parmi vous qui ont des familles, des mères, des sœurs, des femmes, des enfants. Que ceux-là sortent des rangs” (11: 832). Similar discourses on the necessity for connection, and specifically on the sanctity of the familial connection, can be found, as already mentioned, in Gwynplaine’s speech before the House of Lords (“Vous êtes pères, fils et frères, donc vous êtes souvent attendris. Celui de vous qui a regardé ce matin le réveil de son petit enfant est bon” [14: 350]) as well as in Les Travailleurs de la mer, in which the seaman’s greatest risk and dilemma is figured as putting his familial responsibilities in jeopardy (“Risquer sa vie, ce n’est rien quand on est seul; mais la question change lorsqu’en son unité on contient plusieurs. [. . .] Il faut songer à la famille” [12: 545]). In the same vein, Cimourdain, appealing along familial lines, proposes in Quatrevingt-treize to exchange himself for Lantenac just prior to the battle at la Tourgue, so as to avoid the bloodshed and familial fracture and disintegration undoubtedly to ensue: “Le citoyen vous combat, mais le prêtre vous supplie. Écoutez-moi.

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Chapter Seven Beaucoup d’entre vous ont des femmes et des enfants. Je prends la défense de vos enfants et de vos femmes. Je prends leur défense contre vous. O mes frères . . .” (15: 457). Analogous echoing of the results of disconnection—whether it be familial, romantic, personal, or societal—can equally be found in Hugo’s other novels. For example, in Notre-Dame de Paris, not only Quasimodo, but all of the novel’s central characters (with the exception of Phoebus) are unable to connect or reconnect to another or others and are subsequently removed from the world of the novel. Esmeralda, following her hanging, is anonymously entombed in the cave de Montfaucon and is recognizable to no one but the reader, who, in the novel’s final chapter, which returns to the site eighteen months later, discerns her identity from the “collier de grains d’adrézarach avec un petit sachet de soie, orné de verroterie verte” (4: 342) around her neck. Accordingly, she is erased from the fictional world in a way that leaves no memory of her in that world. Esmeralda’s mother, la Paquette, dies from grief when separated from her daughter (“On la repoussa assez brutalement, et l’on remarqua que sa tête retombait lourdement sur le pavé. On la releva. Elle se laissa de nouveau retomber. C’est qu’elle était morte” [4: 335]), and Frollo, mutilated to the point of no longer having a recognizable human form subsequent to his fall from the cathedral (“n’ayant plus forme humaine” [4: 341]) is condemned to perpetual anonymity, as his body is denied the right of being “inhumé en terre sainte” (4: 341) as a consequence of suspicions of sorcery. In addition to these central characters, additional extended echoes of death and effacement are provided by the deaths—or more accurately the anonymous exterminations—of the members of the disparate and disconnected Cour des Miracles, who, precisely because they are not in any real way linked to society, are in their social exclusion expendable, attacked first mistakenly with stones, beams, and then molten lead by Quasimodo (who does not understand that they are there to help Esmeralda), and then, for those remaining, squashed down by the King’s troops following his order to “écraser le populaire” (4: 313).6 This mass removal of both central and minor characters further shows the consequences of the word anankè, etched on the cathedral wall and based on which the novel is “written” (“C’est sur ce mot qu’on a fait ce

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Decoding Social Exclusion livre” [4: 20]), as this liquidation indeed occurs under fate’s oppressive hand. In both Les Travailleurs de la mer and L’Homme qui rit a parallel link can be seen and made between the removal of characters from the worlds of the novels and their failure to create or sustain ties. Just as in Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris, this link is additionally amplified by the more general removal from the fictional world of secondary and minor characters who echo the hero’s own disconnection. In this way, in Les Travailleurs de la mer, not only is Gilliatt (who has lost his mother and is unable to connect to Déruchette) erased from the world of the novel, but both Clubin (expressly described as a “veuvier” [12: 605] without any children) and Rantaine (whose own family has broken up forty years earlier) are removed as well: Clubin is killed by the octopus and Rantaine fades into the horizon on le Tamaulipas subsequent to Clubin’s recovery of the money that Rantaine had stolen from Mess Lethierry. In L’Homme qui rit, not only are Gwynplaine and Dea removed from the world of the novel, but so are Dea’s mother (“une mendiante” [14: 113] who dies trying to protect her daughter), the Comprachicos (the disparate collective group disappears into the ocean), Maitre Nicless (“un veuf” [14: 212]), and the fluid mass of others that Gwynplaine incarnates and fails to render visible to the Lords (“Je représente l’humanité telle que ses maîtres l’ont faite. [. . .] Mylords, je vous le dis, le peuple, c’est moi” [14: 354]). Finally, in Quatrevingt-treize the irresolvable political conflict that divides Gauvain and Lantenac and the irresolvable ideological one that divides Gauvain and his spiritual father, Cimourdain, which result in Gauvain’s removal from the fictional world of the novel, are mirrored both by the largescale familial conflict and by the corresponding deaths that occur in the novel, as brother fights brother in the civil war. Indeed, from the beginning of Quatrevingt-treize, when Lantenac orders the death of Halmalo’s brother for his negligence on la Claymore, familial connections are constantly sacrificed on both sides for the greater good of the war. It is precisely this argument that Lantenac uses to diffuse Halmalo’s anger and to enlarge Halmalo’s scope of vision from a personal, affective level on which he defines himself in terms of his

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Chapter Seven (absent) familial relations (“Je suis le frère de celui que vous avez fait fusiller” [15: 314]) to the royalist level characterized, above all, by an allegiance to a larger (dynastic) family and family order embodied by the King (“Grâce monseigneur! Pardonnez-moi [. . .] vous parlez comme le bon Dieu” [15: 317]).7 In the same way, the larger allegiance of l’Imânus to the royalist cause is also generated, driven, and indeed defined by the elevation of his personal familial extinction to a higher level, as he specifies in a discourse to the republican troops at la Tourgue: Hommes qui m’écoutez, je suis Gouge-le-Bruyant, surnommé Brise-bleu, parce que j’ai exterminé beaucoup des vôtres, et surnommé aussi l’Imânus, parce que j’en tuerai encore plus que je n’en ai tué; j’ai eu le doigt coupé d’un coup de sabre sur le canon de mon fusil à l’attaque de Granville, et vous avez fait guillotiner à Laval mon père et ma mère et ma sœur Jacqueline, âgée de dix-huit ans. Voilà ce que je suis. (15: 427)8

On the other side of the war, the members of the republican battalion in question—the Bonnet-Rouge—are analogously guided by the tenets of a larger family, fighting not (like the royalists) to defend or avenge their real families and familial order in Vendée, but to guarantee the establishment of the ideological and fraternal family of the Republic that they envision. This goal is embodied in the novel by the real adoption of Michelle Fléchard’s orphaned children by the republican troops: “Camarades, de tout ça je conclus que le bataillon va devenir père. Est-ce convenu? Nous adoptons ces trois enfantslà” (15: 294). That the results of the presence and the actions of this “adoptive” ideological family in Vendée are in the end no less debilitating than the losses suffered by the royalists (as both the children, although saved at the last minute by Lantenac, and Gauvain must be sacrificed in the name of the larger goal) illuminates the fact that the human family that Gauvain desires to see in place has not yet taken form. Familial connection is thus used by Hugo in Quatrevingt-treize, just as in the rest of his novels, to generate a discourse that points to the larger importance of human, fraternal connection and to its supremacy to collective political and historical action. It is

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Decoding Social Exclusion only in finding a way to connect to another or others, and thereby safeguard a created tie, that characters succeed in surviving in the worlds depicted in the novels.

Connection and Survival The inability of secondary and minor characters to connect to another or others serves in Hugo’s novels not only to mirror the heroes’ disconnection but to magnify and amplify Hugo’s humanitarian discourse on the necessity for large-scale human connection. To this end, the select group of characters who do indeed “survive” the closures of Hugo’s novels inversely find a way to maintain a connection to another character or to other characters and thus escape from the corresponding and inevitable effacement that accompanies disconnection. As the following examples show, this tie is not necessarily a romantic one, but underscores rather the characters’ inclusion and acceptance by another or others. The way in which the restoration of non-romantic lost or jeopardized familial ties allows for survival can be observed in Quatrevingt-treize, in which Michelle Fléchard’s quest to locate and be reunited with her children—which spans the entire novel—ends successfully. Indeed, as we have already seen, Fléchard is retransformed following her reunion with them. “Jetée sans transition de l’enfer dans le paradis” through her “excès de joie” (15: 479), Fléchard abruptly recovers from the degenerating physical and mental transformation that characterized her three-month search for her children. The final image of the family (“Elle tendait les bras, elle reçut d’abord Gros-Alain, ensuite René-Jean, ensuite Georgette, elle les couvrit pêle-mêle de baisers, puis elle éclata de rire et tomba évanouie” [15: 479]) sharply recalls the first image of the family together (“Une femme était assise sur la mousse, ayant au sein un enfant qui tétait et sur ses genoux les deux têtes blondes de deux enfants endormis” [15: 289]). Just as the war in Vendée circles back at the end of the novel to the same pivotal point of the novel’s beginning, the Fléchard family—as a result of their reconnection—is able to as well.9 The magnitude of this familial restoration is additionally reinforced by both Gauvain’s reaction, which completely refigures the war for him along

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Chapter Seven personal and moral lines, and by Radoub’s reaction, as Lantenac’s act in saving the children subordinates for him as well political imperatives in favor of moral ones: “Radoub, en bas, éperdu, tendit les mains, reçut l’échelle, la serra dans ses bras, et cria: —Vive la République! Le marquis répondit: —Vive le Roi! Et Radoub grommela: —Tu peux bien crier tout ce que tu voudras, et dire des bêtises si tu veux, tu es le bon Dieu” (15: 479).10 Connection, as figured through family, is thus valorized in the novel, at once through action (Lantenac), action and discourse (Gauvain, Radoub), and juxtaposition, as the survival of the reunited and reconnected family stands out against the mass of deaths that are linked to both large- and small-scale familial isolation and exclusion in the novel. Examples of survival resulting from the formation of a romantic couple can be found in Han d’Islande, Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Misérables, and Les Travailleurs de la mer. In Han d’Islande, Ordener—the only one of Hugo’s heroes who survives a novel’s closure—lives precisely because he is able to form successfully a lasting connection to his beloved Ethel, whom he marries. This connection is concretized through reference to their subsequent procreation (“De l’alliance d’Ordener et d’Ethel naquit la famille de Danneskiold” [2: 420]), a proliferation that is categorically denied to the rest of Hugo’s heroes. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Phoebus and Fleurde-Lys are among the few characters who do not die at the novel’s closure as their marriage—although ironically called by the narrator “une fin tragique” (4: 341)—cements their connection to each other. Not only does this marriage signal the opposition between Phoebus and Fleur-de-Lys, who live, and Quasimodo and Esmeralda, who die, but it also signals the social divide between these characters, as Phoebus de Châteaupers and Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier are significantly among the limited number of characters in the novel who are provided with last names and thus a patronymic heritage that firmly fastens them to the historical world. That Phoebus is repeatedly over the course of the novel unable to remember Esmeralda’s name (“J’oublie toujours son diable de nom” [4: 205]; “Pardon, mais vous avez un nom si prodigieusement sarrazin que je ne puis m’en dépêtrer” [4: 212]), emphasizes by way of contrast both her vulnerability (as her real name—

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Decoding Social Exclusion “Agnès” and her true identity are unknown to her and supplanted largely by generic appellations such as l’égyptienne and la bohémienne) and social expendability, as well as her absolute personal expendability to Phoebus, by whom she is quickly forgotten: “Phoebus se mit donc assez promptement l’esprit en repos sur la charmeresse Esmeralda, ou Similar, comme il disait, sur le coup de poignard de la bohémienne ou du moinebourru (peu lui importait), et sur l’issue du procès” (4: 239). Esmeralda’s dream of romantic fusion and sublimation through connection and love, as she describes it to Gringoire during their chaste “wedding” night (“C’est être deux et n’être qu’un. Un homme et une femme qui se fondent en un ange. C’est le ciel” [4: 86]), thus evaporates as her love for Phoebus remains unrequited and unfulfilled, and ultimately leads directly to both her death and her removal from the world of the novel.11 Phoebus, on the other hand, easily resumes the rhythm of his life prior to having had his fleeting fascination with Esmeralda (“Dès que son cœur fut vacant de ce côté, l’image de Fleur-deLys y revint. Le cœur du capitaine Phoebus [. . .] avait horreur du vide” [4: 239]) and his link to the established social order is solidified even further through his marriage to Fleur-de-Lys. In Les Misérables, Cosette and Marius are situated among those who survive both because ties are created for them and because they in turn create their own connection, which is solidified through their marriage at the end of the novel. It is Cosette’s adoption by Jean Valjean that initially saves her from a fate similar to that of Fantine. Indeed, Cosette, from the beautiful, radiant child that Fantine leaves behind with the Thénardier family, has already, by the time that Jean Valjean comes to claim her, undergone a significant physical transformation, or more accurately degeneration, into a “petite figure sombre [. . .] maigre et blême” whose “grands yeux enfoncés dans une sorte d’ombre profonde étaient presque éteints à force d’avoir pleuré” (11: 318). Her changing physical attributes serve throughout the novel as the gauge of her familial security, and it is not until she is firmly settled into the life of Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent (her surname serving to lock her into the social order), with the love of Jean Valjean as her father, that this imprint is washed away and her innate beauty returns. Marius similarly has adoptive ties put into place

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Chapter Seven for him—to his socially stable maternal family—at the expense of his paternal tie, which, as the narrator informs us early in the novel, Marius knows little about: “L’enfant qui s’appeleait Marius, savait qu’il avait un père, mais rien de plus” (11: 461). Once Marius discovers that his dead father had loved him and sacrificed for him, he blames M. Gillenormand for the disruption and destruction of this tie and casts himself out of the Gillenormand family: “Marius éprouvait des mouvements de révolte inexprimables en songeant que c’était M. Gillenormand qui, pour des motifs stupides, l’avait arraché sans pitié au colonel, privant ainsi le père de l’enfant et l’enfant du père” (11: 473). Upon meeting and falling in love with Cosette, however, Marius’s devotion to his father fades in his mind (“Son père lui-même disparaissait un peu dans son âme sous la splendeur de son amour” [11: 719]), and he is willing to concede his ideological war with his grandfather in the hopes of being allowed to marry Cosette.12 Gillenormand’s refusal, coupled with Jean Valjean’s plans to leave the country with Cosette, ensures for Marius the loss of Cosette and catapults him to the barricades, where he is prepared—more for personal than ideological reasons—to lay down his life. Yet just as Jean Valjean has safeguarded Cosette in inserting her into a new life (and name), Valjean comes to the barricades to safeguard a tie that he knows can be more permanent for her—that of Marius—and he saves his life. Not only are Marius and Cosette reunited following Marius’s illness and allowed to marry, but the young couple is expressly described as merging in a way that highlights the stability of their connection. Indeed, Cosette’s final familial integration is complete as she literally fuses with her new husband, her own identity disappearing into his: “C’est donc vrai. Je m’appelle Marius. Je suis madame Toi” (11: 945).13 The importance of this familial tie as well as that of the entire Gillenormand family is additionally reinforced by the metamorphosis that occurs in M. Gillenormand subsequent to Marius’s return to the household. After having nearly lost Marius to his political beliefs, the “vrai bourgeois complet et un peu hautain du dix-huitième siècle” (11: 447) chooses to completely subordinate his rigid royalist beliefs in favor of his family: “Quant à moi, je n’ai

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Decoding Social Exclusion plus d’opinion politique; que tous les hommes soient riches, c’est-à-dire joyeux, voilà à quoi je me borne” (11: 944).14 The Gillenormand family is not, however, the only family to survive the closure of Les Misérables. The Thénardier family, which traverses the novel from its beginning to its conclusion, also, at least in part, survives and complicates the novel’s familial discourse in its negativity. Indeed, from une mauvaise mère who abandons her sons, one to the street and the others to an extortion scam, to un mauvais père who does not even recognize his children (Gavroche during his prison break and Eponine in front of Valjean’s rue Plumet house), the Thénardiers suffer from an acute moral misery that manifests itself both in the family’s literal deterioration (through the deaths of Gavroche, Eponine, and Mme Thénardier, and the disappearance of the two nameless brothers in the streets of Paris) and its ultimate perpetuation, as Thénardier, with his only surviving child, daughter Azelma, reestablishes himself once again at the novel’s conclusion. As the narrator notes, men like Thénardier “ont toujours existé [. . .] et, tant que la société sera ce qu’elle est, ils seront ce qu’ils sont [. . .] ils renaissent à jamais du suintement social” (11: 536). It is in this way that just as Jean Valjean cannot survive, Thénardier must. For while Jean Valjean and the others lost along the way gain transcendence precisely through their erasure and anonymity, the level of their ascension proportionally linked to the depth of their descent, Thénardier’s descent is irreversible, and with each additional identity that he takes on—from Jondrette, to Fabantou, to Genflot, to don Alvarès, to la femme Balizard, to the nearly truthful Thénard—his insatiable self-interest increases, literally consuming those around him while he remains frighteningly unscathed. In Les Travailleurs de la mer, Déruchette and Ebenezer’s connection, marriage, and survival are proportionally related, and result in their sailing off at the novel’s closure on the Cashmere to begin their new life together. Déruchette, who early in life “n’avait plus ni père ni mère” (12: 586), has familial ties put in place for her when she is adopted and raised by her uncle and godfather, Mess Lethierry, who himself has never been married (“Il ne s’était jamais marié. Il n’avait pas voulu ou pas

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Chapter Seven trouvé” [12: 574]) and loves, as the narrator informs us, only two things in the world: “Mess Lethierry avait deux amours: Durande et Déruchette” (12: 576). Just as the adoptive family of Jean Valjean and Cosette begins to weaken in Les Misérables subsequent to Cosette and Marius’s falling in love, Déruchette’s love and total allegiance to Mess Lethierry is steadily supplanted by her growing love for Ebenezer.15 For while Déruchette has promised to marry the person who saves la Durande (“S’il existait… [. . .] Je l’épouserais” [12: 659]), she can no longer conceive of this promise once her love for Ebenezer has been awakened, and is horrified by the very thought of marrying Gilliatt, in spite of her uncle’s order (“Tu l’épouseras! [. . .] la fille [. . .] la machine. Les deux. Il sera deux fois mon gendre” [12: 774]). Indeed, again like Cosette (“Elle sentait qu’elle ne pouvait vivre sans Marius” [11: 842]), Déruchette’s complete fusion with Ebenezer disallows in her mind the very possibility of survival without the one she loves: “A présent que je sais que je vous aime, il n’est plus possible que vous vous en alliez. [. . .] Je vous dis que je mourrai” (12: 782). Gilliatt’s highly paternal role in organizing and effectuating the young couple’s marriage, which is reminiscent of Jean Valjean’s role in arranging the marriage of Cosette and Marius, allows very deliberately for the young couple’s survival while ensuring his own exclusion and subsequent erasure from the novel. As the Cashmere slowly disappears from the horizon, Déruchette and Ebenezer’s physical and emotional connection is stressed (“Dans ce soleil étaient Ebenezer et Déruchette. Ils étaient assis dans cette lumière, lui près d’elle. [. . .] C’était une gloire; la douce gloire de l’amour en fuite dans un nuage” [12: 792]) by their captivation with each other, while Gilliatt’s isolation is accentuated by the fact that the couple does not even recognize him at the Chaise Gild-Holm-’Ur as the ship passes by (“Vois donc. Il semblerait qu’il y a un homme dans le rocher” [12: 792]).16 Similar to the connection forged between Mess Lethierry and la Durande, which is based upon his (non-amorous) passion and love for the steamship, are other nonhuman and rather unorthodox couplings that nonetheless allow in Hugo’s novels for survival based on love and inclusion. For these connections—to animals in this final grouping—(Gringoire and the

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Decoding Social Exclusion goat Djali in Notre-Dame de Paris and Ursus and his wolf Homo in L’Homme qui rit) are no less relevant as they equally safeguard the character in question from personal exclusion. Human and animal relations are valorized in Hugo’s fiction from his earliest novels: an enormous white bear figures into the action of Han d’Islande and a trusty dog plays an important role in Bug-Jargal. In these novels, however, both of the animals are killed: the misanthropic Han’s pet bear (to whom he has significantly given the name “Friend”) is hunted and slain, thus adding to his loss and societal disconnection, and Bug’s exceptionally handsome and faithful dog Rask, whom he entrusts to D’Auverney, is said at the end of the novel to have been killed in battle, recovered next to D’Auverney’s dead body.17 In both Notre-Dame de Paris and L’Homme qui rit, the relationship between animal and human is more complex than simple metonymical extension. Djali and Homo are invested with more detailed narrative roles and an additional symbolic dimension related to Hugo’s discourse on inclusion and survival. For not only do they survive (in spite of multiple threats to their existence) the novels’ closures, but they directly provide for the survival of Gringoire and Ursus. From the beginning of Notre-Dame de Paris, a curious triangle forms, linking Gringoire to both Esmeralda and her goat. The association of Esmeralda and Djali is so strong that Gringoire, after deciding to follow them through the streets of Paris, has a difficult time distinguishing between them: “Deux fines, délicates et charmantes créatures, dont il admirait les petits pieds, les jolies formes, les gracieuses manières, les confondant presque dans sa contemplation; pour l’intelligence et la bonne amitié, les croyant toutes deux jeunes filles; pour la légèreté, l’agilité, la dextérité de la marche, les trouvant chèvres toutes deux” (4: 68). Yet while Esmeralda refers to Djali as her “sœur” (4: 87), their affective relationship suffers and weakens over the course of the novel. First, Djali, in spelling out Phoebus’s name, inadvertently reveals Esmeralda’s love for him and sets into motion a chain of catastrophic events; secondly, subsequent to Phoebus’s stabbing, the goat seals Esmeralda’s fate by repeating the trick during the murder trial. At the same time, Esmeralda, in her all-consuming passion for Phoebus, subordinates the sororal love of her goat to her

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Chapter Seven romantic love for Phoebus, as witnessed by their “reunion” after Esmeralda is scooped up into the cathedral by Quasimodo. Djali—who has luckily managed to escape her own hanging and to find her way back to Esmeralda—is unable to “obtenir un regard” (4: 258) from her mistress, who, by her own admission, has forgotten her. Like Djali, Gringoire also inadvertently works against Esmeralda, unwittingly revealing her love for Phoebus to Frollo. Yet this disclosure, which will ultimately have dire consequences for Esmeralda, is never understood by Gringoire himself, for the focus of his own affection is not so much Esmeralda, but, increasingly, her goat: “[il] n’était pas très sur d’être éperdument amoureux de la bohémienne. Il aimait presque autant la chèvre. C’était une charmante bête, douce, intelligente, spirituelle, une chèvre savante” (4: 187). Operating from the growing insight that Esmeralda will never love him, Gringoire transfers his sentiment to the more (emotionally!) available goat. His reaction to Esmeralda’s disappearance (“On ne savait depuis un grand mois ce qu’était devenue la Esmeralda [. . .] ni ce qu’était devenue sa chèvre, ce qui redoublait la douleur de Gringoire” [4: 216]), his fear at her trial, his response to the discovery that she is alive (“Il n’avait pas même la tentation d’y aller voir. Il songeait quelquefois à la petite chèvre, et c’était tout” [4: 270]), and his desire to learn the goat’s whereabouts from Frollo (“la petite chèvre est-elle avec la fille?” [4: 276]), all serve to highlight his preference for the goat. Djali’s reaction to Gringoire’s arrival with Frollo in the cathedral (“la petite chèvre [. . .] n’avait pas attendu que Gringoire se nommât. A peine était-il entré qu’elle s’était tendrement frottée à ses genoux, couvrant le poète de caresses et de poils blancs, car elle était en mue” [4: 317]), as compared with Esmeralda’s—who doesn’t recognize him—further fortifies Gringoire’s attachment to the goat, and it is not surprising that, when faced at the novel’s close with the choice of saving Esmeralda or Djali (“Il pesait tour à tour l’égyptienne et la chèvre; et il les regardait l’une après l’autre, avec des yeux humides de larmes, en disant entre ses dents: —Je ne puis pas pourtant vous sauver toutes deux” [4: 321]), he chooses the form of Esmeralda that he perceives as caring for him over the one that does not. Gringoire flees with Djali and, as we learn in

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Decoding Social Exclusion the novel’s next to last chapter, is able to forge a future for himself: “Quant à Pierre Gringoire, il parvint à sauver la chèvre, et il obtint des succès en tragédie” (4: 341). This successful coupling of Gringoire and Djali is framed against the unsuccessful coupling that characterizes the textual itineraries of the majority of the novel’s characters, and as unorthodox, strange, and even comical as it may be, it nonetheless assures his survival. This discourse also governs L’Homme qui rit, in which Ursus and Homo similarly survive the fictional world as a result of the tie that has been forged between them. This connection, labeled “une amitié étroite” (14: 33) in the story’s first line, spans the events of the entire novel, from the adoption of Gwynplaine and Dea as young children to the death of these two in the novel’s final pages. From the beginning, Homo’s significance to Ursus and their absolute likeness are stressed: “Comme ami, Ursus préférait Homo à un chien, estimant que le loup vient de plus loin vers l’amitié. C’est pourquoi Homo suffisait à Ursus. Homo était pour Ursus plus qu’un compagnon, c’était un analogue” (14: 37–38). The reversal of the antithetical division (human/savage) in their names further reinforces the degree to which the two are indistinguishable, as does Ursus’s revelation that “Quand je serai mort, qui voudra me connaître n’aura qu’à étudier Homo. Je le laisserai après moi pour copie conforme” (14: 38). While the man indeed mirrors the wolf in its nature (“Sa grande affaire était de haïr le genre humain” [14: 44]), the wolf is additionally invested with a decisive narrative role in which his own animality comes into play. For “la loi anglaise” mentioned by the narrator to be “peu tendre aux bêtes des bois” (14: 38) renders Ursus and Homo’s emotional bond vulnerable to intervention and termination. This unsettling fragility parallels the fragility of the relationship between Gwynplaine and Dea, and, following the revelation of Gwynplaine’s true identity, both relationships are threatened as Gwynplaine disappears without a trace from the center of his adoptive family and the authorities threaten to seize and kill Homo if he is not removed from England. Ursus’s equation of the real loss of Gwynplaine for Dea to the imagined loss of Homo for him (“Gwynplaine de moins, c’est tout de moins. Ce sera comme si je perdais Homo” [14: 289])

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Chapter Seven highlights the analogous nature of their bonds. While the damage of Gwynplaine and Dea’s separation is too great for their connective ties to be maintained in the world of the novel, Ursus and Homo survive precisely because they are not separated. Figured in both the novel’s opening line and its closing one (“Quand Ursus revint à lui [. . .] il aperçut pres du bord Homo qui hurlait dans l’ombre en regardant la mer” [14: 384]), Ursus and Homo’s sustained bond exempts them, in spite of their societal exclusion, from the personal exclusion that invariably results in death in Hugo’s fictional world. In this way, Ursus’s attachment to Homo (“Crevez, populace, mais je ne veux pas que mon loup meure” [14: 121]) is also his lifeline, as “Homo perdu, c’eût été trop” (14: 375). Survival, then, in Hugo’s fiction, is reserved in every case for those characters able to create or maintain a connection to another or others, whether it be romantic, familial, social, or personal. This small and select group of characters is, however, eclipsed by the multitude of other characters—from protagonists, to secondary characters, to minor characters—who do not survive, who are erased or effaced from the fictional worlds of Hugo’s novels precisely as a result of their inability to form lasting connections and their corresponding inability to escape social exclusion. Hugo’s novels, in this way, do little in the end either to restore or build faith in the ordered, existing social world. On the contrary, while each of Hugo’s novels advocates the possibility of individual and personal moral ascendancy, the dispossession and death of the majority of the characters in Hugo’s novels remind us time and time again of his misgivings about this world as he puts its social and historical imperatives into question. It is this redefined notion and function of character that creates what perhaps can be seen as the ultimate absence in the Hugolian novel: that of what we now view as the traditional nineteenth-century personnage romanesque, as Hugo eschews in his novels the notion of character as (psychological) representation. This absence is solidified by a corresponding recomposed or redefined notion of place and space in the novels, as the heroes’ social isolation and exclusion is mirrored by a spatial isolation and exclusion that emphasize the fact that the heroes can only find completion and connection outside of the

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Decoding Social Exclusion constraints and limitations of the fictional worlds depicted in the novels.

Place and Space: Vertical Ascension and Completion Called a “sorte de personnage muet” by Hugo in the preface to Cromwell (3: 63), place plays an important role in each of Hugo’s novels. From the cathedral in Notre-Dame de Paris, to the various Parisian locations central to Les Misérables, to the Maison bû de la rue and the rock formation les Douvres of Les Travailleurs de la mer, to the traveling Green-Box and stately palace of L’Homme qui rit, to la Tourgue of Quatrevingt-treize, both the places (lieux) and the spaces (espaces) inscribed in Hugo’s novels are invested with great physical, thematic, and symbolic importance. This importance surpasses the referential, as the ultimate inaccessibility of the created or inscribed linear places and spaces contributes in each of Hugo’s novels to the hero’s progressive isolation and (self-imposed) death.18 While critics have long noted the large-scale significance of spatial distribution to our interpretation both of Hugo’s individual novels and of his fictional corpus as a whole, drawing conclusions about reflexive as well as visionary tendencies in his work,19 there is far less of a global understanding of the relationship between Hugo’s fictional heroes and their surroundings. The relationship between characters and the contexts into which they are placed has been studied in Hugo’s theater by Ubersfeld in Le Roi et le bouffon, in which she outlines a division—typical of romantic drama in general—between closed and open space in Hugo’s plays. This division emphasizes the difference between the powerful and socially established characters that function primarily within closed social space (“espace A”), such as palaces, and the socially marginal characters (the bastard or exiled hero, the ouvrier, etc.) who are “une sorte de limite, le plus souvent ‘invisible,’ ou détruit” (446) and function primarily in open space (“espace B”), such as streets and public squares. Ubersfeld concludes that in Hugo’s theater, this division underscores the “lois fatales des structures sociales” (457), as the heroes only become heroes as a result of their complete confinement to “l’espace B”: “Le

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Chapter Seven Bien en eux se développe par le passage au mal et à la mort. [. . .] Il n’est pas question, il ne sera jamais question pour Hugo d’accepter de rêver, de souhaiter, pour tous, l’intégration” (456). In Hugo’s novels, the relationship between characters and the spatial contexts into which they are placed can be seen on a first level as holding true to the model outlined by Ubersfeld for Hugo’s theater. For just as the heroes of Hugo’s plays—for example, Didier, Gennaro, Gilbert, Ruy Blas—are largely relegated to and defined by their relationship to the open space of social exclusion, the heroes of Hugo’s novels are subjected to a similar kind of spatial segregation that highlights their solitary struggle against the social world. In each case, these rigid spatial dynamics serve to compound the hero’s inherently dual nature. External and internal elements come together in this way to magnify the hero’s isolation and to shape the course of an itinerary that invariably leads to his removal from the system of the novel through his societal alienation and death. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean’s categorical confinement to the open space typical of socially marginal characters is emphasized from the moment of his introduction into the novel, as he is figured walking into the town of Digne, where the doors to nearly every closed (social) place are literally closed upon him. Valjean is in this way refused lodging at la Croix-deColbas, the cabaret de la rue de Chaffaut, the town prison, a house on a small street, and a dog’s niche before finally being received by M. Myriel, whose doors are significantly, as the narrator informs us, never closed to anyone.20 Following the pact that Myriel sets in motion, each subsequent attempt that Valjean makes at integration into a closed place or closed space also fails, in spite of his personal and moral evolution. First, Javert, in uncovering the secret of Valjean’s identity, succeeds in running him out of his role as mayor of the prospering town of Montreuil. After Valjean rescues the young Cosette and establishes them at the Gorbeau tenement house, Javert again is able to drive him out into the danger and uncertainty of open space. The next stop, the Petit-Picpus convent, is home to Valjean and Cosette for five years; but, in the end, Valjean is unable to stay within its secluded and protective walls for fear that he is condemning Cosette to a lifestyle that she herself has

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Decoding Social Exclusion not chosen (“Il se disait que cette enfant avait le droit de connaître la vie avant d’y renoncer” [11: 632]), and he moves them to the secluded and private Maison de la rue Plumet, from which he later flees when once again faced with the possibility of his true identity being exposed. It is, however, Valjean’s refusal to join the Gillenormand family in their (socially established) home subsequent to Cosette’s marriage to Marius that emphasizes the most clearly his inability to integrate in a lasting or permanent way into the closed social space of the novel. While this decision is on the one hand a result of Valjean’s desire not to taint Cosette’s new life with his criminal past, it is, on the other, a result of a social disconnection that is fortified by Cosette’s marriage, as she no longer needs Valjean as her protector. Valjean’s negation of their surrogate father/daughter relationship (“Ne m’appelez plus père” [11: 970]), is in this way accompanied by an effort to erase himself from Cosette’s new surroundings and life. Not only are his visits to Cosette increasingly infrequent, but he progressively reduces the physical space that he accords himself in the Gillenormand home, insisting that he only be received in “la chambre d’en bas” (11: 969). Marius’s further limitation of this space to Valjean—he has the chairs taken out of the room—puts a literal end to Valjean’s visits and a symbolic one to his earthly purpose, as he retreats to the anonymity of his rue de l’Homme Armé lodging to live out his final days. In Les Travailleurs de la mer, Gilliatt is similarly defined by his almost unique relation to the open space depicted in the novel. Early on, we learn that Gilliatt’s repeated exposure to the elements of nature has physically sculpted him, marking and transforming his appearance: “le hâle l’avait fait presque nègre. On ne se mêle pas impunément à l’océan, à la tempête et à la nuit; à trente ans, il en paraissait quarante-cinq. Il avait le sombre masque du vent et de la mer” (12: 567). Furthermore, like Jean Valjean, Gilliatt is systematically unable to integrate into closed (socially important) space during the course of the novel. This is first witnessed by his inability to court Déruchette at her uncle Mess Lethierry’s home, Les Bravées, where, as a loner and misfit, he dares not enter. Instead, Gilliatt passes an entire summer lurking “derrière l’enclos du jardin des Bravées” (12: 599), playing melodies to Déruchette on his bagpipes,

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Chapter Seven while she remains oblivious to his longings. Later in the novel, Gilliatt is unable, following his rescue of la Durande, to assimilate into the social world and order that Les Bravées represents, as he recognizes that without Déruchette’s love and acceptance he does not belong there. As Lethierry announces Gilliatt’s feat, Gilliatt remains in “un coin sombre” (12: 775) of the room with his physical appearance (“Gilliatt était hideux. Il était tel qu’il était sorti, le matin même, de l’écueil Douvres, en haillons, les coudes percés, la barbe longue, les cheveux hérissés, les yeux brûlés et rouges, la face écorchée, les poings saignants” [12: 775]) magnifying his social isolation. His suicide by drowning at the Chaise Gild-Holm-’Ur finalizes his association with the open space of the novel as he is progressively engulfed by the incoming tide and disappears. In L’Homme qui rit, Gwynplaine’s inability to penetrate successfully into closed social space is, like Jean Valjean’s and Gilliatt’s, rendered apparent. Beginning with his dangerous and solitary childhood trek from Portland to Weymouth, at the end of which all doors in the town are closed to him and upon him (“L’enfant sentit le froid des hommes plus terrible que le froid de la nuit” [14: 118]), Gwynplaine’s social exclusion and marginalization is palpable, and continues after he is taken in by Ursus and Homo, as their vagabond lifestyle of performing leads them from town to town. This childhood failure at social integration is compounded and indeed cemented by Gwynplaine’s adult failure to reclaim his rightful social status following the revelation of his true identity as Lord Clancharlie. Unable to penetrate successfully into the closed space of the palace—designated by Ubersfeld as a prime example of l’espace A—Gwynplaine’s prophetic speech to the House of Lords (“Mylords, je viens vous apprendre une nouvelle. Le genre humain existe” [14: 348]) reaches no one. His message ignored, Gwynplaine is all but ousted from his newly recovered seat and retreats to the open space of the novel in which he is briefly reunited with Ursus, Homo, and a dying Dea before following her into death through his self-imposed drowning, in which he, like Gilliatt, is engulfed by the ocean.21 On a second level, however, Ubersfeld’s basic model of opposition between open and closed space is modified and complicated in Hugo’s novels. This is achieved first through the

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Decoding Social Exclusion liberty of amplification and originality that the novelistic form allows him. Indeed, without the restrictions of the historical frameworks that he adopts for the majority of his plays, or the real, physical constraints of the stage, Hugo can introduce in his fiction, as he increasingly does in his poetry, an expansiveness that mirrors his imagination and that is indicative of the sweeping scope of his vision. In terms of the representation of place and space, this means the ability to construct, inscribe, and describe (often in lengthy digressions) large and largerthan-life places and spaces in his novels, such as, for example, the famous depiction of the Paris sewer system in Les Misérables, the cathedral in Notre-Dame de Paris, the forests of Bretagne in Quatrevingt-treize, and the ocean, which is more and more insistently inscribed in his novels. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean’s evasion from the Toulon chain-gang is effectuated through his fall from the ship l’Orion and supposed drowning; in Les Travailleurs de la mer the ocean is at the center of the plot with Gilliatt’s three-month ordeal at les Douvres; in L’Homme qui rit, the ocean departure of the Comprachicos is mirrored at the end of the novel by that of Ursus and Homo; and in Quatrevingt-treize, Lantenac is brought from England to Vendée aboard the battleship Claymore, which sinks to the ocean’s floor after a decisive battle. In addition to this real or physical representation that valorizes the ocean as a vast open space with which the hero is to varying degrees associated, the ocean and ocean imagery are also insistent, recurring metaphors in all of Hugo’s novels, both in terms of representing a collective force that is principally defined by its flux and transformational properties—alternating phases of construction and destruction (“Dans un phénomène de la mer, tout les phénomènes sont présents” [12: 677])—and in terms of the vision that Hugo seeks to project on time and the workings of the larger cycles of the universe. This expansiveness increasingly serves to complicate in Hugo’s novels the clear lines between the representation of open and closed space and its significance. The second major modification to Ubersfeld’s model is achieved through the additional inscription or construction of a closed private place to which each hero not only has access, but belongs in some profound way. This private place is a haven or a solace to the hero, a retreat where he finds acceptance.

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Chapter Seven For Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, this place of acceptance and comfort is the interior of the cathedral of Notre Dame itself, with which over time he becomes even physically associated: “C’est ainsi que peu à peu, se développant toujours dans le sens de la cathédrale, y vivant, y dormant, n’en sortant presque jamais, en subissant à toute heure la pression mystérieuse, il arriva à lui ressembler, à s’y incruster, pour ainsi dire, à en faire partie intégrante” (4: 118). Moreover, that Quasimodo is slowly rendered deaf through the ringing of the cathedral’s bells (“la seule porte que la nature lui eût laissée toute grande ouverte sur le monde s’était brusquement fermée à jamais” [4: 119]) further reinforces his tie to the physical space of her interior, from which it becomes increasingly dangerous for him to leave as “la cathédrale ne lui était pas seulement la société, mais encore l’univers, mais encore toute la nature” (4: 120). For Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the private place of solace is la Maison de la rue Plumet (“La Maison à secret” [IV, III, 1]), where he endeavors to establish a new life for himself and Cosette following their departure from the convent. The comfort of this private and secluded space, complete with secret passages and rooms, allows Valjean to believe—although only temporarily—that he has the possibility to “rentrer parmi les hommes tranquillement” (11: 633). In Les Travailleurs de la mer, Gilliatt’s private space is la Maison bû de la rue, the house in which he spent the majority of his youth and where he continues to live following his mother’s death. This house, which is both geographically isolated (“elle était situé à la pointe d’une langue de terre ou plutôt de rocher qui faisait un petit mouillage à part dans la crique de Houmet-Paradis” [12: 558]) and scrupulously avoided by the inhabitants of Guernsey, who believe it to be haunted, is where Gilliatt finds peace and consolation through a communion with nature. For Gwynplaine in L’Homme qui rit, the closed private place is Ursus’s Green-Box, a “maison en marche” (14: 195) in which he lives and travels, performing with his adoptive family of Ursus, Homo, and Dea. The protective space of the Green-Box and the comfort that it provides Gwynplaine is directly opposed to the dangers and uncertainty of the outside world: “D’un côté l’univers et de l’autre cette baraque; et dans cette baraque il y

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Decoding Social Exclusion avait la liberté, la bonne conscience, le courage, le dévouement, l’innocence, le bonheur, l’amour, toutes les constellations” (14: 209).22 In the end, however, these closed private places or havens of solace prove to be as inaccessible or transitory to the heroes as the closed social spaces of the novels. Indeed, with the exception of the (real) cathedral of Notre Dame, all of these places are very consciously dismantled or in some way ultimately disallowed to the heroes during the course of their itineraries: La Maison de la rue Plumet is regretfully abandoned by Jean Valjean in Les Misérables as a result of Javert’s incessant investigation of him, likened by Marius, after Valjean and Cosette’s sudden departure, to being “aussi silencieuse et plus vide qu’une tombe” (11: 737); Gilliatt’s Maison bû de la rue in Les Travailleurs de la mer is no longer a comfort to him following his return to the island after rescuing la Durande (in fact, he is never figured there again) and, as the narrator additionally informs us, the house is subsequently demolished and removed from its location (“La petite presqu’île qui portait cette maison est tombée sous le pic des démolisseurs de falaises et a été chargée, charretée à charretée, sur les navires des brocanteurs de rochers et des marchands de granit” [12: 570– 71]); and the Green-Box in L’Homme qui rit has, as a result of Barkilphedro’s machinations, disappeared when Gwynplaine returns to the Inn Tadcaster (“Gwynplaine venait d’arriver à ce bord sinistre, le vide. La Green-Box partie, c’était l’univers évanoui” [14: 362]).23 This very conscious inscription and subsequent dismantlement of a private, personal place of comfort for each hero serves to magnify the spatial construct of exclusion established above, underscoring the hero’s (literal) disconnection from the linear, social world depicted in the novel. Butor confirms this deliberate pattern, noting that “Chez Hugo les ‘héros’ vont essayer de réaliser autour d’eux une oasis [. . .] mais cette ‘île’ qu’il voudront conserver—la maison de la rue Plumet pour Jean Valjean, la ‘green-box’ pour Gwynplaine, le ‘bû de la rue’ pour Gilliatt—sera balayée par les raz de marée de l’histoire” (“Victor Hugo romancier” 225–26). In this way, the function of these private places surpasses both the classical notion of space and place as backdrop (décor) and the newer romantic

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Chapter Seven conception of place as the legible exterior reflection of the hero’s interior sentiments so as to introduce a larger discourse concerning the hero’s relation to the world around him, as well as to time and history. For if, as Hamon proposes, the relationship between character and description of place is to be “interprétée en termes de conjonction ou de disjonction d’actants, c’est-à-dire comme des énoncés d’états anticipateurs ou résultatifs de transformations narratives” in which a kind of “métonymie narrative” (“Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 162) is created through the relationship between the context into which characters are placed and their personal psychology, then the reduction and disappearance of the hero’s closed private place cements his progressive—and irreversible—isolation from the fictional world depicted, the impossibility of his sustained existence in this social world.24 This intentionally constructed linear spatial inequity is in the end tempered—if not eclipsed—by what can be seen as the third level of spatial opposition that exists in Hugo’s fiction. For in each novel, the hero’s exclusion from the social world and the linear, social, and private places and space of the novel is offset by a simultaneous use and valorization of vertical space. This final and largest opposition points to the existence in Hugo’s fiction of a redefined spatial hierarchy, as it is each hero’s mastery of vertical space, as opposed to the linear places and space from which he is increasingly excluded, that guarantees not social integration but his own personal and moral ascendancy. Indeed, the hero’s ultimate transcendence of the social world of the novel operates on a vertical rather than on a horizontal scale, with his ultimate ascent away from the social world of the novel in direct proportion to one or more textual “descents” that precede his anonymous death. As we saw in Chapter 1 of this study, one of the ways in which Hugo renders the characters in his novels archetypal is through their relation to myth and mythical patterns. The hero’s quest itinerary and its defining act function as an initiating trial that is characterized by a series of actions that includes or culminates in an important and transformational vertical descent of some kind. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Quasimodo swoops down from the protected enclaves of Notre-Dame to save Esmeralda from being hanged (“on le vit couler sur la façade, [. . .] courir vers les

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Decoding Social Exclusion deux bourreaux avec la vitesse d’un chat tombé d’un toit, les terrasser sous deux poings énormes, enlever l’égyptienne d’une main [. . .] et d’un seul élan rebondir jusque dans l’église” [4: 247]); in Les Misérables, Jean Valjean—among his other descents and ascents—is buried and rises “from the dead” so as to be able to enter the Petit-Picpus convent and descends with and raises Marius from the depths of the Parisian sewer system (“L’Intestin de Léviathan” [V, II]); in Les Travailleurs de la mer, Gilliatt’s slaying of the octopus occurs following a visit to her underground cavern (“Gilliatt prit son couteau dans ses dents, descendit des pieds et des mains du haut de l’escarpement et sauta dans cette eau” [12: 738]); in L’Homme qui rit, Gwynplaine is brought to the torture chamber beneath the Southwark prison to discover his true identity (“La Cave pénale” [II, IV]); and in Quatrevingt-treize, after Lantenac has saved Michelle Fléchard’s children from burning to death, Gauvain goes down and assumes his place (and fate) in the dungeon of the family’s ancestral home (“Gauvain pénétra dans la salle du rez-de-chaussée [. . .] quelques-uns de ces hommes assoupis se levèrent, entre autres l’officier qui commandait le poste. Gauvain lui désigna la porte du cachot” [15: 489–90]). The irreversible, transformational nature of these descents points not only to the heroes’ insertion into a redefined spatial hierarchy, but, as we saw in Chapter 1, also into a redefined quest pattern, one in which the external goals of the romance model are supplanted by the realization of an internal private or moral victory. For while the heroes’ progressive exclusion from linear space underscores their disconnection from the social worlds of the novels, their embracement and skillful command of the domain of vertical space emphasize their personal strength and fortitude.25 Although the effort made by some of Hugo’s heroes in their descents may in some cases lead to a temporary social victory, as for example in Gilliatt’s slaying of the octopus and rescue of la Durande, which results in an increase in his popularity on the island, or in Quasimodo’s rescue of Esmeralda, which is met with cheers and acceptance from the crowd at the base of the cathedral, there is, however, no possibility of a corresponding permanent advancement in the social, linear space of the novel, as it is society itself that is figured time and time again

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Chapter Seven as the hero’s greatest—and most insurmountable—adversary. On the contrary, the hero, whose personal transfiguration through descent is in the end of a profoundly private nature, must subsequently continue to rise far above and far away from the linear, social space of the novel, as the vertical scale is capable of being valorized not in the social configuration put into place, but in the cosmic configuration. This continued ascendancy is figured in its ultimate and final form through the hero’s self-imposed and anonymous death, upon which in every case Hugo’s novels close. For it is only in death that the hero can find acceptance, transcendence, affirmation, and corresponding completion as his moral potential is realized through his ascendancy and absorption into the cosmic whole, an absorption that is magnified by the hero’s complete and utter effacement from the fictional world: Quasimodo’s skeleton disintegrates into dust, Jean Valjean has been effectively erased from existence, Gilliatt and Gwynplaine are swallowed up by the ocean, and Gauvain’s soul has left his body and taken flight. While this absorption underscores the opening of the hero toward his own personal transcendence, it simultaneously serves to question the social world from which and about which Hugo writes, as the repeated message is that historical existence is largely incompatible with the fulfillment of moral potential. All of the elements that have been explored in this study in relation to the redefined character that Hugo puts into place in his novels have resulted in an additional kind of transcendence for them—a literary one—as Hugo’s characters have been and continue to be successfully reincarnated in a variety of forms. Their timelessness and staying power points once again to the difference between Hugo’s character-making and that of his contemporaries, as the universality and malleability of his characters has ensured their popular and cultural heritage.

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From Quasimodo, to Esmeralda, to Jean Valjean, to Cosette, to Gwynplaine, Victor Hugo’s characters have enjoyed an afterlife whose longevity is unparalleled in French literature. One hundred and seventy years after the publication of Notre-Dame de Paris, a musical version of it by Luc Plamondon and Richard Cocciante—first presented in France in 1998 and commercially and critically well received in London, Las Vegas, and Montreal—once again created, in the first years of the new millennium, a buzz around Hugo’s characters, turning them into front-page news in the same way that the musical version of Les Misérables had done in the 1980s and 1990s or that any of the countless operatic, film, and television adaptations of Hugo’s novels have done over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 But have Hugo’s characters ever not reverberated in the world in ways that take them beyond the page? Evidence of all kinds—from the empirical to the most subjective—proves that a great number of Hugo’s characters surpassed long ago the borders of their textual representation, taking on larger-than-life status and a subsequent autonomous existence and mythology all their own in popular culture. This independence and expansion is in large part a result of the universal natures and qualities of Hugo’s characters, as the unique, archetypal template from which they are drawn results in their lending themselves well not only to adaptation, but even to the kind of complete reinvention that has been witnessed, for example, in films like Claude Lelouch’s highly successful 1995 version of Les Misérables, which offsets the events and characters of the novel against the murky moral territory of World War II France, or in Disney’s controversial Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1996), in which the romantic 179

Conclusion couple of Phoebus and Esmeralda triumph at the film’s closure with the help of their “friend” Quasimodo. During Hugo’s own lifetime, he authorized, encouraged, and even participated in the adaptation of his fictional works into other forms (operas and plays, among others) that sometimes greatly altered the original plots and outcomes of his novels.2 In addition, Hugo’s characters inspired—from their creation—a great number of artistic representations, ranging from illustrations to accompany various editions of his novels, to independent depictions of celebrated scenes, to portraits of the characters themselves. Hugo’s own substantial artistic talent was equally—and regularly—put to use in creating images of his characters that were disseminated separately from the novels.3 Hugo actively took part in this way in the shaping of his own destiny through the construction and transmission of a malleable legacy that would in the end allow him to exceed the scope of his early ambitions (“Je veux être Chateaubriand ou rien” [1: 966]) through the establishment of not only a literary but a cultural heritage.4 Reasons for this overwhelmingly successful cultural transformation of Hugo’s literary texts have been explored by Porter and by Grossman, who suggests that Hugo’s “love of spectacle and his renowned visual imagination explains his perennial appeal to popularizers in general and to the cinema in particular” as “Hugo’s attraction both to the inner eye of the imagination and to the outer eye of the spectator has provided the world with a natural scriptwriter par excellence” (“From Classic to Pop Icon: Popularizing Hugo” 486). Yet while Hugo’s visual—and visionary—tendencies certainly in part explain the success that his works have had in other domains as well as their perennial interest, the key to their endurance is firmly rooted in the composition of Hugo’s characters, in the roles that they play in his novels, and in the meaning with which he invests them. It is ironic that what has always been the largest criticism of Hugo’s characters—their lack of individual psychological depth—has been precisely what has allowed them to remain fresh and adaptable for nearly two centuries, and to be—in the end—far better known than the characters created by his contemporaries. For it is the characters’ very independence from a fixed social or historical foundation, which was Lukács’s prin-

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Conclusion cipal criticism of Hugo as a novelist (“Hugo was never able to get away from his basic mistake, which was that he portrayed human beings independently of their social environment” [Studies in European Realism 95]), that explains the staying power and adaptability of Hugo’s characters as compared, for example, to Balzac’s, who have and who will continue to become increasingly dependent upon the reader’s capacity to reconstruct distant cultural codes.5 The popularization of Hugo serves in this way only to cement further his resilience, as the simplification of complex themes and abstract ideas as well as of the historical and cultural digressions in Hugo’s novels has allowed his characters to “become timeless—literally, not tied to history—part of the mythography of the international landscape” (Grossman, “From Classic to Pop Icon” 486).6 In addition to confirming Hugo’s popular appeal, the sustained heritage of Hugo’s characters provides us perhaps with the greatest proof of the presence of a redefined and surprisingly modern fictional character in Hugo’s novels. Whereas more traditional nineteenth-century characters, such as those created by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, have found a literary heritage and dialogue in the twentieth century with the nouveau roman, which, with its famous principle of la mort du personnage acted or reacted precisely against the psychologically based characters of nineteenth-century French fiction,7 Hugo’s heritage and his dialogue with the twentieth and now twentyfirst centuries fall largely outside of the boundaries—and the limitations—of the novel altogether. Indeed, without necessarily anticipating this revolt against the idea of the representable individual as the support or generator of meaning, Hugo can nonetheless be seen as already having moved away from this conception of character, as having understood the value of the conceptual, nonpsychological function that character could perform, and how this kind of character could be used to project a message not only about a particular historical period but about the movement of time and history itself. Thus for the “new novel” that Hugo envisioned in his 1823 review of Scott’s Quentin Durward (“Après le roman pittoresque, mais prosaïque, de Walter Scott, il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque, mais poétique, réel, mais

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Conclusion idéal, vrai, mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère” [5: 131]) there would also be a “new” kind of character to create—one that put into question the essence of character-centered, psychological fiction in which meaning is generated through the strength of the fictional illusion. In this way, as Michel Butor observes, character for Hugo has neither a sociological nor a psychological function, but serves rather as the point of intersection for a larger, probing inquiry: L’individu, si original qu’il soit, ne peut plus alors être considéré que comme un point remarquable d’un champ de forces. D’où la disparition du personnage romanesque romantique par excellence: le conquérant de Paris; chez lui plus de Rastignac, de Rubempré, de Julien Sorel, pas même de Frédéric Moreau. Gwynplaine, dans L’Homme qui rit, passe bien du peuple à l’aristocratie, mais ce n’est point qu’il l’ait voulu; un concours de forces le déplace brutalement, et sa réponse est le refus (“Victor Hugo romancier” 225).8

This ultimate modernity that characterizes both Hugo’s fiction corpus and his fictional creations in no way suggests that Hugo did not share with Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, and other novelists of his day an unflinching critical view about the shortcomings and failures of contemporary society and of the many social “types” that populated it. On the contrary, all while Hugo and his characters were being negatively judged by the realist standards that increasingly took hold, he continued to adhere to the practice of realism that he adopted early in his career as a novelist (particularly relative to le petit fait vrai) and never wavered, from his first novel to his last, in his desire to represent in his fiction the social realities and inequities of the world around him. Yet while Hugo’s fellow novelists turned their critical gaze sharply inward to magnify and account for various layers and degrees of historical and social determinism, Hugo’s critical gaze, like a prism, refracted outwards to incorporate a larger ideological dialogue on the fundaments of time, history, individual and collective destiny, and the nature of progress. And even though this central distinction was, on the one hand, visibly discordant (as witnessed both by Hugo’s eschewing of realism as it gained momentum and developed as

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Conclusion a literary movement and by antagonistic and acerbic commentary concerning Hugo’s practice by critics and by writers such as Flaubert and Zola), it surely had, on the other, many symbiotic benefits as nineteenth-century novelists measured their ambitions against the imposing literary giant that Hugo had become and defined themselves and their craft in relationship or in reaction to him. Indeed, as this book has endeavored to show, Hugo’s interaction with and sustained opposition to not one, but two generations of nineteenth-century fiction writers was rich and complex, and contributed in both subtle and significant ways to the larger directions taken by the novel as a genre. If what has come to be known today as the “conventional” nineteenth-century character, as defined by the realist tradition, is absent from Hugo’s fictional corpus it is because, from the beginning, character served in Hugo’s novels—both in its conception and its function—as a vehicle for something else. Not only did he veer away from the psychologically based characters that would eventually drive and define realist fiction, but also from the purely functional characters of the romance and melodramatic traditions that informed his work. Indeed, the irreconcilable and dialectical oppositions that exist not only among Hugo’s characters but also within them point to the fact that Hugo, in reaching back to an archetypal model, did not use character to affirm the ethical truths and societal norms of a morally transparent universe but rather to complicate and challenge them. The textual itineraries of Hugo’s characters additionally provide proof of a refigured conception of character—and particularly of the hero and his textual role—as these itineraries repeatedly lead to their removal from the novels in ways that dispossess them of their fictional and social identities. The semiotic process through which characters take on meaning (“la première apparition d’un nom propre non historique introduit dans le texte une sorte de “blanc” sémantique [. . .] qui [. . .] va se charger progressivement [. . .] de signification” [Hamon, “Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 128]) is paralleled by a thematic process of progressive discharge and reduction, which culminates in the characters’ effacement from the worlds of the novels. This textual depletion of character then propels a humanitarian discourse that puts social and historical imperatives into question, as it is only

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Conclusion through their deaths that Hugo’s characters find acceptance, transcendence, affirmation, reconciliation of their internal oppositions, and indeed a kind of completion that emphasizes and promulgates moral ascendancy and a larger system of absolute values. In this way, character is used on the largest level in Hugo’s fiction to link the particular historical moments (about which Hugo writes) to both the historical moment from which he writes and to the continuous, unstoppable unfolding of history itself. The repetitive inquiry that takes place from novel to novel and that is studied in this book permits us, despite the fact that Hugo never formally unified his fictional universe, to read the novels in light of each other and in light of Hugo’s maturation over the course of his long career, and also compels us, in these concluding remarks, to ask the essential question of whether Hugo’s conception of character changes over time. For if Hugo, from Notre-Dame de Paris, to Les Misérables, to Les Travailleurs de la mer, to L’Homme qui rit and Quatrevingt-treize, remains true in all of his fictional endeavors to his early aspirations of creating a “new” kind of novel, there is something that is indeed more and more insistent about each novel that he writes. While his conceptual view of the genre remains for all intents and purposes unaltered, his use of it undergoes an evolution as he avails himself of the form over the course of the 1860s and 1870s to foreground his ideological and political positions with increasing intensity. In this, Hugo’s vision of character, while it remains similarly unchanged in terms of his conceptual understanding, undergoes a parallel process of intensification. When considered together, Hugo’s earlier fictional creations, from Ordener, to Quasimodo, to Esmeralda, although already marked by Hugo’s unique stamp, differ less obviously than do his later ones, from Jean Valjean, to Gilliatt, to Gwynplaine, to Gauvain, who become more and more consciously unreal, both in opposition to the continued psychological refinement of the characters of his contemporaries and as a result of Hugo’s desire to amplify his own increasingly strong and confident ideological views. This is witnessed, for example, by the almost fantastically reductive and symbolically charged representations of opposing forces embodied in the characters of Quatrevingt-treize (“Cimourdain, c’est-à-dire 93,

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Conclusion tenait Lantenac, c’est-à-dire la monarchie, et il se trouverait quelqu’un pour ôter de cette serre de bronze cette proie!” [15: 486–87]). In much the same way as Hugo’s characters became progressively more intense as a way of centering political and ideological concerns, criticism of them—and of his novels— became increasingly explicit and provided critics with an indirect method for attacking Hugo’s politics.9 Despite the fact that Hugo worked steadily throughout his career to connect with the readers of his works, whom he found so important, the lukewarm commercial and critical success of the novels subsequent to Les Misérables nonetheless left him with feelings of disenchantment. While Quatrevingt-treize faired slightly better in both areas, Hugo expressed in jottings in an 1869 notebook his dissatisfaction with the state of both his novels’ reception and readers: “J’ai voulu abuser du roman [. . .]. J’ai voulu forcer le lecteur à penser à chaque ligne. De là une sorte de colère du public contre moi” (14: 1518). Although many contemporary critics and readers additionally found the vision of the social world depicted in Hugo’s novels to be ambiguous—and even fatalistic—he also was equally insistent in his desire to view his novels as ultimately and collectively positive in nature. As he specified: “On a voulu voir dans Anankè toute une profession de foi, et l’on a déclaré que l’auteur [. . .] était fataliste. Il est le contraire. Il pense, quant à lui, que la série de ses œuvres est une série d’affirmations de l’Ame” (14: 387). This perception, as well, confirms the presence of a redefined character and character function in Hugo’s work. For the affirmation of l’âme that indeed occurs in each of Hugo’s novels, occurs precisely through the destruction, erasure, and refiguration of the represented individual, as each novel in the end opens upon the vast—and un-representable—expanses of l’infini. Hugo’s heroes in every case find completion precisely in being anonymously absorbed into the cosmic whole. Character is thus but one force among others in the larger cosmic struggles of the universe. This simultaneous reduction and expansion is specifically alluded to by the narrator of Les Misérables, who announces that “Ce livre est un drame dont le premier personnage est l’infini. L’homme est le second” (11: 389), as well as by Hugo himself in a proposed preface to L’Homme qui rit in

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Conclusion which he intended to remind readers of the cosmic elevation that takes place in his very particular conception of the drame: “Aux personnages humains il mêle, comme la nature elle-même, d’autres personnages, les forces, les éléments, l’infini, l’inconnu” (14: 388). In the end, it is this expansion that perhaps best allowed Hugo’s characters to resist both classification and demystification, and which has also allowed them to continue to have relevance to our world. For speak they still do—from Cosette and Gavroche to Quasimodo, Jean Valjean, and Esmeralda, Hugo’s characters have never been reduced to the one-dimensionality of which they were so often accused. Even though Hugo’s real—or even his ideal—nineteenthcentury reader may not, in the end, have been satisfactory to him, we can only imagine that he would find his current form of behind-the-scenes superstardom to be a gratifying legacy. For as Grossman observes, Hugo’s early prediction in NotreDame de Paris—ceci tuera cela—has in many ways come true. Not only has the monument been surpassed by the book, but the book has now been surpassed by other creative mediums, “killing,” above all, the author in the process as the characters have usurped the author’s place: “In the final analysis, Hugoas-author has been largely occluded by the characters he created; they have, in essence, become [. . .] transhistorical” (“From Classic to Pop Icon” 487). Yet what “author” is it that has been killed off? A master at creating, molding, and circulating his own myth and legend, Hugo can also be seen as putting forth a redefined notion of the author and of the author’s role, both through his painstaking construction of own his image and his careful and savvy selfmanagement of his long writing career, and through the fictional “authors” that figure into his novels. Indeed, that Gringoire of Notre-Dame de Paris and Ursus of L’Homme qui rit are clear parodies or caricatures of the author and his role speaks to Hugo’s awareness of the author’s ultimate limitations. Knowledge of these limitations on Hugo’s part also seemed to lead to a kind of frenetic desire to mark his work with the inscription of reflexive “Hs” and “Gs,” to include himself in a very finite way in his own legacy. Knowing, or seeing, perhaps well in advance that the largest form of preservation of this legacy would in the end come from

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Conclusion the eclipse of the author in favor of his creations, Hugo also carefully managed their image, grafting his indelible mark upon them so that through their uniqueness—and resemblance—they remain, even when detached from the texts, so very Hugolian. It is in this way that Hugo’s characters have transcended not only the fictional world in which they are placed, but time itself, so as to leave their permanent mark on future generations.

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Notes Introduction 1. These sites are both popular and scholarly. The “Groupe Hugo,” working out of the Jussieu branch of the University of Paris, posts on their site current information about Hugo scholarship, members’ monthly presentations, and recent publications in the field (http:// groupugo.div.jussieu.fr). Offerings on eBay for Hugo memorabilia include books in a variety of editions, photographs, comic books, drawings, jewelry, stamps, tobacco cards, and more. 2. See in particular Michel Butor, “Victor Hugo romancier” (1964); Guy Rosa, “Jean Valjean (I, 2, 6): Réalisme et irréalisme des Misérables” (1985); Nicole Savy, “Cosette: Un personnage qui n’existe pas” (1985); Jacques Seebacher, “Le Symbolique dans les romans de Victor Hugo” (1986); René Journet, “Victor Hugo et la métamorphose du roman” (1988); and collected articles such as Le Centenaire des “Misérables”; 1862–1962: Hommage à Victor Hugo (1962); Lire “Les Misérables” (Ed. Guy Rosa and Anne Ubersfeld, 1985); Hugo dans les marges (Ed. L. Dällenbach, 1985); Hugo le fabuleux (Ed. Jacques Seebacher and Anne Ubersfeld, 1985); G comme Hugo (Ed. Antoine Court and Roger Bellet, 1987); Victor Hugo, “Les Misérables”: “La preuve par les abîmes” (Ed. J.-L. Diaz, 1995); and “Les Misérables”: Nommer l’innommable (Ed. Gabrielle Chamarat, 1994). 3. Cited in Albouy’s “La Vie posthume de Victor Hugo” (xxxv). Albouy provides us in this article with a detailed historical summary of Hugo’s literary and political legacy in the twentieth century. See also Albouy’s “Victor Hugo et la critique bourgeoise” in Mythographies. 4. Cited in Lukács, Studies in European Realism 94. 5. Lukács echoes Goethe’s sentiments in stating that Hugo was “never able to get away from his basic mistake, which was that he portrayed human beings independently of their social environment—and from the resulting puppet-like nature of his characters” (Studies in European Realism 95). For broad but very useful discussions of realism in fiction, see Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Wayne Booth’s timeless The Rhetoric of Fiction. 6. Hugo’s two early novels, Han d’Islande (1823) and Bug-Jargal (1826), as well as Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné (1829), a first-person narrative, and Claude Gueux (1834), a polemical short story, will be examined primarily in their relation to his subsequent works. The study of characters from Hugo’s theater will also be included when relevant to fictional patterns. 7. Brombert illuminates and compellingly links the imaginative and prophetic aspects of Hugo’s fictional world (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel); Ubersfeld’s semiotic approach leads her, above all, to important conclusions about the function of language in Hugo’s fiction

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Notes to Pages 5–6 (Paroles de Hugo); Grossman enhances our understanding of Hugo’s aesthetics (The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics of Harmony) and his conceptions of utopia and of the sublime (Figuring Transcendence in “Les Misérables”: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime); and Roman strives to situate Hugo’s fiction in relation to both its similarities with the tradition of the philosophical novel and to the new territory that it forges for itself (Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique). Among the significant scholarly articles on Hugo’s characters, Nicole Savy’s “Cosette: Un personnage qui n’existe pas” is perhaps the most important in terms of its analysis of social role of the female character in Hugo’s fiction. 8. This impasse is generally viewed as the inability to explain in a satisfying way the fundamental relationship between personnage and personne. For detailed histories of the study of character and the evolution of the study of character, see Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits”; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse; Philippe Hamon, Le Personnel du roman; and Vincent Jouve, L’Effet-Personnage dans le roman. 9. As outlined by Aristotle, characters or “agents” are products of plots and as such only need to incarnate one of two principal traits: they must be either noble (spoudaios) or base (phaulos). Although the notion and conception of traits has since significantly evolved, the dominating criteria for evaluation has remained one of representation, as exemplified by the derivative appellations in both English and French: character, which suggests definition by an (engraved) mark or distinctive quality, and personnage, which has its origins in the notion of persona, marked by its relation to a kind or type. 10. Tomashevsky specifies in “Thématique” that “La présentation des personnages, sortes de supports vivants pour les différents motifs est un procédé courant pour grouper et enchaîner ces derniers. L’application d’un motif à un certain personnage facilite l’attention du lecteur” (293). 11. In Le Personnel du roman, his study of character in Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart series, Hamon also signals the importance of the larger system of characters, noting that a “texte romanesque est fait de la mise en scène d’innombrables personnages que la plupart des analyses négligent ou ignorent systématiquement” (20). 12. See, for example, W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel, and Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature. 13. Two psychoanalytical studies in relation to Hugo have been important catalysts in Hugo scholarship: Charles Baudoin’s Psychanalyse de Victor Hugo and Charles Mauron’s “Les Personnages de Victor Hugo: Etude psychocritique.” These studies, however, have proven more useful for études génétiques than for the kind of analysis of character that I propose in this study. 14. See in particular the seminal works of Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading) and H. R. Jauss (Towards an Aesthetic of Reception).

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Notes to Pages 7–17 15. The term appearance, for the purposes of organization of this study, is not used as in its principal meaning to connote the outward aspect of something or someone, but rather to suggest the notion of “phenomenon.” Reappearance is used to convey the notion of repetition, and disappearance is used to convey not only the notion of death, but the conscious and complete removal of characters from the fictional worlds of the novels. 16. This study uses the term archetype to signify a prototype (or original pattern of a class of things) that represents the typical and essential elements shared by all varieties of that class. The term figure is used to signify the symbolic representation of real (historical) individuals, while type is used to refer to a character that is an example or that is representative of a group of others (see Chapter 3 for a detailed exploration of the nineteenth-century conception of type character). The French term personnage (which can etymologically be traced to persona or mask) and the English term character (which puts emphasis on a distinctive quality) will be used interchangeably to signify fictional creations put in place in a text by an author. 17. Cited in Meschonnic 12. 18. All references to Hugo’s works, which will be given parenthetically in the text, are to the Œuvres complètes of Victor Hugo, ed. Jean Massin, 18 vols. 19. This strong philosophical and ideological connection among his novels was additionally addressed by Hugo in several of his prefaces. For example, in the preface to Les Travailleurs de la mer Hugo directly relates the novel to his two preceding ones (“Un triple anankè pèse sur nous, l’anankè des dogmes, l’anankè des lois, l’anankè des choses. Dans Notre-Dame de Paris, l’auteur a dénoncé le premier; dans Les Misérables, il a signalé le second; dans ce livre, il indique le troisième” [12: 551]), and in the preface to L’Homme qui rit he outlines a correlation between the work and two other projected novels, La Monarchie, which was never written, and Quatrevingt-treize: “Le vrai titre de ce livre serait L’Aristocratie. Un autre livre, qui suivra, pourra être intitulé La Monarchie. Et ces deux livres, s’il est donné à l’auteur d’achever ce travail, en précéderont et en amèneront un autre qui sera intitulé: Quatrevingt-treize” (14: 27).

Part 1: Appearance Chapter One The Archetype Transformed 1. Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine. All references to Balzac’s works, which will be given parenthetically, are to vol. 1 of this edition. 2. It is significant to note that Hugo often referred to his novels as drames. For example, in the “Note ajoutée à l’édition définitive” of

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Notes to Pages 17–19 Notre-Dame de Paris he uses the terms interchangeably in glossing over the reintegration of the allegedly “lost” chapters of his novel: “Ne croyez pas qu’il y ait rien d’arbitraire dans le nombre de parties dont se compose ce tout, ce mystérieux microcosme que vous appelez drame ou roman” (4: 21). He equates the two terms again in a draft of the preface to L’Homme qui rit: “Ce roman, cette histoire, ce drame, L’Homme qui rit [. . .]” (14: 391; emphasis mine). While this purposeful appellation can be linked to a strategy employed by many nineteenth-century writers to lend legitimacy to the yet unproven novel in applying the vocabulary of the theater to the genre (i.e., Balzac’s Comédie humaine), Hugo’s use of the term drame eclipses simple justification, and serves rather to draw attention to the totalizing form he aspires to create. 3. Although Hugo wrote Bug-Jargal prior to Han d’Islande, having completed the first version of the former in 1819 for publication in Le Conservateur littéraire, it is the second and heavily revised edition of 1826 that is considered to be definitive and is thus placed sequentially after Han d’Islande in chronological listings of Hugo’s work. 4. See Grossman’s The Early Novels of Victor Hugo for an account of Hugo’s extensive familiarity with and admiration for Scott’s historical novels. 5. Stendhal’s review called the novel “le plus baroque et le plus horrifique produit d’une imagination déréglée qui ait jamais glacé le sang et blêmi le teint des lecteurs de roman” (Courrier anglais 2: 55). Grossman observes that Vigny was among the few to respond favorably to the novel in calling it “un beau et grand et durable ouvrage” (Early Novels 21) and thanking Hugo in the following terms for his contribution: “Vous avez posé en France les fondements de Walter Scott [. . .]. Je vous remercie au nom de la France” (22). 6. As Lukács observes, the introduction and vogue of historical fiction in France prepared for the “consciously historical conception of the present” (The Historical Novel 81) that would appear as the century progressed in the works of writers such as Balzac. 7. In France, the term roman first applied to the language in which a text was written (vernacular French as opposed to Latin). It later came to signify a genre, that is, a work (in verse) whose subject matter was fictional or nonhistorical. See Dean A. Miller, The Epic Hero, in which Miller describes the hero and the quest on the most basic level as “Someone extraordinary/ Goes or is sent/ To search for and retrieve/ Something important” (162), and Philippe Hamon, “Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage,” who reminds us that in any predetermined narrative system, “La non-perturbation de cette structure est donc un élément important de sa lisibilité, lisibilité liée au fait que le lecteur peut non seulement situer un personnage dans une échelle de personnages-types et de relations d’oppositions ou de ressemblances, mais aussi prévoir certains déroulements-types” (140).

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Notes to Pages 19–24 8. Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Ambrosio, or The Monk (1795) and the novels of Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) are examples, among others, of particularly successful gothic novels read in early nineteenth-century France. As Myriam Roman notes, Hugo’s practice in Han d’Islande of including epigraphs for each chapter can be seen as a direct influence of this tradition (Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique 601). 9. In his essay on the theory of genres, Frye distinguishes between novel and romance in the following way: “The romance, which deals with heroes, is the intermediate between the novel, which deals with men, and the myth, which deals with gods” (306). 10. The quest motif is further reinforced by elements of Scandinavian mythology, which provide an important backdrop for the novel and, as Pierre Albouy notes, are bolstered by “des allusions aux divinités et aux héros du nord, Regner Lodbrog, Odin, Thor, Freya et les walkyries” (La Création mythologique chez Victor Hugo 120). 11. In a coup de théâtre, they are brought forth at the end of the novel during Ordener’s trial, having been found by Oglypiglap on Spiagudry’s cadaver. 12. This basic romance schema of hero, villain, and heroine, which conforms to the functional actantial model advanced by Greimas in Sémantique structurale, is figured through the following characters in the five novels to be studied: in Notre-Dame de Paris, Quasimodo and Frollo vie for Esmeralda; in Les Misérables, Jean Valjean battles Javert so as to keep Cosette; in Les Travailleurs de la mer, Gilliatt goes up against the octopus and other “monsters” to save la Durande and win Déruchette’s hand in marriage; in L’Homme qui rit, Gwynplaine must rid himself of Josiane in order to be reunited with Dea; and in Quatrevingttreize, Gauvain must take on Lantenac in his endeavor to bring Vendée under the Republic’s control. 13. Fléchard is first introduced as “une femme” (15: 289) when found by the republican troops in the forest of la Saudraie. Following the abduction of her children by the royalist forces, she is referred to most frequently as la mère, which also serves as the title of the fourth book of part 3 of the novel. 14. For example, “Que se passait-il en ce moment dans l’âme obscure de l’archidiacre?” (4: 210); “le prêtre mit sa main sur son front” (4: 272); “un rire de démon [. . .] éclata sur le visage livide du prêtre” (4: 339). Esmeralda, as well, is as often referenced as l’égyptienne as by her own name, which categorically ties her to a larger group with which— although she does not truly belong—she is indelibly associated. As Hamon observes, “le personnage est représenté, pris en charge et désigné sur la scène du texte par un signifiant discontinu, un ensemble dispersé de marques que l’on pourrait appeler son ‘étiquette’” (“Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 142). In repeatedly situating his characters

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Notes to Pages 24–28 in reference to the larger or archetypal group to which they belong, Hugo thus deflates what Hamon calls the richesse of the individual name (nom propre). 15. This technique of inserting characters into the larger mold to which they belong is a technique that is also frequently employed by Balzac in his novels; yet Hugo employs it to emphasize the characters’ archetypal qualities, while Balzac uses it rather to draw attention to the social groups to which the characters belong. 16. Again, a parallel can be drawn here with Balzac, who also often uses dominant physical aspects or personality traits both to reference characters in his novels and to give them unity throughout the text. The difference, however, is that Balzac’s characters are not only uniformly described in much greater physical detail, but that description for Balzac (be it of characters or setting) invariably has a psychological dimension. This dimension is absent from Hugo’s descriptions, which use the highlighted element to flesh out characters that are otherwise not well drawn in and to draw attention to their symbolic importance. It is for this reason that the physical attributes of Hugo’s characters are not examined in detail in this study, as Hugo’s characters are intentionally not well drawn in on a physical level. 17. As Wallace W. Douglas outlines in “The Meanings of ‘Myth’ in Modern Criticism,” “‘Myth’ is taken as a representation in fictional form of truths of values that are sanctioned by general belief: myth ‘tells the truth to the extent that people believe that it tells the truth’” (121). 18. This tendency is confirmed by Albouy: “La psychologie hugolienne est de nature cosmique ou mythique [. . .] une métaphysique soustend la psychologie de Hugo et sa tendance à définir l’homme par l’au-delà ou l’en-deçà de l’humanité, par sa place dans l’univers” (Mythographies 156). 19. Cellier distinguishes this “roman initiatique” from the bildungsroman, which developed during the same period and found its way into France with the realist roman d’apprentissage. The latter, as Cellier explains: “fait passer aussi les héros par une série d’épreuves, mais pour aboutir à la sagesse et non au salut” (“Chaos vaincu” 214). 20. The importance of salvation in the “roman initiatique” is often figured through the predominance of Christian imagery. Cellier observes that “l’identification au Christ s’impose de plus en plus” (“Chaos vaincu” 219) during the course of the hero’s trajectory. The very notion of salvation through death and rebirth is, of course, a profoundly Christian one, and will be examined in detail in Part 2 of this study, in which Hugo’s heroes are studied both in terms of their relation to the concept of type character in the nineteenth century and in terms of their function within the system of characters that Hugo puts in place in his novels. 21. Many characters in Hugo’s theater are similarly double in nature: for example, in the character of Triboulet of Le Roi s’amuse (1832)

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Notes to Pages 28–32 resides the conflict of the hideous monster and the loving father; Lucrèce Borgia, in the play of the same name (1833), incarnates the moral monster and the mother; and Marie Tudor, the title heroine of Marie Tudor (1833), is irreconcilably divided between a queen’s rigid duties and a woman’s desires. 22. In addition to the larger religious frame of reference that renders the presence of the poles of sublime and grotesque synonymous with the concepts of good and evil in man, the central duality that defines each of Hugo’s protagonists can also be seen as having a literary frame of reference: that of the tradition of the personnage double (defined by an irresolvable vital cleavage) that can be traced back to Antiquity and that benefited from a new wave of popularity in both European and American literature during the nineteenth century. 23. In this doubling of character roles, through which a part of the hero’s personality is represented or reflected by another character in the novel, Hugo’s characters intersect with the larger literary tradition of the psychological fictional double or doppelgänger. On doubles in literature, see in particular Robert Rogers, The Double in Literature; Clément Rosset, Le réel et son double; and Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History. 24. This decision is figured through an ideological crisis. Like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, Gauvain undergoes his own “tempête sous un crâne” in arriving at his choice to free Lantenac in spite of what it might mean for the fragile Republic. 25. Gilliatt’s transformation by nature is additionally underscored by his evolving relationship with water birds during the course of the novel. From foes who steal his food supply upon his arrival at les Douvres, the birds develop a total complicity with Gilliatt during his stay there. Just before his drowning at the Chaise Gild-Holm’Ur, they try to warn him of the imminent danger he faces: “Les mauves et les cormorans volaient autour de lui, inquiets. On eût dit qu’ils cherchaient à l’avertir. Peut-être y avait-il dans ces volées d’oiseaux quelque mouette venus des Douvres, qui le reconnaissait” (12: 792). 26. Quasimodo’s skeleton, when separated from that of Esmeralda at the end of Notre-Dame de Paris, “ tomba en poussière” (4: 342); the final words of Les Misérables tell us that on Jean Valjean’s gravestone “on n’y lit aucun nom” (11: 997); Gwynplaine disappears without a sound into the ocean in the final passage of L’Homme qui rit; and when Gilliatt is covered by water in the sea-chair in Les Travailleurs de la mer, the narrator informs us that “il n’y eut plus rien que la mer” (12: 793). Gauvain is the only Hugolian hero who cannot and does not have an anonymous death, as he is the leader of the republican forces and must be treated as an example. 27. For example, Gwynplaine’s deformity disappears when he is reunited in death with Dea (“Il avait le sourire que Dea venait d’avoir”

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Notes to Pages 34–36 [HQR, 14: 354]) and Gauvain’s self-imposed death frees him from being the “homme politique” (QVT, 15: 417) that the Revolution requires of him.

Chapter Two Hugo Novelist 1. As Brooks additionally asserts, “[. . .] the psychic bravado of virtue, its expressive breakthrough, serves to assure us, again and again, that the universe is in fact morally legible, that it possesses an ethical identity and significance. This assurance must be a central function of melodrama in the post-sacred universe: it relocates and rearticulates the most basic moral sentiments and celebrates the sign of the right” (43). 2. Like Frye and Brooks, Prendergast also confirms that “In its simplified manicheanism, its unremittingly reductive classification of experience in terms of clear-cut moral divisions, melodrama responds directly to the desire for a world characterized by the maximum moral clarity” (8). 3. See Brooks 12–13. This pejorative sense continues to coexist today, as does that of the adjective melodramatic, which is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “exaggeratedly emotional or sentimental” (785). 4. See the presentations in the Massin edition of Han d’Islande (by Yves Gohin, 2: 55–84) and Bug-Jargal (by Georges Piroué, 1: i–viii) for more on contemporary reactions to the novels. 5. The principal plays from this period are Marion de Lorme (1829), Hernani (1830), Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Lucrèce Borgia (1833), Marie Tudor (1833), Angelo, Tyran de Padoue (1835), and Ruy Blas (1838). Of these, only Lucrèce Borgia, Ruy Blas, and Hernani met with popular success. 6. Cited in Victor Hugo, Théâtre 279–80. 7. Cited in Albert W. Halsall, Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama 43. 8. Both Marion de Lorme and Le Roi s’amuse, for example, were subject to censure. Hugo refused to modify the former—considered too subversive because of the representation of Louis XIII—for two years before being convinced to do so by friends. Le Roi s’amuse—censured after its first performance—was quickly modified so as to temper its unflattering representation of François I. As James Smith Allen observes in In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800– 1940, Hugo’s 1827 play Amy Robsart also fell victim to Restoration censorship as it was “delayed and then suspended for its reputed profanation of faith by placing ecclesiastical figures on the stage” (97). Allen attributes Restoration censuring in general to the endangerment of what was considered a clear and natural hierarchy, as literary works were expected to portray class, gender, and political submissiveness (97). 9. On the relationship between drama and melodrama and melodrama and the novel, see also Ubersfeld, Le Roi et le bouffon.

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Notes to Pages 38–41 10. In The Mysteries of Paris and London, Richard Maxwell addresses the questions of interpretation and resolution in Hugo’s and Dickens’s fiction from a different angle—that of allegory—as he endeavors to illuminate the nineteenth-century novel’s ability to produce and present social knowledge. Concerning Notre-Dame de Paris, he argues that the concluding scene at Montfaucon “suggests a triple problem with figural interpretation: this narrative has become unfinishable, this hero has become invisible, the knowledge sought by narrative and hero alike has become unattainable” (55). This additional “failure” of coded structures effectively compounds the breakdown of the archetypal model and the subversion of the melodramatic mode. 11. Cited in Ubersfeld, Le Roi et le bouffon 494 and Claude Gély, Hugo et sa fortune littéraire 28. Gély also cites the reaction of another of Hugo’s contemporaries, Alphonse du Valconseil, who asked the following question in the Revue analytique et critique des romans contemporains (1845): “Dites, est-il dans Notre-Dame de Paris une seule figure qui approche pour la pureté de la fille d’Egypte? [. . .] N’est-ce pas l’amour de l’extraordinaire, du non-connu, qui vous porte à choisir ces sujets? Votre école n’est-elle pas sans moralité? N’est-elle pas purement artistique?” (132). 12. Repeated mention of Esmeralda’s feet throughout the novel prepares us for Paquette and Esmeralda’s reconnection and reunion, as it is Esmeralda’s childhood “petit soulier” that serves as the object of recognition. That her childhood shoe is no longer on Esmeralda’s corpse when it is viewed at Montfaucon eighteen months after her death highlights the ineffectiveness of the melodramatic gesture: “L’un de ces squelettes, qui était celui d’une femme, avait encore quelques lambeaux de robe d’une étoffe qui avait été blanche, et on voyait autour de son cou un collier de grains d’adrézarach avec un petit sachet de soie, orné de verroterie verte, qui était ouverte et vide” (4: 342). 13. Cited in Ubersfeld, who underscores the fact that “Hugo ne veut pas plier devant le public, mais le plier à lui” (Le Roi et le bouffon 619). 14. On the nineteenth-century transformation of both the status of writers and the reading public, see Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama. The second chapter of the study, “Balzac and the Reading Public,” outlines the reasons for which the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a rapid growth of the reading public and the transformation of the common reader. Important elements of this growth include the consolidation of middle-class interests and power and the increase in literacy, which was spurred on by the primary education acts of 1833. In addition, see Allen’s In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 as well as his Popular French Romanticism: Authors, Readers, and Books in the 19th Century, an equally insightful study on the emerging and shifting literary marketplace of the nineteenth century. 15. “Le roman historique est un très bon genre, puisque Walter Scott en a fait; et le drame historique peut être une très belle œuvre, puisque Dumas s’y est illustré; mais je n’ai jamais fait de drame historique ni de

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Notes to Pages 41–46 roman historique” (Hugo, letter to Albert Lacroix of December 1868, cited in Massin, 14: 1254). 16. While serial publication, which developed primarily as a strategy for selling newspapers, quickly found a readership, writers had a more difficult time adapting themselves to it. Chateaubriand’s outrage, for example, at his editor’s decision to publish—without his permission—portions of Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe serially from 1848 to 1850 speaks to the difference between his generation—bolstered by privilege and patronage—and the next, for whom publication was a new and often confusing business. On the rise of and reactions to the serial novel, see Marguerite Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France: The Critical Reaction 1815–1848. 17. While the concept of writing for an ideal—or idealized—reader can be traced at least as far back as the Renaissance and is, in the nineteenth century, in no way limited to Hugo, what is important to note is the difference between Hugo’s conception of this reader and that of his contemporaries. For the majority of Hugo’s contemporaries, reference to an ideal reader most often symbolizes the author’s frustration with the new dependence on the real reading public. It is in this way, for example, that can be understood Stendhal’s dedication of several of his novels to the happy few. In Hugo’s case, however, the ideal reader is not the shrinking reading elite but a virtual public that he shapes or cultivates for himself. 18. Sue himself, when asked by his editor what the outcome of Les Mystères de Paris would be, admitted to the evolving nature of his story: “Quant à la suite, je serais très embarrassé de vous l’envoyer. Je ne la connais pas. J’ai écrit cela d’instinct, sans savoir où j’allais. Maintenant je vais chercher” (cited in Nora Atkinson, Eugène Sue et le roman feuilleton 16). 19. Balzac was even more explicit in another letter to Mme Hanska: “Dieu merci, mes rivaux sont Molière et Walter Scott, Lesage et Voltaire, et non ce Paul de Kock en satin et à paillettes; [. . .] vous me permettrez de déplorer qu’on lui paye ses volumes 10,000 fr. tandis que je n’obtiens que 3000 des miens” (Prendergast 37). The negative effects of an excess of mediocrity on contemporary literature are similarly lamented by Sainte-Beuve in his “De la littérature industrielle”: “deux littératures coexistent dans une proportion bien inégale et coexisteront de plus en plus, mêlées entre elles comme le bien et le mal en ce monde, confondues jusqu’au jour du jugement: tâchons d’avancer et de mûrir ce jugement en dégageant la bonne et en limitant l’autre avec fermeté” (471). 20. In their Mémoires de la vie littéraire for the year 1862, the Goncourt brothers bitingly observe that Hugo “gagne deux cent mille francs—qui est le vrai chiffre de vente—à s’apitoyer sur les misères du peuple” (103). 21. In his biography of Hugo, Graham Robb notes that Hugo’s interest in and understanding of the business of publication did not stop there:

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Notes to Pages 47–55 he went as far as to work with his publishers to establish strategies for marketing the novel, penning press releases that were fed to the public months before the first volume was printed calling it the “social and historical drama of the nineteenth century,” and overseeing the advertising campaign, choosing what he felt were the most nationalistic passages— those on Waterloo—to be excerpted so as to avoid potential censoring (377–78). 22. In L’Effet-Personnage dans le roman, Vincent Jouve outlines the functioning of this kind of limited or shrouded omniscience: “L’illusion d’autonomie est souvent soutenue par une série de techniques annexes. L’auteur, par exemple, refuse de se réserver le moindre excédent de sens afin de donner l’illusion qu’il n’est pas le créateur de ses personnages (vis-à-vis desquels il est sur un pied d’égalité), mais un simple observateur. [. . .] Le recours aux phrases interrogatives et aux formules du type ‘je ne saurais le dire’ dénote, dans certains passages, la volonté de l’auteur de s’effacer devant ses créatures” (116–17). 23. This shifting of the Hugolian narrator’s omniscience and authority is offset throughout each novel by the consistent use of a common narrative technique of unification: the fonction de régie. This technique allows the narrator to make reference to the narrative text itself so as to “en marquer les articulations, les connexions, les inter-relations, bref l’organisation interne” (Genette, Figures III 262). Examples of this in Hugo’s work include the inscription of phrases such as “On s’en souvient que” (TM, 12: 699; HQR, 14: 125); “Disons-le une fois pour toutes” (TM, 12: 610); “Nous venons de le dire” (QVT, 15: 73); “Indiquons un détail” (HQR, 14: 174); and “Ajoutons que,” “Insistons-y,” “Disons-le” (QVT, 15: 405, 424, 429). 24. Piroué specifies that “Il ne visite pas tous les recoins, certains sont impraticables; il n’entre pas dans toutes les pièces, certaines sont fermées à clef. [. . .] Ces portes sur lesquelles il est écrit ‘Privé,’ Hugo ne les pousse pas” (Victor Hugo romancier ou les dessus de l’inconnu 220). 25. Flaubert, letter to Madame Roger des Genettes of 1862. Cited in Correspondance: Troisième série (1854–1869) 314. 26. This reference to the “female” reader is, to my mind, a tongue-incheek acknowledgment of one of the stereotypes that had emerged about the new reading public—namely, that it was largely composed of women. Hugo’s ideal reader is not a gendered one, but rather any reader who reads well, who is “pensive” while reading.

Part 2: Reappearance Chapter Three Hugo and Type Character 1. Cited in Max Bach, “Critique et politique: La Réception des Misérables en 1862” 605.

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Notes to Pages 55–61 2. Cited in Ubersfeld, Le Roi et le bouffon 280. 3. While “mirror” was a term frequently used by realist writers as well, most famously in Stendhal’s definition of the novel in Le Rouge et le noir (1830) (“un roman: c’est un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin”), Hugo’s vision and practice of concentration or amplification is quite different. Hugo’s “mirror” does not strive to reproduce faithfully the real, but rather to condense (and thus distort) it through magnification. 4. While Hugo’s relationship to nineteenth-century realism is the most significant for the shape of my argument, it is nonetheless important to mention two other purposes that were additionally served by (harsh) contemporary criticisms of Hugo’s works. First, criticism provided a way for other writers (poets, dramaturges, and novelists) to define themselves more clearly against the literary giant that Hugo had already become during his lifetime; and second, criticism also increasingly provided an implicit method for attacking Hugo’s political positions. 5. Le Grand Robert: Dictionnaire de la langue française (1995) lists, among the other definitions for the entry type, the following accepted nineteenth-century usages: “ensemble des caractères organisés en un tout, constituant un instrument de connaissance par ‘abstraction rationnelle’ et permettant de distinguer des catégories d’objets et de faits” and “personne ou chose qui réunit les principaux éléments d’un type abstrait et qui peut en être donnée en exemple” (7: 567). 6. Sainte-Beuve’s commentary, concerning the publication of the personal correspondence of Eugénie de Guérin, provides us with yet another conception of type—that of the exemplary (human) figure immortalized: “De nos jours les choses vont vite: on passe immédiatement à l’état de type. On n’attend même pas les cinquante ans d’épreuves et de quarantaine; on est type à bout portant et dès le lendemain de sa mort” (245). 7. Nodier reiterates this connection between the individuality and the universality of the type later in the article: “J’ai dit que le génie de l’écrivain inventeur se reconnaissait surtout à la création des types, et qu’aucun caractère d’invention ne devenait type s’il ne présentait cette expression d’individualité originale, mais saisissante, qui le rend familier à tout le monde” (189). 8. Demetz specifies that the scientific use of the terms type and prototype came into vogue during the second half of the eighteenth century “as useful terminological instruments in discussing central issues of comparative anatomy and zoology” (398–99). 9. See Demetz 412–13, who notes that it was “Balzac’s essential achievement to have looked under the cover of deceptive conformity and to have found, close to the placid familial hearth, interesting and ‘new’ characters of unusual interest” (412).

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Notes to Pages 61–63 10. In the same passage, Balzac additionally specifies the nature of the evolution from the classical “type” to the realist (social) one: “J’ai eu cent fois à faire ce que Richardson n’a fait qu’une seule fois. Lovelace a mille formes, car la corruption sociale prend les couleurs de tous les milieux où elle se développe” (17). 11. Nodier’s description of Chateaubriand’s René (1802) provides a good example of this vision of romantic type character: “Quand on s’occupe des types en littérature, il n’est pas permis d’oublier René, imposante et magnifique création, dans laquelle le génie a déposé le secret effrayant de notre civilisation” (193). Just as realist writers were responsible for creating new variations of type, romantic writers also brought into vogue new types, such as, for example, that of the prostitute who, despite her tainted exterior, remains pure on the interior. 12. See Demetz 411, and Jouve, who focuses attention on the process of “détermination” through which Balzac achieves the creation of such types: “Il [Balzac] vise à faire de l’être romanesque une réalité objective et extérieure au lecteur, aussi indépendante de lui que les individus vivants” (L’Effet-Personnage dans le roman 52). 13. Fantine, as well, as Bach observes, was generally condemned for being “qu’une pâle copie de la Fleur de Marie d’Eugène Sue, ou plutôt [. . .] une nouvelle version de la Paquette Chantefleurie, ce type romantique, éternel et banal, surtout pour Hugo, de la fille de joie réhabilitée par l’amour maternel” (604; emphasis mine). Similarly, the continuation of Flaubert’s negative commentary on Les Misérables focuses precisely on the romanticized qualities of the characters: “Où y at-il des prostituées comme Fantine, des forçats comme Valjean et des hommes politiques comme les stupides cocos de l’A.B.C. ?” (Gély 58). 14. Zola, for example, in his “Nos auteurs dramatiques” declared concerning Hugo and Notre-Dame de Paris that “Il n’y a plus une créature libre, naïve, allant son bonhomme de chemin. Tous les personnages sont rognés pour entrer dans un moule, tous gardent une attitude hiératique” (596). Criticisms such as Zola’s were, of course, offset by the public popularity of Hugo’s novels, especially Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables. Hugo’s theatrical characters, both from his plays of the 1830s and later dramatic endeavors, were evaluated in much the same way, though they generally did not have the same popular success. See Albert Halsall, Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama, for additional details on the reception of Hugo’s plays. 15. Cited in Gély 59. 16. Hugo himself made reference to this growing distance in his Le Tas de pierres (written during the 1860s and 1870s and published posthumously in 1942): “Je me sens seul en présence de cette génération” (Gély 59). This feeling of isolation from the real public goes in tandem with his increasing interest in his ideal reader (studied in Chapter 2) who, unlike the majority of Hugo’s second generation of contemporaries, is

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Notes to Pages 65–70 able to decode and come to a greater understanding about the intentions of his work. 17. It is also interesting to note the continuity between the preface to Cromwell and William Shakespeare relative to the drame. Thirty-seven years later, Hugo’s conception of this totalizing form has not changed: “Le drame est déconcertant. Il déroute les faibles. Cela tient à son ubiquité. Le drame a tous les horizons. Qu’on juge de sa capacité. L’épopée a pu être fondue dans le drame, et le résultat, c’est cette merveilleuse nouveauté littéraire qui est en même temps une puissance sociale, le roman” (12: 204). 18. Ward argues in favor of Hugo’s acquaintance with Nodier’s essay, which had appeared more than thirty years earlier, and with which there are many clear initial parallels (950). 19. Herein resides as well the difference between Hugo’s conception of type and the classical conception, as the psychological elements of classical type character are subordinated in Hugo’s conception of a compact and compressed version of man to his defining (universal) composition. This character is then transposed in the fictional social world. 20. Cited in Ubersfeld, Paroles de Hugo 144. Hugo similarly highlights his subordination of the social to the universal in Quatrevingt-treize: “L’histoire a sa vérité, la légende a la sienne. La vérité légendaire est d’une autre nature que la vérité historique. [. . .] C’est [. . .] peindre sous l’homme momentané l’homme éternel” (15: 388). 21. Cited in Gély 56–57. Gély also alludes to Baudelaire’s private commentary on the novel, citing his well-known letter of August 1862 to Mme Aupick in which he states: “Tu as reçu sans doute Les Misérables [. . .] ce livre est immonde et inepte. J’ai montré, à ce sujet, que je possédais l’art de mentir” (57). Regardless of his true opinion, what is significant for the purposes of this study is that Baudelaire set Les Misérables (“roman construit en manière de poème”) and Hugo’s conception of character (“Homme universel”) apart. 22. This division into categories excludes at present the study of a kind of character that is not specific to Hugo but applicable to all fiction: the comparse or functional character, whose primary purpose is the advancement or filling in of the plot. As we will see in Part 3 of this study, the Hugolian comparse characters are most significant in that they serve to mirror Hugo’s heroes in terms of their social isolation and exclusion.

Chapter Four Character as Template 1. This term “flat,” which Forster contrasts with “round” characters in his 1927 essay, has since mutated into a certain number of equivocal terms, such as “static” characters, “stylized” characters, etc., that are used in literary criticism. Regardless of the term that is used, the designation of “flat” is in no way pejorative. On the contrary, “flat” characters

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Notes to Pages 71–74 play an essential role in achieving complexity in fiction, as Forster specifies: “a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well as round” (71). This notion has also been developed by Baruch Hochman, who observes that “characters who stand at the center of a work [. . .] are ordinarily flanked by lesser characters, of lesser complexity, dynamism, and wholeness. Such flanking characters usually serve compositional as well as thematic purposes [. . .]. The progressive diminution of centrality, repleteness, complexity, and interest creates the space within which the central character can be experienced in [. . .] vividness, complexity, and coherence” (Character in Literature 68). 2. The difference of Hugo’s poetics is once again underscored by his onomastic choices. Whereas Balzac, his realist successors, and naturalists such as Zola sought to layer significant onomastic connotations in social verisimilitude, Hugo’s characters’ names are most often overtly symbolic, mysterious, or fantastic, and rarely show concern for maintaining an illusion of reality. The symbolic importance of the names of Hugo’s characters will be examined both in individual discussions of type characters and in a more general discussion of their social (in)significance in Part 3 of this study. 3. Although Myriel’s visit to the conventionnel provokes an evolution in his thinking in challenging his pure légitimiste position, thus rendering him less static, the primary purpose of this visit is to reinforce the bishop’s capacity to put his vocation before all else, and thus his innate goodness. 4. Many of the chapter titles of this opening book of Les Misérables— itself significantly entitled “un Juste”—also reinforce Myriel’s complete transparency. For example: “Les œuvres semblables aux paroles” (I, I, 4); “Ce qu’il croyait” (I, I, 13); “Ce qu’il pensait” (I, I, 14). In addition, the adoption of his baptismal name of “Bienvenu” by the people of Digne also works to highlight Myriel’s goodness (“Les pauvres gens du pays avaient choisi, avec une sorte d’instinct affectueux, dans les noms et prénoms de l’évêque, celui qui leur présentait un sens” [11: 59]). 5. It is significant to note that Valjean did not, in fact, promise the bishop anything. Myriel himself creates the pact from the actions that Valjean has already committed, employing a “cause and effect” argument to put Valjean onto the path of goodness, from which he immediately strays in the Petit Gervais incident. 6. Allusions are frequently made to Fléchard’s breasts throughout the novel. She is wounded in her breast when she is shot by Lantenac’s troops (“au trou qu’elle avait au-dessus du sein correspondait un trou dans l’omoplate” [15: 413]) and her connection to her children is magnified by the fact that she was breast-feeding her youngest child, Georgette, when she was taken from her. As Tellmarch observes compassionately relative to Fléchard’s tortured state: “Avoir été mère, et ne plus l’être! avoir été nourrice, et ne plus l’être! [. . .] Elle pense à la toute petite qu’elle allaitait il n’y a pas longtemps. Elle y pense, elle y pense,

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Notes to Pages 74–76 elle y pense. Au fait, ce doit être si charmant de sentir une petite bouche rose qui vous tire votre âme de dedans le corps et qui avec votre vie à vous se fait une vie à elle” (15: 415). While the name “Michelle Fléchard” does not appear to carry any overt symbolism, its commonality reinforces the universality of the character. In this way, Hugo draws attention to the fact that Fléchard is representative of the plight of the majority of peasant women in Vendée in 1793 as she is caught up in a war that she neither desires nor understands. 7. Hugo takes the maternity/animality comparison one step further in the next passage, in which Fléchard is likened to one of the mythical Gorgons in her ability to turn those who look at her to stone: “Les grandes douleurs sont une dilatation gigantesque de l’âme; cette mère, c’était la maternité; tout ce qui résume l’humanité est surhumain” (15: 475). 8. The static nature of the Hugolian mother and her devotion is reinforced, for example, in Notre-Dame de Paris by Paquette’s fifteen-year separation from Esmeralda, during which her only desire is to find her daughter (“je ne veux rien, mais je veux mon enfant” [4: 334]). Mention should also be made of two Hugolian mothers who can be characterized as representations of “la mauvaise mère”: the Comtesse d’Ahlefeld of Han d’Islande and Mme Thénardier of Les Misérables, both of whom fail their children in their maternal duties and, consequently, are in no way transfigured by their maternity. On the contrary, the Comtesse goes mad at the end of Han d’Islande (“La pauvre mère était folle” [2: 416]) and Mme Thénardier dies alone in prison near the end of Les Misérables. 9. This relationship is directly articulated by the narrator of L’Homme qui rit, who emphasizes the sacred state inherent to the child: “Ce qui est fait contre un enfant est fait contre Dieu” (14: 104). 10. Sandy Petrey has observed that “The Fléchard children emit a “bégaiement,” a “chuchotement,” a “gazouillement,” but not a parole, not human speech. What they mean is not expressible in the semiotic system able to state what adults do, so their sounds are of necessity another order of signification” (History in the Text: “Quatrevingt-Treize” and the French Revolution 93). The innocence of children is often additionally figured in Hugo’s novels through ornithological metaphors that emphasize their vertical proximity to the divine. The Fléchard children, for example, when seen in the burning tower by their mother, are described as “un petit groupe confus, quelque chose qui avait l’aspect indistinct et amoncelé d’un nid ou d’une couvée, et qui lui faisait l’effet de remuer par moments” (15: 474). 11. The proportional relationship between happiness and beauty and unhappiness and symbolic disfigurement is made clear through the retransformation of Cosette once she is under Jean Valjean’s protection and is loved as his daughter, as the imprint of unhappiness and social

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Notes to Pages 77–81 misery is washed away: “La figure de Cosette en était même jusqu’à un certain point changée. Le sombre en avait disparu. Le rire, c’est le soleil; il chasse l’hiver du visage humain” (11: 425). 12. This intersection of the gamin child (of whom the narrator estimates there were 260 discovered each year by the police at the time Les Misérables is set [11: 435]) and the symbolic Hugolian child in Gavroche provides us with an unforgettable portrait of childhood innocence and social misery caught in the remarkable moment before the latter crushes the former: “Quand ces pauvres êtres sont hommes, presque toujours la meule de l’ordre social les rencontre et les broie, mais tant qu’ils sont enfants, ils échappent, étant petits. Le moindre trou les sauve” (11: 444). 13. The narrator insists that, as opposed to the gamin of other cities, the innate goodness of the Parisian gamin is more resistant to corruption: “le gamin de Paris, insistons-y, si fruste et si entamé à la surface, est intérieurement à peu près intact” (11: 435–36). 14. In this way, Gavroche’s death also fixes him as the symbol of a permanent state of anarchy, as Gavroche, who is unable to make true or valid political distinctions, is primarily opposed to social norms. 15. This is highlighted, for example, in Eponine’s death both by the fact that she is in no way afraid to die (“On se revoit, n’est-ce pas” [11: 804]) and by the final image that the narrator presents of her: “elle ouvrit lentement ses yeux où apparaissait le sombre profondeur de la mort, et lui dit avec un accent dont la douceur semblait déjà venir d’un autre monde [. . .]” (11: 804; emphasis mine). 16. The angel, however, returns in the next step: motherhood, the transfiguring condition defined by its sublime self-sacrifice: “mais plus tard, il revient, apportant une petite âme à la mère” (12: 577). 17. The heroine of Hugo’s novels is in this way figured, above all, as an object whose naiveté is based on a passive ignorance of the world around her. This heroine is thus quite different from the equally innocent and virginal but more active heroines of Balzac, such as Ursule Mirouët and Eugénie Grandet. 18. Ebenezer is additionally linked, by his narrative role of the jeune premier (amoureux) first presented in the simplest form in Hugo’s novels in the character of Ordener in Han d’Islande, to both Marius of Les Misérables, who is more complex and will be treated in the third category of type characters, and Phoebus of Notre-Dame de Paris, who also functions as the novel’s villain. It should also be noted that although Ebenezer does indeed play this highly symbolic role, there is nonetheless an ambiguity surrounding his actions, especially at the novel’s conclusion, when he does not truly question the extent of what Gilliatt does for him and the consequences that it will have: “Mais qu’était-ce que cet homme? [. . .] Ebenezer s’y perdait, mais il donnait à ce qui se passait le consentement tacite et rapide de l’homme qui se sent sauvé” (12: 784).

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Notes to Pages 82–84 For a typological approach to grouping Hugo’s characters, see Roman, Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique, “Le retour des personnages,” pp. 547–83. 19. Habibrah of Bug-Jargal is also as reprehensible physically as he is morally: he can be seen as a prototype for Hugo’s concept of the multiformed grotesque: “Ce nain hideux était gros, court, ventru, et se mouvait avec une rapidité singulière sur deux jambes grêles et fluettes, qui, lorsqu’il s’asseyait, se repliaient sous lui comme le bras d’une araignée. [. . .] Son visage était toujours une grimace, et n’était jamais la même; bizarre mobilité des traits, qui du moins donnait à sa laideur l’avantage de la variété” (2: 586–87). The moral ugliness of Musdoemon in Han d’Islande is also figured through his hideous external makeup. Phoebus is the only villain in Hugo’s novels whose physical representation is in direct opposition with his role. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that his (romance model) role as villain overlaps in the text with that of his narrative function of le jeune premier. Phoebus, whose name links him symbolically to the sun, is thus handsome on the outside, but criminally mediocre and morally bankrupt on the inside. The names of the other villains, from Musdoemon and Habibrah to Barkilphedro and l’Imânus, are all characterized by an almost fantastical strangeness and mysterious harshness that additionally draws attention to and emphasizes their moral ugliness and the symbolic disconnection between these characters and the sublime. 20. As Albouy specifies, Hugo, like Balzac before him, puts a comparison between animality and humanity into motion, stating in Les Misérables that “si les âmes étaient visibles aux yeux, on verrait distinctement cette chose étrange que chacun des individus de l’espèce humaine correspond à quelqu’une des espèces de la création animale [. . .] depuis l’huître jusqu’à l’aigle, depuis le porc jusqu’au tigre, tous les animaux sont dans l’homme [. . .] les animaux ne sont autre chose que les figures de nos vertus et de nos vices, errantes devant nos yeux, les fantômes visibles de nos âmes” (11: 168). It is interesting to note that in this a certain overlap can be seen between the Hugolian symbolic type character and the classical sense of caractère. 21. The names of the characters that make up this second category of type come closer, on the whole, to creating an illusion of social verisimilitude or reality (Claude Frollo, Javert, la duchesse Josiane, etc.). Yet while certainly less extravagant than the names bestowed upon other of Hugo’s characters, something about these names resonates nonetheless as unique and mysterious. As Roman remarks, the choice of atypical names “présente d’emblée le personnage comme signe à élucider, figure originale” (Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique 524). This desire on Hugo’s part for decoding and difference fits with his more general conception of character as well as with his relationship with the reader (studied in Chapter 2).

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Notes to Pages 85–88 22. Frollo also specifies that before he encountered Esmeralda he was “heureux [. . .] pur, j’avais l’âme pleine d’une clarté limpide. Pas de tête qui s’élevât plus fière et plus radieuse que la mienne” (4: 230). This admission underscores both the (fatal) discord of Frollo’s duality and the fatality that he views as responsible for it: “Je te regardai tant que tout à coup je frissonnai d’épouvante, je sentis que le sort me saisissait” (4: 231). This duality of priest-lover is additionally compounded in the novel by another duality central to Frollo—that of priest-sorcerer—as Frollo is expressly described as practicing secret sciences. It is for this reason that he is denied burial “en terre sainte” (4: 341) at the novel’s close. 23. As Jacques Dubois observes, “dès l’origine, dès les débuts du récit, le personnage de Javert est marqué par une logique poussée à sa limite. [. . .] Le mauvais du bon, le pire du meilleur, tel est bien le paradoxe du personnage” (“L’Affreux Javert: The champ you love to hate” 11–12). 24. This scene additionally foreshadows the ultimate ideological conflict that Javert will confront: “Mon Dieu! C’est bien facile d’être bon, le malaisé c’est d’être juste” (11: 195). 25. Javert in this way is the one character who consistently recognizes Jean Valjean throughout the novel in spite of his physical transformations and disguises. It is only when his system of beliefs has been ruptured through Valjean’s release of him that Javert is no longer able to see clearly, as exemplifies the scene in which Jean Valjean rises from the sewers with Marius, and Javert, for the first time, fails to recognize him: “Qui êtes vous? Moi. Qui, vous? Jean Valjean” (11: 903). 26. J.-P. Richard elaborates on this statue-like quality: “Raideur, ou rigidité, c’est-à-dire non-mollesse, non-pénétrabilité, non-expressivité aussi, à la limite de non-mouvement, non-vie. Le corps javertien déclenche chez son scripteur, Hugo, une certaine rêverie de la substance, fondée sur un malaise spécifique du dur” (“Petite lecture de Javert” 147). 27. A parallel can be drawn between Cimourdain, who is indeed a former priest, and Frollo as the duality inherent to the two is centered on the priest/lover opposition. For while Cimourdain’s love for Gauvain is filial rather than amorous, it is no less dangerous to him and to his duty to the Republic, as the novel’s outcome reveals. 28. As Claudie Bernard remarks, “le dualisme, le face-à-face des antagonismes structure en surface l’univers hugolien” (Le Chouan romanesque: Balzac, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Hugo 154). Cimourdain’s dualism relative to Gauvain is outlined in detail in the chapter entitled “Les Deux Pôles du vrai” (“L’amitié était entre les deux hommes, mais la haine était entre les deux, principes; c’était comme une âme coupée en deux, et partagée” [15: 417]), while his dualism relative to Lantenac— who is the catalyst for his very presence in Vendée—is outlined both directly by the narrator (“Disons-le, ces deux hommes, le marquis et le prêtre, étaient jusqu’à un certain point le même homme” [15: 429]) and indirectly (they are both repeatedly described by the adjective

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Notes to Pages 89–93 “inexorable”) throughout the novel. Unlike Cimourdain, however, Lantenac is not composed of a central duality. Indeed, his “transformational” act of saving the Fléchard children at his own expense has no lasting effect upon him; although temporarily changed, he is neither transformed nor transfigured. As both his speech to Gauvain in the chapter entitled “L’Ancêtre” (III, VII, 1) and his actions following his release by Gauvain reveal, he will continue to wage war on the Republic. 29. Cimourdain’s suicide, like Javert’s, can be seen as an act that cements the character’s exclusion from salvation in its effect on the soul. The narrator of Les Misérables specifically refers to suicide as an “acte irréligieux” (11: 871) and as “cette mystérieuse voie de fait sur l’inconnu, laquelle peut contenir, dans une certaine mesure, la mort de l’âme” (11: 906). In this way, Cimourdain’s soul is described as being dark and shadowy as it leaves his body after death. 30. This animality is taken further in the physical interaction between the two characters in Josiane’s chambers as she literally attacks the frozen Gwynplaine: “Je t’aime! cria-t-elle. Et elle le mordit d’un baiser” (14: 317). 31. As Gérald Schaeffer observes in his notes to the 1982 GarnierFlammarion edition of L’Homme qui rit, this neologism (which rhymes with Josiane) places the struggle between Gwynplaine and Josiane “explicitement [. . .] sous le signe de la mythologie” (2: 376). 32. Quasimodo’s conversion is the least complex, as it is figured through his primitive nature and perceptions. Gauvain’s, on the other hand, while concentrated in a single moment, is perhaps the most ambiguous, as helping his uncle—seen by Gauvain as a progression in human terms—is at the same time a regression in terms of its impact on the war in Vendée. 33. While this discourse on salvation is in large part Christian in nature, it is doubled and rendered more universal by the simultaneous transformation of “l’aventure humaine en mythe” (127) as Cellier proposes in his more general “Le roman initiatique en France au temps du romantisme.” In Hugo’s conception of type, Christian duality is thus superimposed on a mythologically based (yet extremely personal and inspired) understanding of the nature of man and his origins in which the notion of initiation functions on many levels. 34. The fact that all of these heroes are virgins adds to their primitive sides. This virginity and its consequences will be explored in detail in Chapter 6 of this study. Although also a virgin, Gauvain is an exception in terms of his proximity to the grotesque being described in relation to the animal. He is depicted rather (like his precursor, Enjolras) consistently in terms of his inherent (and almost angelic) goodness. This can in part be explained by the fact that Gauvain symbolically fulfills at the same time in the novel the narrative role of the jeune premier, in love not with a real woman, but the abstract one of the Republic.

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Notes to Pages 93–98 35. The lack of development of Quasimodo’s soul is in this way justified (“Cette âme tomba dans une nuit profonde” [4: 119]), as is his form of malice: “Il était méchant en effet, parce qu’il était sauvage; il était sauvage parce qu’il était laid. Il y avait une logique dans sa nature comme dans la nôtre” (4: 120). 36. Gwynplaine’s close proximity to the sublime is additionally accentuated by repeated insistence on the artificiality of his exterior monstrosity. As the narrator informs us at different moments in the text: “Gwynplaine, beau de corps, avait été probablement beau de figure. En naissant, il avait dû être un enfant comme un autre. On avait conservé le corps intact et seulement retouché la face. Gwynplaine avait été fait exprès” (14: 183); “Gwynplaine était horrible, artificiellement horrible, horrible de la main des hommes” (14: 188). 37. As Michel Grimaud proposes in both “De Victor Hugo à HomèreHogu: L’Onomastique des Misérables” and “Compétence narrative et nom propre,” the names given to Hugo’s heroes often reinforce their double nature and the fact that they are “pris entre deux mondes” (“Compétence narrative” 147). As such, the doubling in the name “Jean Valjean” can be seen as indicative of the central duality that is explored throughout his itinerary. The name “Gwynplaine,” as well, Grimaud suggests, highlights with its incorporation of “plaine,” a “terme géographique,” the “thématique du haut et du bas” (“Compétence narrative” 147). Quasimodo’s name, as the novel itself offers, makes explicit reference to both his incomplete nature and the day on which he was found by Frollo (“En effet, Quasimodo, borgne, bossu, cagneux, n’était guère qu’un à peu près” [4: 117]) and thus emphasizes his disconnection from the world around him. The names “Gilliatt” and “Gauvain” can also be seen as drawing attention to the heroes’ dualites, as the mythical qualities of the names are in sharp opposition to the imperatives of the social and historical worlds of the novels and thus turn the definition of heroes (and of heroism) on its face. 38. The title of the chapter in which this combat is waged, “Une tempête sous un crâne,” highlights the turbulent and intense quality of Jean Valjean’s crisis. 39. Here again, the literary device of antithesis (“héros/monstre” / “tueur/sauveur”) serves to reinforce the magnitude of the epic struggle that Gauvain undergoes. 40. While Lantenac can thus be seen as having a conversion that fails, other characters that straddle the categories can also be grouped in reference to their (single or multiple) conversions. M. Gillenormand of Les Misérables, for example, who is similar to Lantenac in terms of the values that he incarnates (he is described as a “vrai bourgeois complet et un peu hautain du dix-huitième siècle” [11: 447]) is one of the only characters in Hugo’s fictional world to undergo a “happy” conversion, as after having nearly lost his grandson Marius to his political beliefs,

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Notes to Pages 99–106 Gillenormand completely abandons his rigid royalist tenets in favor of apolitical familial resolution: “Quant à moi, je n’ai plus d’opinion politique; que tous les hommes soient riches, c’est-à-dire joyeux, voilà à quoi je me borne” (11: 944). 41. The narrator prepares us for this conflict early in the novel, as Gwynplaine’s social consciousness takes shape: “Oh! si j’étais puissant, comme je viendrais en aide aux malheureux!” (14: 204); “C’est de l’enfer des pauvres qu’est fait le paradis des riches” (14: 208). 42. The opposition between this near suicide (“Gwynplaine, égaré et tragique, posa fermement sa main sur le parapet comme sur une solution, et regarda le fleuve” [14: 369]), which is thwarted by Homo, and the resolution of Gwynplaine’s irreconcilable extremes through death and salvation, as witnessed by his ability in his final moments to overcome his physical deformity (“Il ne quittait pas des yeux un point du ciel, au plus haut de l’ombre, il souriait” [14: 384]), underscores the power of his conversion. 43. Many critics have drawn attention to the sexual nature of this encounter, as the octopus literally tries to penetrate Gilliatt. See in particular Bernard, “Les Travailleurs de la mer et le travail du texte” and Grant, “Les Travailleurs de la mer: Towards an Epic Synthesis.” 44. In removing himself from the role of suitor, Gilliatt resembles, in his subsequent relationship with Déruchette, Jean Valjean in that he is both paternal (giving her away) and maternal (providing her with what his own mother had given him). In this, he replaces Mess Lethierry, to whom this function had previously been attributed.

Chapter Five Reconfigurations 1. Cited in Meschonnic 12. 2. In particular, Roman points to the following repetitive situations: the priest who asks for the blessing of the person whom he has come to bless; the character who penetrates the underworld of society; the action of attacking or defending a fortress; and the character who voluntarily chooses death (576–78). 3. See Charles Baudoin, Psychanalyse de Victor Hugo. Among others, Baudoin links the repeated motifs of frères ennemis, l’œil, fuite, and fatalité that are found in Hugo’s works to his complicated and often tumultuous familial relationships. 4. Brombert notes that Notre-Dame de Paris has the additional complication of looking both back and ahead to 1789, a year that “looms both a projected future in relation to the narrated time (1482) and as a relevant past for the author and his reader from the perspective of the writing time (1830)” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 55). In this way, the novel forces the reader to “think about history as a problem, rather than as an account of figures and events” (82). The complex and interlocked nature of history is further referenced by the narrator in

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Notes to Pages 106–13 L’Homme qui rit: “Qu’est l’histoire? Un écho du passé dans l’avenir. Un reflet de l’avenir sur le passé” (14: 336). 5. For example: “Sans doute c’est encore aujourd’hui un majestueux et sublime édifice que l’église de Notre-Dame de Paris. Mais [. . .] il est difficile [. . .] de ne pas s’indigner devant les dégradations, les mutilations sans nombre que [. . .] le temps et les hommes ont fait subir au vénérable monument” (ND, 4: 91); “Cette maison a été démolie et rebâtie depuis, et le chiffre en a probablement été changé dans ces révolutions de numérotage que subissent les rues de Paris” (LM, 11: 448); “Le vocabulaire maritime de nos pères, presque entièrement renouvelé aujourd’hui, était encore usité à Guernesey vers 1820” (TM, 12: 575); “Le Southwark de ce temps-là ressemble au Southwark d’aujourd’hui comme Vaugirard ressemble à Marseille” (HQR, 14: 211); “Les Minquiers, écueil tragique, étaient plus âpres encore en ce tempslà qu’aujourd’hui” (QVT, 15: 308). 6. “Je ne suis qu’historien” (ND, 4: 178); “Nous devons même dire, pour être fidèle historien, que parmi les curiosités [. . .]” (LM, 11: 304). 7. As Jouve argues, the result of the reintroduction of the same character in different works is that “Le lecteur est alors conduit à quitter la scène textuelle pour un horizon intertextuel” (119). Similarly, Hamon observes about the reappearing character in Zola’s novels that “Ainsi l’histoire d’un personnage présent et agissant dans la fiction est perpétuellement accompagnée, sous-tendue, programmée, de tout un réseau ‘d’histoires’ de personnages” (Le Personnel du roman 54). 8. Lukács draws attention to the risk inherent in exaggerating the importance of isolated historical figures, as collective forces (as opposed to individual actions) are responsible for shaping history (The Historical Novel 75–76); while Barthes signals the peril of attributing to an historical figure its real historical importance, as any extended attention necessarily compromises the fictional illusion (S/Z 95). 9. Historical figures, in Hugo’s theater of the 1830s, similarly have roles of referential and symbolic importance. Marion de Lorme, for example, directly integrates Louis XIII’s edict against duels into the play’s plot and portrays both Richelieu and the King in conformity not so much with their real historical actions but rather with the accepted perception of their personal power dynamic (“Est-ce que le roi peut quand le cardinal veut?” [3: 835]). Yet while Richelieu and Louis XIII are confined to the play’s background, they, just like Louis XI in Notre-Dame de Paris, make “decisions” from the wings (such as the King’s judgment to pardon Didier and Richelieu’s subsequent revocation of the pardon) that directly and negatively influence the protagonists’ textual itineraries. Cromwell can be seen as an exception to this pattern, but as it deals with English history—not French—Hugo takes more liberty with both the historical backdrop and characters. 10. As Laforgue confirms about the historical figures in Hugo’s novels: “Il ne s’agit pas d’une inversion des rôles entre historique et fictionnel, mais bien davantage d’un déplacement de l’histoire vers le

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Notes to Pages 113–18 roman et dans lui et d’une inscription de la matière historique dans le cadre romanesque” (Gavroche: Études sur “Les Misérables” 50). This symbolic function through which historical figures are invested with recreated meaning is also addressed by Bernard, who notes that “Ces personnalités ‘réelles’ [. . .] se mêlent sans heurts aux êtres de fiction: c’est qu’au fond histoire et Histoire composent le même texte, inspiré d’en haut” (Le Chouan romanesque 218). 11. Hamon specifies that “L’apparition d’un personnage historique (Napoléon) ou mythique [. . .] viendra certainement rendre éminemment prévisible leur rôle dans le récit, dans la mesure où ce rôle est déjà prédéterminé dans ses grandes lignes par une Histoire préalable déjà écrite et fixée” (“Pour un statut sémiologique du personnage” 126–27). 12. As Hamon outlines elsewhere, historical figures have a similar function in Zola’s novels to the one that they have in Balzac’s: “Le personnage historique chez Zola, est plus un personnage dont on parle qu’un personnage parlant, un personnage plus cité qu’agissant, ce qui est une manière de le maintenir également, à travers les paroles des autres personnages, à une certaine distance de l’action” (Le Personnel du roman 61). 13. Albouy specifies that “La simplification et l’exagération qui accompagnent ce symbolisme, ont pour effet l’immobilité du personnage. [. . .] Il n’existe que par sa fonction de symbole et pour l’exercer” (La Création mythologique 186). Bernard, as well, highlights elsewhere the exaggerated representation of these figures, noting that “Hugo pousse au maximum les virtualités épiques des leaders jacobins” (Le Passé recomposé: Le Roman historique français du dix-neuvième siècle 115). 14. Horror toward the slaves’ repressed state is figured through D’Auverney’s reactions to the inhumane conditions he finds upon his arrival in Santo Domingo: “Huit cents nègres cultivaient les immenses domaines de mon oncle. Je vous avouerai que la triste condition des esclaves était encore aggravée par l’insensibilité de leur maître. Mon oncle était du nombre [. . .] de ces planteurs dont une longue habitude de despotisme absolu avait endurci le cœur” (2: 586). 15. In Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné as well, discomfort with the collective group’s potential for moblike behavior is evidenced in the prison yard scene, which is likened several times by the first-person narrator to a spectacle: “Puis tous les yeux se tournèrent vers la fenêtre que j’occupais.—Le condamné! le condamné! crièrent-ils tous en me montrant du doigt; et les explosions de joie redoublèrent. [. . .] Bonjour! bonsoir! me crièrent-ils avec leur ricanement atroce” (3: 673–74). 16. As Brombert confirms about the truands in Notre-Dame de Paris, “It is significant that the only peuple to be represented in Notre-Dame de Paris is the Parisian underworld: the tribe of beggars, vagabonds, and criminals crowding the slums of the Cour des Miracles—a terrifying and alienated city within the city, with its own laws of lawlessness” (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel 74).

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Notes to Pages 120–30 17. Ubersfeld additionally specifies that “toute vue hugolienne du peuple s’établit dans l’ambiguïté, dans la mystification idéologique du peuple à instruire, à civiliser pour le faire exister” (Le Roi et le bouffon 87). 18. It is interesting to note that Gauvain’s message is humanitarian rather than political. For like the peuple to whom he gives voice, Gauvain, as he directly informs Cimourdain, is not “un homme politique” (15: 417). Similar apolitical beliefs are expressed by members of the peuple, as illustrate the following responses given by Michelle Fléchard (“Je te demande quelles sont tes opinions politiques? Je ne sais pas ça” [15: 290]), and Tellmarch (“Etes-vous pour ou contre le roi? Je n’ai pas le temps de ça” [15: 328]). 19. This breakdown or silencing of voice and communication in Hugo’s novels is taken even farther by internal disharmonies, often within the collective group. As Bernard observes, “Les péroraisons de Gwynplaine, Gauvain, Enjolras et d’un certain Hugo reçoivent un autre démenti dans les textes mêmes. Leur appel à la fraternité est constamment battu en brèche par des querelles entre frères et par des affrontements fratricides entre classes et à l’intérieur des classes” (Le Passé recomposé 93–94). 20. The exception to this deferred potential of the peuple is Les Travailleurs de la mer, in which the “noble petit peuple de la mer” (11: 549) of Guernsey (embodied in the character of Mess Lethierry) triumph over the ocean through the invention of the steamship. Yet the political content of this peuple is never well fleshed out in the novel.

Part 3: Disappearance Chapter Six The Poetics of Death 1. On effacement in Hugo’s novels, see also Albouy, La Création mythologique chez Victor Hugo and Piroué, Victor Hugo romancier ou les dessous de l’inconnu. Brombert’s “V.H.: L’Auteur effacé ou le moi de l’infini” provides a more succinct summary of effacement as a textual process in Hugo’s novels. In relation to character, the term effacement is used here to describe the very deliberate narrative erasure of all vestiges of a character from the fictional world created in the text. 2. Zola’s final novel in Les Rougon-Macquart additionally highlights the difference between his formal organizational thread and Hugo’s thematic one, as the last volume, Le Docteur Pascal (1893), closes with the birth of an ultimate heir to the Rougon-Macquart family, and thus the appearance of the next generation. 3. See in particular Baudoin, Psychanalyse de Victor Hugo; Jacques Seebacher, “Poétique et politique de la paternité chez Victor Hugo”; and

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Notes to Pages 131–32 Galya Gerstman, “Fictional Fathers and Fathers by Fiction: The Surrogate Father as Novelist in the Works of Victor Hugo.” 4. It is significant to note that this maternal self-sacrifice leads in all but one case to the mother’s death. In Notre-Dame de Paris, both Paquette and Esmeralda die at the end of the novel (Esmeralda is hanged and Paquette dies from the shock of her daughter’s imminent death); in Les Misérables, Fantine dies as a direct result of her mode of selfsacrifice; and in L’Homme qui rit, Dea’s unnamed mother dies with her daughter at her breast, expiring while trying to keep her warm in the snow. Michelle Fléchard is the only mother to live and be reunited with her children. 5. The biological father is effectively excluded from the genealogy of all but a few of Hugo’s characters. Moreover, in the rare cases in which a father is figured, he is part of a complex relationship that has broken down, as with Gavroche and Thénardier or Marius and Pontmercy in Les Misérables. While this absence is sometimes softened by the presence of a grandfather, as, for example, for Marius, this relationship too often permanently erodes. In Quatrevingt-treize, the relationship between the grand-nephew Gauvain and the (un-grandfatherly) great-uncle Lantenac also breaks down in an irreparable way. 6. In Han d’Islande and Bug-Jargal as well, neither Ordener nor D’Auverney has a living mother or father. Ordener’s mother is never mentioned, and all that is known of his father is that he was the “fils naturel du roi Frédéric III” (2: 105). D’Auverney’s biological parents are never named, and his uncle, who serves as a sort of surrogate father, is killed shortly after D’Auverney’s arrival in Santo Domingo. 7. The relationship between Jean Valjean and Myriel in Les Misérables is in many ways an exception to this breakdown, as Myriel remains, even after his death, a kind of “spiritual” father for Valjean in that he influences the choices that Valjean makes throughout his itinerary. In Les Travailleurs de la mer, not only is Gilliatt’s father never named nor mentioned, but Gilliatt is not provided—even temporarily—with any kind of surrogate paternal figure. 8. In both Les Misérables and Quatrevingt-treize, the names of Jean Valjean and Gauvain do in fact link them to a specific lineage that is critical to the plot. In Les Misérables it sets up the affaire Champmathieu in which Champmathieu is falsely accused of being “the” Jean Valjean from Faverolles; yet on a larger level this name is significant in that it inscribes Valjean not into a system of patronymic heritage but one of generic repetition (“son père s’appelait Jean Valjean ou Vlajean, sobriquet probablement, et contraction de voilà Jean” [11: 108]). In Quatrevingt-treize, the family history between Lantenac and Gauvain, who are each the only living relation that the other has left (“le marquis n’avait pas d’enfants, un petit-neveu, presque un petit-fils” [15: 404]), provides the reader with a micro-vision of the ravages of the war, as

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Notes to Pages 133–36 Lantenac and Gauvain struggle—significantly, on the grounds of their family chateau—to destroy each other (and each other’s name) in endeavoring to win the war in Vendée. 9. For example, members of the Aiglemont family appear in La Maison Nugingen (1838), Ursule Mirouët (1841), and Modest Mignon (1844); members of the Granville family appear in La Duchesse de Langeais (1834–35), Le Cousin Pons (1847), and Le Curé du village (1839); and members of the Vandenesse family appear in Le Père Goriot (1834–35), Le Lys dans la vallée (1835–36), César Birotteau (1837), Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838–47), and Béatrix (1839–44). 10. This observation also applies to Hugo’s theater. For although his theater is in large part constrained by the historical material that it reworks in most instances, the fictional protagonists found in it are expressly described in terms of their familial void. For example, Didier, the protagonist of Marion de Lorme, is repeatedly figured in terms of his familial lack: “J’ai pour tout nom Didier. Je n’ai jamais connu mon père ni ma mère” (3: 742); “Je ne suis qu’un enfant trouvé sur une porte, et je n’ai pas de nom” (3: 765). 11. The difference between the protagonist’s two names, “Gwynplaine,” which, as noted above, was mysteriously bestowed upon him and underscores his lack of history, and “Lord Fermain Clancharlie,” which inscribes him both in a family and (by his title) into history (“une pairie [. . .] c’est un nom qui continue” [14: 141]), is significant. This opposition between the disconnected name and the socially and historically established name is additionally highlighted by the narrator’s “conscious” decision to continue to refer to Gwynplaine as Gwynplaine after the revelation of his true identity: “Gwynplaine—nous continuerons à le nommer ainsi; Clancharlie est un lord, Gwynplaine est un homme [. . .]” (14: 305). 12. The intersection of the slave revolt and D’Auverney and Marie’s wedding night effectively interrupts the consummation of their union, and thus the solidification of their familial bond. 13. The largest connective tie—the one that links D’Auverney to his homeland—is also cut at the end of the novel, as the representative of the Republic announces to the General that D’Auverney, who has already been killed in battle, is wanted as an “aristocrate, un contrerévolutionnaire, un royaliste, un feuillant, un girondin” (2: 703) and is labeled an “ennemi de la patrie” (2: 704). Familial isolation is also underscored in Hugo’s polemical Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné, in which the unnamed condemned man laments that “je laisse une mère, je laisse une femme, je laisse un enfant” (3: 666) and is not recognized by his daughter when she comes to visit him in prison, as he is “déjà effacé de cette mémoire” (3: 704). 14. This discourse echoes her earlier statement about “l’amulette”: “C’est que je manque à un vœu…Je ne retrouverai pas mes parents…

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Notes to Pages 137–40 l’amulette perdra sa vertu. Mais qu’importe? Qu’ai-je besoin de père et de mère à présent?” (4: 211). This renunciation of her biological family in favor of a romantic union with Phoebus emphasizes Esmeralda’s vision of Phoebus as not only the man that she loves, but also a form of family and protection. 15. Quasimodo’s desire is thus not an overtly amorous one; rather he seeks to protect and in some way matter to Esmeralda, to have an effect upon her. To this end, Quasimodo offers to try to bring Phoebus to her, and when he refuses to come, shields the truth from her. His envy of Esmeralda’s goat Djali also speaks to this particular and peculiar desire, as the following lament underscores: “Une fois, il survint au moment où elle caressait Djali. Il resta quelques moments pensif devant ce groupe gracieux de la chèvre et de l’égyptienne. Enfin, il dit en secouant sa tête lourde et mal faite: Mon malheur, c’est que je ressemble encore trop à l’homme. Je voudrais être tout à fait une bête, comme cette chèvre” (4: 262). 16. It is significant to note that Jean Valjean’s admission of his true identity in the affaire Champmathieu and the subsequent creation of this tie to Cosette effectively undo another tie—Valjean’s tie to the people and community of Montreuil, to whom he has served as both mayor and “père.” Without Valjean in this paternal role, the narrator informs us that “la prospérité de Montreuil-sur-mer disparut; tout ce qu’il avait prévu dans sa nuit de fièvre et d’hésitation se réalisa; lui de moins, cet fut en effet l’âme de moins” (11: 294). 17. Much has been made of the incestuous undertones of Valjean’s love for Cosette (See in particular Brombert and Brochu). Yet as the narrator specifies (“Le pauvre vieux Jean Valjean n’aimait, certes, pas Cosette autrement que comme un père; mais [. . .] dans cette paternité la viduité même de sa vie avait introduit tous les amours; il aimait Cosette comme sa fille, et il l’aimait comme sa mère, et il l’aimait comme sa sœur; et, comme il n’avait jamais eu ni amante ni épouse, comme la nature est un créancier qui n’accepte aucun protêt, ce sentiment-là aussi, le plus imperdable de tous, était mêlé aux autres, vague, ignorant [. . .]” [11: 810]), these subconscious elements are based more on his inexperience in the domain of love than true incestuous feelings. In either case, what is most significant for this study is Jean Valjean’s desire to forge a lasting connection to Cosette on any of these levels. 18. As Brombert has remarked, the repeated references in the novel to Valjean as a passant also highlight the transitory nature of this relationship: “L’image répétée de l’effacement se doit lire en regard de l’autre figure de mobilité et de transition: le passant. [. . .] Il sait qu’il doit faire place à Marius, c’est-à-dire à l’avenir” (“Victor Hugo: La Fin du héros ou l’éclipse du père” 20). 19. The opposition between “Monsieur Jean” and “Madame Pontmercy” in Valjean’s discourse additionally points to his progressive depletion from

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Notes to Pages 140–42 the novel, as he has gone from using “created” names—such as M. Madeleine, Ultime Fauchelevent, etc.—to only his simple and real first name. In this way, while Cosette gains legitimate social stability and status in trading in the created name of Euphrasie Fauchelevent for the “real” one of Madame Pontmercy, Jean Valjean is progressively discharged of both his created and real names. 20. This verse (“Il dort. Quoique le sort fût pour lui bien étrange, / Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n’eut plus son ange; / La chose simplement d’elle-même arriva, / Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s’en va. [11: 997]) again stresses the link between disconnection and effacement. Without Cosette, Valjean becomes an anonymous “il” whose death is likened to the fading of day into night. 21. As both the title of this first book of Les Travailleurs de la mer (“De quoi se compose une mauvaise réputation”) and that of its fourth chapter (“Impopularité”) indicate, Gilliatt’s social isolation is absolute. Suspected among other things of being a sorcerer, Gilliatt, as the narrator informs us, “était à peu près haï dans le pays” (12: 565). 22. The inscription of Gilliatt’s name in the snow serves in this way to make Gilliatt suddenly cognizant of his own existence, as well as to establish his textual existence. 23. It is interesting to note that the conclusion to Les Travailleurs de la mer is reminiscent of Hugo’s 1835 play Angelo, Tyran de Padoue, in which la Tisbe sacrifices her own personal happiness and life in favor of the formation of the romantic couple of Rodolfo and Catarina. Many of Hugo’s plays—although often constrained by the historical events that they revisit—end with both the hero’s death and the conscious nonformation of the romantic couple. Examples of failed couples in Hugo’s theater include Didier and Marion in Marion de Lorme, Hernani and Dona Sol in Hernani, and Ruy Blas and the Queen in Ruy Blas. 24. While Ursus is the paternal figure to Gwynplaine and Dea, Homo is the maternal figure, both protective and tender toward the young children. It is also Homo who—conveniently left untied—saves Gwynplaine at the novel’s end from committing suicide and reconciles him, albeit temporarily, with this created family. 25. The titles given by Hugo to the different books of the novel both underscore and prepare for this collapse. The second book of Part 2 of the novel, entitled “Gwynplaine et Dea” (which is itself divided into chapters such as “La Cécité donne des leçons de clairvoyance” [II, II, 7] and “Non seulement le bonheur, mais la prospérité” [II, II, 8]), presents us with an Edenistic vision of the couple and the created familial unit, while the book entitled “Commencement de la fêlure” (II, III) points to its imminent rupture. The complex and confused nature of the relationship between Dea and Gwynplaine (which is both filial and amorous) also prepares for the ultimate impossibility of their union within the boundaries of the world depicted.

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Notes to Pages 142–48 26. Ursus’s reaction to the news of Gwynplaine’s “death,” during which he sheds tears for the first time in his life (“Il est mort! [. . .] Mort! Ils l’ont tué! Gwynplaine! Mon enfant! Mon fils!” [14: 299]), highlights the filial attachment that Ursus has developed for Gwynplaine despite his verbose (and protective) tirades to the contrary: “Nous étions si tranquilles auparavant, Homo et moi! Qu’est-ce qu’ils venaient faire dans ma baraque, ces gredins-là? [. . .] M’en voilà délivré” (14: 288). 27. This evaporation or absorption of the fictional story into the larger “History” of 1793 is expressly addressed by the narrator in reference to the character of Cimourdain: “Cimourdain avait, dans ces temps et dans ces groupes tragiques, la puissance des inexorables. [. . .] Tel était Cimourdain. Personne aujourd’hui ne sait son nom. L’histoire a de ces inconnus terribles” (15: 349). 28. Petrey remarks that this resolution is emphasized by the fact that the connective ties linking Gauvain and Cimourdain are, subsequent to their deaths, revalidated, as indicates the text’s closing line: “Et ces deux âmes, sœurs tragiques, s’envolèrent ensemble, l’ombre de l’une mêlée à la lumière de l’autre” (15: 508). As Petrey continues, “It is as ‘sœurs,’ as members of the same family, that Gauvain and Cimourdain leave the Revolution” (“Quatrevingt-treize: Children Belong with Their Mother” 176). 29. In this, Gwynplaine can be seen as undergoing a kind of sexual “tempête sous un crâne” in the novel that is reminiscent of Jean Valjean’s moral one and prefigures Gauvain’s ideological one. Ordener, the hero of Han d’Islande, is the only one of Hugo’s heroes who does not experience discomfort about his sexuality and who does not remain a virgin, as indicates the last line of the novel: “De l’alliance d’Ordener et d’Ethel naquit la famille de Danneskiold” (2: 420). As we will see in Chapter 7, it is precisely through Ordener’s ability to create a connection and filiation (through his marriage to Ethel and the subsequent procreation that is announced) that he is able to “survive” the novel’s closure. 30. In his article, “Héros vierges,” Marius-François Guyard makes an interesting observation concerning the proportional relationship between the virginity of Hugo’s heroes and their physical strength, noting that “Il y a plus qu’un parallèle entre virginité et force: une similitude essentielle. L’homme vierge a des puissances d’amour à la mesure de son renoncement; l’homme fort peut se soumettre à une force d’un autre ordre. Virginité et force: deux réserves d’une même énergie spirituelle” (172). While a rapport between virginity and physical strength can also be found in Balzac’s novels, the ineffectiveness of both male virility and strength are used directly in Hugo’s novels to reinforce the heroes’ exclusion from the worlds in which they are figured. 31. Roman confirms Quasimodo’s “failure” in this domain: “La surdité de Quasimodo le contraint au mutisme, qu’il rompt pour la Esmeralda, en vain: les paroles du bossu offrent le pathétique discours des humbles qui ne savent pas se faire entendre” (Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique 91).

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Notes to Pages 148–51 32. As a result of this progressive breakdown of communicative abilities, Valjean “writes” in this way in the final hours of his life a letter to Cosette that finally explains her past. 33. It is not insignificant that the narrator informs us that his final laments are heard by God alone (“Oh! s’écria-t-il au dedans de lui-même [cris lamentables, entendus de Dieu seul], c’est fini” [11: 980]). 34. Even Gilliatt’s four-year and one-sided “courting” of Déruchette is never once elevated to a verbal level. On the contrary, the narrator informs us that four years after Déruchette has written Gilliatt’s name in the snow, “Il n’avait pas encore dit une parole à Déruchette” (12: 600). Instead, he relies on music (secretly serenading her with “sa mélodie favorite Bonny Dundee jouée sur le bag-pipe” [12: 600]) and puts stock in gestures, believing that on one occasion, “au moment où il avait passé elle avait souri” (12: 600). 35. Gilliatt’s recourse to the figure of speech of litotes characterizes not only this exchange, but the majority of his efforts at communication throughout the novel. 36. This disconnection is additionally highlighted by Gwynplaine’s strange relationship with his half-brother, Lord David (whom he has come to know under the name of Tom-Jim-Jack). Their entire relationship is based on a spoken or verbal misunderstanding about their identities, as the “recognition” scene in the palace shows: “Gwynplaine, je ne m’appelle pas Tom-Jim-Jack./ Tom-Jim-Jack, je ne m’appelle pas Gwynplaine” (14: 320). It is also interesting to note that Josiane does not like to hear Gwynplaine’s voice, preferring his deformed exterior to his (true) interior: “Je te fais des questions, mais n’y réponds pas. Je n’aime pas ton son de voix. [. . .] Un être incomparable comme toi ne devrait pas parler, mais grincer. [. . .] C’est la seule chose en toi qui me déplaise” (14: 314). 37. Hugo initially envisioned a dialogue between great-uncle and grand-nephew that would follow this announcement and that would refigure once again the revolution and the war in Vendée in larger familial terms, as this proposed remark by Gauvain indicates: “Il y a quelque chose qui est au-dessus de toutes les monarchies et même au-dessus de toutes les révolutions, c’est-à-dire l’humanité et la famille. Il y a vous qui venez de rentrer dans l’humanité, et il y a moi qui rentre dans la famille. Mon oncle, sauvez-vous” (15: 494n11). Hugo’s decision not to include this explanation on Gauvain’s part points to the way in which Hugo uses the failure of communication to emphasize a character’s disconnection.

Chapter Seven Decoding Social Exclusion 1. The often-forgotten subtitle to Notre-Dame de Paris—1482—similarly serves to situate the novel in this larger context. For L’Homme qui

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Notes to Pages 152–56 rit, Hugo’s prefatory commentary, in which he calls the novel’s true title “L’Aristocratie” (14: 27), also signals the novel’s insertion into this larger frame of reference. 2. In her study entitled “Nommer la misère,” Ubersfeld examines the way in which names are used in Les Misérables precisely to draw attention to filiation. She addresses at length, for example, both the choice of Fantine, a sobriquet given anonymously to her by the first passer-by, and that of Félix Tholomyès, which, as a complete bourgeois name, underscores familial and filial unity (Paroles de Hugo 135–36). Guy Rosa similarly remarks the way in which names are used in the novel to point to a character’s lack of history. For Jean Valjean, for example, Rosa notes that his name “achève un état-civil défectif. [. . .] C’est un sobriquet, son vrai nom est un faux nom [. . .] ce n’est qu’un prénom redoublé. Enfin ce nom n’est pas vraiment le sien puisque c’est aussi celui de son père et que sœur et mère ont, au féminin, le même prénom. Concluons: ce sont des anonymes” (“Jean Valjean [I, 2, 6]: Réalisme et irréalisme des Misérables” 222). 3. That the two unnamed Thénardier brothers subsequently (and symbolically) replace Gavroche in his role of gamin is highlighted by their activities in the last scene in which they appear: as their brother dies on the barricades, they display their newly acquired street savvy by outsmarting birds for discarded brioche in the Jardin du Luxembourg. It is also interesting to note the way in which Hugo’s onomastic choices reflect the disconnection of these characters, as the social function of name as patronymic marker does not apply to those on the fringes of society, such as Gavroche and his two unnamed brothers, as demonstrates the following observation made by the narrator: “Nous avons oublié de dire que sur le boulevard du Temple on nommait cet enfant le petit Gavroche. Pourquoi s’appelait-il Gavroche? Probablement parce que son père s’appelait Jondrette. Casser le fil semble être l’instinct de certaines familles misérables” (11: 445). 4. Eponine dies in the place of Marius, taking a bullet that was meant for him. The name Eponine, which, as Agnès Spiquel observes, makes reference to a well-known Gaelic legend in the nineteenth century, emphasizes the nature of this sacrifice: “Le choix de ce nom la situe nettement dans la lignée des femmes qui se sacrifient pour protéger l’homme qu’elles aiment” (“Eponine ou le salut au féminin” 102). 5. As the narrator specifies concerning Enjolras’s tenderness toward Mabeuf, whom he kisses both immediately following and the day after Mabeuf’s death, “C’était les deux seuls baisers qu’il eût donné dans sa vie” (11: 869). The lack of familial and romantic connection in Enjolras’s life prepares in this way for his removal from the world of the novel. 6. The anonymous, disconnected quality of many of the truands is stressed by the narrator’s insistence on this very fact, as for example, in

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Notes to Pages 158–61 the following description given during the siege of the cathedral: “Et la sacristie, où il y a des charretées d’or! ajouta un truand dont nous regrettons de ne pas savoir le nom” (4: 291). Included in the mass extermination of the siege is the character of Jehan Frollo, who has exploited to the point of rupture his familial ties to his brother Claude Frollo. It is interesting to note that, in spite of their disconnection, they both have the same fate of being thrown from the cathedral by Quasimodo. The theme of les frères-ennemis is recurrent in Hugo’s work, and particularly in his theater, in plays such as the never-finished Les Jumeaux (1839). 7. It is important to note that Lantenac’s success in converting Halmalo and in saving his own life is achieved precisely through the insertion of Halmalo’s brother’s error into a larger discourse on familial loss: “Il y a là des hommes qui périssent, [. . .] il y a là des maris qui ne reverront plus leurs femmes, des pères qui ne reverront plus leur enfant, des frères qui, comme toi, ne reverront plus leur frère” (15: 316). 8. It is also important to note that the virginity that characterizes Hugo’s heroes and magnifies their exclusion spills over to many of the secondary and even minor masculine characters in Hugo’s novels. Indeed, from Gringoire and Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris, to Javert, Enjolras, and Mabeuf in Les Misérables, to Rantaine and Mess Lethierry in Les Travailleurs de la mer, to Ursus in L’Homme qui rit, to Cimourdain, Tellmarch, Halmalo, l’Imânus, and Radoub in Quatrevingt-treize, this virginity, which precludes these characters from having a subsequent “history” and “memory” in the worlds of the novels, further amplifies the social disconnection and dispossession so often undergone in Hugo’s fiction. 9. While this “return” resituates them, on the one hand, in the precarious position that they occupied at the beginning of the novel, it shows, on the other, the only real progression that occurs in Quatrevingttreize, as something that is lost (the children) is regained through the fraternal efforts of the members of the blancs and the bleus who come together to save the children from the burning tower. 10. The effects of Radoub’s moral reconfiguration are also evident during Gauvain’s trial, in which he again subordinates political vision in favor of moral vision. This is emphasized by the fact that Radoub no longer sees Lantenac as the opposing leader, but in simple, human terms as a “vieux”: “Le vieux a bien fait de sauver les enfants, vous avez bien fait de sauver le vieux, et si l’on guillotine les gens parce qu’ils ont fait de bonnes actions, alors va-t’en à tous les diables, je ne sais plus du tout de quoi il est question” (15: 498). 11. Indeed, it is because Esmeralda sees Phoebus and cries out for him while hiding in her mother’s cell (“Phoebus! À moi, mon Phoebus!” [4: 331]) that she is recaptured and hanged. Phoebus, as the narrator tells us, does not even hear her cries, and a moment later, “n’y était plus” (4: 331).

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Notes to Pages 162–65 12. It is interesting to note that the discourse employed by Marius in this reunion meeting with his grandfather is, above all, familial, as he twice calls him “mon père” in trying to persuade Gillenormand to approve the marriage, and that it is along familial—and not political—lines that their battle is redrawn when Marius leaves: “Il y a cinq ans, vous avez outragé mon père; aujourd’hui, vous outragez ma femme. Je ne vous demande plus rien, monsieur. Adieu” (11: 734). 13. Let us also take note of the extreme measures taken by Jean Valjean to ensure Cosette’s new identity, as the false identity papers that he has manufactured for Cosette constitute a far more serious infraction than his original “crime” of stealing; yet Valjean does not hesitate to break the law in order to assure Cosette’s future in the Gillenormand family. Much has been made, particularly in feminist criticism, of Cosette’s complete “absorption” into Marius. Yet as Nicole Savy has pointed out, Hugo’s view of the woman superimposes a social and an idealizing discourse, with the female character most often condensed into “une pure altérité par rapport aux je masculins qui la constintuent” (“Cosette, un personnage qui n’existe pas” 189). 14. This “transformation” is also described by Gillenormand in the following way: “Il n’y a pas de Robespierre qui tienne, la femme règne. Je ne suis plus royaliste que de cette royauté-là” (11: 947). 15. This shift is emphasized by the change in the way in which Déruchette addresses her uncle. Prior to meeting and falling in love with Ebenezer the narrator informs us that “Elle n’appelait jamais son oncle autrement que ‘mon père’” (12: 587), while subsequent to these events this appellation changes, highlighting precisely the modification of his importance to her: “C’était la première fois de sa vie que Déruchette disait, en parlant de mess Lethierry, mon oncle. Jusque-là elle avait toujours dit mon père” (12: 782). This change in Mess Lethierry’s importance to her is further remarked by both Gilliatt (“Miss Déruchette a ses vingt et un ans. Elle ne dépend que d’elle. Son oncle n’est que son oncle. Vous vous aimez…” [12: 783]) and by Ebenezer (“Un oncle n’est pas un père” [12: 783]). 16. It is also important to note that Mess Lethierry also “survives” the novel’s closure. For although Mess Lethierry has lost Déruchette, his other love, la Durande, has been restored to him, and is being repaired and rebuilt in the novel’s final pages, thus assuring his reconnection to it. 17. With limited narrative itineraries, these animal characters exist largely as extensions of human ones, and can be understood in relation to the largely metonymical function that they serve. In this way, Friend both physically complements Han (“vêtu de peaux de bêtes” [2: 255]) and equals the Icelandic monster in his savageness. Similarly, Rask imitates Bug in his exceptionality. Like his master, Rask is physically imposing (“un chien énorme” [2: 579]) and possesses a kind of superhuman strength. But it is in his natural superiority that he resembles Bug the

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Notes to Pages 169–75 most. He has more generosity, heart, and valor than any other of his kind, as attests Sergeant Thadée’s response when D’Auverney asks Thadée why he risked his life to retrieve Rask from the English soldiers who captured him in battle: “Comment es-tu fou à ce point de t’exposer ainsi pour un chien? –Ce n’était pas pour un chien, mon capitaine, c’était pour Rask. [. . .] Pour Rask, le dogue de Bug…” (2: 582). 18. For the purpose of this study, place (lieu) is defined as a concrete geographical location, while space (espace) is defined as a more fluid whole that can encompass a number of (concrete) places and that can also function on a larger, more abstract level. On the theoretical study of place and space in the novel, see Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace; Gérard Genette, “La littérature et l’espace”; and Roland Bourneuf, “L’Organisation de l’espace dans le roman.” 19. See, for example, in reference to specific novels, Bernard’s “De l’architecture à la littérature: La Topographie parisienne dans NotreDame de Paris de Victor Hugo” or Alice Szebrat’s “Les Lieux grotesques dans Les Misérables.” For discussions of the distribution and use of place and/or space in Hugo’s entire fictional corpus, see Piroué and Brombert. 20. This qualification that sets Myriel apart from the rest of the inhabitants of Digne is expressly described: “La maison n’avait pas une porte qui fermât à clef. [. . .] Pour ce qui est de l’évêque, on peut trouver sa pensée expliquée ou du moins indiquée dans ces trois lignes écrites par lui sur la marge d’une Bible: ‘Voici la nuance: la porte du médecin ne doit jamais être fermée, la porte du prêtre doit toujours être ouverte’” (11: 69). 21. The basic distribution of closed and open space operates differently in Notre-Dame de Paris and Quatrevingt-treize. In Notre-Dame de Paris the basic schema of open and closed space is almost reversed, as Quasimodo has unlimited access to the closed space of the cathedral. It is conversely when he leaves the cathedral and enters the open space of Paris that Quasimodo is in danger of doing harm or being harmed by others. As we will see, this can be understood insofar as the cathedral functions not as a social space but as a private space of solace from which Quasimodo is eventually forced out. The schema of open and closed space is more ambiguous in Quatrevingt-treize, in which different, more complex spatial oppositions are valorized, such as the opposition sea/land (“En mer” / “En Vendée”) and the opposition capital/ province (“A Paris” / “En Vendée”). 22. The additional inscription of a closed, private space for the hero also functions differently in Quatrevingt-treize, in which the setting for the novel’s decisive battle, Gauvain’s childhood home la Tourgue, can be seen as both his private haven and a socially and historically important espace A. This space is not inaccessible to Gauvain, who is not a marginal hero, but an aristocrat who has given up his noble roots and heritage in favor of the Republic. This renunciation is underscored by

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Notes to Pages 175–80 the battle at la Tourgue, during which both the chateau and its (royalist) “History” and Gauvain’s personal history are in large part destroyed. While this intersection of Gauvain’s personal history or past and “unfolding” History complicates the schematic opposition that is being outlined here, its ultimate destruction and disappearance (“Cette ruine est aujourd’hui tout à fait démolie, et il n’en reste aucune trace” [15: 423]) nonetheless underscores Gauvain’s inability to function within the (spatial) boundaries of the fictional world of the novel. 23. In Notre-Dame de Paris, as the (real) cathedral cannot be “removed” from the novel, Quasimodo is in the end forced out of this protective private space as a result of his violent actions in assaulting the truands and in throwing Frollo from the cathedral’s tower, and, on the largest level, as a result of Esmeralda’s death and the effect that it has on him. In this way, his private, personal haven is no less destroyed, even if he has a hand in its destruction. 24. It is interesting to note that while Hugo’s heroes are thus defined both by their relation to the open space of social exclusion and by their exclusion from the private, personal space that they try to carve out for themselves, the characters who survive the closures of Hugo’s novels inversely have access to more and more physical and social space in the fictional worlds created. For example, Phoebus, in marrying Fleur-deLys at the end of Notre-Dame de Paris, gains her fortune, status, and property; Cosette and Marius in Les Misérables have access following their marriage to all that the Gillenormand name offers in terms of holdings; and Lord David in L’Homme qui rit is willed Gwynplaine’s title, wealth, and extensive assets. 25. As Piroué specifies, “Il faut descendre [. . .]. Nul n’agit mieux que Gilliatt quand, chaque matin, il dégringole de son perchoir pour affronter les éléments. Il a raison de s’aventurer dans les grottes, il en fera les fabriques de son industrie libératrice; de pénétrer dans le repaire de la pieuvre, il y trouvera le cadavre de Clubin qui explique tout. Gauvain et Gwynplaine font bien d’accepter le cachot; ils en remonteront transfigurés. Jean Valjean n’est jamais mieux inspiré, en dépit des apparences, que lorsqu’il renonce à sa situation privilégiée de bourgeois pour plonger en plein enfer” (30).

Conclusion 1. For a summary and discussion of French and American operatic, cinematic, and television representation of Hugo’s novels, see Porter, Victor Hugo 152–54. 2. For example, subsequent to the publication of Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo worked on the libretto for Louise Bertin’s opera version of the novel (La Esmeralda 1836). He also worked with his brother-in-law Paul Foucher on an 1850 stage version of the novel that significantly transformed its plot and ending. For more on Hugo’s interest and active

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Notes to Pages 180–85 involvement in the dissemination of his work under a variety of forms, see Josette Archer, “Adaptations théâtrales des romans de Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris et Les Misérables” and Albouy, “La Vie posthume de Victor Hugo.” 3. See Victor Hugo: Dessins or Jean-François Barrielle, Le Grand Imagier Victor Hugo for reproductions of illustrations of Hugo’s novels by nineteenth-century artists and for reproductions of Hugo’s own character sketches. 4. It is precisely in this way that the characters of Notre-Dame de Paris, for example, are able to be continuously reshaped or remolded so as to apply to the present. A Nouvel Observateur article (“Victor Hugo Superstar”) speaks to this general capacity for reinvention (“Esmeralda, c’est les sans-papiers. Cosette, une gosse de SDF. Quasimodo, un marginal. Gavroche, un rappeur” [4]), as does the description of the NotreDame de Paris musical that initially appeared on its Web site, which recast the crux of the plot as two love triangles (Frollo-PhoebusEsmeralda and Esmeralda-Fleur-de-Lys-Phoebus). 5. Anecdotal but interesting evidence of this is provided by the critical and commercial failure of the made-for-television film Rastignac ou les ambitieux (Alain Tasma, 2001), in which Balzac’s hero is transposed into a modern corporate setting. His particular brand of “arrivisme” fails—when detached from its nineteenth-century context—to have the same kind of impact on and significance for the viewer. 6. Using the example of the Broadway production of Les Misérables, Porter similarly argues that it is the simplification and reduction of Hugo’s ideas and characters to the “moral polarities of good and evil” that allow for his amazing popular success (152–53). 7. This reaction against the fictional representation of the individual was first envisioned by François Mauriac in his Le Romancier et ses personnages (1933), in which he turns Balzac’s “Avant-Propos” to the Comédie humaine on its head (“Il s’agirait de se résigner à ne plus faire concurrence à la vie” [858]), and was put fully into motion in the 1950s by writers such as Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. 8. France Vernier has similarly made reference, in a study of Les Misérables, to the conceptual, non-psychological nature of Hugo’s characters: “Ce n’est donc pas, comme ce sera le cas pour le ‘nouveau roman,’ la mort du personnage qui est ici mise en scène: c’est bien la fonction idéologique qui constitue le personnage romanesque” (“Les Misérables ou: De la modernité” 75). 9. Reactions to Hugo’s later novels in literary journals often focused on providing a judgment of the work’s political and social positions rather than its literary merits. For details on the reception of individual novels, see Bach, “Critique littéraire ou critique politique? Les Derniers Romans de Hugo vus par les contemporains.”

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Index Albouy, Pierre, 1, 28, 57, 66, 80, 81, 82, 96, 119, 189n3, 193n10, 194n18, 206n20, 212n13 Allen, James Smith, 41, 196n8, 197n14 Amy Robsart (Hugo), 196n8 Angélo, Tyran de Padoue (Hugo), 34, 35, 217n23 Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 5, 58, 190n9 Bach, Max, 56, 62, 201n13 Balzac, Honoré de, 15, 18, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 56, 57, 60–61, 62, 128, 182, 198n19, 201n10, 212n12, 218n30, 225n7 and character, 67, 108, 109, 114, 127, 132–33, 181, 194nn15–16, 203n2, 205n17, 211n7, 215n9, 225n5 fictional project of, 9, 102–03 Barthes, Roland, 51, 71, 114, 211n8 Baudelaire, Charles, 68, 202n21 Baudoin, Charles, 104, 210n3 Bernard, Claudie, 127, 207– 08n28, 211–12n10, 212n13, 213n19 Brémond, Claude, 5 Brochu, André, 73, 82–83 Brombert, Victor, 2, 3, 4, 21, 22, 26–27, 47–48, 76, 103, 115, 121, 127, 145, 189–90n7, 210– 11n4, 212n16, 213n1, 216n18 Brooks, Peter, 33, 35, 36, 39, 196n1 Bug-Jargal (Hugo), 21–22, 34, 79, 116–18, 128, 135,

165, 206n19, 212n14, 214n6, 215nn12–13, 222–23n17 Butor, Michel, 50, 175, 182, 189n2 Cellier, Léon, 26, 32, 92, 194nn19– 20, 208n33 character critical perspectives on, 5–7 Hugo’s creation of, 4, 8–9, 7, 63, 64–69, 101, 128, 168, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 185–86, 202n19, 208n33, 225n8 adversary, the hero’s, 29– 30, 83–91 children, 75–78, 204nn9–10 collective characters, 9, 116–22 the hero, 91–101 heroes, secondary, 80–81 heroines, 78–80, 205n17 historical figures, 9, 108–16 mothers, 73–75, 130–31, 203–04n6, 204nn7–8, 214n4. See also Hugo, Victor: novels of: maternity in the symbolic character, 70– 71 villains, 29, 36–37, 81–83, 206n19 in Hugo’s novels contemporary reactions to, 55, 56–57, 62–63, 68, 185, 201nn13–14, 202n21, 225n9 deaths of, 8, 128–29, 135– 36, 152–53, 153–54, 155, 156, 157, 184, 214n4. See also Hugo, Victor: novels of: death of the hero in

235

Index character: in Hugo’s novels (continued) doubling of, 28–29, 195n23 duality/double nature of, 27–28, 194–95n21, 195n22 longevity of, 178, 179–80, 186–87 modernity of, 11, 181, 182 names of, 23–24, 71, 78, 129, 132, 139, 140, 160–61, 161–62, 167, 203n2, 203–04n6, 206n19, 206n21, 209n37, 214–15n8, 215n11, 216–17n19, 220nn2–4 repetitive patterns relative to, 9, 107–08 sexuality of, 79–80, 90, 145–46, 153, 208n34, 210n43, 216n17, 218n29, 220n5, 221n8 universality of, 2, 25, 194n18 type character historical functioning of, 57–58 and Hugo. See character: Hugo’s creation of realist concept of, 59–61, 61–62 romantic concept of, 59, 61–62, 68, 200n7, 201n11 Chateaubriand, François René de, 18, 198n16 Cocteau, Jean, 2 Collot, Michel, 50 Contemplations, Les (Hugo), 43– 44 Cromwell, preface to (Hugo), 9, 10, 16–17, 27–28, 35–36, 47, 56, 63, 65, 66, 103, 169, 202n17

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Demetz, Peter, 60, 62, 200nn8–9 Dernier Jour d’un Condamné, Le (Hugo), 212n15, 215n13 Diderot, Denis, 58 Douglas, Wallace W., 194 n17 Dubois, Jacques, 207n23 Ducrot, Oswald, 6 Dufour, Philippe, 61 Dumas, Alexandre, 43, 109 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 106 Flaubert, Gustave, 43, 49, 55, 57, 181, 182, 183, 201n13 Forster, E. M., 70, 91, 202–03n1 Frye, Northrop, 19–20, 23, 34, 193n9 gamin, le. See Misérables, Les: Gavroche Gaudon, Jean, 1, 48–49 Gautier, Théophile, 55, 57 Genette, Gérard, 199n23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3 Goncourt brothers (Edmond and Jules), 56, 198n20 Grant, Richard B., 1, 4, 19, 22, 103 Greimas, A. J., 5, 193n12 Grimaud, Michel, 209n37 Grossman, Kathryn M., 2, 4, 21, 22, 85–86, 180, 181, 186, 189–90n7, 192nn4–5 Guyard, Marius-François, 218n30 Hamon, Philippe, 5, 36, 71, 109, 113, 129, 176, 183, 190n11, 192n7, 193– 94n14, 211n7, 212nn11–12 Han d’Islande (Hugo), 17–18, 20–21, 34, 42, 79, 116–18, 128, 135,

Index 160, 165, 193n8, 193n10, 204n8, 206n19, 214n6, 218n29, 222–23n17 Hernani (Hugo), 35, 217n23 Hochman, Baruch, 202–03n1 Homme qui rit, L’ (Hugo), 130, 217n25, 219–20n1 preface to/prefatory projects for, 26, 31, 51, 105, 185–86, 191n19 quest itinerary in, 25, 26 treatment of characters in Anne, Queen, 112 Barkilphedro, 37, 82, 83 Les Comprachicos, 128, 157 David [Dirry-Moir], Lord (Tom-Jim-Jack), 219n36, 224n24 Dea, 70, 78–79, 167–68 Gwynplaine, 26, 27, 28, 31, 47, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98–99, 120, 131, 132, 133–34, 142–43, 146, 147, 148, 155, 167– 68, 172, 174–75, 177, 178, 195n26, 195– 96n27, 209n36, 210nn41–42, 215n11, 218n29, 219n36 Homo, 165, 167–68, 217n24 Josiane, 29, 84, 89, 90, 208nn30–31, 219n36 Ursus, 132, 165, 167–68, 186, 217n24, 218n26, 221n8 Hugo, Victor concept of the novel, 15–17, 18–19, 181–82, 184, 191–92n2 difference(s) from contemporaries, 18–19, 41–42, 43–44, 45–46, 63–64,

104, 129–30, 182–83, 198n17, 201–02n16 influence of Walter Scott on, 15, 17 novels of. See also individual novels characterization techniques in, 8–9, 24–25, 70, 71–72, 73–74, 76, 78, 80, 81–82, 84–85, 87, 89, 90, 91–94, 109– 10, 193n13, 193– 94n14, 194nn15–16, 202–03n1, 204n10, 204–05n11 death of the hero in, 10, 26– 27, 31–32, 134–35, 137, 140, 141–42, 142–43, 144–45, 178, 195n26, 195–96n27. See also individual novels: treatment of characters in digressions in, 48–50, 173 effacement of character in, 10, 31–32, 127–28, 137, 139, 140, 151, 152, 153, 156, 164, 178, 183–84, 195n26, 213n1, 217n20 failure of la parole in, 118, 120, 145, 147–50, 213n19 familial isolation in of the hero, 130–34, 136, 138–40, 140–41, 142–43, 143–45 of secondary/minor characters, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157–59, 163 isolation and exclusion in of the hero, 10–11, 38, 130, 134–45, 146, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176, 184

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Index Hugo, Victor: novels of: isolation and exclusion in (continued) of secondary/minor characters, 151–59, 221n8 maternity in, 73–75, 130–31, 203–04n6, 204nn7–8, 205n16, 214n4 myth/mythical patterns in, 25, 26, 176–77, 194n17 narration in, 46–48, 71–72, 84–85, 87, 98–99, 106, 107, 199nn22– 24, 211n6 necessity of connection for survival in, 10, 130, 155–56, 158–59, 159–69, 222n12, 224n24 ocean imagery in, 121–22, 173 le peuple (Hugo’s concept of) in, 118–22 relationship to reader, 8, 42–44, 44–46, 49–52, 185, 186, 198n17, 199n26 relationship to realism, 3–4, 16, 55, 56–57, 182– 88, 200nn3–4 similarities among, 102–07 suicide in, 208n29, 210n42 theatrical works, 30, 43, 57, 169–70, 201n14, 215n10, 217n23. See also individual plays titles of, 151, 219–20n1 transfiguration and moral ascendancy of hero in, 9, 10, 32, 94–96, 97–98, 99–101, 138, 140, 141–42, 143, 145, 168, 176–78, 183–84, 185, 209n38

238

transformational properties of time in, 105–07, 210–11n4, 211n5 transformation of the romance/archetypal model in, 7, 19–22, 22–25, 26–30, 135, 150, 183, 193n12, 194n15 understanding of progress in, 116, 119, 120–22, 184 use of space in, 10–11 private spaces for the hero, 173–76 spatial segregation of the hero, 169, 170–72 valorization of vertical space, 176–77 Journet, René, 121, 122, 189n2 Jouve, Vincent, 6–7, 71, 199n22, 201n12, 211n7 Jumeaux, Les (Hugo), 220–21n6 LaForgue, Pierre, 77–78, 211– 12n10 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 18, 38 Lucrèce Borgia (Hugo), 194– 95n21 Lukács, Georg, 3, 114, 180–81, 189n5, 192n6, 211n8 Marie Tudor (Hugo), 194–95n21 Marion de Lorme (Hugo), 196n8, 211n9, 215n10, 217n23 Massin, Jean, 1 Mauriac, François, 2, 225n7 Maxwell, Richard, 197n10 melodrama history/purpose of, 33–34 Hugo’s use of in novels, 36–40 Hugo’s use of in theater, 34–35 Meschonnic, Henri, 2, 103, 104 Miller, Dean A., 192n7

Index Misérables, Les (Hugo), 44–45, 46, 49, 62, 67, 73, 185 quest itinerary in, 25, 30 treatment of characters in les amis de L’ABC, 120, 154–55 Cosette, 29, 76–77, 79–80, 152–53, 161–62, 164, 204–05n11, 216– 17n19, 224n24 Enjolras, 80–81, 120, 154, 220n5, 221n8 Fantine, 24, 29, 73, 74, 75, 131, 152–53, 214n4, 220n2 M. Gillenormand, 162–63, 209–10n40, 222n12, 222n14 Javert, 29, 83, 84, 86–88, 153, 207nn23–26, 221n8 Mabeuf, 81, 154, 220n5, 221n8 la Magnon, 154 Marius [Pontmercy], 29, 96–97, 155, 161–62, 220n4, 222n12, 224n24 Myriel, 70, 71–73, 170, 203nn3–5, 214n7, 223n20 Napoleon, 114–15 Navet, 154 Pontmercy, [Georges], 128, 162, 214n5 Thénardier family Azelma, 154, 163 brothers (unnamed), 154, 163, 220n3 Eponine, 29, 76, 78, 154, 163, 205n15, 220n4 Gavroche, 77–78, 153– 54, 163, 205nn12–14, 220n3

Mme Thénardier, 152, 154, 163, 204n8 M. Thénardier, 81–82, 83, 163, 214n5 Tholomyès, [Félix], 128, 152, 220n2 Valjean, Jean, 24, 27, 28, 39, 72–73, 91–92, 93, 94, 95–96, 131, 133, 138– 40, 146, 147, 148, 151–52, 162–63, 163, 164, 170–71, 174, 175, 177, 178, 195n26, 203n5, 209n38, 210n44, 214– 15n8, 216nn16–18, 216–17n19, 219nn32– 33, 220n2, 222n13 Nash, Suzanne, 127 Nodier, Charles, 18, 57, 59, 61, 65, 200n7, 201n11, 202n18 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo), 38, 42–43, 49, 197n10, 199n26, 219–20n1, 224–25n2, 225n4 quest itinerary in, 25 treatment of characters in Djali, 165–67 Esmeralda, 38–39, 79, 80, 136, 137, 156, 160– 61, 165–66, 193– 94n14, 197n12, 215–16n14, 221n11 Fleur-de-Lys [de Gondelaurier], 160–61 Frollo, Claude, 24, 29–30, 47, 83, 84–86, 132, 136, 156, 193–94n14, 207n22, 207n27, 221n8 Frollo, Jehan, 220–21n6 Gringoire, [Pierrre], 136, 164–67, 186, 221n8 Louis XI, 110–11

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Index Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo) (continued) Paquette, 38–39, 73, 75, 131, 136, 156, 197n12, 204n8, 214n4 Phoebus [de Châteaupers], 37, 70, 82, 83, 136, 160–61, 165–66, 221n11, 224n24 Quasimodo, 27, 28, 29– 30, 37, 91, 92–93, 93–94, 94–95, 131, 132, 133, 136–38, 146, 147–48, 176– 77, 178, 195n26, 208n32, 209n35, 216n15, 218n31, 223n21, 224n23 les truands, 118–19, 156, 174, 212n16, 220– 21n6 nouveau roman (le), 11, 181 novel gothic, 19, 193n8 nineteenth-century French advent/vogue of historical novel in France, 18, 41, 109, 192n6 development of, 18, 40–41, 58 serial novel, 41, 44, 45, 198n16 Petrey, Sandy, 98, 204n10, 218n28 Piroué, Georges, 2, 47, 104, 199n24, 224n25 Pixérécourt, René-Charles Guilbert de, 35 Porter, Laurence, 180, 225n6 Prendergast, Christopher, 34, 40, 45, 196n2, 197n14, 198n19 Propp, Vladimir, 5

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Quatrevingt-treize (Hugo), 202n20, 223n21 quest itinerary in, 25, 30 treatment of characters in Cimourdain, 24, 25, 84, 88–89, 132, 155–56, 207n27, 207–08n28, 208n29, 218nn27– 28, 221n8 Fléchard, Michelle, 24, 39, 70, 73–74, 75, 131, 159, 193n13, 203–04n6, 204n7, 213n18, 214n4, 221n9 Fléchard children (RenéJean, Gros-Alain, Georgette), 75–76, 158, 159, 204n10, 221n9 Gauvain, 24, 25, 27, 28, 38, 91, 92, 94, 97– 98, 120, 131, 133, 143–45, 145–46, 147, 149–50, 159– 60, 177, 178, 195n24, 195– 96nn26–27, 208n32, 208n34, 213n18, 214–15n8, 218n28, 219n37, 223–24n22 Halmalo, 157–58, 221nn7–8 l’Imânus, 37, 82, 83, 158, 221n8 Lantenac, 29, 47, 98, 157– 58, 160, 207–08n28, 209–10n40, 214n5, 219n37, 221n7, 221n10 Marat, Jean-Paul, 115 Radoub, 160, 221n8, 221n10 Robespierre, Maximilien, 112 Tellmarch, 213n18, 221n8

Index Richard, J.-P., 207n26 Robb, Graham, 2, 198–99n21 Robert, Guy, 121, 122 Roi s’amuse, Le (Hugo), 35, 194– 95n21, 196n8 Roman, Myriam, 2, 4, 104, 115, 189–90n7, 193n8, 205–06n18, 206n21, 210n2, 218n31 Rosa, Guy, 189n2, 220n2 Ruy Blas (Hugo), 43, 217n23 Sainte-Beuve, C.-A., 58, 198n19, 200n6 Sarcey, Francisque, 55 Savy, Nicole, 189–90n7, 222n13 Scott, Walter, 15, 18, 40, 41, 56, 109, 181 Seebacher, Jacques, 189n2 Spiquel, Agnès, 220n4 Spitzer, Léo, 71 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 18, 43, 47, 56, 182, 192n5, 198n17, 200n3 Sue, Eugène, 43, 44, 45, 46, 198n18 Taine, Hippolyte, 57 Todorov, Tzvetan, 6 Tomashevsky, Boris, 5, 190n10 Travailleurs de la mer, Les (Hugo), 56, 155, 217n23 preface to, 191n19, 105 quest itinerary in, 25, 30 treatment of characters in Clubin, 24, 37, 82, 83, 128, 157 Déruchette, 47, 70, 79, 80, 163–64, 222n15 Ebenezer [Caudry], 70, 81, 163–64, 205–06n18, 222n15 Gilliatt, 25, 27, 28, 31, 91, 92, 93, 94, 99–100,

131, 132, 133, 140– 42, 146, 147,148–49, 171–72, 174, 175, 177, 178, 195nn25– 26, 210n44, 214n7, 217nn21–22, 219nn34–35, 222n15, Lethierry, Mess, 163–64, 164, 213n20, 221n8, 222nn15–16 octopus, 29, 84, 89, 90 Rantaine, 157, 221n8 Ubersfeld, Anne, 2, 4, 30, 36, 37, 119–20, 147, 169–70, 172, 189–90n7, 196n9, 197n13, 213n17, 220n2 Vernier, France, 225n8 Vigny, Alfred de, 18, 109, 114, 192n5 Ward, Patricia, 58, 59, 64, 65, 202n18 Wellek, René, 60 William Shakespeare (Hugo), 63, 64–66, 113, 119, 120, 202n17 Wolf, Nelly, 119 Zola, Emile, 55, 64, 128, 182, 183, 201n14, 212n12 and character, 108, 127, 133, 181, 203n2, 211n7 fictional project of, 9, 102–03, 213n2

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Index

About the Author Isabel Roche, Bennington College, specializes in the nineteenthcentury French novel. She has published articles on Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables.

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