Victor Hugo, le quoi et le pourquoi (review)

This volume of Collection XIX^e siècle (Edition Diffusion) assembles six studies by Edgard Pich that are loosely threaded by a focus on Hugo's period of exile. Yet as Pich remarks in the short preface, his purpose neither in the individual essays nor in the entire collection is to revisit Hugo's exile years by way of biographical interpretation or even attention to thematic concerns, but to ask what for him is a more fundamentally pressing and basic question: What is Hugo saying at this unique and privileged moment of his trajectory as a writer, how is he saying it, and how does he intend for us, his readers, to understand the message?

The first essay, "Le Monochrome Hugolien: l'exil avant l'exil," examines the role and importance of description in Hugo's Les Rayons et les ombres (1840), a work which Pich views as esthetically linked to the major works of the exile period. In particular, he argues that description, which normally has an orienting function in allowing the reader to reconstitute space and objects, is used by Hugo in the poems of this collection to hinder rather than facilitate representation. The resulting "narrative fragments" of which the poems are composed give way to an "impression" (hence the link with the visual realm of the monochromatic). As he notes, his analysis diverges from the majority of scholarship that deals with Les Rayons et les ombres in that it proposes a continuity between the esthetic principles of this collection (such as disorientation and reflexivity) and the works written during Hugo's exile.

The second, third, and fourth studies all deal with Les Misérables (1862). The first of this grouping, "Misère et savoir: au commencement étaient Les Misérables, " seeks to elucidate the practice that Pich identifies as la misère hugolienne. In situating Hugo's novel in relation to Proudhon's Philosophie de la misère (1846) and Marx's Misère de la philosophie (1847), Pich suggests that what differentiates Hugo from the two philosophers is the way in which he accentuates the uncertainty of historical processes by inserting himself at the very center of his problematic. As a result, la misère becomes in Hugo's work a type of esthetic enunciation. In a distinctly separate second half of the essay, Pich draws a number of parallels between Hugo's poetry and that of Leconte de Lisle, each of whom identify with the notion of an esprit misérable.

The next essay, "Les Misérables ou la rupture," explores the question of narrative coherence in the novel, specifically examining the ways in which the novel is structurally and thematically composed of multiple ruptures (such as the digressions that punctuate the narrative events). In citing in particular elements of the Waterloo digression and the Affaire Champmathieu to support his argument, Pich concludes that Hugo's approach is revolutionary here not so much because of its philosophical or ideological dimension but, once again, because of the profoundly personal way in which he implicates himself in his fiction-making process and what emerges from it on linguistic and esthetic levels.

The last of the chapters devoted to Les Misérables, "Un Chapitre des Misérables: I, 5, 12. Le désoeuvrement de M. Bamatabois," provides us with a close reading of the episode in which Fantine is harassed by a bourgeois and then unjustly arrested by Javert. In his convincing analysis of this scène, Pich addresses issues of character-making, individual psychology, and narrative function, again highlighting here the ways in which Hugo emphasizes the experience of la misère in the novel.

In the fifth and sixth essays, Pich turns his attention to La Légende des siècles (1859), looking at how the poems of the volume, while overtly antithetical to Les Misérables in many ways, also complement the philosophical underpinnings of the novel, particularly in relation to historical understanding and advancement. The...