Victor Hugo (review)

Porter, Laurence M. Victor Hugo. New York: Twayne, 1999. Pp. 188. ISBN 0-8057-1652-1

Those familiar with the extensive scholarship of Laurence Porter will hardly be surprised to learn that he has here again produced an exemplary study of one of French literature's towering figures. Published in Twayne's World Authors Series, his latest book offers a fascinating and highly enjoyable critical introduction to the life and work of Hugo, one that takes into account both new and earlier scholarship, all the while offering an original perspective on a figure who, to many literary historians, is the nineteenth century. Instead of praising Hugo primarily for his productivity, eclecticism or political engagement, Porter shows us in detail the formal and thematic singularity of a large variety of his texts (in prose, poetry and drama). In this way, he underscores Hugo's true creativity, not just his energy, and does not hesitate to compare his artistic genius to that of even Goethe or Shelley, something many modern readers have been loath to do.

As Bachelard indicated over fifty years ago, however, creativity is a complex affair that involves inspiration and expression; it involves an artist's psyche as well as his or her preferred imagery. This is why any examination of the former demands, first and foremost, careful scrutiny of the biographic, historical and, ultimately, psychoanalytic sources for the creative impulse itself. Porter shows his well-honed skills in these areas right from the start of Chapter 1, titled "The Divided Self: Royalist Odes and Frenetic Novels." Indeed, his first sentence - "Hugo's career began under the aegis of the monarchy his parents had opposed" - evokes those very microcosmic and macrocosmic forces already at work in the early work of Hugo that Porter then spends the rest of his book effectively documenting. He next offers close readings of representative tropes and topoi in Hugo's first volume of poetry "Odes et Poesies diverses," and of the political subtexts of early novels like Han d' Islande and Bug-Jargal. These readings allow him to argue that the young Hugo was a kind of Janus figure whose mind was turned both towards certain neo-classical stylistic conventions associated with the monarchy (given his virtuosic control of a wide range of earlier verse and stanzaic forms), and, at the same time, towards his own future liberal republicanism. Yet, such internal divisiveness takes on monumental proportions in the very deliberate composition of his next novel, Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482, which Porter rightly calls a "polyphonic novel" (16), one that presents stories on at least four levels. Porter makes us realize that Hugo's initial, unstable and divided self quickly becomes less a personal problem for him as a writer than an ageless source of new creativity. He suggests this by emphasizing the oftentimes overlooked, complete title of the book in question: "When restored, the date contrasts with the first part of the title: an apparently ageless monument confronts the instability of history." (20) Rather than see heterogeneity in a negative light, Hugo thus embraced it, as he found himself rapidly transformed into the undisputed leader of French Romanticism.

Interestingly, Porter himself exhibits a kind of mimetic fascination with Hugo's multidimensional expressiveness. Knowing that he does not have that many pages in which to explore fully the true richness of his chosen author, he displays a remarkable ability to supersaturate his own text with a myriad of relevant critical voices, important intertextual references and wide-sweeping literary-historical comments that speak directly to today's readers. He adroitly mixes useful technical jargon that makes everyone appreciate, say, the versification and rhetorical devices in Hugo's poetry, with a (mercifully) watered-down critical vocabulary that should confuse or scare no one, even if it ineluctably reminds a "happy few" of particular theoretical notions dear to Jacques Lacan, René Girard and Michael Riffaterre. In addition to such pithy remarks in Porter's chronology and bibliography, I refer here also to important...