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Reviewed by:
  • Victor Hugo on Things that Matter
  • Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe
Barnett, Marva A., ed. Victor Hugo on Things that Matter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. xxiii + 491. ISBN 978-0-300-12245-9

This substantial tome is a textbook consisting of a selection of short extracts from Hugo’s immense oeuvre, presented with ample introductory material and annotations. The project of bringing Hugo’s work to a wider audience is to be applauded, and the strength of the book lies in the sheer range of material sampled: political speeches, letters to lovers, and paintings are included as well as the more obvious poems and extracts from novels and plays. However, it is not clear exactly what sort of audience is being served. The title and preface might suggest this is a kind of self-help book for the general reader, but in fact the extracts are all in French and the ancillary material is clearly directed at students. I would be delighted to think that there are students on courses devoted to detailed study of Victor Hugo who might use this as a coursebook, but such students would need additional guidance to understand why all the extracts matter. The introductory materials are excellent on thematic and historical matters but do not supply the tools to read the texts as literature. They offer few hints on how to negotiate the nineteenth-century aesthetic conventions which Hugo both uses and transforms, or on how to analyse formal aspects of the texts, particularly the poems.

The book includes an overall introduction, with thumbnail sketches of complete works, and then a series of thematic chapters, which are arranged under two main headings: “Victor Hugo in Private Life” and “Victor Hugo in Public Life.” Each individual extract is introduced with a brief paragraph and accompanied by helpful notes supplying context and explaining references. There is also a useful and up-to-date bibliography, including a number of internet resources. The second half, on public life, is excellent. It includes an interesting choice of texts, often non-literary ones which are rarely anthologized, such as the political speeches. They are all clearly contextualized with lucid summaries of the historical background, although the literary annotations are not infallible – the poem “Loi de formation du progrès” is described as having been written “in the context of the Prussians’ siege of Paris” (430) when in fact much of the [End Page 195] poem had been written in 1857–58 and then incorporated into L’Année terrible. Chapters cover the role of the poet, liberty and democracy, tyranny and exile, social justice, poverty and crime, and humanity and progress. The introduction promises that readers already familiar with Hugo’s writing may find new sides of his work in this book, and this half on public life certainly fulfils that promise.

However, the first half, on private life, is more hesitant, especially the sections on love, children, death, and nature. Many of the extracts are poems, fortunately always included in their entirety, and lesser known examples are imaginatively juxtaposed with classic anthology pieces like “Demain dès l’aube” and “A Villequier.” However, the annotations tend merely to summarize content, and the occasional statements about form are often rather vague, such as the following on “Encore à toi”: ‘each line is balanced, never running nonstop into the next verse, with no Romantic odd-numbered groups of syllables” (42). The later chapters in this section are more successful, on God and Religion,” “Mystery, exotic, grotesque” and “Rights, Law and Conscience.” The last is particularly illuminating in its summary of the role of conscience in Hugo’s thinking. The thematic compartmentalization sometimes obscures connections between the areas, for instance the poems written to and about his daughter Léopoldine after her death are grouped in the section on death and their sensual and mystical aspects are not highlighted.

The strength of the volume is in its showcasing of Hugo’s wide range of interests. The thematic structure is designed effectively to show how he explored the same preoccupations across a variety of genres, although less attention is given to pointing out how individual works combine disparate concerns in striking...

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