The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics & Poetics of Transcendence (review)

This study completes a noteworthy, welcome achievement, a trilogy that surveys and interprets all Hugo's novels. Kathryn Grossman analyzes how transcendence forms their underlying unity: the heroes (and at least two secondary characters, Fantine and Éponine in Les Misérables) sacrifice themselves for love. This ideal broadens in Les Misérables and later novels to include the love of humanity. Hugo's rich, complex depictions of society and of individuals demonstrate how society is a faisceau of adjacent but separate groups, each illustrating contrasting values. No character type has a monopoly on particular motivations. Although every novel has at least one memorable villain who hates others, some villains (such as Clubin or Barkilphedro) betray their companions, whereas others stand by them. Envy and spite govern some socially "respectable" characters as well as some criminals. Morally, the worst are those who will their degradation and retreat from enlightenment and redemption—notably, privileged, obliviously self-righteous people in good social standing, insensitive to others, whom they condemn unthinkingly. Hugo often presents them as judges or jurors who embody and perpetuate the moral blindness of society.

The most admirable characters not only illustrate moral values, but are themselves moral fractals: the debates and conflicts among opposing impulses within society recur, in miniature, within the heroes' minds. They must conquer and preserve virtue through wrenching inner debates and despite compelling temptations. Such crises of conscience are nothing new in literature. But Hugo often enriches them with a fuller context that a Catholic might characterize as The Communion of Saints; virtuous conduct by one person, witnessed, experienced, or remembered by another, enlightens and inspires that witness and, sometimes, a society. But notwithstanding many instances of altruistic self-sacrifice in Hugo, his novels offer no definitive moral closure. The struggle will continue. This pattern does not appear in every novel by Hugo, but it does shape all those that Grossman treats here: Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L'Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (1874). Two years later, a stroke robbed Hugo of his creative powers, but as he had wished, pious disciples released previously unpublished works periodically until the early 20th century.

Typically, Kathryn Grossman begins by situating herself in her scholarly and world community. She briefly explains how her intellectual history led her to her present project; then she provides a clear overview of the works she will treat. She finds Hugo's three final novels characterized by disjunctions in time and space; by an exuberant mélange des genres (inspired by Shakespeare), and by multiple plot tensions—ethical, intergenerational, and political. Hugo consciously competes with Sir Walter Scott, presenting a set of invented characters within a historically accurate past setting. Even his earliest novels resonate with humanitarian geopolitical implications. His superficially melodramatic plots are dominated by persecutors, victims, and rescuers; thematically (as in Sartre's Chemins de la liberté), his characters illustrate moral choices ranging from predation to selfishness to envy to complacency to misguided partisanship to disinterested love. The cornucopia of ideas in the last ten pages of Grossman's introduction (28-37) becomes a bit overwhelming.

Elsewhere, however, she effectively controls the presentation of her insights. Her 486 footnotes survey a vast body of critical opinion, summarizing, praising, or respectfully disagreeing with masterful concision and control. These notes amount almost to a second book, an état present (and that book is good to have), but it is not allowed to interfere with the first one, in which her analyses of the three late novels flow smoothly. She initially acknowledges Paul Ricœur as her major theoretical mentor on time and narrative. She has studied him carefully, and cites him appropriately throughout. But Ricœur provides only formalistic generalizations. Grossman's greater interests are Hugo's autobiographical and sociohistorical allusions and themes.

Chapter 2 (39-93) explains that Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) transforms the sea from a place...