In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Victor Hugo, chiffonnier de la littérature: ‘Je ne sais pas écrire avec une épingle’ by Virginie Geisler
  • Bradley Stephens
Victor Hugo, chiffonnier de la littérature: ‘Je ne sais pas écrire avec une épingle’. Par Virginie Geisler. (Romantisme et modernités, 153.) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. 592 pp., ill.

Hugo’s penchant for interior design is apparent to anyone who visits either of his former homes in Paris and Guernsey, where the poet used his surroundings to project his artistic guise as what Paul Bénichou once called the ‘poète de la matière’ (p. 10). Virginie Geisler’s extensive and detailed book reminds us that such an interest in materiality is evident throughout Hugo’s fiction. Hugo’s sociohistorical and philosophical concerns as a Romantic are illustrated and reinforced through an ‘obsession textile’, which is revealed as an integral part of his creative enterprise. In a century in which clothing took on increasing importance as a marker of both economic and cultural capital, and in a literary career whose initial success owed much to Hugo’s experience as a playwright, it should come as no surprise that costume and appearance provided a significant stimulus to his dramatic imagination. The intimate connection between habit and habitude enabled Hugo to probe the humanity of his fictional characters. From Phoebus’s gallant apparel in Notre-Dame de Paris and Deruchette’s captivating ensemble in Les Travailleurs de la mer to the narrator’s prison rags in Le Dernier jour d’un condamné and Michelle Fléchard’s worn woollen cowl in Quatrevingt-treize, Hugo’s eye for physical attire highlights the workings of personal identity and social power. Importantly, Geisler argues that Hugo’s fascination with fabric was not limited to its representation as a material reality in itself, since Hugo also utilized its metaphoric potential as a lexicon in which to describe and explore the individual’s embodied consciousness. In this sense, the human form is a ‘corps textile’ (p. 288) on which the skin becomes an intrinsic texture of meaning, evidenced for example when Marius in Les Misérables observes the bullet wounds and sabre scars across his father’s body and is reminded of the colonel’s heroism during the Napoleonic Wars, or indeed in Duchess Josiane’s provocative sensuality as she attempts to seduce Gwynplaine in L’Homme qui rit. The association between the legibility of text and the substance of the body’s surface is tightened further still through references to Hugo’s graphic work, some of which used textiles such as lace to create ink washes and prints, and to his fondness for quality writing paper (itself a composite of fibres) as a source of both visual and tactile pleasure. Geisler could nonetheless have been clearer as to why Hugo’s first two novels, Han d’Islande and Bug-Jargal, are not brought within her field of [End Page 115] focus: their absence here at the very least invites further reflection about how Hugo developed his model of historical fiction in the 1820s. Similarly, she might have broadened the range of critical possibilities that the moniker of chiffonnier brings to Hugo’s writing by probing the extent to which his texts can be read as a patchwork of literary forms and allusions, especially given her references to Barthes’s well-known comparison of texte and tissu and to Hugo’s mix of genre in the Préface de Cromwell. Such questions suggest that this study’s major contribution to Hugo scholarship should prompt yet further discussion.

Bradley Stephens
University of Bristol
...

pdf

Share