Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo

Chapter Three. Hugo and Type Character

55 Chapter Three Hugo and Type Character From Flaubert’s sharp judgment that Les Misérables put into place “des types tout d’une pièce comme dans les tragédies [. . .] des mannequins, des bonshommes en sucre,”1 to Théophile Gautier’s observation that “Hugo ne prend de l’histoire que les noms des temps, que les couleurs générales [. . .] Peut-être ferait-il mieux encore de ne pas mettre de nom du tout et d’appeler ses personnages le Duc, la Reine, la Princesse et ainsi de suite,”2 to Zola’s commentary on Hernani and Ruy Blas that “le manque d’humanité des personnages saute aux yeux” (“Nos auteurs dramatiques” 586), the characters that Victor Hugo created in his fictional and dramatic works were uniformly denigrated during the course of the nineteenth century by his contemporaries for their contradictions, exaggeration, lack of originality and psychological depth, and above all, their invraisemblance. This critical consensus was succinctly resumed by Francisque Sarcey in a review of Hugo’s theatrical works that appeared in the June 24, 1867, edition of Le Temps: “Tout l’art de Victor Hugo consiste à mettre violemment ses personnages dans une position où il puisse aisément, lui poète, s’épancher en odes, en élégies, en imprécations [. . .] ce sont des costumes pittoresques, plutôt que des hommes de chair et d’os” (Quarante ans de théâtre. Feuilletons dramatiques 4: 2). Commentary of this nature, on the largest level, points to the tendency of nineteenth-century critics to evaluate (and devaluate ) Hugo’s novels and plays—in spite of the fact that they looked to the realist movement for neither inspiration nor application—in light of the realist criteria that gradually supplanted the aesthetics of classicism and then romanticism in France during the course of the nineteenth century. 56 Chapter Three First introduced in France in the 1820s as a term describing the literary technique concerned with the careful depiction of detail and local color (couleur locale) that was practiced by Hugo and other romantic writers, realism as a concept and a movement evolved with Balzac, Stendhal, and followers such as Champfleury, Duranty, and the Goncourt brothers into a literary school that took as its concern the truthful and objective portrayal of the “real” contemporary world and its inhabitants. Although specific visions of what realism was and should be were not always cohesive—leading to a variety of different and sometimes even competing “realisms” in the mid-nineteenthcentury —the movement nonetheless steadily took hold. By the beginning of the 1860s, the decade during which Hugo’s Les Misérables was published, literary realism, additionally bolstered by its convergence with the artistic realist movement practiced by Courbet and a number of newly discovered Dutch artists, had firmly taken root in France. While Hugo remained faithful throughout his career as a novelist to the technique of the realist detail (le petit fait vrai) and to the portrayal of the local color that he had admired in the works of Walter Scott and other romantic writers (as witnessed , for example, in his minutely detailed account of the lifestyle and customs of the Channel Islands’ residents in “L’Archipel de la Manche,” his long introductory section to Les Travailleurs de la mer), his early conception of the drame— described in the preface to Cromwell as “un miroir de concentration ” (3: 70) in which universal, core truths were reflected, condensed, and amplified—diverged, however, strongly from the tenets of impartiality and objectivity envisioned and promoted by the proponents and practitioners of the realist movement .3 Furthermore, Hugo’s romantic conception also diverged from the larger tradition of classicism (with its formal and psychological imperatives) from which the realist movement had in large part evolved. Hence a possible explanation can be seen for many of the less than positive assessments of Hugo’s theatrical works and novels, and especially for the negative reaction to his characters, who were criticized precisely for their exaggerated , larger-than-life qualities. Max Bach confirms this hypothesis about the unfavorable critical reception of the characters of Les Misérables: “Malgré l’aventure libératrice du roman- 57 Hugo and Type Character tisme, la suprématie du classicisme français reste évidente. Les critiques jugent encore en fonction d’une littérature essentiellement psychologique enfermée dans des limites étroites, gouvernée par certaines règles absolues...