Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo

Notes

Notes 189 Introduction 1. These sites are both popular and scholarly. The “Groupe Hugo,” working out of the Jussieu branch of the University of Paris, posts on their site current information about Hugo scholarship, members’ monthly presentations, and recent publications in the field (http:// groupugo.div.jussieu.fr). Offerings on eBay for Hugo memorabilia include books in a variety of editions, photographs, comic books, drawings , jewelry, stamps, tobacco cards, and more. 2. See in particular Michel Butor, “Victor Hugo romancier” (1964); Guy Rosa, “Jean Valjean (I, 2, 6): Réalisme et irréalisme des Misérables” (1985); Nicole Savy, “Cosette: Un personnage qui n’existe pas” (1985); Jacques Seebacher, “Le Symbolique dans les romans de Victor Hugo” (1986); René Journet, “Victor Hugo et la métamorphose du roman” (1988); and collected articles such as Le Centenaire des “Misérables”; 1862–1962: Hommage à Victor Hugo (1962); Lire “Les Misérables” (Ed. Guy Rosa and Anne Ubersfeld, 1985); Hugo dans les marges (Ed. L. Dällenbach, 1985); Hugo le fabuleux (Ed. Jacques Seebacher and Anne Ubersfeld, 1985); G comme Hugo (Ed. Antoine Court and Roger Bellet, 1987); Victor Hugo, “Les Misérables”: “La preuve par les abîmes” (Ed. J.-L. Diaz, 1995); and “Les Misérables”: Nommer l’innommable (Ed. Gabrielle Chamarat, 1994). 3. Cited in Albouy’s “La Vie posthume de Victor Hugo” (xxxv). Albouy provides us in this article with a detailed historical summary of Hugo’s literary and political legacy in the twentieth century. See also Albouy’s “Victor Hugo et la critique bourgeoise” in Mythographies. 4. Cited in Lukács, Studies in European Realism 94. 5. Lukács echoes Goethe’s sentiments in stating that Hugo was “never able to get away from his basic mistake, which was that he portrayed human beings independently of their social environment—and from the resulting puppet-like nature of his characters” (Studies in European Realism 95). For broad but very useful discussions of realism in fiction, see Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Wayne Booth’s timeless The Rhetoric of Fiction. 6. Hugo’s two early novels, Han d’Islande (1823) and Bug-Jargal (1826), as well as Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné (1829), a first-person narrative, and Claude Gueux (1834), a polemical short story, will be examined primarily in their relation to his subsequent works. The study of characters from Hugo’s theater will also be included when relevant to fictional patterns. 7. Brombert illuminates and compellingly links the imaginative and prophetic aspects of Hugo’s fictional world (Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel); Ubersfeld’s semiotic approach leads her, above all, to important conclusions about the function of language in Hugo’s fiction 190 (Paroles de Hugo); Grossman enhances our understanding of Hugo’s aesthetics (The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics of Harmony ) and his conceptions of utopia and of the sublime (Figuring Transcendence in “Les Misérables”: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime); and Roman strives to situate Hugo’s fiction in relation to both its similarities with the tradition of the philosophical novel and to the new territory that it forges for itself (Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique). Among the significant scholarly articles on Hugo’s characters, Nicole Savy’s “Cosette: Un personnage qui n’existe pas” is perhaps the most important in terms of its analysis of social role of the female character in Hugo’s fiction. 8. This impasse is generally viewed as the inability to explain in a satisfying way the fundamental relationship between personnage and personne. For detailed histories of the study of character and the evolution of the study of character, see Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits”; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse ; Philippe Hamon, Le Personnel du roman; and Vincent Jouve, L’Effet-Personnage dans le roman. 9. As outlined by Aristotle, characters or “agents” are products of plots and as such only need to incarnate one of two principal traits: they must be either noble (spoudaios) or base (phaulos). Although the notion and conception of traits has since significantly evolved, the dominating criteria for evaluation has remained one of representation, as exemplified by the derivative appellations in both English and French: character, which suggests definition by an (engraved) mark or distinctive quality, and personnage, which has its origins in the notion of persona, marked by its relation to a kind or type. 10. Tomashevsky specifies in “Thématique” that “La présentation des personnages, sortes de supports vivants...