Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo

Chapter One. The Archetype Transformed

15 Chapter One The Archetype Transformed In his review of Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, which appeared in the first edition of La Muse française in July of 1823 and was later reworked and republished in Littérature et philosophie mêlées (1834), Hugo provides us with his earliest musings on the novel as a genre. In the review, he both praises Scott’s epic and colorful conception of the form and proposes and promotes—in terms that would become representative of Hugo’s inflated rhetoric—his own developing vision of what the novel should be: “Après le roman pittoresque, mais prosaïque, de Walter Scott, il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque, mais poétique, réel, mais idéal, vrai, mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère” (5: 131). This new novel to be created would take a very different direction in Hugo’s fictional endeavors from the novels of another Scott admirer, Balzac, who, in the 1842 “Avant-Propos” that outlined the unification of his past and future works into the Comédie humaine, focused his praise on Scott’s ability to paint the “infinie variété de la nature humaine” (11).1 While Balzac used Scott’s example to chronicle the “social species” that generated “l’histoire oubliée par tant d’historiens, celle des mœurs” (1: 12), setting himself up as the secretary who would transcribe the truths of French society, Hugo drew from the model of Scott the notion of a kind of refracted realism through which universal truths were amplified and rendered clear by the novelist’s art. The role of the novelist , as Hugo conceived of it, was thus to: [. . .] exprimer dans une fable intéressante une vérité utile. Et, une fois cette idée fondamentale choisie, cette action 16 Chapter One explicative inventée, l’auteur ne doit-il pas chercher, pour la développer, un mode d’exécution qui rende son roman semblable à la vie, l’imitation pareille au modèle? Et la vie n’est-elle pas un drame bizarre où se mêlent le bon et le mauvais, le beau et le laid, le haut et le bas, loi dont le pouvoir n’expire que hors de la création? (5: 129–30) This concept of an all-encompassing art was further developed in Hugo’s celebrated romantic manifesto, the preface to his unperformable play Cromwell (1827), in which human and literary history is divided into three principal periods: les temps primitifs, les temps antiques, and les temps modernes. The modern period (which spans the entire Christian era) is characterized by the drame, a form that embraces and exposes the dualism inherent to the human condition, thus incorporating all elements of the real. Included in and essential to this totalizing vision is the representation of the grotesque: “le plus riche source que la nature puisse ouvrir à l’art” (3: 54). The grotesque , says Hugo, which was in its infancy during ancient times, comes into its own during the modern period with writers like Shakespeare, who used it to render the sublime more intense: “Il semble [. . .] que le grotesque soit un point de départ d’où l’on s’élève vers le beau avec une perception plus fraîche et plus excitée” (3: 54). This requirement for totality, however, in no way implies one of true “reality.” Distinguishing between “truth” in representation and “reality” itself, Hugo demarcates his unique conception of the depiction of the real in affirming that “l’art ne peut donner la chose même” (3: 70). As he specifies, “Il faut donc que le drame soit un miroir de concentration qui, loin de les affaiblir, ramasse et condense les rayons colorants, qui fasse d’une lueur une lumière, d’une lumière une flamme” (3: 70). The principal function of the drame for Hugo is, in this way, to condense and amplify the real so as to yield from it greater truths. While the purpose of the preface to Cromwell was primarily to meditate on the conditions necessary to a theatrical renaissance in the nineteenth century, the overarching artistic conceptions it presented were in no way limited to the theater. The preface also contained the seeds for what would germinate and grow into many of the organizing...