Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty (review)

Although Hugo and Sartre enjoy parallel canonical status in their respective centuries, other points of contact between the two writers have received little attention. For Bradley Stephens, however, the writings of Hugo and Sartre show a similar 'commitment to human freedom that is individual and creative as much as it is political and objective' (p. 96). This commitment to freedom has two important characteristics: first, it is a 'flight towards being' or a 'dynamics of becoming' (pp. 8, 9), and secondly, as a constantly unrealized process, it is also a burden and a condemnation. Freedom, therefore, can be seen as a liability in two senses: as an ongoing tendency or 'fuite vers', and as an at times unwelcome imposition. However, this double liability also pays dividends in that this kind of liberty can never become its opposite — alienation or inertia. Thus in Hugo these negative possibilities are constantly countered by imagination and poetic voyance (the homme-océan), and in Sartre mauvaise foi is redeemed by an awareness of mauvaise foi or by what Stephens calls 'Sartre's écrivain écrivant' (p. 141). Since, moreover, 'Romantic fervour and Existentialist reflexivity reveal themselves to be mutually reinforcing' (p. 141), important parallels can be drawn between romanticism and existentialism, with romanticism proving much more open-ended and self-questioning than is commonly thought and with existentialism much less abstract and cerebral. The shared emphasis on the liability of liberty in Hugo and Sartre thus exemplifies broader similarities that can be found between the two movements, and, furthermore, between romanticism and deconstruction. These similarities are to be found particularly in French romanticism (as opposed to its more favoured Anglo-German varieties), since too little credit has hitherto been given to the debt owed by such writers as Bataille and Breton — and Sartre — to their Romantic predecessors. In order to illustrate Hugo's and Sartre's shared emphasis on 'the liability of liberty', Stephens concentrates on two particular works, Notre-Dame de Paris and L'Âge de raison, which, as narratives, facilitate self-reflexivity, multiple perspectives, and 'the kind of hybrid quality that Hugo and Sartre associate with being, and which counteracts any attempt to limit human freedom' (p. 90). Although some readers might regret that little reference is made to Hugo's poetry or to the plays of either author, the analogies between the two chosen narratives are clearly and thoroughly presented. The parallels between Quasimodo and Mathieu and between Frollo and Daniel are as useful as the demonstrations of the two texts' recourse to multiple narrative voices. Of both texts Stephens can therefore conclude that '[n]o conceptual models of action are authorized, no generalizations given credence' (p. 151). Liberty may be a liability, but in Hugo and in Sartre it has two strong, subtle, and surprisingly complementary exponents. For the detail of its analyses and for the breadth of its final perspectives, this volume is, therefore, a welcome addition to the Legenda imprint.