The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence by Kathryn M. Grossman (review)

Towards the beginning of this book Kathryn Grossman recalls her earlier self sitting in the Jardin du Luxembourg and reading Les Misérables for the first time. The experience led to thirty years of thinking about Hugo and has resulted in many articles and books, the most significant of which are her three studies of Hugo’s novels, The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics of Harmony (Geneva: Droz, 1986), Figuring Transcendence in ‘Les Misérables’: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), and this latest volume. Grossman begins by rooting our responses to Hugo in the present day: in a period of instant gratification, he is vulnerable to being overlooked or misunderstood, for the complexity and intricacy of his writing demands careful, close reading. Paradoxically, however, the very excesses of our present age mimic Hugo’s vertiginous universe: ‘The massive footprint of our hypermarchés, their towering shelves stacked to the brim with an apparently endless variety of goods, likewise simulates Hugo’s vertical and horizontal sublime, the feeling of unlimited possibilities in every direction’, she observes (p. 1). The quintessentially Hugolian characteristic of lurching between escarpement and abîme has, perhaps, never been more timely in its relevance, and yet the novels have received woefully little critical attention. The publication of this third of Grossman’s studies marks the culmination of a groundbreaking examination of the development of Hugo’s ideas about genre, time, and aesthetics. Grossman’s carefully articulated methodology, rooted in the work of Paul Ricoeur and Thomas Weiskel, enables her to plot in painstaking detail the dizzying intratextual patterns linking all the novels, and to demonstrate that the constituent parts form an integrated and coherent vision of the sublime. Much of the pleasure in reading this volume is to be guided not only through these intratextual connections, but to be led to an appreciation of the intertextual presences enriching the novels. Grossman sees all three of the later novels — Les Travailleurs de la mer, L’Homme qui rit, and Quatrevingt-treize — as commentaries on the iniquities of Napoléon III, which spurred Hugo to ever more stunning acts of artistry. Indeed, all three were written on the Channel Islands and are closely connected not only by their veiled commentaries on the political situation in France, but by the fact that they display important intertextual relationships with major works of English literature. Grossman’s illuminating and persuasive accounts of the importance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Les Travailleurs de la mer, Milton’s Paradise Lost to L’Homme qui rit, and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to Quatrevingt-treize offer new perspectives on Hugo’s sense of his development as a novelist as he inscribes himself into the pantheon of the Western canon along with Shakespeare and Milton, and establishes himself as the French Dickens. This is an immensely rich volume whose rewards include an appreciation of the links connecting a huge body of work and of Hugo’s complex development as a novelist and philosopher. Grossman is the ideal guide to the intricacies of Hugo’s narrative plotting and thought, as her absolute mastery of the material is matched by the gracefulness and clarity of her expression.