Victor Hugo, un temps pour rire (review)

In this study, Joë Friedemann seeks to develop our understanding of an important but extremely fluid aspect of the Hugolian corpus: that of le rire. While critical attention has been fruitfully devoted to the related but divergent concepts of fantasy, humor, and the grotesque, the phenomenon of laughter in Hugo's body of work and its implications have not been the focus of detailed exploration. Friedemann argues that laughter, as expressed through a variety of modalités rieuses, has its own distinct importance and serves as a source of Hugo's philosophical and metaphysical questioning. Additionally, certain ideological dimensions of laughter that will be later transformed into theory by Baudelaire, Freud, Bergson, and Bakhtine are intuitively illustrated in the Hugolian text, spanning his fiction, philosophical and critical writings, and poetry. Adopting a method of investigation already employed in his previous analyses of laughter (such as Le Rire dans l'univers tragique d'Elie Wiesel, Nizet, 1981), Friedemann's point of departure is an inventory of the lexicon of laughter and its derivatives in Hugo's work. He then proposes a chronological study of texts in which le phénomène rieur is the most striking, tracing the ideological evolution and maturation of Hugo's conception of laughter.

The first chapter, "Han d'Islande : un premier "humour" hugolien," looks at the ways in which le rire for Hugo was, from its earliest manifestations, multi-dimensional and included both penetrating observation and an understanding of its own seriousness. Indelibly associated with the independence of the creative process, laughter encompasses in Han d'Islande an impressive register of nuances (from the ironic to the burlesque) that announce the complex awareness that will be developed in Hugo's subsequent writing. In the second and third chapters of the study ("Vers le non-comique: Bug-Jargal et Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné" and "Notre-Dame de Paris: De la Fête des fous à la damnation"), Friedemann situates Hugo's next three fictional endeavors in relation to his ideological evolution as there is a movement first away from comic laughter in Bug-Jargal and Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné and then towards a bipolar conception of laughter in Notre-Dame de Paris, in which two distinct registers of introverted and extroverted laughter coexist. The fourth chapter, "Les Misérables: vers la sagesse," understands laughter in Hugo's longest and best-known novel as a response of despair against the arbitrariness of existence, as an inflection of hope that bridges the distance between the difficulties of daily life and aspirations towards the sublime.

In the fifth chapter ("'Cet inquiétant rire de l'art': William Shakespeare et les œuvres critiques"), Friedemann mines Hugo's often-dismissed critical text William Shakespeare for a broader definition of the laughing phenomenon. While acknowledging the flaws inherent to the overarching arguments of William Shakespeare, Friedemann maintains that Hugo nonetheless succeeds in presenting a coherent vision of his conception of laughter, one in which laughter is increasingly viewed as the point of struggle between the visible and the invisible, the knowable and the unknowable, and is imbued with metaphysical and mythical significance. The sixth chapter, "L'Homme qui rit: du non-rire-masque au rire des profondeurs," presents L'Homme qui rit as the culmination of Hugo's fictional exploration of laughter, as it serves as both the source and the result of all truths and allows for visionary expansion. In the final chapter (" 'Rire avec l'infini': l'apport de la poésie"), Friedemann enlarges the scope of his study so as to take into account manifestations of laughter in Hugo's poetry, seeking to trace the laughing theme in Hugo's totalizing poetic exploration of the relationship between man and the divine so as to define its conceptual foundation.

Can Victor Hugo be considered a "comic" author? This is the question that Friedemann asks and endeavors to answer in the conclusion to his study. For while many of Hugo's works contain humorous...