The Simplest of Signs: Victor Hugo and the Language of Images in France, 1850-1950 (review)

The Simplest of Signs combines two sets of essays: semiotic approaches to Victor Hugo (21-104) and studies of later authors' art criticism (105-187), loosely linked by three initial paragraphs and one at the end. Most of the documentation is twenty years old. However, one finds much of interest throughout. Nearly all the footnotes offer thoughtful comments on the theoretical issues raised in the main text. The second section is the more noteworthy, but both parts are thought provoking.

Raser begins by noting 19th-century French authors' strong interest in writing art criticism. Liberation from classical esthetics, the proliferation of monuments during kaleidoscopic regime changes, and the public display of artworks in museums during the latter decades of the century undoubtedly contributed to this trend. Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482 (with the date, as usual, unmentioned) provides the locus classicus of the synthesis of the arts that Raser traces forward to Sartre.

Raser's first chapter problematizes the notion of reference by saying that signs point not to things, but to other signs. He offers four case studies. 1 – Many dates of composition in Les Contemplations are altered so that they refer not to historical events, but to poetic or political meanings. 2 – Hugo's "performative" utterances in his theater often misfire, and the revelation of overwhelming, sinister power at the conclusions of his plays mocks human attempts to control the world with language. Raser really means commissives here, not performatives. Equating performatives with speech acts in general, and neglecting the polysemy of Grice's "implicatures," Raser cannot analyze the rich texture of the middle ground (between performatives and assertorics) of directives, commissives, and expressives, which form the terrain where the interpersonal negotiations essential to theater occur. 3 – Raser presents an intriguing discussion of apostrophe as anthropomorphic projection in "Tristesse d'Olympio," where, he holds, it clashes with the narrative impulse. But here and later he appears to hypostatize the complementary trope of prosopopoeia, defining it as "resurrection" instead of recognizing it as merely another projection in reverse ("X, the nonhuman, absent, or dead entity can send me a message, rather than receive mine"). Unless the notion is unpacked, we risk confusing Galatea, Mercury, and Lazarus. 4 – Quatrevingt-Treize should not be labeled "pastoral," but "regional" (like Les Travailleurs de la mer) – which pastorals depict a world at war? Concerning the debates in that work, we should speak of "citation," "dialogue," or "discourse" rather than "prosopopoeia" (51, 57), because the characters are alive onstage in the present time of narration.

Chapter 2, "Hugo's Textual Systems: Antithesis, Inscription, Ekphrasis" reads Bug-Jargal as reflecting the dilemma of choosing between politics and esthetics. "This choice defined [Hugo's] later esthetics and rendered some of his later political positions ambiguous" (63). It would be clearer to say that Hugo initially engaged in the politics of esthetics, a typically Restoration pose, before exploring the esthetics of politics in later novels such as L'Homme qui rit and Quatrevingt-treize. Moreover, it is necessary to refer to Les Travailleurs de la mer to understand that the "fatality" evoked by Claude Frollo's inscription in Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482 is only one panel of Hugo's visionary triptych of enslavement to religious dogma (ND), history (QVT – and the date 1482), and natural forces (TM). The graffiti inside Notre Dame, which Raser considers in isolation, form part of a rhetoric of human transience (compare Quasimodo's skeleton, which falls to dust) that contrasts dramatically – not only with cosmic and historical forces, but also with other inscriptions such as the individual workmen's signatures on each stone, and the cultural code of Catholic faith inscribed through the architectural form and the building materials themselves. The latter, as Hugo laments elsewhere, can be dismantled and reused (and thus, "reinterpreted") through human violence that exceeds the destructiveness of nature. [End Page...