Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique: Du drame dans les faits au drame dans les idees (review)

Roman, Myriam. Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique: Du « drame dans les faits » au « drame dans les idées ». Paris: Champion, 1999. Pp. 826. ISBN 2-7453-0036-9 / ISSN 1169-2944

In celebration of the bicentenary of Victor Hugo's birth in 1802, a multitude of books and articles devoted to his poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, and drawings have already come out, are currently in press, or will eventually be published in con-junction with the various Hugo symposia in planning both here and abroad. Myriam Roman's recent single-volume study of the nine novels - Han d'Islande (1823), Bug-Jargal (1826), Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (1829), Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Claude Gueux (1834), Les Misérables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), L'Homme qui rit (1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (1874) - is the first to appear since Victor Brombert's provocative exploration of Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984). Drawing on Descartes, Kant, and Hegel (as well as on both Hugo's own philosophical writings and the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition embodied by Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire), Roman reveals the wide array of strategies employed by the novelist to engage what she calls "le lecteur pensif." In so doing, she persuasively argues for a complex dialectics at the heart of Hugo's enterprise.

Following an introductory overview of the relations between romanticism, philosophy, and the novel, Roman investigates Hugo from three major angles. First, she focuses on theoretical considerations: the impact of the eighteenth-century philosophes; the relation between le rire and Hugo's notion of the grotesque; the writer's evolution from the historical novel in the early works to a romantic "naturalism" in the later ones. As she shows: "Conçu comme une forme dramatique, le roman hugolien se définit [...] comme un roman polyphonique qui jouera tour à tour des implications philosophiques de l'ode, de l'épopée ou de la tragédie pour signifier le «drame dans les idées», l'interrogation inachevée portée sur l'Histoire et la nature, sur l'homme et Dieu, ou plus exactement, sur l'Histoire dans la nature, sur la conscience humaine en Dieu" (227). Rather than remain diametrically opposed, transcendence is realized through immanence, the ideal through the real.

In the second part of her study, Roman looks at the ways in which Hugo appro-priates a broad range of genres - the Gothic, historical, social, adventure, and mystery novel; pastoral and utopian literature; tale, legend, and myth - to create a rich and suggestive mélange. After illustrating these points in an inspired reading of the opening passages in Les Travailleurs de la mer, she examines the nine novels diachronically. From the failed synthesis in Han d'Islande and Bug-Jargal to the emergence of a dialectic between History and the individual conscience in Les Misérables to the tension between epic and tragedy in the last three novels, Roman lucidly explains not only the evolution of Hugo's enterprise but also its remarkable continuity. Her discussion of the philosophical contradictions underlying "l'amb-iguïté foncière du roman hugolien qui se veut à la fois historique, éthique et cosmique" (464) offers a comprehensive overview of the entire corpus and lays out the ontological and metaphysical issues at stake.

The final section takes a more microscopic approach to the texts. According to Roman, Hugo's predilection for drama (and melodrama) informs both his manipulation of narrative time, gaps, and surprises and his use of signs (including inscriptions and foreign languages) related to the acts of reading, writing, and erasure. At the same time, the novelist's synthetic impulse can be seen in the repeating patterns of characters within and between books - patterns that allow the reader to perceive similarities amid differences and differences amid similarities - and...