Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo by Isabel Roche (review)

Book Reviews1 3 1 Roche, Isabel. Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007. Pp 242. ISBN-13: 978-155753 -438-5. $43.95 (Paper). Victor Hugo (1802-1885) stands as a towering figure in nineteenth-century French literature but, as Isabel Roche notes, even after the celebration of the bicentennial of Hugo's birth, his literary legacy remains a subject of debate, alternating "between equally intense periods of hugolâtrie and hugophobié' (1). Hugo's work—like his literary and political persona—developed as did the nineteenth century, cutting across literary genres and periods, and across the political spectrum. Hugo was a poet, dramatist and novelist; first a monarchist and later a republican; a supporter ofNapoleon and an ardent critic ofNapoleon III. But while Hugo's fortune and literary status were initially insured by his success as a poet, he is perhaps best remembered now, and in the U.S. especially, as the father of Les Misérables and The Hunchback ofNotre-Dame, works people are more likely to see on stage or screen than read as novels. That is the crux of the paradox behind Roche's work. On the one hand, there is the long shadow cast by the characters Hugo created—figures like Quasimodo, Esmerelda, Jean VaIjean, Fantine and Gavroche, who have taken on a life of their own. On the other, there is a body of criticism—from Goethe to Lukács and on—that points to character as the Achilles' heel ofHugo's fiction. With an eye to explaining both the exceptional appeal of Hugo's characters and how Hugo's refusal ofthe psychological conventions ofrealist literature led many to misread his work, Roche opens her study with a simple and important question: "Why does Hugo create characters the way he does?" (4). Focusing on the construction of character allows Roche to reveal the profound if subtle coherence of Hugo's fictional universe, one filled with figures who captivate readers because they struggle with, and succumb to, forces larger than life itself. Hugo's novels were written over a period of more than fifty years: from Hans d'Islande (1823) to Quatrevingt-treize (1874). While he never sought to link his novels, as did Balzac or Zola, Roche traces the patterns that are played out, with increasing complexity, in each successive work. She organizes her study into three major sections—"Appearance," "Reappearance," and "Disappearance"—in order to emphasize the parallel courses taken by his characters. Time and again, Hugo's archetypal characters confront situations that challenge their understanding of the world around them in order that the reader, specifically figured by Hugo as 'le lecteur pensif,' do the same : "Indeed the irreconcilable and dialectical oppositions that exist not only among Hugo's characters but also within them point to the fact that Hugo, in reaching back to an archetypal mode, did not use character to affirm the ethical truths and societal norms of a morally transparent universe but rather to complicate and challenge them" (183). Roche's study will be of interest both to scholars focusing on Hugo and to those with a more general interest in the development of the novel in the nineteenth century. Her introduction provides a useful overview ofmajor critical 132Women in French Studies approaches to the novel; she is as careful to acknowledge the critics, like Brombert and Hamon, whose work informs her own as she is to situate Hugo's conception of the novel relative to the traditions that influenced him (romance, melodrama, the archetypal hero quest), to his definition of le drame, and to the romantic and realist novels ofhis contemporaries. Roche is on the faculty of Bennington College and her work has appeared in journals such as the French Review and the French Forum. In addition, she has recently published critical editions in English ofboth Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (2004) and Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (2007). This book is based on Roche's 2002 dissertation. Her writing is clear and engaging; her argument accessible and applicable to works by other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. While the thematic structure of her study results...