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

Roche's book at once adds another voice to the chorus of Hugolâtres who have been reclaiming the poet as a modern and challenging writer, whilst at the same time amplifying one particular chord as regards his construction of narrative. A detailed introduction sketches the array of scholarship since the 1950s that has fleshed out the important thematic and ideological concerns of Hugo's work, only to observe that Hugo's reliance on —and transformation of —the archetypal mode of character in his narratives has yet to be brought fully into focus. The romance tradition of moral transparency, itself rooted in archetype and melodrama, is thrown into question by Hugo's appropriation of those same devices. Roche stresses that Hugo may have conjured universal and sensational characters to the chagrin of contemporaries such as Zola, but the effect to which they were deployed as an ensemble ensured that they broke free from any one-dimensional mould. Hugo's characters do not resolve key dilemmas and integrate with their world to uphold a moral imperative. On the contrary, heroes only prevail by either dying or committing suicide, whilst adversaries become ambiguous, the evil go unpunished, and children become lost or damned. That Jean Valjean embodies an everyman quality rather than a more individual or sophisticated role may have irked the realist mindset, but was entirely in keeping with Hugo's Romantic objectives. Rather than an inward focus that details a specific historical moment, Hugo indeed turns his mind's eye outwards towards the sweeping scope of his poetic vision. Instead of an accurate and historically particular description, Hugo demanded that reality be condensed and then magnified in order to yield from it more far-reaching truths. The result is that character for Hugo 'serves a conceptual rather than a representative or psychological function' (p. 128) that evokes the timeless mysteries of man's universal history rather than a specific reality. The central premise of Roche's argument should come as no surprise to those familiar with the nuances of Hugo's writing, but it is both impressive and exciting to see this approach projected with rigorous clarity and persuasive illustration across all seven of his novels. Pertinent use is made of Hugo's theoretical and poetic works so as to contextualize these readings within a wider sense of his overall Romantic project, whilst a sound bibliography ensures that potential critical resonances remain in sight. The slightest of reservations does, however, arise in Roche's use of the term 'totality' to refer to the idealized state of being that Hugo's Romantic imagination yearns to access. The need for caution should be flagged here, lest the dynamic tension of Hugo's worldview could be reduced to fit into the very stereotype of the dreamy mythmaker that Hugo studies work so hard to resist. A conspicuous shift from 'totality' to l'infini during her lucid conclusion indicates that Roche herself is not unaware of this imperative, even if it is not made explicit. Nonetheless, her study remains a consistently engaging work that should prove immensely valuable to scholars of both Hugo and Romantic fiction.