Les Travailleurs de la mer: Hugo's Poem of Effacement
1978; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/468456
ISSN1080-661X
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
ResumoIV Les Travailleurs de la mer must be treated as prose poetry, it is not because the fictional hero assumes a mythic rather than a psychological reality, nor because he takes his place in a cosmic choreography. Far more important is Hugo's subversion of narrativity and sequential illusion, the creation of a textual space endowed with a memory that cancels the double rule of events and chance. Hugo himself, in the middle of the novel, commenting on the tight relation between beginnings and endings, insists on the revelatory nature of the initial moment, the threshold. Le premier pas qu'on fait est un r6v6lateur (the first step taken is an inexorable revealer-XXII, 685).1 A fitting image indeed: the opening paragraph of the text is punctuated by footprints in the snow. That overture which Hugo himself signals as remarkable (remarquable appears in the first sentence) imposes determining images: it is Christmas day on the island of Guernsey; three figures-a child, a young woman, a man-walk in the same direction but at a distance of a hundred feet from each other; silence reigns. Between these figures there is no visible link. At one point the young woman in this dream landscape turns around briefly, stops, and with her finger writes something in the snow. When the man reaches the place, he sees his own name inscribed in the snow. He too continues to walk-though now absorbed in thought: pensif. Les Travailleurs de la mer thus begins under the sign of effacement and dissolution. Snow is the ambivalent element, neither solid nor liquid, neither earth nor water, related to death but also to survival: the word Christmas appears in English, in the first sentence. The inscribed name is, however, bound to disappear: snow will melt. What is remarkable about these opening paragraphs is that they serve as prefiguration, but also project, so to speak, the memory of the text. Indeed Gilliatt, the hero, stopping at exactly the same place in the last chapter, will recall how D6ruchette had written his name in the snow.
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