Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Kathryn M. Grossman The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence . Kathryn M. Grossman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xii+285.

2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/674709

1545-6951

Bradley Stephens,

Historical and Literary Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeKathryn M. Grossman The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence. Kathryn M. Grossman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xii+285.Bradley StephensBradley StephensUniversity of Bristol Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreThe ongoing popularity of Victor Hugo’s most famous novel, Les Misérables (1862), confirms that its author remains in dialogue with our own times. The age of the 99 percent and its desire for human solutions to social ills as opposed to solely political calculation finds a powerful interlocutor in perhaps the most towering of French literature’s grands hommes, “the Vergil, the Dante, and, above all, the Shakespeare of France,” as Kathryn M. Grossman describes him in her absorbing study of his later novels (16). In his own country, Hugo remains a patriarchal figure whose mastery of poetry, drama, and prose is matched by his authoritative defiance of political and social injustice, best symbolized by his nearly two-decade-long exile in the Channel Islands during the Second Empire. His formidable reputation has exported French republican ideals abroad, mostly through the almost countless translations and adaptations of his two most influential works of fiction, Notre-Dame de Paris, or The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), and Les Misérables. It is not the least strength of Grossman’s book that she crisply tunes in to the transhistorical and transcultural wavelengths of Hugo’s writing, always aware that “Hugo challenges us as readers, critics, and citizens to engage with his works in our own times—and to hear the urgency of his voice” (263). As Jean-Paul Sartre noted, Hugo had an unparalleled ability as a writer to cross social and national boundaries, generating a popularity that could not be rivaled by his contemporaries.But it remains a curious truth that Hugo’s novels have not nourished a body of scholarship that is proportionate to his considerable renown, due in part to historical (even parricidal) trends of “Hugophobia” and, arguably, to a lack of translated editions of his complete works and essays. There have only been six major books in either English or French since the 1960s that have been dedicated to Hugo’s fiction—and two of these were written by Grossman herself, looking at Hugo’s earlier novels and at Les Misérables, respectively.1 Undaunted neither by the colossal size of Hugo’s overall oeuvre across more than six decades of writing nor by the minefield of often-subjective responses to his work, Grossman has diligently worked through a major project that began at the very start of her own intellectual career. The overall result, completed by The Later Novels of Victor Hugo, is a seminal series of studies that promises to inspire the critical attention to Hugo’s fiction that its character and reputation merit.Indeed, with this final volume in her triptych, Grossman continues to cast clear and inviting light on a suspiciously large blind spot in nineteenth-century literary scholarship and, in turn, draws attention to Hugo’s final three narratives: Les travailleurs de la mer, or The Toilers of the Sea (1866); L’homme qui rit, or The Man Who Laughs (1869); and Quatrevingt-treize, or Ninety-Three (1874). A patient and precise understanding of Hugo’s fiction is showcased by her critically conscious and stylistically sparkling prose, which is forever careful to articulate meaning in her argument. Together, these novels confirm Hugo’s versatility as a writer, rightly approaching each new novel as a fresh departure rather than part of a continuing series. They incorporate different tones and moods in what he called the “harmony of contrasts” that he had made synonymous with Romanticism in the late 1820s and what Grossman refers to as the “generic grab bag” of his fiction, into which Hugo sweeps tragedy, comedy, romance (or quest), and irony (23).Following a concise but lucid introduction, Grossman’s opening chapter revisits Hugo’s first five novels in order to establish in concrete terms the structures through which he uses prose fiction to explore ethical, political, and artistic questions. She demonstrates an important merit of Hugo’s lyrical and narrative discourse—that it is woven together by the self-described “poet-philosopher” in a mimetic art that differs from the more standard realist prose of the period but lends his work a visionary quality that accounts for much of its power. The contrasts between the aesthetic ideals of the poetic and the prosaic, the metaphorical and the metonymical reveal an interconnected and interchangeable universe of creativity, the dynamism of which is the hallmark of a higher but ultimately unknowable divine order. Just as the world knots together and unravels with equal force, so too must the artist’s work channel that creative energy to capture any truth. Using Paul Ricoeur’s thinking on analogy and historical discourse as the principal component of her methodology, and drawing on her previous accounts of Hugo’s conception of human experience as incessant transcendence, Grossman makes a compelling case for Hugo to be read as a sophisticated and ambitious writer. Artist and analyst, Hugo evokes a poetic vision of a world whose contours are always shifting and realigning. Through this vision, a metaphorical imagination sharpens rather than blurs the poet’s line of sight, thereby becoming essential to the definition of any political ideal.The three subsequent chapters take up each of the later novels in turn to evaluate how Hugo maintains that direction without simply lapsing into a repetition of past successful formulas. Discord and reconciliation in both space and time characterize Hugo’s Romantic worldview, seen in the “dizzying spatial optics and manipulation of temporal dimensions” (8) that are in play from his earliest works onward, from the plunging edifice of Notre-Dame and the expansive bird’s-eye view of Paris atop her towers to the fractal time lines of Jean Valjean’s journey through (and beneath) revolutionary, imperial, and monarchical France. Hugo’s point, as Grossman insists throughout, is to draw his reader into a mobile and transformational world in which opposing morals of good and evil, along with the conflicting forces of life and death, dialogue with rather than divorce from one another. Such indeterminacy reclaims the future not as already written in line with the dominant ideologies of the time but as a blank page yearning for a creative mind in the shadow of 1789. Following Les Misérables, each of Hugo’s later novels combines lyrical inspiration with historical representation, imagining history and envisioning a better future in order to prime the present moment. Grossman traces these developments in Hugo’s aesthetics through his evolution as both a writer and an advocate of republicanism, which she vigilantly illustrates in each chapter by referencing Hugo’s other literary and critical writing and by engaging with a wealth of biographical and historical detail. The isolation of exile and the resultant confrontation with mortality emboldened Hugo in his notion of the writer’s role in the modern age and in his condemnation of Louis-Napoleon’s imperialist France.Grossman’s insightful conceptualization of Hugo’s narrative work allows her to exhibit the patterns and particularities of each of the novels in question. Each embraces disjunctions and is charged with manifold tensions regarding human morality, historical lineage, and sociopolitical intrigue. Read in sequence and through the critical prism that Grossman has put in place, these works are used to access pressing and often original perspectives. Gilliatt’s struggle against the elements to salvage a lost vessel off the shores of Guernsey in Les travailleurs de la mer becomes an allegory for Hugo’s own ideological and geographical battles as an exiled poet, thereby countering long-held views that the novel blunts the political edge seen in Les Misérables ; the facially scarred Gwynplaine’s rise and fall as a carnival act who discovers his birthright as a lord in the post-Restoration England of L’homme qui rit exposes a more hopeful portrait of social order than the apocalyptic imagery and dystopian atmosphere have often been taken to achieve; and the rivalry in Quatrevingt-treize between royalist and revolutionary forces in Brittany during the Terror relies not on paired elements and linear progression but on triangulated relationships and on circular structures that suggest inclusion, not division. Grossman’s focus on the textual understandably leaves scarce room within her analysis to consider Hugo’s paintings and sketches from this later stage of his life, some of which appeared in the illustrated edition of Les travailleurs de la mer, but the magnitude of the visual and the visionary in Hugo’s writing is never in doubt.The author’s readings are noticeably enhanced by her bold move toward Hugolian intertexts, specifically within English literature, whereby she identifies echoes of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, respectively, in each of Hugo’s later novels. The relevant sections of each chapter that discuss these textual crossings represent perhaps this volume’s most exciting contribution to future scholarship. At these stages, Grossman lays out a blueprint for a comparative reading of Hugo with two of his most important influences as well as his most celebrated contemporary. Fearless in reaching out to these three monumental figures, Grossman obliges her reader to acknowledge the complexity of Hugo’s literary project and the enormous potential for future investigations through these points of contact that she brings to the fore. If Hugo’s later fiction strives to “renew the idea of what is humanly possible” (226), then Grossman’s stimulating study itself refreshes thinking on this fascinating writer and points toward future critical directions that extend far beyond the immediate horizon. Notes 1Kathryn M. Grossman, The Early Novels of Victor Hugo: Towards a Poetics of Harmony, Histoire des Idées et Critique Littéraire 241 (Geneva: Droz, 1986), and Figuring Transcendence in “Les Misérables”: Hugo’s Romantic Sublime (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 4May 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/674709 Views: 494Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.