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VICTOR HUGO
BRADLEY STEPHENS
Referring back to Jean Cocteaus famous description of Hugo as un fou qui se
croyait Victor Hugo,
1
the art critic Robert Hughes claimed that so might a
Chihuahua x its tiny fangs in the ankle of a bull elephant.
2
Hughess point
is that various generations of artists have sunk their teeth into Hugo in the
hope of delivering something of a death blow to his legend, but that such
aggression has done little to slow down this cultural beast. The mammoth pro-
portions of Hugos renown may have provoked apprehension, but neither
death nor would-be successors have been able to deny him the prominence
that he so blatantly desired in his quest to become Chateaubriand ou rien.
3
In
France, Hugo is the superstar of Republicanism, who championed egalitarian
rights and the abolition of the death penalty. The anecdote that God Himself
was evicted from the Panthe on in 1885 so that Hugo could be interred there
still meets with warm affection. Internationally, the twentieth-century globaliza-
tion of the media age has only solidied Hugos celebrity. Nearly 80 of the
some 140 lm and television adaptations of his work have been in a language
other than French, while !-s Mis-ra//-s became the worlds longest running
musical in 2006, as well as achieving the distinction in 2002 of being the rst
Broadway production to be staged in mainland China.
Navigating the sheer magnitude of a phenomenon whose name adorns a
street in every corner of France is a daunting prospect for any scholar. Two
key problems are discernible within the enormous shadow that Hugo casts,
and which Gustave Flaubert once ttingly described as de sespe rant.
4
Firstly, the often passionate cultural responses to Hugo make any impartial
analysis an especially difcult enterprise. His undeniable bravado and lack of
measure cause as much admiration as exasperation, both of which inform
receptions of his work as readily today as they did in Hugos own time.
What Ste phane Mallarme saw as the infamies immortelles of Hugos
socially-minded aesthetics,
5
George Sand described as la couleur des
#The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
1
Cocteau, !ssai - .ritiqa- ioir-.t-. /- vyst-r- /a. (Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1932), p. 28. It can be argued that
Cocteaus edict, much like Andre Gides equally notorious he las!, has been too readily taken out of context
as a sign of absolute contempt, rather than a subtly conciliatory reection (Gide was responding to a survey
asking who was the greatest of Frances nineteenth-century poets: !!rvitag-, February 1902, p. 109).
2
Sublime Windbag, !iv- Magaio-, 27 April 1998 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/
0,9171,988238-1,00.html> (accessed 27 February 2008).
3
Scribbled on one of Hugos school notebooks dated 10 July 1816, as testied by his wife Ade` le in her
biography, 1i.tr ag ra.ot- par ao t-vio - sa i- (1863), II, in ar-s .vp/-t-s - 1i.tr ag XLVIII
(Paris, Albin Michel, 1926), p. 6.
4
Flaubert, Crr-spoao.- 185968, ed. by Jean Bruneau (Paris, Gallimard, 1991), pp. 456.
5
Mallarme , Crr-spoao.-. !-ttr-s sar /a P-si-, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris, Gallimard, 1995), p. 178.
!r-o./ tai-s, Vol. LXIII, No. 1, 6674
doi:10.1093/fs/knn176

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qualite s;
6
what historian Alistair Horne believes to be bombastic silliness,
7
the novelist Mario Vargas-Llosa hails as lyrical intellectual ction.
8
In par-
ticular, Hugos indomitable self-condence has underpinned his stereotypical
image as the white-bearded grao /vv-, complete with the authority and
immovability that so easily come with such a supremely patriarchal icon.
The 1985 centenary of his death and 2002 bicentenary of his birth only
reinforced this stereotype with their distinctly political agendas. During the
latter, Claude Millet articulated widely held concerns that Hugos name had
been repeatedly exploited at both ends of the political spectrum. Neither the
anniversary of E

mile Zolas death nor the transfer of Alexandre Dumass

remains to the Panthe on could eclipse yet another moment of Hugo commem-
oration. Millet argued that Hugos own oscillations back and forth between
conservatism and liberalism had woven him into the very fabric of modern
Frances unstable political evolution: Hugo parle de tout a` tous.
9
Crucial to
this widespread political appeal were the presidential elections in that year.
Lionel Jospins failure to advance, combined with Jean-Marie Le Pens pro-
gression in the race, accelerated a scramble on both Left and Right to try
and make sense of how the Republic had arrived at this astonishing point.
Hugos moral resilience quickly became an emblem of a lost political
integrity. The Left could cite his near twenty-year deance in exile of the
Second Empire, while the Right found comfort in his condemnation and aban-
donment of the Commune. Hugos grandeur was simultaneously seen to
mirror the g/ir- of the whole of France, and demand for celebratory events
in his honour soared. The Come die Franc aise was obliged to extend an
already lengthy run of Kay /as well into the autumn, often with ninety-ve
per cent of tickets being sold. On both Left and Right, Hugo could serve as
a gure of reassurance, compensating for the perceived erosion of Republican
values. At the same time, however, he again fell prey to the expedient kind of
stereotyping which overlooked his dimension subversive inalie nable,
quaucun ordre moral ne peut accepter.
10
Millet insists that, unlike other
literary luminaries such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Voltaire whose
place in cultural history is more consensual, Hugo stood as both the states
greatest advocate ao her most formidable opponent. Such ambivalence at a
time of deep political anxiety greatly sharpened the focus on the myths and
fervours surrounding Hugo, diverting attention away from his actual work.
This interpretative mineeld is made all the more precarious by a second dif-
culty, namely the vast range of media in which Hugo tirelessly operated.
Hugo was a master of self-reinvention, the Elvis or Madonna of the
6
Sand, !-ttr-s ao- i-, ed. by Thierry Bodin (Paris, Gallimard, 2004), p. 990.
7
Horne, --o .g-s } Paris. Prtrait } a City (London, Macmillan, 2002), p. 321.
8
Vargas-Llosa, !/- !-vptatio } t/- !vpssi//-. 1i.tr ag ao !-s Mis-ra//-s, trans. by John King
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 142.
9
Millet, Actualite de Victor Hugo: re exions sur le succe` s du bicentenaire de 2002, K-ista a |oi-rsia-
- .-ir. /-tras, 19/20 (200203), 113 (p. 8).
10
Millet, Actualite de Victor Hugo, p. 11.
VICTOR HUGO 67

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nineteenth century.
11
He commanded a chameleon-like quality that was
entirely characteristic of his creativity as a Romantic. Something of a Jack
of all trades throughout his life, Hugo moved effortlessly back and forth
between verse and narrative, between oration and visual art, page and stage.
The proportions of this corpus are themselves an imposing testimony to his
verve. During a near seventy-year writing career, he produced at least eight
novels, nine plays, twenty-ve collections of poetry and over 3,000 sketches
and paintings, not to mention a torrent of critical and aesthetic essays. The
contours of such an ever-shifting corpus subsequently diverge as much as
they converge, resisting any overarching frameworks. Even Hugo himself
gave up trying to draw his work into a single whole, eventually abandoning
a preface he was writing in the 1860s that he had initially envisaged as an intro-
duction to his entire ar-.
From the 1950s onwards, Hugo studies ( }aat- - vi-a) have been respond-
ing to both these challenges with considerable success. Scholars have exten-
sively rethought the stereotypes of the supposedly masterful wordsmith,
which misinterpreted or dissociated the ways in which Hugos Romanticism
energized both the actual and the potential. Today, the emphasis is placed
on the all-important harmonie des contraires that Hugo privileges in the
Pr-}a.- - Crvo-// in 1827, through which he continually forces diverse
genres and positions to meet and compete within his work. A series of
impulses that could be seen largely to gather around the poles of realism
and idealism intermingle in an unsettled melting pot of styles which continu-
ally eludes classication. Indeed, what Malcolm Bowie called the unhelpful
elasticity of Romanticism as a term is stretched to sometimes unbearable
ends by Hugo.
12
Critics observe that the critical edge of much of Hugos
writing is blunted by a tendency to generalize but elsewhere sharpened by
his eye for the particular, with his work oscillating between swelling
rhetoric and clinical precision. His taste as a playwright for the overtly theatri-
cal goes hand in hand with the credibility of his psychological and social obser-
vations, rendering the mists of `tr-Dav- - Paris at once subject to the
conventions of tragedy and yet repeatedly self-determining. Where !-s
Mis-ra//-s infuses prosaic description with poetic lyricism, !-s Cot-vp/atios
matches starry-eyed wonder with harrowing anxiety, while his sketches and
paintings rely on the visual only to negate the possibilities of clear represen-
tation. Studies of Hugo now insist that these wild swings in tone and manner
be kept in play, since such endless transformations rely on la distance, jamais
le divorce, to borrow Paul Be nichous extremely helpful formula; la me me
loi double de loignement et de pre sence.
13
What has emerged with Hugo is a
11
Kathryn Grossman, From Classic to Pop Icon: Popularising Hugo, !/- !r-o./ K-i-o, 74 (2001) 48295
(p. 484).
12
Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie, . /rt istry } !r-o./ !it-ratar- (Oxford University
Press, 2003), p. 211.
13
Be nichou, !-s Mag-s rvaotiqa-s (Paris, Gallimard, 1988), pp. 31011.
68 B. STEPHENS

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complicated sense of self that anticipates modernisms multiplicity. A gure of
extreme contrasts as opposed to simple contradictions, Hugo surrenders to
process with the minimum of conscious control. His components keep
aligning and separating, revealing a fractal imagination with no nal term.
14
Little wonder that he himself referred to his work as an ocean whose
horizons were ever-receding and whose depths were undetermined.
15
Coming in a post-war age, the timing of this critical renaissance was not by
chance. As so often had been the case during his lifetime, the alignment of his-
torical forces seemed to play in Hugos favour. The Nazi invasion of Europe
had prompted many Westerners to nd in Hugos writing an expression of
their deepest emotions; [they] understood the exile of Guernsey and the
besieged Parisian of 1870 as never before.
16
Moreover, such renewed
cultural relevance became apparent at a time when academic tastes were
shifting towards the postmodern. A previous critical impatience with
Hugos air for melodrama and fantastic plots was giving way to a growing
willingness to appreciate his plurality of techniques and the more eccentric
characteristics of his style. The role played by New Criticism in this
post-war shift cannot be overstated. The advocacy of close reading and the
rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources began to encourage
fresh readings of Hugos work. Such readings could wrench themselves
away not only from the prejudices and passions that the poet inspired, but
also from the ideological practices that had dominated literary criticism for
some time. The Realist aesthetic, for example, had long dismissed Hugos ima-
ginative writing style, with criticisms from Zola among others tainting recep-
tions of Hugos novels well into the twentieth century.
For the rst time in the history of Hugo scholarship, the emphasis conse-
quently moved from the titan behind the works to the works themselves.
The cliche of the bourgeois mythmaker, unreective and nave in his
optimism, itself became a debunked myth thanks to this shift. Far from
accessing a supposedly authoritative truth, Hugos work was pitched at the
strongest level of subjectivity, with the dimensions of his thinking always vul-
nerable to redesign. The opening salvo in this assault on stereotype came at the
very end of the 1940s with Jean-Bertrand Barre` res !a !aotaisi- - 1i.tr ag.
This three-volume study dispelled past illusions and explored Hugos use of
fantasy as one of dynamism rather than frivolous indulgence or mastery.
Barre` re insisted on the poets conception of the imagination as a playful but
purposive faculty, ce jeu souriant between the diversity and unity that
Hugo saw around him in nature.
17
Rather than ignore the anxieties and
14
Roger Cardinal, Victor Hugo, Somnambulist of the Sea, in .rtisti. K-/atios. !it-ratar- ao t/- 1isaa/
.rts io `io-t--ot/C-otary !rao.- ed. by Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (New Haven, CT, Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1994), pp. 20921 (219).
15
Cest tout un immense horizon dide es entrevues [. . .] entassement duvres ottantes ou` ma pense e
senfonce sans savoir si elle en reviendra.: Hugo, C/s-s a-s 184985 (Paris, Gallimard, 1972), p. 320.
16
Elliott M. Grant, !/- Car--r } 1i.tr ag (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 337.
17
Barre` re, !a !aotaisi- - 1i.tr ag, 3 vols (Paris, Jose Corti, 1950), III, p. ix.
VICTOR HUGO 69

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uncertainties of the material world, Hugo was very much engaged with them
in his cultivation of fantasy. A further critical landmark in this reappraisal of
Hugos imaginary came in 1963. Pierre Albouys !a Cr-atio vyt//giqa-
./- 1i.tr ag
18
stressed that the poet embraced a tense exchange between
the immanent and the transcendent through his emphasis on art as creation
and not actuality. Five years later, the message was broadcast to an anglophone
audience in Richard B. Grants !/- P-ri/as Qa-st. Grant proposed that Hugos
genius was visionary rather than mimetic, generating indicative rather than
representative images. Hugos power of suggestion was therefore cut off
from the traditional cosmic visions of classic mythology, with the result
that he would have to create for himself not only form but also meaning (if
any).
19
In 1969, Jean Gaudons !- !-vps - /a .ot-vp/atio helped expand
this kind of methodological approach further still.
20
But perhaps the most important development in criticism during the 1960s
came with the translation of Mikhail Bakhtins Ka/-/ais ao is !r/. At
various stages in his book, Bakhtin linked the theory of the carnivalesque
that he develops from Rabelais with the Romantic irony that he reads in
Hugos narratives. The celebration of the unorthodox and the inconclusive
represents for Bakhtin the major pull that Rabelaiss writing in fact held for
Hugo in the Pr-}a.- - Crvo-//.
21
Bakhtin compared the carnival with the
Romantic grotesque and its inversion of aesthetic value. Since the grotesque
is not only lhorrible but also le comique,
22
it is suitably matched to the
carnivals festivity: gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking,
deriding.
23
Bakhtin outlined how the carnivalesque unfolds a hybrid and self-
renewing form that can topple oppressive ideologies in order to realize the
relative nature of all that exists: to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit
the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement,
to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world.
24
Bakhtins
reading pointed at Hugos capacity to negate hierarchical distance between
different positions. Complicating any semblance of order in this way,
Bakhtin saw Hugo as anything but prescriptive or steadfast.
Within this reading lay a major implication that has signicantly steered the
course of Hugo studies. Bakhtin privileged Hugos narrative writing for
accessing a range of different generic levels at once. In his view, the lyric
voice of poetry could vary from Realist to Symbolist, but could only select
one genre at a time in which to speak. The novel, on the other hand, is essen-
tially polyphonic, forcing genres to speak simultaneously within its own voice.
18
Paris, Jose Corti, 1963.
19
Grant, !/- P-ri/as Qa-st. !vag-, Myt/ ao Prp/-.y io t/- `arrati-s } 1i.tr ag (Durham, NC, Duke
University Press, 1968), p. 27.
20
Paris, Flammarion, 1969.
21
Bakhtin, Ka/-/ais ao /is !r/, trans. by He le` ne Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1968), p. 43.
22
Hugo, Pre face de Cromwell, in ar-s Cvp/-t-s. Critiqa-, ed. by Jean-Pierre Reynaud (Paris, Robert
Laffont, 1985), p. 10.
23
Bakhtin, Ka/-/ais ao is !r/, pp. 1112.
24
Ibid., p. 34.
70 B. STEPHENS

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Such dynamism placed Hugos novels squarely on the critical agenda. Frances
greatest poet was swiftly becoming one of her greatest novelists as well,
gradually taking his place in the canon alongside Honore de Balzac,
Flaubert and Zola. Facilitating this rediscovery was the 1969 publication of
Jean Massins chronological ar-s .vp/-t-s edition, bringing the works
(and crucially the novels) together for the rst time. The result was an increas-
ingly thorough and wide-ranging body of narrative research in which two
names in particular stand out. In 1984, Victor Bromberts seminal 1i.tr
ag ao t/- 1isioary `-/
25
engaged with each of Hugos eight narratives
to highlight the fragmentary tone of his writing. Kathryn Grossman has
since brought greater precision still by embarking on a three-volume study
of Hugos novels in succession, across which she observes that Hugos funda-
mental playfulness persistently enables opposites to mix rather than
confuse.
26
More recently, particular aspects of the narratives have themselves
also started to come under scrutiny, such as Hugos use of laughter as a
thematic and textual device, as well as his construction of character.
27
This critical attention on narrative has been welcome, although not entirely
unproblematic. By contrasting poetrys supposed centripetal linguistic force
with the centrifugal power of narrative writing, Bakhtin eclipsed the former
without really testing his readings on Hugos verse. Bakhtins presence on
many a bibliography suggests that the lions share of attention which Hugos
novels have received can in part be attributed to his contribution here,
although we must not overlook their popular appeal either (not least in a
cinematic age). In turn, Hugos poetry and indeed his theatre have risked
being sidelined, in spite of their arguable capacity to reect in their own ways
the dizzying aesthetics and techniques that are particular to the novels. Fortu-
nately, several major studies have refused to allow either medium to be
pushed offstage, even if both are denied the limelight occupied by the novels.
Both Ludmila Charles-Wurtz and, especially, Henri Meschonnic have written
captivating book-length analyses of Hugos verse, while Anne Ubersfeld and
Florence Naugrette remain authorities on the dramas.
28
Likewise, Hugos
graphic art continues to be visible, as it were, thanks chiey to the art
historian Pierre Georgel. In 1971, in both Paris and London, Georgel
organized the rst great showing of Hugos works since a posthumous exhibi-
tion in 1888 (which Van Gogh had referred to as astonishing).
29
Georgel
25
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984.
26
See Grossman, !/- !ar/y `-/s } 1i.tr ag (Geneva, Droz, 1986), p. 197, and Grossman, !igariog
!raos.-o-o.- io !-s Mis-ra//-s. ags Kvaoti. a//iv- (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press,
1994). The last instalment of this triptych, looking at the later novels, is forthcoming.
27
Joe Friedemann, 1i.tr ag. ao t-vps par rir- (Saint-Genouph, Nizet, 2001); Isabel Roche, C/ara.t-r ao
M-aoiog io t/- `-/s } 1i.tr ag (West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 2007).
28
For prominent English-language works in these elds, see Meschonnic, 1i.tr ag. ao p-t- .otr- /-
vaioti-o - /rr- (Paris, Maisonneuve, 2002); Ubersfeld, !

ta- sar /- t/-atr- - ag - 1830 a 1839 (Paris,

Jose Corti, 1974); for the prominent English-language works in these elds, see J. C. Ireson, 1i.tr ag.
. Cvpaoio t is P-try (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997) and Albert W. Halsall, 1i.tr ag ao t/-
Kvaoti. Drava (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998).
29
Graham Robb, 1i.tr ag (London, Picador, 1997), p. 390.
VICTOR HUGO 71

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reminded yet another generation that Hugos art, with its prominence of
feature over the subtlety of colour, anticipated much twentieth-century exper-
imentation, including the Rorschach ink-blots and p./ir. Subsequent exhibi-
tions and catalogues ensured that in spite of the often perishable nature of
Hugos materials, his art will not disappear from view.
Notwithstanding these varied contributions, the fact remains that within the
current research elds of French studies and of cultural history, it is the novels
which dominate. There are several directions that future research might take to
redress this inherent imbalance and, in broader terms, to ensure that research
on Hugo continues to ourish. First and foremost, translations of Hugos
work into English need to be more readily available. Both `tr-Dav- -
Paris and !-s Mis-ra//-s come in sound Penguin editions, and were also
recently reissued for Barnes and Nobles New Classics series (with signs that
they are even considering adding a third Hugo novel to the series), while
Harry Guest among others has provided smart translations of Hugos
verse.
30
But there is still no single series of Hugos complete works in
English, with non-French readers having to settle for select titles rather than
inclusive anthologies. Promisingly, however, the interest shown in the
seemingly constant stream of Hugo biographies indicates that his popularity
continues to generate a demand for further points of access into his work.
31
Hugo scholars in this respect should be thankful to historical studies. Many
anglophone colleagues have cemented Hugos substantial place in nineteenth-
century history by highlighting the ways in which he was a visionary social
commentator who evoked deep idealism and yet refused to endorse the insti-
tutions of the day.
32
An English translation project would be an elementary enough enterprise:
for the 1985 centenary, the late Jacques Seebacher and Guy Rosa updated
the ar-s .vp/-t-s to produce a more thorough and cohesive series with
Laffont than had ever been available before. Furthermore, there are two
dedicated organizations already in place that could greatly aid such a project.
The Socie te des Amis de Victor Hugo brings together enthusiasts from
various cultural backgrounds to organize annual festivals, and since 2003 it
has compiled lists of every Hugo-linked event that has taken place both in
France and abroad. Matching this more popular interest, the Paris-based
Groupe Hugo is composed of Hugo scholars from around France who meet
once a month to discuss current research. Created in 1969 by Albouy and
relaunched in 1975 at Paris VII under Seebacher and then Rosa, the group
30
Guest, !/- Distao.-, t/- /aos. 1i.tr ag, -/-.t- P-vs (London, Anvil, 1981).
31
Robbs award-winning study (see n. 29) is the best English-language biography to consult. In French, see
Jean-Marc Hovasse, 1i.tr ag aaot /-i/. 180251 (Paris, Fayard, 2001); this is an exciting volume that
promises a follow-up, but at around 1400 pages, this rst instalment alone is toi.- the length of Robbs
concise yet detailed overview.
32
See Angelo Metzidakis, Victor Hugo and the Idea of the United States of Europe, `io-t--ot/C-otary
!r-o./ tai-s, 23 (1994) 7284, and William Vanderwolk, 1i.tr ag io !i/-. !rv istri.a/ K-pr-s-otatios
t |tpiao 1istas (Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell University Press, 2006).
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maintains a superb website with online archives of meetings and papers dating
back to 1986.
33
The imperative for translations aside, it is also clear that we need to return
more actively to Hugos own critical thinking if we are to cast the net beyond
the novels. Bakhtins apparent challenge to privilege narrative over verse is
by no means beyond question, as it should compel us to think more precisely
about Hugos experimentation with so many different media, and about the pos-
sibilities for destabilizing meaning in his work that this experimentation
afforded him. A comprehensive response to Bakhtins argument using Hugos
own thoughts on art and meaning is, in fact, sorely lacking. The potential is
nonetheless clearly there, especially as an exciting undercurrent in Hugo
studies has concentrated more exclusively on the poets metaphysics. Hugos
relationship to a philosophical rather than strictly artistic tradition is
becoming clearer. Both Mahmoud Aref and Myriam Roman have extensively
explored how Hugos narratives are dramatized by his philosophy of a human
existence that is itself vivid in its contrasts.
34
Henri Peyre has set out a
similar conception of Hugos thinking, claiming that if France can boast of
any great philosophical poetry, it is probably Hugos rather than
Ronsards.
35
For the bicentenary, historians Henri Pena-Ruiz and Jean-Paul
Scot located a Romantic materialism within Hugos political philosophy: un
double sentiment de lhomme a` le gard de la nature, de proximite et
de trangete , se convertit en vision cosmique ou` biento t viendront sinscrire
les luttes pour la liberte et la justice.
36
However, as I have argued
elsewhere, unless the poets relationship to philosophy is clearly identied as
one that resists the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment rather than perpe-
tuates it, then such approaches may be left unnecessarily vulnerable to criticism
and denied the philosophical relevance that they warrant.
37
Clarifying this relationship would also link Hugo and the French Romantic
movement with emergent trends in English and German studies, whereby
Romanticism is being rescued from the stereotype of a self-indulgent aestheticism
so as to engage with contemporary discourse on the history of ideas.
38
Given the
heavy tendency in these other traditions towards poetry, intersections with
Hugos own practices could oblige wider readings of his work that are less
focused on his narrative writing than has been the case. This question of
potential dialogues between Hugo and other artists is itself highly important
33
See <http://groupugo.div.jussieu.fr>.
34
Mahmoud Aref, !a P-os-- s.ia/- -t /avaio- - 1i.tr ag aos so ar- rvao-sqa- (Paris, Champion,
1979); Myriam Roman, 1i.tr ag -t /- rvao p/i/sp/iqa- (Paris, Champion, 1999).
35
Peyre, 1i.tr ag. P/i/sp/y ao P-try, trans. by Roda P. Roberts (Tuscaloosa, AL, University of
Alabama Press, 1990), p. 15.
36
Pena-Ruiz and Scot, |o P-t- -o p/itiqa-. /-s .v/ats - 1i.tr ag (Paris, Flammarion, 2002), p. 60.
37
See my arguments in both Victor Hugo, Charles Renouvier and the Empowerment of the Poet-
Philosopher, Di`-a}, 9 (2007), 116, and A Surreptitious Romantic? Reading Sartre alongside Victor
Hugo, in artr-s -.o C-otary, ed. by Benedict ODonohoe and Roy Elveton (Newcastle upon Tyne,
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming in 2009).
38
See P/i/sp/i.a/ Kvaoti.isv, ed. by Nikolas Kompridis (London, Routledge, 2006).
VICTOR HUGO 73

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to assuring that the former exile of Guernsey does not himself become a
remote island of sorts within French studies. It is a question that I myself
have already raised in this journal.
39
Hugos place in literary and cultural
history would be well served by identifying his relationship to his contempor-
aries both within and outside France. For example, his implicit reactions to the
inuence of Darwinism on late-nineteenth-century thinking remain ungauged.
One last aspect of Hugo which would also benet from fresh initiatives
would be his sometimes unhelpful image as a grao /vv-. The alpha male
qualities that Hugo is seen to exert in his literary career tie in neatly with
his notorious sexual reputation with women. His combination of talent and
boldness both on a page as the poetic yaot and behind closed doors as the
sexual i-ar has only reinforced the often crude patriarchal likeness that is
now so readily associated with him. However, the scope of Hugo studies in
emphasizing Hugos complexities could be reiterated and indeed broadened
by probing the overt masculine sexuality that his extraordinary egotism and
ga/aot-ri- are seen to represent. Masculine subjectivities betray internal
tensions: there are no homogeneous patterns but rather contradictory desires
and shifting boundaries. Masculinities are not xed but can be renegotiated
and unsettled.
40
Such unsettling would be entirely in keeping with the
prevalent trends in Hugo studies, whereby various binaries mix into an
unsteady hybrid of meaning, rather than become fused into an integrated
whole. Hugos masculine self-interest as regards his personal and literary
treatment of women cannot of course be denied, but it can most certainly
be complicated so as to bring another rich dimension of analysis to his work.
In responding to these potential ways forward and indeed to the ongoing
challenges surrounding Hugo, two basic principles of academic house-
keeping still require urgent attention: a less disjointed volume of Hugos
general correspondence and a comprehensive index to his complete works.
The latter might prove a difcult enterprise, but the former should be more
forthcoming, especially when compared to the excellent editions of correspon-
dence available for some of Hugos contemporaries, such as Alphonse de
Lamartine. As we continue to scale French literatures Mont Blanc and to
chart the different facets of this immense writers work, it is only appropriate
that the possibilities for Hugos future, as with the difculties his work
presents, are as manifold as the characteristics of the man himself.
41
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
39
Stephens, Reading Walter Benjamins Concept of the Ruin in Victor Hugos, `tr-Dav- - Paris,
!r-o./ tai-s, lxi:2 (2007), 155166.
40
Bob Pease, K-.r-atiog M-o. Pstv-ro Mas.a/ioity P/iti.s (London, Sage, 2000), p. 35.
41
I extend my thanks to those agp/i/-s with whom I have been in dialogue with when preparing this
article, especially to Andrea Beaghton, Kathryn Grossman, Claude Millet and Guy Rosa.
74 B. STEPHENS

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