Simply splendid - perhaps the best account of Hugo's fiction
anywhere in English. Princeton's Brombert (The Romantic Prison,
Novels of Flaubert) engages all of Hugo's novels, from Han
d'Islande (1823) to Quatre-vingt-treize (1873), in a reading so
energetic, insightful, and eloquent it constitutes a major
rehabilitation of a colossus in disrepair. As Brombert shows, all
of Hugo's oeuvre is shaped and wracked by dialectical
contradictions: between the people as a messianic force and a
brutish rabble (les miserables are both unfortunate wretches and
low criminals); between political revolution as a "redemptive
event" and a source of inhuman violence (Notre-Dame de Paris
anticipates the exultation and horror of an unleashed proletariat);
between a succession of epic historical narratives and Hugo's
persistent themes of "effacement," his dream of history's
dissolution. Older critics have often depicted Hugo as a titanic
but complacent egotist, as the "reassuring bard of progress, of
light, of redemptive love, and of Satan's ultimate salvation." But
Brombert points out Hugo's deepening sense, in Les Travailleurs de
la mer, L 'Homme qui rit, and Quatre-vingt-treize, of the link
between literary creation and evil (e.g., Gernardus Geestemunde in
L'Homme qui rit, the intellectual bandit-chief, "whose ultimate
scriptural message to posterity is the confession of a crime"). And
if Hugo does see God, or the "self of the infinite," mysteriously
at work in the world, he also believed in a grim dualism that dared
to define evil, in both nature and human destiny, as "a dark
beginning of God continuing beyond us into the invisible."
Brombert's eye for both pregnant symbolism (such as the clash of
horizontal and vertical viewpoints in Notre-Dame de Paris) and
large philosophical structures (poetic language "as a system of
vanishing traces," mimes the continuous birth and disintegration of
reality) is admirably sharp. The only issue Brombert ignores is
Hugo's place in the great tradition of the French novel. He notes
that the plot of L 'Homme qui rit is (deliberately) a tissue of
absurdities, but he doesn't address the usual complaints about
Hugo's fiction (swollen rhetoric, improbabilities, muddy political
thinking) - except insofar as he implicitly refutes them, which he
very often does. Vigorously written and argued, Brombert's study is
priority reading for anyone with a serious interest in modern
French literature. (Kirkus Reviews)
Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the power and
originality of Hugo's work, and provides a new interpretation of
Hugo's narrative art as well as a synthesis of his poetic and moral
vision. The twenty-eight drawings by Hugo reproduced in this book
are further testimony to the visionary nature of Hugo's
imagination.
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