18 Everything And Nothing Hugo And Shakespeare Fiona Cox

18 everything and nothing: hugo and shakespeare fiona cox abstract: this article re-evaluates hugo’s relationship with shakespe

18
Everything and Nothing: Hugo and Shakespeare
Fiona Cox
Abstract: This article re-evaluates Hugo’s relationship with
Shakespeare, by analysing his literary criticism, in particular
William Shakespeare (1864), which offers us a vivid portrayal of the
ways in which Hugo both negotiated relationships with his literary
ancestors. I approach Hugo’s work from an existential standpoint,
underpinned primarily by the thinking of Ronald Laing, Jan Kott and
Eugène Ionesco. In doing so I argue that the way in which Hugo
inscribes his own experiences into his analysis of Shakespearean
characters uncovers far more than has been acknowledged to date about
his own ontological insecurities, and in particular his fear of
non-being.
Keywords: Hugo, Shakespeare, existential insecurity, exile, Borges,
Bloom, nothingness, extinction, Kott, Hamlet, Prospero, Lear.
Biographical note: Fiona Cox is Senior Lecturer in French at the
University of Exeter. Her research interests include classical
reception in modern and contemporary French literature, in modern and
contemporary women’s writing. As well as chapters and articles on Hugo
she has published two monographs Aeneas Takes the Metro – Virgil’s
Presence in Twentieth-Century French Literature (1999), Sibylline
Sisters – Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2011) and
is at work on a third entitled Strange Monsters – Ovid’s Presence in
Contemporary Women’s Writing (2017).
The father of a nation, a poet, the mouthpiece for his people, sits
exiled along with the surviving members of his family, longing both
for the daughter who has died and for the overthrow of the unlawful
usurper of his native land. Hugo’s predicament from 1851-1870 in the
Channel Islands reads almost like the background of a Shakespearean
play. This is especially the case when we remember that it was during
the exile years that his daughter, Adèle, would succumb to the
psychosis that would imprison her for the rest of her life. The shades
of Prospero, of Lear, and of Hamlet haunt this episode of his life.
It is unsurprising then, that Hugo should write at length from exile
about Shakespeare. His book, William Shakespeare (1864), initially
designed as an introduction to his son François Victor’s translation
of the works of Shakespeare, quickly expanded into a meditation on the
nature of genius. In the opening section of the book Hugo relates how
the seeds of his project were sown at the start of the long season of
exile:
Dehors il pleuvait, le vent soufflait, la maison était comme assourdie
par ce grondement extérieur. Tous deux songeaient, absorbés peut-être
par cette coïncidence d’un commencement d’hiver et d’un commencement
d’exil.
Tout à coup le fils éleva la voix et interrogea le père:
‘Que penses-tu de cet exil?’
‘Qu’il sera long.’
‘Comment espères-tu le remplir?’
Le père répondit:
‘Je regarderai l’Océan.’
Il y eut un silence. Le père reprit:
‘Et toi?’
‘Moi’, dit le fils, ‘je traduirai Shakespeare.’ (Hugo1985a: 247)
The implicit equation between Shakespeare and the Ocean is immediately
reinforced by Hugo’s next line: ‘Il y a des hommes océans en effet’
(1985a: 247). Hugo is both fashioning himself as a Shakespearean
character and turning to the writer who, to his mind, exemplifies the
qualities of genius. This double manoeuvre is also to be found in Les
Contemplations (1856); the poem ‘Le Poëte’ opens with the lines:
Shakespeare songe; loin du Versaille [sic] éclatant,
Des buis taillés, des ifs peignés, où l’on entend
Gémir la tragédie éplorée et prolixe,
Il contemple la foule avec son regard fixe,
Et toute la forêt frissonne devant lui. (Hugo 1943: 175)
Significantly, Hugo depicts a Shakespeare who belongs to a French
literary tradition. In William Shakespeare he suggests, with some
asperity, that England is undeserving of her national poet:
‘L’Angleterre, pays d’obéissance plus qu’on ne croit, oublia
Shakespeare’ (Hugo1985a: 258). As he appropriates Shakespeare for
France, reminding us of the ways in which Shakespeare helped the young
Romantics to define themselves in opposition to the staid,
unimaginative world of eighteenth-century classicism, Hugo is, of
course, reminding his readers of his own pivotal role as leader of the
Romantics and explicitly associating himself with Shakespearean
genius. Furthermore, as he set out his Romantic agenda in his Préface
de Cromwell (1827), he observed there too that: ‘Un homme, un poète
roi, poeta soverano, comme Dante le dit d’Homère, va tout fixer. Les
deux génies rivaux unissent leur double flamme, et de cette flamme
jaillit Shakspeare [sic]’ (1985a: 14). Shakespearean allusion
permeates Hugo’s œuvre, not only the plays, the criticism and poetry,
but also his prose fiction such as Le Dernier jour d’un condamné
(1829).i This alignment of himself with Shakespeare not only inserts
Hugo into the family of those who have been touched by genius, but
also encourages him to adopt the personae of many other people,
starting with those writers whom he most admires.ii
As Hugo describes the Shakespearean imagination, it is immediately
clear how apt Shakespeare was as a weapon against the rigid confines
of eighteenth-century classicism:
Shakespeare, c’est la fertilité, la force, l’exubérance, la mamelle
gonflée, la coupe écumante, la cuve à plein bord, la séve [sic] par
excès, la lave en torrent, les germes en tourbillon, la vaste pluie de
vie, tout par milliers, tout par millions, nulle réticence, nulle
ligature, nulle économie, la prodigalité insensée et tranquille du
créateur. (1985a: 349)
Shakespeare offers us the entire palette of human emotion, as he
depicts life in all its glory and all its terrors. There is a distinct
unease as he refers to the ‘prodigalité insensée et tranquille du
créateur’, since this is reminiscent of the cruelly impassive stance
adopted by Shakespeare in ‘Le Poëte’, as he casts his creations into
the crucible of extreme suffering, before returning to lick their
blood from his claws in the safety of his cave. He warns us that:
‘Quand il vous tient, vous êtes pris. N’attendez de lui aucune
miséricorde. Il a la cruauté pathétique’ (1985a: 342). Shakespeare
hurts us because, ultimately, we are able to recognise ourselves in
his work. The creativity of his teeming brain is such that our own
life stories are there, if only we can allow ourselves to recognise
this: ‘Shakespeare a l’émotion, l’instinct, le cri vrai, l’accent
juste, toute la multitude humaine avec sa rumeur. Sa poésie c’est lui
et en même temps c’est vous’ (1985a: 283). It would be highly
disingenuous to overlook the ways in which these observations about
Shakespeare’s genius echo Hugo’s pleas to his own readers in the
Préface of Les Contemplations: ‘Prenez donc ce miroir, et
regardez-vous-y. On se plaint quelquefois des écrivains qui disent
moi. Parlez-nous de nous, leur crie-t-on. Hélas! quand je vous parle
de moi, je vous parle de vous. Comment ne le sentez-vous pas? Ah!
insensé, qui crois que je ne suis pas toi!’ (Hugo 1943 : 28). Such
intratextual echoes between literary criticism and poetic manifesto
contribute greatly to Hugo’s fashioning of himself as a literary
genius, walking in the footsteps of Shakespeare.
Hugo’s relationship with his literary forebears and his fashioning of
his own poetic identity point to an ‘anxiety of influence’ that he
both experiences with regard to those writers who influenced him, and
exerts over his literary descendants.iii This is most palpably
indicated in Gide’s famous sigh: ‘Hugo- hélas!’, when asked : ‘Quel
est votre poète?’.iv Few writers, also, could have experienced the
Bloomian dimension of Apophrades or The Return of the Dead with more
potency than Hugo, given the propensity of dead poets to visit him via
his table-tapping episodes. But Hugo, too, was troubled by writers
such as Shakespeare whose imagination seemed to drown everything else
out, and which left little space for his descendants to ‘clear their
imaginative space’. He observes of Shakespeare that: ‘Il semble qu’il
y ait de l’importunité dans une trop grande présence. Les hommes ne
trouvent pas cet homme-là assez leur semblable’ (1985a : 417).
Typically, Hugo attempts to rival Shakespeare and, ultimately, to
outdo the suffering of Shakespearean characters. Like Hugo,
Shakespeare understood what it meant to be an outcast, to be
misunderstood. Hugo claims that: ‘La vie de Shakespeare fut très mêlé
d’amertume. Il vécut perpétuellement insulté. Il le constate lui-même.
La postérité peut lire aujourd’hui ceci dans ses vers intimes: “Mon
nom est diffamé, ma nature est abaissée; ayez pitié de moi pendant
que, soumis et patient, je bois le vinaigre” Sonnet III’ (1985a: 257).
When Hugo depicts himself performing the role of the exiled
paterfamilias, he emphasises a comparable sense of being reviled
within the country as a whole, rather than simply being driven out by
a tyrant’s fury: ‘Le plus vieux était un de ces hommes qui, à un
moment donné, sont de trop dans leur pays’ (1985a: 246). This last
observation shifts Hugo’s identification with Shakespeare towards an
identification with one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters –
King Lear.
It is immensely revealing to observe the ways in which Hugo inscribes
himself into the role of Shakespearean characters in his attempts to
emulate this national poet, to become the voice of his nation. His
description of Lear is a thinly veiled description of his own plight,
shot through with the imagery from Les Contemplations of the poet
bowed by grief, targeted by a cruel God, aged before his time: ‘Et
quelle figure que le père, quelle cariatide! C’est l’homme courbé. Il
ne fait que changer de fardeaux, toujours plus lourds. Plus le
vieillard faiblit, plus le poids augmente. Il vit sous la surcharge.
Il porte d’abord l’empire, puis l’ingratitude, puis l’isolement, puis
le désespoir, puis la faim et la soif, puis la folie, puis toute la
nature’ (1985a: 366). Hugo, too, has been bowed by the weight of
ingratitude, despair and loneliness; he has experienced the sense that
the universe is conspiring against him. And, though he glides past the
fact in William Shakespeare, his family history is haunted by madness
– that of his brother Eugène as well as the madness that was becoming
visible in the behaviour of his younger daughter, Adèle, by 1864. But
it is not enough for Hugo to match Lear’s suffering – his sense of
personal injury, coupled with poetic rivalry, means that he must outdo
Lear:v ‘Ce désespoir suprême lui est épargné de rester derrière elle
parmi les vivants, pauvre ombre, tâtant la place de son cœur vide et
cherchant son âme emportée par ce doux être qui est parti. O Dieu,
ceux que vous aimez, vous ne les laissez pas survivre’ (1985a :366).
Unlike Lear, Hugo has experienced the most devastating of tragedies –
the loss of a child.
It is unsurprising that Hugo should identify so explicitly with Lear,
since Lear offers so potent an image to the Romantic imagination of
the noble, suffering old man. And yet, according to his own readings
of Shakespeare, Hugo should have been aware that there may well have
been unpalatable truths about his own identity within his readings of
Shakespeare that he may have been powerless to control. We have seen,
through Gide’s weary response about Hugo, that the feelings that he
inspired within his literary descendants were often conflicted. Bloom
alerts us to the fact that it is the awakening of an existential
crisis that sharpens the antipathy of a great poet to his
predecessors:
For the poet is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through
an awareness of other selves. The poem is within him, yet he
experiences the shame and splendor of being found by poems – great
poems – outside him. To lose freedom in this center is never to
forgive, and to learn the dread of threatened autonomy forever. (Bloom
1973: 26).
It is, of course, deeply ironic that in order to negotiate a lack of
freedom entailed by his exile, Hugo should borrow the identity of Lear
in order to articulate his anguish, and so – apparently unwittingly --
make himself even more vulnerable to the threat of mockery.
Eugène Ionesco, most notably, delighted in debunking the stories and
images that Hugo fashioned about his life. In Ionesco’s eyes Hugo was
so preoccupied by the forging of his image and identity that he was
blind to the damage that he was perpetrating on those around him:
‘Mais il a été dénaturé par la vanité et par la littérature. Il ne se
rendait pas compte de ce qu’il faisait. Il ne s’est jamais rendu
compte de ce qu’il faisait. Il n’a rien su faire d’autre que
consolider sa gloire, satisfaire sa soif de parvenir’(Ionesco 1982:
35). For Ionesco, at the heart of Hugo’s identity was the cold
emptiness of one who has been promoted way beyond their abilities. The
times demanded a strong spokesman and Hugo was elected to this role by
an unthinking populace and thus propelled into megalomania: ‘Et parce
que la foule ne saurait créer d’autres génies que ceux qui lui
appartiennent et lui représentent le vide Victor Hugo, le pauvre, a pu
être pris pour un mage, pour un surhomme, pour un poète de la taille
de Dante et de Virgile’ (1982: 30-31).vi This image of emptiness,
parading in the guise of greatness, is already present in King Lear,
where it is the Fool who highlights the dilemma. When Lear cries:
‘Doth any here know me? This is not Lear./ Doth Lear walk thus? speak
thus? . . . Who is it that can tell me who I am?’, the Fool answers:
‘Lear’s shadow’ (Act 1, scene 4). In his analysis of the contemporary
reception of Shakespeare’s plays Jan Kott, a critic whose thinking was
shaped by Ionesco’s work, argues that Lear himself, in his efforts to
appear tragically noble, betrayed his inner emptiness and unwittingly
turned himself into a figure of fun: ‘The trouble was, however, that
the demented old man, tearing his long white beard, suddenly became
ridiculous. He should have been tragic, but he no longer was’ (Kott
1974: 129). Such an image of delusion also shadows perceptions of
Hugo, as I shall discuss below.
It is, however, through his response to another Shakespearean
character that we can perceive most vividly the existential terrors
that beset Hugo. He describes the insecurity corroding Hamlet as lying
at the heart of Shakespeare’s vision: ‘Hamlet, le doute, est au centre
de son œuvre’ (Hugo 1985a: 343). When he wrote admiringly of the
capacity of poetic genius to beget creations that made human lives
flee back into the shadows, he was not simply extolling poetry, he was
also expressing the terror of non-being: ‘de là ces grands spectres
lumineux qui sortent de leur cerveau et qui s’en vont flamboyer à
jamais sur la ténébreuse muraille humaine. Ces fantômes sont. Exister
autant qu’Achille, ce serait l’ambition d’Alexandre’ (1985a: 342). In
his discussion of Hamlet he emphasises again and again Hamlet’s
anguish in the face of non-being, or of being the wrong person. His
imaginative response here is so strong that it betrays the fact that
Shakespeare’s work was probing his own greatest insecurities:
Nulle figure, parmi celles que les poëtes ont créées, n’est plus
poignante et plus inquiétante. Le doute conseillé par un fantôme,
voilà Hamlet. Hamlet a vu son père mort et lui a parlé: est-il
convaincu? Non, il hoche la tête. Que fera-t-il? Il n’en sait rien.
Ses mains se crispent, puis retombent. Au dedans de lui les
conjectures, les systèmes, les apparences monstrueuses, les souvenirs
sanglants, la vénération du spectre, la haine, l’attendrissement,
l’anxiété d’agir et de ne pas agir, son père, sa mère, ses devoirs en
sens contraire, profond orage. (1985a: 361)
When he was deliberately presenting himself in Shakespearean terms
Hugo may have selected the elderly, patriarchal Lear, but it is surely
here in the image of the young man unable to find a firm centre for a
self divided by conflicting family loyalties (let us not forget that
Hugo was the child of a broken home, whose parents supported opposing
sides in France’s bloody civil history) whose past was scarred by
madness and haunted by ghosts, that Hugo’s identity is most potently
expressed.vii
Even as he was writing William Shakespeare he was beset by anxiety
about his younger daughter, Adèle who had disappeared in 1863, only to
write from Canada with news of the man whom she was intending to
marry. As it became apparent that she had deluded herself, and no
engagement was forthcoming, she fell into a madness from which she
would never emerge. In December 1863 Hugo allowed himself the words
‘la folie’, but then his mind veered sharply away from this
possibility.viii His relationship with his two daughters at this time
is chillingly parallel. In his table-tapping sessions he was
communicating regularly with the spirit of the drowned Léopoldine; at
the same time he was receiving strange messages from his far-distant
younger daughter, who was drowning in madness. Robb observes that
Hugo’s idea of a cure for her fragile state – to hold parties for her
gathering together the loftiest of intellects, and to strive to make
of her a source of pride and comfort in his later years – was:
simply a repetition of one of the causes. Adèle was to be turned into
a second Léopoldine. Yet this is precisely what she had done to
herself. Her diary shows that she believed in her dead sister, more
firmly even than Hugo himself, as the ‘Virgin Mary’ of the New Age,
and now she, too, had effectively drowned and was sending messages
back from another world, pursuing her sacred mission to marry the man
‘of the past’ (as she put it) to the woman ‘of the future’. (Robb
1997: 397-98)
In his account of Adèle’s madness Robb suggests that the prevalence of
madness in the Hugo family history might support R. D. Laing’s view
that schizophrenia, a divided self, is ‘not a disease at all, simply a
logical response to an irrational world’ (Robb 1997: 398). He also
reminds us that Adèle had been enacting for herself episodes from her
father’s family history, modelling her behaviour on stories she had
heard. This is another recognized strategy to counter the fear of not
really existing on her own terms, like the one of modelling herself on
her dead sister. Laing’s description of Ophelia could be a description
of Adèle at this time: ‘In her madness there is no-one there. She is
not a person. There is no integral selfhood expressed through her
actions and utterances. Incomprehensible statements are said by
nothing. She has already died. There is now only a vacuum where there
was once a person’ (Laing 1960: 179). In Ophelia the image of the
drowned daughter and the mad daughter coalesce – they become one and
the same, something that Adèle had been seeking and fearing all along.
It is striking that in his discussion of Hamlet, Hugo refers to
Ophelia only obliquely, as he observes that Hamlet’s feigned madness
induces a real madness in his mistress: ‘Il donne aux autres des
maladies qu’il n’a pas; sa folie fausse inocule à sa maîtresse une
folie vraie’ (1985a: 359). To recognise his daughters in the fractured
mind and death of Ophelia may have entailed recognition of himself in
the role of Polonius, a controlling and manipulative father who
demanded of his children ‘To thine own self be true’ and then ensured
that this was impossible for them, placing them in a classic
double-bind. Furthermore recognition of himself as Polonius would
compromise the ease with which he could identify with Hamlet himself,
and he uses the play to confront his own existential anxieties rather
than those of his daughter.
The fragility of Hugo’s sense of being, revealed through his
responses, or notable absence of response, to Shakespeare’s
characters, lends credence to Jean Cocteau’s well-known quip – ‘Victor
Hugo était un fou qui se croyait Victor Hugo’ (Cocteau 1969: 1180).
Cocteau is highlighting Hugo’s terror at the prospect of failing to
live or of living the wrong life. In light of Cocteau’s observation it
is telling that Hugo understands absolutely Hamlet’s rationale for
feigning madness: ‘Hamlet, même en pleine vie, n’est pas sûr
d’être.’[…] Hamlet fait le fou pour sa sûreté’ (1985a: 360). As he
presents Hamlet’s psyche, he argues that the reason why Hamlet’s angst
resonates so powerfully amongst his readers is that Hamlet is so
compelling an example of a person who fails to inhabit their life.
Hamlet lives in reality the horror of those dreams in which one
urgently wants to act, but is unable to do so:
Avez-vous jamais eu en dormant le cauchemar de la course ou de la
fuite, et essayé de vous hâter, et senti l’ankylose de vos genoux, la
pesanteur de vos bras, l’horreur de vos mains paralysées,
l’impossibilité du geste? Ce cauchemar, Hamlet le subit éveillé.
Hamlet n’est pas dans le lieu où est sa vie. Il a toujours l’air d’un
homme qui vous parle de l’autre bord d’un fleuve. Il vous appelle en
même temps qu’il vous questionne [. . .] Il semble que votre moi si
soit absenté et vous ait laisse là. (1985a: 362)
The image of a character calling out to you from the other bank of a
river is suggestive of representations of the dead in the classical
underworld, calling out to those on the other side who are shortly to
join them. We know that for poetic purposes Hugo was fond of
projecting himself as a dead man, claiming that his words were coming
from beyond the grave, to the point of writing a work entitled
Post-scriptum de ma vie. In his observations about Hamlet, however, it
is clear that Shakespeare is probing his most haunting insecurities,
his terror of never really existing. That Hugo recognises himself in
Hamlet’s predicament is indicated by the shift of personal pronouns
from ‘vous’ to ‘il’ back to ‘vous’ again. As Hugo articulates Hamlet’s
difficulties in inhabiting his life, he is anticipating Laing’s
existential phenomenological approach, designed to help those who
experience acute discomfort in their attempts to accommodate
themselves to ‘being-in-the-world’. Hugo says of Hamlet that: ‘Il
représente la malaise de l’âme dans la vie pas assez faite pour elle.
La chaussure qui blesse et qui empêche de marcher, il représente cela;
la chaussure, c’est le corps’ (1985a : 362). Like Hamlet, Hugo feels
that the most intensely lived world exists on the other side of the
looking glass: ‘Il est tourmenté par cette vie possible, compliquée de
réalité et de chimère, dont nous avons tous l’anxiété’ (1985a : 361).
Shakespeare’s ghost has laid his hand on his shoulder, an experience
which he vividly depicts in William Shakespeare: ‘Un homme, un mort,
une ombre, du fond du passé, à travers les siècles vous saisit’ (1985a
: 301). And while, in his view, the world of poetry belongs both to
the living and the dead,ix it is the world that lies beyond this one
that charges his imagination with its greatest powers and greatest
fears:
ces enfers et ces paradis de l’immensité éternellement émue, cet
infini, cet insondable, tout cela peut être dans un esprit, et alors
cet esprit s’appelle génie, et vous avez Eschyle, vous avez Isaïe,
vous avez Juvénal, vous avez Dante, vous avez Michel-Ange, vous avez
Shakespeare, et c’est la même chose de regarder ces âmes ou de
regarder l’Océan. (1985a : 247-248)
The greatest source of terror is this very abundance linked to genius.
For Ann Jefferson this dissolution of the self into other men lies at
the heart of Hugo’s poetic practice, and the relationships that he
forges with his literary ancestors: ‘In other words, it is by aligning
himself with a legion of other artists and poets that the poet-genius
– genius being the ultimate horizon of poetic identity for Hugo -
himself becomes Legion.’ (Jefferson 2007; 154) Hugo rather
breathlessly attempts to sum up Shakespeare’s achievements, but the
characters stream past in a seeming endlessly procession:
Othello, Roméo, Iago, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard III, Jules César,
Obéron, Puck, Ophélia, Desdemona, Juliette, Titania, les hommes, les
femmes, les sorcières, les fées, les âmes, Shakespeare est tout grand
ouvert, prenez, prenez, prenez, en voulez-vous encore? Voici Ariel.
Pavolles, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda, Caliban, en voulez-vous
encore? Voici, Jessica, Cordelia, Cressida, Portia, Brabantius,
Polonius, Horatio, Mercutio, Imogène, Pandarus de Troie, Bottom,
Thésée, Ecce Deus, c’est le poète, il s’offre, qui veut de moi? il se
donne, il se répand, il se prodigue, il ne se vide pas. Pourquoi? Il
ne peut. L’épuisement lui est impossible. Il y a en lui du sans fond.
Il se remplit et se dépense, puis recommence. Cest le panier percé du
génie. (1985a: 351)
As Hugo surveys this genius, he becomes more and more terrified that,
when the tides of genius recede, there will be no evidence of any
coherent, integrated self at the source. In the grip of this anxiety
he projects his anguish upon his imagined figure of Shakespeare: ‘On
dirait par moments que Shakespeare fait peur à Shakespeare. Il a
l’horreur de sa profondeur. Ceci est le signe des grands
intelligences’ (1985a: 352). Having found his own deepest fears
expressed through the persona of Hamlet, Hugo in turn projects onto
the figure of Shakespeare his own anguish in the face of the poetic
imagination.
Hugo’s œuvre is haunted by his horror at the idea of his own
extinction. In a bid to ensure his immortality he may have peopled the
world with characters such as Quasimodo, Javert, Valjean and the
nameless condemned man, but it remains intolerable to him to envisage
their continued existence in a world in which he cannot continue to
survive. His outrage at the disparity between his own fate and that of
his creations is expressed in Les Feuilles d’automne, where he
observes that: ‘Rien ne reste de nous, notre œuvre est un problème./
L’homme, fantôme errant, passe sans laisser même/ Son ombre sur le mur
(Hugo 1948:37). Once more this anguish is reflected in his
observations about Hamlet, where he presents Hamlet as a character
able to induce real responses within those around him, while failing
to inhabit fully an integrated self:
Hamlet. On ne sait quel effrayant être complet dans l’incomplet. Tout
pour n’être rien.x Il est prince et démagogue, sagace et extravagant,
profond et frivole, homme et neutre. […] Il donne aux autres des
maladies qu’il n’a pas; sa folie fausse inocule à sa maîtresse une
folie vraie. Il est familier avec les spectres et avec les comédiens.
Il bouffonne, la hâche d’Oreste à la main. Il parle littérature,
récite des vers, fait un feuilleton de théâtre, joue avec des os dans
un cimetière, foudroie sa mère, venge son père, et termine le
redoutable drame de la vie et de la mort par un gigantesque point
d’interrogation. (1985a:359)
He is everything, but ends up as nothing.
It is striking that, in his study of the themes underpinning Hugo’s
novels, the critic Georges Piroué probes the troubled and troubling
relationship between everything and nothing in the light of Hugo’s
terror of non-being: ‘Le mot “personne” dans son double sens serait
peut-être la meilleure fiche d’identité pour définir ce Dieu et cet
homme face à face. A savoir nullité et densité, effacement et
localisation; rien dans l’ordre du potentiel. Un balancement qui va de
la phrase “Ce n’est personne” à la phrase “C’est une personne”’
(Piroué 1964: 206). It is Piroué, also, who analyses the role of the
actor in Hugo’s novels, demonstrating how Hugo explores the role of
the actor as a way of working through his own ontological
insecurities: ‘Le mot acteur dit bien cela. Présent, il existe;
absent, plus personne’ (1964: 142).xi On this island in the middle of
the sea, struggling to retain his role of father of the nation,
tormented by his fraught relationships with his daughter and his wife,
Hugo experienced the terrors of the imagination and the attendant
fears of non-being especially acutely. He gazed into the abyss of his
poetic creation, observing that ‘La production des âmes, c’est le
secret de l’abîme’ (329) and called: ‘O forgeron du gouffre, où
es-tu?’ (329). For Piroué these struggles to harness the currents of
the imagination lay at the very heart of Hugo’s being: ‘Il affirme:
“Il faut que le songeur soit plus fort que le songe.” J’y vois la
devise de son bouclier’ (1964: 86). Hugo’s fragility in the face of
his nightmares of extinction enabled him to anticipate vividly the
discourses of ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ that shaped so much
twentieth-century thought.
A number of critics have made a persuasive case for reading Hugo’s
work from an existential viewpoint.xii From this perspective it is
striking that his reading of Shakespeare, and his presentation of his
own self as a creator, should anticipate so vividly the dilemma voiced
so graphically by the Shakespeare of Jorge Luis Borges’s parable
entitled ‘Everything and Nothing’. In an interview with Zlotchew
Borges indicated the debt he owed to Hugo:
Zlotchew: ‘You are the instrument of an archetype that is trying to
enter the material world, aren’t you?’
Borges: ‘Well, yes. That’s a good explanation. Walt Whitman said: ‘I
don’t know who I am.’ And Victor Hugo, more prettily: ‘Je suis un
homme voilé par moi-même. Dieu seul sait mon vrai nom’; ‘I am a man
hidden by myself. God alone knows my real name.’ (Zlotchew 1998: 239)
If we turn to Borges’ parable, where Shakespeare beseeches God to
bestow upon him a coherent, stable identity, we are shown a vision of
the emptiness at the heart of his acts of creation that is uncannily
like the subject of Hugo’s nightmares. Borges argues that Shakespeare
has left little clues, indicating his terror of non-being, strewn
throughout his works: ‘Richard affirms that in his person he plays the
part of many and Iago claims with curious words: ‘I am not what I am’
(Borges 1970: 285). At the heart of Borges’ Shakespeare is nothing but
a cold emptiness: ‘There was no-one in him; behind his face (which
even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and
his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a
bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no-one’ (Borges 1970: 284). The
parable closes with the terrifying image of a God who is not in
control of his creation, but who is in the grip of the same
existential anguish as Shakespeare and his creations: ‘Neither am I
anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my
Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself,
are many and no-one’ (Borges 1970: 285). The God who cries out in this
way in Borges’ parable glances back at Hugo’s plea in Promontorium
Somnii: ‘Tu rêves donc aussi, ô Toi! Pardonne-nous nos songes alors’
(1985a: 668).
It was, according to many Shakespearean scholars, on the magical
island of dreams that Shakespeare wrote his literary testament: ‘No
wonder that many generations of students and critics have seen in it (The
Tempest) a poetic testament, a farewell to the theatre, a
philosophical and artistic autobiography. Under the guise of Prospero,
Shakespeare is said to have represented himself’ (Kott 1974: 296). I
began this article by arguing that Hugo’s exile lent to his life the
trappings of a Shakespearean drama. His communion with the
extra-terrestrial spirits bestowed upon him the image of a magician,
as well as connecting him to practices leading back to antiquity, as
he himself observed: ‘L’œuvre semblant surhumaine, on a voulu y faire
intervenir l’extrahumain; dans l’antiquité le trépied, de nos jours la
table. La table n’est autre chose que le trépied revenant’ (1985a:
262). Hugo’s research into the reception of Shakespeare conjures up
yet another uncanny parallel – the fact that Shakespeare, too, was
believed to have transcribed the words that came to him from the
spirit world: ‘Forbes, dans le curieux fascicule feuilleté par
Warburton et perdu par Garrick, affirme que Shakespeare se livrait à
des pratiques de magie, que la magie était dans sa famille, et que le
peu qu’il y a de bon dans ses pièces lui était dicté par “un Alleur”,
un Esprit’ (1985a : 261). The Shakespeare represented here stands very
close to Shakespeare’s own creation of Prospero.
Kott observes that: ‘Prospero’s island, like Denmark, is a prison’
(312). It is a place where the exiled Prospero probes the emptiness at
the heart of his being, a place where he risks losing his reason: ‘The
history of mankind is madness but, in order to expose it, one has to
perform it on a desert island’ (Kott 1974: 313).xiii Hugo’s debt to
Shakespeare is not confined to Shakespeare’s importance to the
Romantic movement, or to the deepening colour that a quotation might
lend to a scene. William Shakespeare demonstrates the ways in which
Shakespeare shapes both the selves whom Hugo longs to be, and the
selves he refuses to fails to acknowledge. As one of Shakespeare’s
strongest readers, – a dimension of his work that has been masked by a
tendency to think of Hugo’s Shakespeare simply as a talisman of the
Romantic movement – Hugo acts out his own existential anxieties on a
small island between England and France. The literal island
metamorphoses into an image for the workings of his poetic
imagination.
The magical world of dreams, the shipwreck on an island, the genius
who creates reality through his books – all of these images lead to
Prospero and The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play. Kathryn Grossman
has offered a compelling account of the ways in which The Tempest
underpins Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), another book written in
exile, whose protagonist, Gilliatt, appears as a Prospero figure with
extraordinary powers. Grossman sees in: ‘the last image of Gilliatt
disappearing beneath the rising tide, a reference not only to the
drowning of Léopoldine Hugo in 1843, but also the despair of Alonso,
king of Naples, who believes that his son Ferdinand has drowned’
(Grossman 2012: 89). The Tempest haunts William Shakespeare equally,
and once more its presence is all the more palpable for remaining
undiscussed, untouched. It is in the parallels that Hugo chooses not
to draw explicitly that his greatest terrors can be located. He dreads
losing his identity as he pours himself into a myriad of fictional
beings. The image of Prospero must have offered a painful reminder of
his human frailty outside of the world of books. When Caliban advises
an attack on Prospero he urges:
Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am; nor hath not
One spirit to command; they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books. (Act 3, scene 2)
And in the final Act Prospero himself agrees to leave the island and
renounce his books. In his farewell to poetry Prospero speaks of his
weakness in a world that is not controlled by his words. As he leaves
the island of dreams, leaves the site of imagination and creativity,
Prospero walks into a future of nothingness where: ‘Every third
thought shall be my grave’ (Act 5, scene 1). In doing so he treads the
path down which Hugo will walk more than two hundred years later on
his island of exile where he wrestles with the terrible emptiness
mining his abundant creativity, and straining his divided self between
the opposing poles of everything and nothing.
Works Cited
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Borges, Jorge Luis. 1970. Labyrinths. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E.
Irby. London:
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Brombert, Victor. 1984. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Cambridge
MA.: Harvard
University Press.
Cave, Terence. 1988. Recognitions: A Study of Poetics. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Cocteau, Jean. 1969. Œuvres completes XII. Paris: Club français du
livre.
Cox, Fiona. 2002. ‘The Dawn of a Hope so Horrible: Javert and the
Absurd.’ In: J. A.
Hiddleston, ed. Victor Hugo: Romancier de l’abîme. Oxford: Legenda,
79-94.
Grossman, Kathryn. 2012. The Later Novels of Victor Hugo Oxford:
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Hugo, Victor. 1943. Les Contemplations. Paris: Gallimard.
────── 1948. Les Feuilles d’automne Blackwell : Oxford.
────── 1985a. Œuvres complètes – Critique. Paris: Robert Laffont.
────── 1985b. Œuvres complètes – Roman I. Paris: Robert Laffont.
Ionesco, Eugène. 1982. Hugoliade. Trans. Dragomir Costineanu with
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Paris: Gallimard.
Jefferson, Ann. 2007. Biography and the Question of Literature in
France. Oxford: Oxford
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Kott, Jan. 1974. Shakespeare our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw
Taborski. London and
New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Laing, R.D. 1960. The Divided Self. London: Tavistock.
Piroué, Georges. 1964. Victor Hugo ou les dessus de l’inconnu. Paris:
Denoël.
Robb, Graham. 1997. Victor Hugo. London: Picador.
Stephens, Bradley. 2011. Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre and the
Liability of Liberty. Oxford:
Legenda.
Zlotchew, Clark M. 1998. Jorge Luis Borges: An Interview. In: Jorge
Luis Borges,
Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 221-39.
i‘Chimère à la Macbeth ! les morts sont morts, ceux-là surtout’ (Hugo
1985b : 442-43).
ii ‘In the process of alignment, the many are simultaneously absorbed
into a single, compendious creative entity – the Poet – who is defined
precisely by his capacity to contain entire worlds and populations.
This is [. . .] how Shakespeare is portrayed in the emblematically
entitled ‘Le Poète’ [...] By being in continuous dialogue with other
creative minds, the poet’s own mind acquires the ability to
accommodate worlds that contain figures from all of human history.
[...] The capacious mind, which can contain ‘all in one’, is the one
that is capable of producing poetry; and it is the history of such a
mind that is narrated in Les Contemplations’ (Jefferson 2007: 154).
iii (Bloom 1973)
iv (Robb, 1997: 538 and 619)
v Lear’s grip on the nineteenth-century imagination is evidenced also,
of course, in Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835), as well as Leo
Tolstoy’s polemic attacking Shakespeare for the creation of Lear. Of
especial interest is George Orwell’s 1947 essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the
Fool’, where he argues that Tolstoy’s attack was rooted in the
uncomfortable parallels between the fate of Lear and the fate of
Tolstoy.
viSee also: ‘Il ne s’est pas mis à écrire des poésies pour écrire des
poésies, mais tout simplement parce que, dès l’âge de quatorze ans, il
voulait être “Chateaubriand ou rien”’ (Ionesco 1982: 31) .
viiTerence Cave observes of these conflicted loyalties that: ‘The
crisis of the adolescent is re-enacted in the crisis of the
middle-aged man: recognition narratives characteristically juxtapose
two moments of fictional biography in this way, sketching the
structure of a life and in many cases suggesting the precariousness of
the structure, its proneness to collapse’ (Cave 1988: 23).
viii (Robb, 1997: 397)
ix ‘Et la poésie a deux oreilles : l’une qui écoute la vie, l’autre
qui écoute la mort’ (Hugo 1985a: 322).
xMy italics.
xiOne of the places where Hugo works this out most powerfully is in Le
Dernier jour d’un condamné where the condemned man shrinks back
horrified at the prospect of his extinction, all the while conscious
of his role in the procession of those who have trod the same path,
and aware that many within the baying crowd will end up playing
exactly the same part as him.
xii Bradley Stephens looks at links between Sartre and Hugo (Stephens,
2011, passim), and establishes compelling links between Hugo and
Kierkegaard (Stephens, 2011, Chapter 2). Fiona Cox draws upon Camus to
interpret Les Misérables (Cox, 2002), Brombert likens Hugo’s Le Dernier
jour to Sartre’s La Nausée (Brombert, 1984, 29), while Graham Robb
observes the influence of Le Dernier jour on Camus’s L’Etranger and
claims that: ‘The unnamed prisoner himself is an Existentialist avant
la lettre.’ (Robb, 1997: 136-137). See also Timothy Raser’s
contribution to this special number.
xiiiSee also: ‘On the island which Shakespearean scholars took to be
Arcadia, the history of the world has once more been performed and
repeated’ (Kott 1974: 317).