Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Liability of Liberty

Bradley Stephens

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907747014
• eBook ISBN: 9781351193016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"The arch-Romantic Victor Hugo (1802-85) and the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) are widely perceived to have little in common beyond their canonical status. However, responding to Sartre's often overlooked fascination with Hugo, Bradley Stephens cuts through generic divisions to argue that significant parallels between the two writers have been neglected. Stephens argues that both Hugo and Sartre engage with human beings in distinctly non-ontological terms, thereby anticipating postmodernist approaches to human experience. From different origins but towards similar realisations, they expose the indeterminate human condition as at once release and restriction. These writers insist that liberty is not simply a political ideal, but an existential condition which engages human endeavour as a dynamic rather than definitive mode of being. This incisive new book affirms the ongoing relevance of the two most iconic French writers of the modern period to contemporary discourse on what it means to be free."

CHAPTER 1
A Mutual Engagement

A major obstruction thus far to a dialogue between Hugo and Sartre has been that both writers have repeatedly found themselves hindered by the cultural imperative to catalogue significant historical figures like themselves. Such a will towards classification may enable us to file important names away in an anthology so as to achieve a wider understanding of both past and present. At the same time, it is also true that such an exercise inevitably utilizes readily identifiable labels, whose potential sophistication of meaning may be rendered more basic in their swift application. This has certainly been the case for the heavily loaded terms ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Existentialism’, both of which can be deceptively simple prima facie. These terms may in theory denote a distinctive set of ideas, but in practice neither outlook offers a straightforward doctrine of thinking. For Hugo and Sartre, each way of thinking, when used in conjunction with their oeuvres, is not systematic in its nature, and is hence betrayed in a certain sense by its own proper noun. Tellingly, even though they themselves made use of these terms, neither writer was fully comfortable with them, precisely because of their capacity to reduce rather than recognize the density of their work. Such diminution related to the potentially misleading minimalism of each marker, both in an ideological and historical sense. Aside from the Préface de Cromwell, which itself was intended as a rallying cry for the Romantic generation of 1820s’ France, Hugo seldom used the term without couching it in hesitations and explanations. In 1864, he notes that ‘ce mot, romantisme, a, comme tous les mots de combat, l’avantage de résumer vivement un groupe d’idées’ [this word, Romanticism, like all words used in combat, has the advantage of compellingly summing up a set of ideas], but that it is also restrictive in its ongoing association with an antagonism towards Classicism.¹ Thirty-four years earlier, he had in fact bemoaned these ‘misérables mots à querelle’ [wretched words used in dispute] and how they had diverted attention away from the work of art itself.² The hostility towards Classicism was historically specific for Hugo, since it was embedded in his mind in the first three decades of the century. Such historical specificity threatened to class his writing as possibly outmoded, failing to acknowledge its perpetual vibrancy. Similarly, Sartre recognized the advantages of the phrase ‘Existentialism’ as a header which could be attached to his work to help identify its tenets, and he was grateful that it helped in part distinguish him from a Marxist. But he still made a point later in his career of noting his unease with this branding due to its potentially crude effect, confining his work to an exclusively post-war and political moment: ‘Le mot est idiot. Ce n’est d’ailleurs pas moi, comme vous savez, qui l’ai choisi: on me l’a collé et je l’ai accepté’ [The word is idiotic. And as you know, it wasn’t even me who chose it: it got tagged on to me and I accepted it].³

History has demonstrated that they had reason to harbour these concerns, since detractors of both writers have been all too willing to dismiss their work as unreceptive to fresh and supposedly more sophisticated ways of thinking. The mammoth legacies of both Hugo and Sartre have been subject to protracted backlashes, which have tried to relegate these writers to the sidelines of contemporary discussion by presenting them as defeated and disqualified figures. The acidity of Lévi-Strauss’s and Foucault’s attacks on Sartre as a supposedly outdated thinker with little relevance to a new age is easily matched by attacks on Hugo. Consider, for example, the acerbic criticisms levelled by Émile Zola towards Hugo’s apparent ‘conception idéaliste et réglémentée de l’art’ [idealist and regimented conception of art] as a Romantic whose time had apparently passed, or a young Eugène Ionesco’s claim that ‘les poètes modernes ne dépendent de Victor Hugo que par réaction’ [modern poets only need Victor Hugo as someone to react against].⁴ The highly subjective nature of many of these attacks relates to what can be described as a form of parricide. As is often noted by literary scholars, and even theorized by Harold Bloom with regard to poetry in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), new generations of writers can find themselves in an ‘Oedipal’ moment, whereby the need to discard past models in order to mark out their own originality and promote their own relevance is deeply felt. The reputations which had brought Hugo and Sartre into the limelight in the first place had also heightened concerns amongst younger writers and thinkers about their prestige and the influence it might entail. The Godlike image of Hugo from the 1860s onwards, with his white beard and imposing physique, only compounded the unease felt by those trying to assert their work alongside his. Even as early as October 1859, and before either the publication of Les Misérables or Hugo’s triumphant return from exile, Flaubert claimed that ‘il est désespérant d’écrire après un pareil homme’ [it is dispiriting to write in the wake of such a man], ‘ce colossal poète’.⁵ A comparable discomfort can be detected a century later in response to Sartre, during a decade of deep distaste for any authoritarianism, even one of renown. When casting a glance back at the 1960s, the feminist thinker Toril Moi concludes that there was something of a cult of aggression towards Sartre, and one which dispensed with the formality of actually reading much if any of his work: ‘Since Sartre was the great father figure at that time, he obviously had to be toppled.’⁶

These acts of parricide towards Hugo and Sartre betrayed a literary and ideological agenda rather than any scholarly mode of critique. These attacks capitalized on the potentially reductive nature of categories such as ‘Romantic’ and ‘Existentialist’, and indeed the very names ‘Hugo’ and ‘Sartre’, which had quickly become brands in themselves. In both cases, the full story was rarely being told. Elements of their work were wilfully ignored or erased according to the prevalent aesthetic and philosophical ideas of the time, which attempted to turn both men’s writing into one-dimensional rather than multi-faceted oeuvres. The phenomenon of what might be termed Hugocide was undeniably persistent between 1850 and 1950. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Hugo was too socially minded for a generation disillusioned by the political failures of 1848 and engrossed by Gautier’s idea of ‘l’art pour l’art’ or art for art’s sake. In 1864, Mallarmé found ‘des choses exquises’ in Hugo’s verse, but simply hated the piece entitled ‘Le beau serviteur du vrai’ taken from the recently published William Shakespeare: ‘ce chapitre déshonorant’, whose ‘infamies immortelles’ on art serving social progress did not sit well with the father of Symbolism.⁷ Come the end of the century and the ascendancy of a so-called ‘intellectual’ social class under the Third Republic, the criticisms inverted, and Hugo was ironically seen to be too poetic in his thinking by influential writers like Zola. Sartre himself pinpointed the common denominator in these reactions, citing the grandeur of the poet’s vision of man and the faith he held in that vision, be it in a social or poetic context: ‘[Hugo] ne cessera pas d’écraser ses successeurs par la haute image de l’homme qu’il propose’, ‘dans la mesure où il possède je ne sais quelle puissance surhumaine’ [Hugo will not cease to crush his successors with the lofty image of man that he puts forward, in so far as he possesses some superhuman power].⁸ Not without irony, it would be an energetic privileging of the human subject on Sartre’s part which would provoke an equally strong reaction during the structuralist period. One of Sartre’s most renowned commentators, Christina Howells, has been persistent in making this argument:

Sartre’s own discussions became an embarrassment, coming so close in many ways to the points the philosophers of the 1960s and 1970s wished to make [...]. The solution was parricide. Only certain aspects of Sartre’s thinking were recognized, his radicalism was almost wilfully suppressed, and he was accused of that very bourgeois humanism and individualism he so profoundly and persistently attacked.⁹

The awkwardness felt by successive generations in the presence of Hugo and Sartre can perhaps best be captured by just one word: ‘Hélas!’ André Gide’s now notorious response to Hugo’s dominance of French literature in 1902 has also been satirically borrowed by at least two commentators keen to stress the hangover from the structuralist discomfort with Sartre’s thinking.¹⁰

Crucially, significant efforts have been made to move critical thinking beyond this awkwardness and the slanted interpretations it can give rise to. These readings have sought not to misinterpret or disassociate the ways in which Hugo and Sartre position their thought processes and writing practices in a state of flux between the actual and the potential. For both writers, the belief in liberty as the defining characteristic of human experience compels an unfixed and itinerant strategy for dealing with the dilemmas of human experience. Even before the renaissance in Hugo studies that began in the 1950s, major writers and thinkers had begun to understand Hugo’s supposed contradictions as a necessary and productive feature of his work. George Sand saw Hugo’s incongruity as ‘la couleur des qualités’. In 1862, a fortnight after receiving a signed first instalment of Les Misérables, she expressed her respect for Hugo’s ability to capture both the hope and despair of human history:

Que la griffe caresse ou déchire, c’est celle du lion. [...] vous nous consolez; vous nous montrez dans la suite de ces terribles réveils que vous n’êtes pas le méchant Dante qui invente l’enfer mais aussi le bon Virgile qui montre le chemin du ciel.

[Whether the claws caress or cut apart, they belong to a lion. [...] you console us, and show us in a succession of these terrible eye-openers that you are not simply the wicked Dante creating Hell but also the wise Virgil showing us the way to Heaven.]¹¹

Sand nods to Hugo’s ever-growing reputation by depicting him as the proverbial king of the literary beasts, whose claws can tear apart any illusions we may have and yet fight for us against a harsh reality. Nearly fifty years later, this argument persists when Charles Péguy exhibits the same attraction as Sand to Hugo’s doubling of the prosaic and the poetic in the name of freethinking. Péguy testified to a soaring imagination which did not lose itself to the dizzy heights of fantasy: ‘un héroïsme de sainteté qui monte de la terre mais qui n’est point préalablement déraciné de la terre; [...] qui s’en arrache mais au fond ne s’en déracine point’ [a saintly heroism which rises up from the earth but which is never uprooted [...] which draws away but ultimately never detaches itself from reality]. In short, Hugo repetitively dared to think ‘négativement et positivement’.¹²

These oscillations did not escape the attention of the German critic Walter Benjamin. In his essay on Baudelaire in the late 1930s, Benjamin welcomes the allegorical quality of Hugo’s work which he sees as the result of the poet’s ability to flit between the natural and the supernatural without assimilating the two. Above all else, Benjamin ranks Hugo as a modernist comparable to Baudelaire for his refusal to bring that interchange to any kind of resolution: ‘Hugo never succeeded in fashioning a bridge between the two. He saw no need for such a bridge.’¹³ Benjamin outlines how the absence of a harmonizing agent — a ‘bridge’ between the myths of his age and the realities of his world — reclaims Hugo not as a master of idealism but as the allegorist of revolution. As a writer, he entered ‘the marketplace’ in order to make his career, but through his emphasis on art as subjective creation and not objective actuality, he exposed the relations of production that underpin this commodity culture. In so doing, he laid bare the means of distributing ‘phantasmagoria’, the myths and images of a capitalist dreamworld that conceal their man-made artificiality with a natural gloss. The bourgeois vision of a progressive society under stable control is, for Benjamin, an ideological slumber that hypnotizes the individual into a refusal of a world that is, in reality, both unfixed and transient. Hugo’s allegorical traits enabled his reader not only to explore that dreamworld, but more importantly to awake from its constrictive ideologies. In turn, a revolution against their deterministic nature could be brought about, resisting the exploitation of individual freedom that capitalism employed. For Benjamin, Hugo acknowledged both the imaginary and the real, but refused to fuse the two into some mythic truth that could pretend to harmonize our existence.

Notwithstanding these individual commentaries, it was not until after the Second World War that a more general and widespread recognition of Hugo’s complexity began to emerge. The Nazi invasion of Europe had prompted many Westerners to find with Hugo an expression of their most intimate feelings and fears, with one biographer writing at the very end of the war that ‘[they] understood the exile of Guernsey and the besieged Parisian of 1870 as never before’.¹⁴ For the French, moreover, Hugo quickly became a valued voice in moments of national self-scrutiny as a patriarch of Republican endeavour, not least in 1945 and 1968 as Claude Roy has insisted, and indeed in the 2002 presidential elections, as Claude Millet has documented.¹⁵ The renewed historical relevance of Hugo’s work became apparent at a time when New Criticism was changing approaches to reading literature. The advocacy of close reading and the rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources began to encourage fresh impressions of Hugo’s work. Such readings wrenched 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, such as the Realist aesthetic which had never cast the Hugolian imagination in a favourable light. A previous critical impatience with Hugo’s flair 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 emphasis consequently moved from the titan behind the works to the works themsel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Notes on Translations
• Introduction
• 1 A Mutual Engagement
• 2 Bad Faith and the Dynamism of Being
• 3 Poetry, Philosophy and Narrative
• 4 Romance, Reason and Reading on the Streets of Paris
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index