Part 1
Let us begin with that which is withoutâour physical life.
Walter Pater
THREE YEARS AFTER THE DEATH of Victor Hugo in 1885, the first exhibition of his graphic works was held at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. Among the works there assembled were drawings that Hugo had produced during his stay in the Channel Islands, to which he had retreated upon his exile from France in 1851. The nearly twenty years he spent there, first in Jersey and then in Guernsey, proved unusually fertile in an artistic sense, and when he was not absorbed in intense literary work, Hugo devoted himself to the graphic arts. It was during this period that he âdiscoveredâ an artistic technique involving and exploiting an inherent degree of chance or risk.1 He began to generate forms and images by folding paper in half and blotting it with ink, or by stamping it with cutouts or objects dipped in ink. He employed the former method, for example, in Tache dâencre sur papier pliĂŠ et personnages (1853-55) (fig. 1), in which he drew out or encouraged the appearance of the faces and grotesques that he saw lurking within the aleatory shapes. Born of the interaction of imagination and technical ingenuity, and involving, as he himself put it, âall sorts of queer mixtures that eventually render more or less what I have in my eye and above all in my mind,â Hugoâs images are projections from within, their curves, dimensions, and contours roughly approximating the features of subconscious phantoms and the internal landscape they haunt.2
Most of the drawings that Hugo produced during this period are dominated by fluid, amorphous masses from which shadowy patterns, forms, and structures surface, hinting at meanings unsettling and often ominous. The French littĂŠrateur ThĂŠophile Gautier referred to them as âdark and savage fantasiesâ imbued with the âchiaroscuro effect of Goyaâ and âthe architectural terror of Piranesi.â3 A unique series of Dentelles (1855-56) contain eerie images created when Hugo dipped a piece of finely patterned lace in ink, pressed it between two leaves of paper, and then enhanced the impression with ink blots. The resultant image would depend on how much of the lace had been treated with ink and on how much pressure had been exerted when the lace was pressed onto the paper. The effect is eerie, for the technique reproduces the highly structured nature of the fabric but also (because the inked pattern is fragmentary) suggests that it is in the process of decomposition.
Of this select group of blottesques, three in particular merit close scrutiny: a carte de voeux (fig. 2)âthe earliest and best known of the Dentellesâand two of the Dentelles et spectres (frontispiece and fig. 3), so called because in them Hugo conjures up the toothy, grinning skulls that he discovered staring out at him, latent within the filaments of the design. All three pieces are linked by the organicism that Hugo perceived and emphasized within the lacy figurations. The carte de voeux (bearing the handwritten date along the bottom of the cardââ1er janvier 1856ââthat has allowed scholars to roughly date its companion pieces) is richly evocative. In it, the first letter of Hugoâs last name descends from a fretted image that hovers, wraithlike, in the muted upper half of the card: although so much more substantial than the shadowy entity out of which they materialize, the letters âH-U-G-Oâ are inextricably tied to an âancestralâ point of origin, however ephemeral or skeletal it may appear, and thus connect the artist himself, by extension, to the reticulated specters of his art.
Figure 1. Victor Hugo, Tache dâencre sur papier pliĂŠ et personnages (1853-55). Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
The lace of the Dentelles et spectres, in particular, seems to evoke the physiological qualities of the human body whose grinning skull it discloses. Hugo emphasized and highlighted the amorphousness latent in the fragile, delicately delineated lines that blur and melt in the midst of their own surcharged intricacy, the signature of the fabricâs complexity but also the signifier of its imminent dissolution. Like the human body (which in its healthy state displays a pleasing symmetry but upon its demise reverts to an amorphous chaos, undifferentiated and atomized), lace is characterized by an ornamental design often predicated upon the ordered repetition of symmetrical patternings. It is also, however, an open-work material reminiscent of a skeletal structure from which the flesh has been eaten away (âburnt-outâ or âetched,â to use the argot of the lace-makers). The lace of Hugoâs Dentelles et spectres thus functions as a medium revealing underlying structures that (when fleshed out again with haunting images drawn from Hugoâs own reservoir of sublimated horrors) metamorphose into blotted phantoms. The phantoms, turning their gaze upon the viewer, reveal a skeletal rictus with teeth (the French dentelle means âlittle toothâ) prominently displayed. Viewed in evolutionary terms, lace might be thought of as the Roderick Usher of its species: easily thrilled by external stimuli (the slightest of breezes disturbs it; too strong a light foxes it), easily torn asunder, its complexity quick with dissolution. Its defining qualityâits fragile beautyâalso poses the greatest threat to its material integrity. It is worth noting that because Hugo utilized the same wisp of lace for the dozen or so Dentelles that he generated, the demise of the fabric signaled the extinction of this particular subspecies of graphic works.4
Working in littleâthe largest of the Dentelles measures 38 by 13 centimeters, whereas the Dentelles et spectres are even smaller, measuring only 6.5 by 6 centimetersâHugo brings to light webbed networks of association and meaning in which each mesh draws in all the rest, and thus he compels his viewer to confront the skeletal figures that would otherwise lurk undetected within the larger patterns that constitute the fabric as a whole. He resurrects in this body of work his belief, voiced some twenty years earlier, that âwhat we call the ugly . . . is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation.â5 Moreover, he exploits the innately conflictive nature of his medium (lace is, after all, âfretted,â containing both ornamental patterns and cankerous spots in which it is simultaneously made and unmade) and renders explicit what is often ignored (the unstable and therefore unnerving character of a fabric prized for its attenuated beauty). In so doing, Hugo recasts his medium as âthe threadââto invoke the metaphor he introduces in the preface to Cromwell (1827), his disquisition upon âthe grotesqueâââthat frequently connects what we, following our special whim, call âdefectsâ with what we call âbeautyâââa condition synonymous, in Hugoâs view, with âoriginalityâ and âgeniusâ:
Figure 2. Victor Hugo, Carte de voeux (1856). Reproduced by courtesy of the Director and University librarian, the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, England
Figure 3. Victor Hugo, Dentelles et spectres (1855-56)
Defectsâat all events those which we call by that nameâare often the inborn, necessary, inevitable conditions of good qualities.
Scit genius, natale comes qui temperat astrum.
Who ever saw a medal without its reverse? a talent that had not some shadow with its brilliancy, some smoke with its flame? Such a blemish can be only the inseparable consequence of such beauty.6
The lace, suggesting the connection between Hugoâs own genius and his troubled unconscious, also functions as a âmediumâ in another sense of the word, for it becomes a channel through which an ominous thing intrudes upon the viewerâs field of vision. When we examine lace closely, our eyes stumble across an uneven terrain wherein accretion leads on to black holes of emptiness defined by the edges of grotesques and arabesques. A multitude of tiny abysses mushrooms in the midst of a complex design. M.R. James gave us a way to visualize this very phenomenon in âMr Humphreys and His Inheritanceâ (1911), in which, poring over a sheet of paper bearing his original plan for a maze, the eponymous character stumbles across a âhitchâ that he had not noticed before: âan ugly black spot about the size of a shilling.â As he stares into the holeââbut how should a hole be there?â he wondersâhe is unexpectedly overwhelmed by feelings of hate, then of anxiety, then of horror at the notion that âsomething might emerge from itâ and rise to the surface. And, of course, something does emerge:
Nearer and nearer it came, and it was of a blackish-grey colour with more than one dark hole. It took shape as a faceâa human faceâa burnt human face: and with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them.7
Hugoâs blottesques in generalâand his Dentelles in particularâare similarly transgressive (like the hole in Mr. Humphreysâs plan, which, as we discover, runs down through paper, table, and floor into the âinfinite depthsâ of the abyss), defined by the violation of demarcating borders: those, for example, that separate complexity of design and amorphousness, ornament and decomposition, and, finally, the visible and invisible worlds. The reality that they disclose is deeply imbued with the âsadnessâ that William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), detected âat the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.â âLet sanguine healthy-mindedness,â he wrote, âdo its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquetâ: âBack of everything is the great spectre of universal death.â8 It is precisely the âevil backgroundâ ignored by the sanguine, healthy-minded that becomes the point dâappui for Hugoâs Dentelles, which depict the moment at which the mask begins to slip, revealing the power of the unconscious (just as M.R. Jamesâs story reveals the power of the living past) and a vital source of his creative impulse. What is made suddenly manifest in the Dentelles is not the âunconquerable soulâ that seems, for the protagonist of William Ernest Henleyâs vigorously optimistic âInvictusâ (1888), to be a talisman against the looming âHorror of the shade,â but the grinning bare skeletal truth of things, the always-denied triumph of the horrific: the rictus invictus.
Because the sheer number of drawings displayed there suggested that Hugoâs acuity was as compellingly visual as it was literary, the 1888 exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit proved enormously important to students of Hugoâs work, prompting a reevalution of what the Belgian symbolist Emile Verhaeren called âlâimagination hugonienne.â9 The exhibition also served as a confirmation of a belief that many of those in attendance had long maintained: that Hugo, âpoĂŤte sacrĂŠâ (the phrase belongs to Auguste Vacquerie, Hugoâs friend and spokesperson) and âdessinateur de gĂŠnieâ (the designation of the painter Benjamin Constant), was quite simply âle MaĂŽtre.â StĂŠphane MallarmĂŠ made that role explicit in a letter in which he invited the Provençal poet ThĂŠodore Aubanel to reside as his guest in a room that he had carefully decorated with âan old lace thrown over the bed, and simply, together with the portrait of Hugo, the portraits of friends who deserve to be here.â10 The exhibition also revealed that in the Dentelles Hugo had discovered an idiom that rendered the pieces assembled there consonant with two distinct cultural momentsâthat in which they had been engendered and that in which they were finally disclosed to the gaze of the public. When he identified the âstrange originalityâ and âunlooked for effectâ of Hugoâs drawings, which had been born of âthe transformation of a blot of inkâ and which revealed images âstriking, mysterious . . . sometimes sublime, sometimes familiar, always wonderful,â Gautier spoke for viewers such as Edmond de Goncourt, who took particular note of the exposition in his Journal, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, who wrote in praise of âthese painted tempests . . . considerably quieter, however, than the hurricane of his sentencesâ that assail one with an âobsessive fear.â11 All of these aesthetes shared a way of looking at things that was predicated on the notion that the outward and the sensible always bodied forth, however imperfectly, the inward and the ineffable: âa dream of form in days of thoughtâ was how Oscar Wilde expressed this dialectic in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).12
Perhaps because he was so fervent an admirer of Hugoâs work, Gautier went to the heart of the masterâs otherworldly visions when he alluded to the curious shape that they assumed: âbehind the reality he introduces the fantastic like a shadow behind the body, and one never forgets that in this world every figure, beautiful or deformed, is followed by a black spectre like a shadowed page.â13 It was a glimpse of this same crepuscular reality that Nathaniel Hawthorne (a contemporary of Hugo who was similarly intrigued by the notion of an intermediate world of shadows in which things otherwise unseen might be made partially manifest) had hoped to afford his reader when, in a notebook entry of August 14, 1835, he recorded the germ of âa grim, weird storyâ wherein the âfigure of a gay, handsome youth, or young ladyâ might âall at once, in a natural, unconcerned way, [take] off its face like a mask, and [show] the grinning bare skeletal face beneath.â14 In Tess of the dâUrbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy presents his reader with a heroine who, moments before she disfigures the beautiful face that has brought her such woe, presses her hand âto her brow, and [feels] its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin,â and, with a prescience symptomatic of what her husband terms âthe ache of modernism,â thinks with longing of the time when âthat bone would be bareâ and when her corporeal frame would thus more truly cohere with her blighted condition.15 The jungle that looks âlike a maskâheavy like the closed door of a prison,â with its âair of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence,â whispers to Conradâs Kurtz of things âof which he had no conception,â but which he approximates by means of a series of heads on stakesâall the faces but one turned in toward his house, and that one (correspondent, presumably, with the rest) âblack, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids . . . and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of teeth, . . . smiling too, smiling continuously.â16
Similarly populated with apparently robust individuals who nevertheless turn upon the viewer a deathâs-head stare, the imaginary worlds of the symbolist artists James Ensor, FĂŠlicien Rops, and, in his late âsickâ phase, the Viennese artist Anton Romako remind us that Hugo and Hawthorne, as well as their late-nineteenth-century heirs presumptive, were not merely appropriating the image of âthe skeleton at the feastâ from a momento mori tradition that dates back to antiquity, but taking inspiration from an evolving scientific discourse that increasingly recast the physical world itself as a Melvillean pasteboard mask. Ropsâs coquettes romp at masked balls, seducing with fleshless grins (fig. 4), while the subject of Romakoâs Portrait of Isabella Reisser (1885) (fig. 5) ...