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Sequence and Theme in Victor Hugo's Les Orientales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Richard B. Grant
Richard B. Grant*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Abstract

Critics have traditionally viewed the individual poems of Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829) primarily as exercises in innovative versification and exotic local color. But if the poems are read sequentially, a significant pattern emerges. The apocalyptic cataclysm of “Le Feu du ciel” introduces the theme of sudden death and destruction that emerges as central to the entire volume. Hugo’s preoccupation with sudden violence needs to be understood in the light of his attitude toward the French Revolution. Attracted by the freedom that it brought but repelled by its excesses, Hugo could not decide during this period whether the Revolution was morally good or evil, with the result that at the end of Les Orientales he avoided taking a political stance and found refuge in art for art’s sake. It was only many years later that he was able to resolve his political doubts and complete his vision of human destiny.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 5 , October 1979 , pp. 894 - 908
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 The Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: XIX e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1971), i, 491, is typical:

A la vérité il s'y trouve moins de passions politiques et d'échos de l'actualité que de couleurs, de lumières, de chatoiements, de dentelures, de sons éclatants. Ces poèmes nous font assister à une débauche d'imagination et de couchers de soleil; il nous fait entendre un cliquetis de rythmes, de rimes ... de virtuosité verbale, où s'annonce ... la poésie artiste de Théophile Gautier, de Théodore de Banville, des Parnassiens.

For similar sentiments see Philippe Van Tieghem, Histoire de la littérature française, 3rd ed. (Paris: Fayard, 1949), p. 399, and Pau] Guth, De l'orage romantique à la Grande Guerre, Vol. il of Histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Fayard, 1967), p. 116.

2 Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Massin, 18 vols. (Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1967–70), su, 496. All further references to Hugo's work are to this edition, hereafter abbreviated OC. Hugo's concept of “pure poésie” must not be confused with the modern use of the term as developed by Valéry, Bremond, and others. Nor does Hugo adopt a meaning popular in his own time, when “pure poésie” was often used to characterize poetry communicating intense states of personal feeling. See D. J. Mossop, Pure Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), Ch. ii. The context of Hugo's remark suggests that he merely meant poetry divorced from the realities of daily life.

3 Cited by Henri Meschonnic, in “Présentation,” Les Orientales, by Victor Hugo, OC, iii, 487.

4 Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Victor Hugo,” Portraits contemporains (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1881), i, 414.

5 Cited by Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950), p. 18.

6 “Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet,” Œuvres complètes en prose d'Alfred de Musset (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 830.

7 E.g., Elliott M. Grant. The Career of Victor Hugo (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1945), pp. 47–49. See also n. 1, above.

8 One is an exotic evocation of the Spanish city of Granada, and the other three are delicate or whimsical love poems.

9 Riffaterre, “En relisant Les Orientates,” in his Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), 242–58.

10 Elizabeth Barineau, ed., Les Orientales, by Victor Hugo (Paris: Didier, 1952), i, xix. Another example of the inability of traditional critics to see any pattern in Les Orientales is Louis Guimbaud's unsupported declaration that “Fantômes,” “Extase,” and “Novembre” were included in the volume only in order to make enough pages to satisfy the publisher (Les Orientales de Victor Hugo [Amiens: Malfère, 1928], p. 106).

11 A study of the manuscript shows that Hugo himself had originally devised some kind of plan for the volume. He listed the titles of nine of the poems in a column headed by the letter g and twelve in a column headed t, for a total of twenty-one poems, approximately half the forty-one poems that make up the completed recueil. Elizabeth Barineau has suggested that these letters might stand for “turc et grec” or for “triste et gai,” but she has also admitted that neither of these interpretations can bear close scrutiny (I. xxvi). More recently. Michel Berveiller has concluded that they stand for “terrible et gracieux” (“Les ‘T’ et les ‘G’ des Orientales.”Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 68 [1968], 726–30), but this is not very different from “triste et gai.” Whatever the letters may stand for, it is probable that they reflect the same kind of dualism on which the preface of Cromwell is based, a dualism that in almost Manichean fashion divides the world into body and soul, grotesque and sublime. But the poems are not classifiable into any such easy binary system. Indeed, the poems in Hugo's two groups are often quite distinct both in subject matter and in tone. Perhaps Hugo sensed that his poetry was too complex to be contained by any simple formula. At any rate he abandoned the t and the g.

12 John Porter Houston has studied the progression of descriptive language in Les Orientales (Victor Hugo [New York: Twayne, 1974], pp. 23–33) and concludes that the “wholeness of Les Orientales as a collection … comes from stylistic tendencies running throughout the volume” (p. 24). This approach to the work is clearly of value, but it leads Houston in directions different from my own.

13 Translation from Goethe's Maximen and Reflexionen, cited by René Wellek in A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), i, 211.

14 Statesman's Manual, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. [W. G. T.] Shedd (New York: Harper, 1853), iv, 55. For the distinction between mechanic and organic see Coleridge's Lectures upon Shakespeare, i, 437. For a general presentation of the aesthetic shift taking place in the late eighteenth century, see M. F. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958).

15 In recent years the concept of allegory has been expanded by critics to include more than simple personification allegories like Le Roman de la rose and Pilgrim's Progress. See the studies by Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1959), and Angus Fletcher, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964). In both these studies the authors try to look at allegory in terms more in keeping with the dynamism of contemporary literature and criticism. It is, however, not the modern but the early romantic point of view, with its inevitable oversimplifications caused by the lack of historical perspective, that we refer to here.

16 Ruff, “Sur l'architecture des Fleurs du mal,” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 67 (1930), 51–69, 393–402; rpt. as a monograph (Paris: Colin, 1931).

17 Nash, Les Contemplations of Victor Hugo: An Allegory of the Creative Process (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976). Nash refers to “the complex superstructure within which each poem occupies a place” (p. 9).

18 In fact, French troops had not yet occupied the Acropolis, but it was widely believed in France that they had occupied all of Athens (OC, iii, 528).

19 Hugo had not quite reached the understanding, which appears in his mature work, that the only way to achieve personal salvation is to go down boldly into the underworld of the unconscious and face its dangers. This idea is articulated as early as “La Pente de la rêverie” (written in 1830) and finds its best-known example in Jean Valjean's descent into the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables. For a general study of this motif in Hugo's narratives, see Richard B. Grant, The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth, and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1968).

20 Hunt, The Epic in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Blackwell, 1941), p. 405.

21 Volney, Les Ruines; ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires, in Œuvres complètes de Volney (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1857), p. 30.

22 From Manderfeldt to the Chevalier Sparre. Cited in Auguste Viatte, Les Sources occultes du romantisme: Illuminisme, Théosophie, 1770–1820 (Paris: Champion, 1928), i, 233, n. 2.

23 Although Hugo uses the language of religion, his hostility to the Revolution at this time was more political and moral than religious in the orthodox sense. See Géraud Venzac, Les Origines religieuses de Victor Hugo (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1955).

24 OC, v, 108. These notes were written in 1830 but not published until 1833 and 1834.

25 Hugo's political about-face on the Revolution is evident in Notre-Dame de Paris, written in 1830 (pub. 1831). See esp. Bk. x, Ch. v (OC, iv, 294–313).

26 P. Albouy, “La Mythologie hugolienne,” Nouvelle Critique, 28 (1951), 109–28, and A. Ubersfeld, “Peuple et histoire dans le théâtre de Victor Hugo,” in Affrontement des classes et création littéraire. Annales Littéraires de l'Université de Besançon, No. 129 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971), pp. 29–47.

27 E.g., OC, iii, 502, 512, 521, 549, 603. Among the older studies, see Edmond Huguet, La Couleur, la lumière et l'ombre dans les métaphores de Victor Hugo (Paris: Hachette, 1905), pp. 196–225, but his only conclusion is that Hugo likes fire because it is “magnifique” and “vivant” (p. 196). See also Mysie Robertson, L'Epithète dans les œuvres lyriques de Victor Hugo publiées avant l'exil (Paris: Champion. 1927), pp. 326–29. It must be stressed that neither the older nor the more recent critics link fire imagery either to apocalypse or to any other general concept.

28 “Lazzara” is an excellent example of this traditional usage. The man has his phallic “bon fusil bronzé par la fumée”; she is “une amphore,” she dances near a lake, and “elle lève sa robe et passe les ruisseaux.”

29 Hugo's fear of the mob is clearly visible in Notre-Dame de Paris, when the rabble assaults the cathedral: “Aucun moyen de résister à cette marée ascendante de faces épouvantables” (OC, iv, 294).

30 Published in three séries, or parts, in 1859, 1877. and 1883. Before his death Hugo combined these three series into a unified whole.

31 Although this idea reaches its fullest expression in La Légende des siècles, it appears in slightly different form as early as 1846, as is indicated by the following fragment (cited by René Journet and Guy Robert, Autour des Contemplations [Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1955], p. 178):

… l'Eternel
se montra, tout trembla, tout disparut, le ciel
et la terre s'étaient enfuis devant sa face,
Et l'on ne pouvait même en retrouver la trace.

Jean Gaudon has made the shrewd observation that in this passage Hugo is even more radical than the Book of Revelation itself, because no new heaven or new earth comes to replace the old one (Le Temps de la contemplation [Paris: Flammarion, 1971], pp. 132–33).

32 In two other great poetical statements that mark the end of Hugo's career, we find this same pattern of reabsorption into the Godhead, but rather than treating humanity as a collective the poet concentrates on the salvation of the individual. In La Fin de Satan (published posthumously in 1886) God permits Satan to be redeemed, to be reborn as Lucifer and accepted once again in heaven. In Dieu (1891) it is the poet-narrator who approaches God by successive stages. But before he can pass over to a new life, he must die to the old one: “Il [Dieu] me toucha le front du doigt / Et je mourus.”