The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [10]
Although such reasoning and negotiations may seem commonplace in today’s world, Hugo’s business savvy helped him avoid the financial and artistic dependence on the new reading public that many of his contemporaries faced. Indeed, the novel proved its worth in the 1830s with a number of successes-among them Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin, 1831)—increasingly validating the capacities of the form. As realism gradually emerged as the aesthetic and literary movement that would transform the novel into the principal literary genre, and as the serial publication of novels in newspapers spurred on the industrialization of literature, the novelist of the nineteenth century—well known or not-had to live by his or (much less often) her pen, and with this reality often came practical and artistic constraints. In Hugo’s case, however, his careful management of the publication and republication of not only The Hunchback of Notre Dame but also his theatrical works and poetry resulted in a financial independence that ultimately allowed him to avoid the same kinds of concerns about content and style; he could write what he wanted, when he wanted. With regard to his fiction, which subsequently included Les Misérables (1862), Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea, 1866), L‘Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs, 1869), and Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-three, 1874), this freedom gave Hugo the space he needed to continue pursuing the concept of the novel outlined in his review of Quentin Durward, one in which core, universal truths are transmitted through an expansive exploration of the human condition.
While the majority of French novelists of the nineteenth century who are still read and studied today—Stendhal, Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola—focused their gaze inward on the workings of contemporary society and the ways the political turmoil of their recent past affected their present and the social behavior that defined it, and while the most celebrated French historical novelists, such as Alexandre Dumas—author of Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844) and Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844)—looked to the distant past as a way of distracting from the uncertainties of the here and now, Hugo wrote during the course of his career a decidedly different kind of novel. Hugo’s novel viewed history—from long-ago medieval France in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to the more recent post-Revolutionary and Restoration France in Les Misérables and The Toilers of the Sea, to the seemingly immaterial history of seventeenth-century England in The Man Who Laughs, to the haunting history of Revolutionary France in Ninety-three—as neither an explanation for the present nor an escape from it, but rather as a catalyst for grap pling with ideological and philosophical questions of the highest order relative to the passage of time itself and the nature of progress. Each of Hugo’s novels tells and retells the same story of universal man and his struggles; in this larger context we can understand Hugo’s surprising assertion, in an 1868 letter, that although he considered the historical novel a very good genre because Walter Scott had distinguished himself with it, he had “never written ... a historical novel” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 14, p. 1;254; translation mine). If, strictly speaking and by modern definition this declaration rings false, since all of Hugo’s novels do meet the criteria to qualify as “historical,” it is more significant that this disavowal—which was made while Hugo was in self-imposed exile in protest of the unfolding history of the Second Empire and its emperor, Napoleon III—underscores the complex understanding of and relationship to history that characterizes