The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [265]
24 (p. 483) tragic end: he married: This ironic commentary on Phoebus’s “fate” speaks to the moral emptiness, criminal indifference, and bourgeois mediocrity that define him. In opposition to the “marriage” that is the subject of the novel’s concluding chapter, this loveless union, through which Phoebus will link his name to Fleur-de-Lys’s fortune, cements Phoebus’s place and role in the social world depicted in the novel.
25 (p. 485) crumbled into dust: This “erasure” of all traces of Quasimodo—as his skeleton fantastically disintegrates into dust—brings the novel full circle back to the “absent” word anankè on which the story is “based.”
26 (p. 486) are not new: The chapters added to this eighth edition in 1832 are: “Unpopularity” (book 4, chapter 6), “Abbas Beati Martini” (book 5, chapter 1 ), and “The One Will Kill the Other” (book 5, chapter 2).
27 (p. 487) creation ... of the poet: In all of Hugo’s fiction, he cultivates the “other readers” to whom he refers in this paragraph—those who look beyond the plot to uncover the ideological content of the work. In a proposed dedication to The Man Who Laughs (1869), Hugo christens this reader le lecteur pensif (“the thoughtful reader”) and promises greater rewards to any reader who seeks to apprehend the meaning of the multiple and sometimes contradictory layers of his writing.
28 (p. 489) clumsy architecture ... Renaissance: This theme will be further amplified in Hugo’s “Guerre aux démolisseurs” (“War on Those Who Demolish”), published in 1834 in Litterature et philosophie mêlées (“Literature and Philosophy Mingled”), which builds upon his 1825 musings in “Sur la destruction des monuments en France” (“On the Destruction of Monuments in France”), a piece on the unnecessary demolition of historical monuments.
Inspired by The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame has been brought to the screen an extraordinary number of times, including two silents titled Esmeralda (1905 and 1922), Jean Delannoy’s 1957 version starring Anthony Quinn, a BBC TV play (1977), a 1982 made-for-television production starring Anthony Hopkins as Quasimodo and Derek Jacobi as Claude Frollo, and another television adaptation simply titled The Hunchback (1997), starring Mandy Patinkin and Salma Hayek.
The first full-screen production of Hugo’s classic was the silent 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo. Director Wallace Worsley faithfully re-creates medieval Paris, in particular the majestic cathedral of Notre Dame. But the one-eyed Chaney, wearing a hairy body suit, a leather harness to prevent him from standing upright, and a seventy-pound hump on his back, is the film’s most memorable spectacle, giving a sensitive performance as the grotesque, misshapen bell ringer. Chaney’s portrayal of the deaf, hideous, but ultimately kind “monster” predicts the pathos of later films centered around an outsider—especially those in the golden age of horror such as Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931). The scene of Quasimodo’s public flogging, followed by Esmeralda’s (Patsy Ruth Miller) offering him water to drink, is particularly moving.
The next exemplary film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was William Dieterle’s lavish, all-star adaptation of 1939. Shot on location in Paris, with large-scale fifteenth-century sets, the film features grand camera sweeps of Notre Dame Cathedral and captures the swarming crowds and the ominous public square, perfectly setting the medieval stage on which Church and State grapple for dominance.
In the role of Quasimodo is a terrifically made-up and stooped Charles Laughton, who also appeared in another Hugo film adaptation, Les Misérables (1935). The grotesque Laughton cuts a stunning figure as he peers out from the