The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [9]
Both Han of Iceland and Bug-Jargal drew heavily on Scott’s expansive vision and his techniques of novel writing, adopting in particular his trademark use of couleur locale—local color—to bring the depiction of the historical period alive through attention to the picturesque. The 1823 preface to Han of Iceland playfully points out the care that went into reproducing the atmosphere of the tale’s exotic location, down to the near-abusive use of the letters k, y, h, and w in the characters’ names. In Bug-Jargal the island of Santo Domingo is also replete with an exoticism produced by vivid details, from the extremes of the tropical landscape to the mysterious language (a mixture of Spanish and Creole) spoken by the rebelling slaves. In a review of Scott’s Quentin Durward that appeared in the July 1823 issue of La Muse française (a periodical Hugo helped found), Hugo openly lauded Scott’s epic and colorful conception of the novel, hailing him as the catalyst of a literary renaissance and praising him for his all-encompassing exploration of the past, for the truth behind his fiction, and for his ability to diffuse a didactic message artfully. Yet Hugo stops short of extolling Scott’s achievements as the apogee of the form; instead he uses his approbation of Scott as a spring-board to elaborate his own conception of the novel. Indeed, despite the critical failure of Han of Iceland, Hugo was in no way deterred from introducing and promoting his idea(1) of a yet non-existent form of the novel: “After the picturesque but prosaic novel of Walter Scott, there remains another novel to be created, more beautiful and still more complete. This novel is at once drama and epic, is picturesque but is also poetic, is real, yet also ideal, is true, but also grand—it will enshrine Walter Scott in Homer” (see, in “For Further Reading,” Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 5, p. 131; translation mine).
It is this “new” novel that Hugo undertook to create with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, incorporating as organizing principles many of the artistic conceptions already presented relative to theater in his preface to Cromwell, such as man’s inherent duality, the coexistence of antitheses in the universe, the tension between cyclical and progressive notions of time and history, and the essential and prophetic role of the poet-author. Hugo was also aware that this new novel belonged to a new time-both in terms of the political climate following the regime change of 1830, in which the period and the purpose of the Restoration were redefined as a constitutional monarchy came to power; and in terms of the literary climate, as literature was shifting more and more from the patronage model to a business model in which commercial concerns and the emergence of a new and more literate middle-class reading public had, for the first time, an impact on writers and their craft. Hugo’s exclusion of several chapters from the first edition of The Hunchback can be understood in this context. Although Hugo claims in the “Author’s Note Added to the Definitive Edition” (1832) that these three chapters—“Unpopularity” (book 4, chapter 6), “Abbas Beati Martini” (book 5, chapter 1), and “The One Will Kill the Other” (book 5, chapter 2)—were “lost” prior to the printing of the first edition, the truth is more likely that Hugo purposefully held them back to ensure his novel’s commercial success, fearing that the latter two, which are strong in ideological content but do not advance the narrative, might compromise the rhythm of the story. Added incentive for waiting to include these chapters was the realization that the contract with Gosselin specified royalties for only two volumes, and that Gosselin—firm in his stance and already exasperated with