Michael Riffaterre VICTOR HUGO’S POETICS A: any poetics must be, Hugo’s is inseparable from a certain theory of inspiration, since the nature of his inspiration affects 2 writer's techniques. The poet finds inspiration in what surrounds him. His concern is with the “mysteries which rise to blind him ... every morning with the sun, every evening with the stars." But Hugo goes far beyond contemplation and meditation upon the spectacle of nature: “the horizon darkens and contemplation becomes vi- sion;”? in fact, as early as the time of his first travels to see the world, when he composed Le Rhin, his exercises in imagination, and sometimes in hallucina- tion, in the face of nature foreshadow the methods of a Rimbaud. ‘The poet’s task is not only to see the world as a Baudelairean forest of sym- bols,‘ like the seer who deciphers God’s intentions in the book of the universe. He must not merely let himself be penetrated by reality, he must penetrate it, and prolong it, so to speak, in the direction sketched out by God: “the vast yearning for what could be, such is a poet’s perpetual obsession. What could be in nature, what could be in destiny.” In short, the poet must continue the work of divine creation where ascertainable truth gives place to potential truth: “what is it to look at the ocean, compared with looking at the possible!”S Ir is this rivalry with God—*the poet putting himself in the place of destiny”*—this going beyond, which engenders beauty: “in art, however lofty the truth, beauty is still higher.”” ‘This article first appeared in the American Society Legion of Honor Magazine, Vol. 32, no. 3 (1961), pp. 181-195. We would like to thank the American Society of the French Legion of Honor for granting us permission to reproduce this article, as well as the fol- lowing two articles. 1. This paper is related to research done on Hugo’s William Shakespeare, which was made possible by a generous 1960 Grant-in-Aid of the American Council of Learned Societies. I shall limit myself to the poetics outlined in William Shakespeare (1864) and in the texts of the same period from Post-Scriptum de ma Vie. This poetics corresponds to Hugo’s greater works, written during his exile 2. Post-Scriptum de ma vie, Imprimerie Nationale ed. (abbrev.: PS), p. 584 3. PS, p. 625 4. For Hugo, Creation “exudes” God, PS, p. 623. 5. PS, p. 627, 6. William Shakespeare, Impr. Nat. ed. (abbrev. WS; Notes de travail: 7. WSN, p. 380. ; Reliquat: R),p. 121, The Romanic Review Volume 93 Numbers 1-2 © The Trustees of Columbia University152 MICHAEL RIFFATERRE Prisoner as he is within the boundaries of reality, the poet can find his es- cape toward the possible only through supernaturalism, “the part of nature that is beyond our senses.”* To reach it the poet must use observation, imagina- tion and intuition.’ Here is a sensualistic theory of knowledge: nature is the ob- ject of imagination, imagination being the interiorization of the world perceived by the senses; mankind is the object of observation, but mankind is still nature, observed in man; “supernaturalism” is the object of intuition. Intuition, or con- jecture, makes the poet kin to the scientist," with the difference that the latter’s work remains to be perfected, whereas a poem is a final and perfect form." Con- jecture is, we might say, an extrapolation from the given of the senses, or, again, a conception of possible infinity inferred from a finite given: “nature mirrored by the soul is more abysmal than when seen directly ... This reflection ... is an augmentation of reality.” Infinity is the only reality, be it called God or moral ideal or absolute,!® or simply consciousness of what is beyond man, a con- sciousness which in itself makes him great" and is the source of all poetry. Any esthetics which limits Beauty by certain definitions or by the applica- tion of certain rules negates infinity and sterilizes imagination. This is the case with French classicism. Even irregularity can be a part of true poetry; in one of his drafts, under the title The Infinite in Art, Hugo sketches a theory of the baroque: “What makes the charm or irregularity? apparently irregularity is unfinishedness, and in unfinishedness there is infinity.” Even ugliness or evil can be part of poetry: “What we calll evil we should call good if we could see the beginning and the end of it. Evil, whether in nature or in destiny, is a thing mysteriously begun by God which stretches beyond us into the invisible ... Some apparent ugliness ... is really part of a supreme beauty.”!> The poet, therefore, eager to contemplate the absolute, must cast away any preconceived esthetics. He must be sure not to let literary tradition interpose itself between him and nature. Not only must he not restrict his inspiration to the beaten path, he has to be more than original. For an original poet may still follow guides and models; in order to create a beauty that can be called his own, it is then sufficient if he has personal traits of style: thus Virgil imitating Homer. Such beauty, however, quickly fades from imitation to imitation, and Hugo often compares “original” poets to moons more and more pallidly re- flecting other moons of an invisible sun (here we recognize a personal version 8. PS, p. 612; cf WSN, p. 385. 9. PS, pp. 611, 619-20. 10. PS, pp. 601, 622. 11. WS, pp. 56-57. 12. PS, p. 612. 13. PS, pp. 618, 625, 623. 14. PS, p. 485. 15. WSN, p. 385.Victor Huco’s Pogrics 153 of a criticism frequently levelled at classicism by the Romantics"*). The true mark of poetic genius is thus not originality but “primitiveness.” The word has no chronological connotation: “one can be primitive in any epoch: who- ever draws direct inspiration from man is primitive.”"” In Amphitryon Moliére is only original, in the Misanthrope he is primitive. The poet copies from life, and his art does not lie in stylistic devices but in idées-méres, that is, in ar- chetypes: “What is the use of copying books, copying poets, copying things already done, when you are rich with the enormous richness of the possible, when all the imaginable is yours, when you have before you, at your disposal, the whole dark chaos of types.” Let us note the word: the poet does not grope about at random but knows how to select characters representative of funda- mental traits of the human mind. Such characters Hugo calls prototypes or “Adams,” each of them representing a whole psychological family.!” Nowhere more clearly than in this theory of types do we see what he means when he says that the poet continues the work of God: “the types are cases foreseen by God; genius actualizes them.”?° The type lives more intensely than real people do; it is not an abstraction but the union of converging psychological forces all the more powerful be- cause concentrated within the narrow channel of a single passion; the type is a life, but a life in the form of a monomania.”! Don Juan, for example, epito- mizes, in a figure always and everywhere valid, not only the seducer in his var- ious forms but one kind of appetite, just as Macbeth symbolizes another sort of appetite, that of men who are nothing but a blind, insatiable hunger: the conquerors, the ambitious.2” These types are powerful poetically because they embody anxieties and de- sires which man has felt and repressed since his remote beginnings. All these types have the same “point of departure, since they all have the same human heart.”25 By comparing the actualizations of the same types in various cultures, by comparing Priam and Lear, for instance, Hugo easily traces their enduring quality to deep psychological roots: the types are the “points of intersection of creative forces,” they all have something of the “same subterranean before- 16. WSN, pp. 363-4; WSR, pp. 338-9. 17, WSN, p. 375. 18. WSR, p. 291. 19, WS, p. 123. 20. WS, p. 124. 21. WS, p. 123. 22. WS, p. 220. 23. WSN, pp. 375-6. 24, WSN, p. 383.154 Micuact RIFFATERRE life shadowiness.”25 Never perhaps until C.G. Jung do we find the concept of archetypes of the collective unconscious so clearly formulated. This underlines how important it is for the poet to be docile to the sugges- tions of his unconscious, to what Hugo calls the “unknown collaboration.” Communication with the mind’s depths is indeed a true mark of genius: “what pedants call caprice, what fools call folly, what the ignorant call hallucination ... this strange openness to the breath of the unknown is necessary to the deeper life of art.2” It demands of the poet good faith, a kind of naive ac- ceptance of his mind’s phantasms: Shakespeare believes in them, Moliére does not; therefore the spectre of Elsinore imposes itself upon the reader, whereas the animated statue of the Commandeur in Don Juan looks only like what it is, a theatrical machine.** Communication with the depths is achieved through meditation, for a time in Hugo’s case through turning tables, but above all through night and-day dreams (among his papers he left a number of “verses written while sleeping”). More than any other Romantic, more than Charles Nodier, the man who convinced him that the visions of sleep are not errors but knowledge, Hugo believes that “the phenomena of sleep put the invisible part of man in communication with the invisible part of nature.”?? He un- derscores the fact that dreams permit the poet to perceive what conscious thought represses: “what we unjustly thrust out of our thoughts takes refuge in dreams.”* In fact, Hugo does not recoil from conclusions such as we might find in modern psychoanalytical writings: John wrote the Apocalypse because he was the “old virgin,” and “love, unsatisfied and uncontented, changes at the end of life into a sinister disgorging of chimeras.”** The respect the poet must feel for the “unknown collaboration” and the at- tention he turns to whatever in nature escapes our senses, sets up what we call a “binary” poetics. That is, everything is conceived and expressed in terms of contrasts, in pairs, To begin with, the intellectual process of the creative ge- nius is twofold: he uses logic, on the one hand, to apprehend whatever in this world is accessible to reason or at any rate to sensory perception, and on the other hand “caprice,” which is to say fantasy, imagination.22 And reality is characterized by a fundamental duality, by the coexistence of contraries: the tritest of these are the facile oppositions which seem to delight God, a naive author, though they would incur the scorn of critics—night and day, moun- 25. WS, p. 124. 26. WS, p. 45. 27. WSR, p. 309. 28. PS, pp. 620-1. 29. WSR, p. 303. 30. PS, p. 618. 31. WS, p. 33. hia ee teaVictor Huco’s Portics 155 tain and valley. This universal duality is the physical confirmation of a Manicheism always present in Hugo’s mind. Duality is above all the point in common between art and nature: “the ubiquitous antimony ... the ego and the non-ego, the objective and subjective ... such is the dark burning conflict, the ceaseless ebb and flow ... the stupendous apparent antagonism from which a Rembrandt draws his chiaroscuro.”*? This is to say that the artist has at his disposal the same devices as God: the “perpetual confrontation between con- traries is the essence of life, in poetry as in Creation.” Antithesis is at the same time an organizing principle of the cosmos and the basic figure of rhetoric— a special case of inseparability of form and content, on which more later. An- tithesis is not a facile device of rhetorical amplification, as the adversaries of Romanticism have contended, but the graphic symbol of the great metaphys- ical dichotomy. The poet concentrates on this dichtomy, since it is his task to oppose “the invisible truth to superficial reality,” since he has two ears for listening to life and to death,’ since poetry expresses man and man is “a dou- ble being, the boundary of two worlds. On this side of him is physical matter; beyond him, mystery ... The luminous world is the one we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only the night.” Hugo, is a passage on St. Paul—where, in- cidentally, God's grace is defined in the same terms as is poetic inspiration else- where—attributes to the apostle the dual spiritual life he himself experienced: “half his thought is on earth, and half in the Unknown, and you would say at times that verse responds to verse through the dark wall of the sepulchre.”2” Of course this “binary” poetic approach is not limited to the expression of op- position between visible and invisible; it gives structure to the whole of Hugo’s inspiration; he constantly alternates between power and grace, between vi- sionary anguish and the fantasy best exemplified by the Chansons des Rues et des Bois; his favorite symbols, such as the image of the two slopes of a moun- tain which he uses so often, emphasize the faculty which sets the poet apart: that of seeing at the same time the surface of things and their depths. Neither the role of the unseen collaboration nor any structural identity be- tween ature and art implies that the poet does no more than transcribe an inspiration which is beyond his control. On the contrary, only will power can create a masterpiece:** “the will to beauty combined with the will to truth ... This twofold intuition of the ideal civilizes man by making God manifest, and amends the relative by confronting it with the absolute.”* True, the content 33. WS, p. 113. 34. PS, p. 510, 35. WS, p. 85. 36. PS, p. 568, 37. WS, p. 36. 38. WS, p, $9, 338, 39. WSR, p. 263.156 Micart RIFFATERRE of a poem must be such that “one can never contemplate it without discover- ing new horizons filled with the mysterious radiance of infinity.” Yet form de- mands an “austere precision,” for if the ideal must have some indefiniteness, Beauty “needs contours.”*” The poet of genius turns off his furor poeticus whenever he feels like it. The poet is enslaved only by his own idea; it is no sooner conceived than it focuses the entire force of his will: “however dis- turbing or formidable it may be, the poet follows up his idea to the bitter end, without pity for his fellow man.”*! The poet must keep control of the uncon- scious forces that drive him: Shakespeare’s chief merit, for instance, is that he is “a dreamer stronger than his dream;”*? Hugo often insists that madness is the abyss awaiting many thinkers who seck to draw knowledge from the oneiric world. Of the three physiological centers which condition literary cre- ativity—brain, heart and belly—the last is the treacherous one: it degrades; this is why sensual poetry offers a spectrum ranging all the way from the Song of Songs to off-color doggerel: “Volupté remplace Volonté.”*? Thus will- cteated art is perforce moral art, poetry being conscience. Hence poetic crea~ tion is a kind of heroism, or at least an act of missionary spirit, a pre-Sartrian engagement: “Destiny, especially other people’s, must not be taken lightly ... Any meditation of a sane, straight mind leads to a dim awakening of respon- sibility. To live is to be engaged.” In the concrete realization of the work of art, this self-mastery is exercised in two directions; first, it maintains immediate contact between the deep sources of poetry and their stylistic expression—an expression which must exert maximal effect on the reader. Second, it aims at creating a reality more real than that surrounding us, by making form more perfectly adequate to thought—the poet has within him a reflector, observation, and a condenser, emotion.” An effective image, a good symbol, for instance, must have outward justi- fication, appropriateness, naturainess and similitude; it is natural that Don Quixote, being a knight, should ride a horse, and despite Sancho’s promotion to squirehood, his jackass mount reminds us that he is just a peasant after all. But in the same way that the phenomena of God’s Creations conceal His in- tention, the poet’s symbols serve as a mere facade for the deeper world of his poetic intention. Cervantes invented Sanchos as the incarnation of common sense: he “sets him astride Ignorance, and ... to Heroism he gives Fatigue as a mount. Thus he draws ... the two profiles of Man and parodies them, spar- 40. WSR, p. 3095 cf PS, p. 560. 41, WS, p. 144. 42. WSN, p. 356. 43. WS, p. 39. 44, WSR, p. 260. 45. WS, p. 108.Vicror Huco’s Porrics 157 ing the sublime as little as he spares the grotesque ... Enthusiasm takes the field, and Irony falls into step.”*" The shape of everything, animate and inan- imate, has a meaning which the poer’s intuition makes clear;‘” his own sym- bols are as rigorously shaped: in Diew, for instance, where each dogma is sym- bolized by a different winged creature, infamous birds represent the lowest grade in the spiritual ascension, and the griffin, a triple animal, symbolizes Christianity, etc. Thus form is inseparable from idea. This is true also of prosody, because there must be harmony between feelings expressed and the metre chosen: so that “drama more closely resembles nature: and reflects changes in emotional stress, the poet passes from one rhythm to another: “hence the use of the anapest for the chorus, of the iamb for dialogue and the troche for passion;”** a spondaic line of Lucretius, for example, because of its long syllables, looks almost monstrous and full of shadow.” But these correspondences are still su- perficial: the true value of rhythm lies in the fact that it is the form the divine order of the universe takes in poetry. This order Hugo, following the esoteric ters of his time, calls Number: “number reveals itself to art through rhythm, which is the heartbeat of infinity.” It is difficult not to balk at such formulas. It is one thing to say that poetry depends on number just as science does; it is something else to state blandly that number governs metre and “the irides- cence of imagination,” differential calculus and poetic archetypes. The temp- tation is great to suspect that Hugo is here indulging in mere verbalism. Noth- ing of the sort: we must not take him too literally. The use of the word nombre is not excessive; it is purely incantatory. There are words that make him dizzy, that are like chinks in the wall of reality. Hugo counts on such words to awaken his readers’ metaphysical anxiety, to revive in our reasonable world the idea of the Unknown: this method will be taken up again by the Surreal- ists, But the word nombre, for all its poetic haze, has precise meaning, which is order. Hugo has a definition for it: “order is the full development of every man’s faculties in accordance with the diameter Nature and Providence have given him.”5* It follows for Hugo that there is an ideal form for the expression of any idea, a form that is consequently inseparable from the idea: “it is a mistake to be- lieve that an idea can be rendered in several different ways ... An idea can be expressed only one way.” This ideal was to be Flaubert’s as well, and it seems to contradict the endless synonymic amplifications so typical of Hugo’s own wi 46. WS, p. 42. 47. PS, p. 624. 48. WS, p. 70. 49, WS, p. 29. 50. WS, p. 55. 51. WS, p. 55; PS, p. $31.158 Micuaet RiFFATERRE style, Actually he is not groping about for the right phrase, he is exercising a faculty which he sees as the “very essence of poetry,” the faculty of “casting light upon all kindred ideas encircling a central idea.” On the other hand, “the idea without the word would be an abstraction; the word without the idea would be noise.” Their fusion is no superimposi- tion but an identification, and to separate the two elements would be to vivi- sect them.* In the three stages of poetic genesis, as Hugo sees it—the act of imagination, which conceives, the act of creation, which organizes, and the act of production, which weaves the initial concept into the cloth of the poem—there is nowhere a simple adding of form to content, but rather an ex- tetiorization of content, which makes it visible and palpable. This stamps the idea with the seal of the poet, with what Hugo calls his idiosyncrasy, that is to say his style.** It is in the word, the smallest component of style, that this idiosyncrasy is most manifest: “genius ... thinks the word simultaneously with the idea. Hence these deeper meanings inherent in the word.”55 Hugo recognized the impor- tance of verbal obsessions, both as signs enabling the reader to identify a style, and as indices of the writer's deeper preoccupations; these signs are the more striking because they reflect streams of thought which underlie the more su- perficial meaning: they are a “sudden blossoming-out of the unknown.”5 More generally, the power of words arises from the discrepancy between the immensity of man’s inner wold and the paucity of the lexicon: to each single word corresponds a wealth of meanings: “sometimes in order to find a sub- stitute for a word you will need a whole sentence.” The great writer reveals more of a word’s inner meaning than language ordinarily does.’” The only shoals to be avoided are inappropriate and improper words, and also those which have been worn out by too great success (this includes some of Hugo’s own early neologisms). Because of the part played by words in style, the latter is rigidly conditioned by language. This does not detract from the author’s originality, since much of it lies in the effects he is able to draw from semantic contrasts and exten- sions of meaning: the appropriateness of a word in context is often its impro- priety in language; this makes a deeper impression on the reader, since it vio- lates his habits.** Thus form is not only the aptest expression of content, it is also built in such a unique and characteristic fashion that permanence is guar- 52. PS, p. 484. 53. PS, pp. 481, 485, 510, 512. 54. WS, pp. 338-9; PS, pp. 481, 484. 55. PS, p. 484. 56. WSR, p. 340. 57. WSR, pp. 348-9. 58. WS, p. 339.Victor Huco’s Portics 159 anteed which will resist any distorting substitution and will insure the same effects on successive generations of readers. This is also the purpose of the for- mal restrictions of verse:°° we should not look upon these restrictions as added obstacles or artificial constraints; like syntax or vocabulary, they are natural and necessary linguistic forms: rhyme after all is as natural in poetic style as the echo is in nature. The structure of the language does orient the develop- ment of poetry: Hugo paints a vivid picture of the literary paralysis which fol- lows upon the phonetic decay of a language.‘! According to climate, a lan- guage has a predominance of vowels or consonants, and therefore different criteria of poetic beauty: Northern, consonantic languages emphasize har- mony; Southern, vocalic languages emphasize melody. A writer chooses his words with a view to effects in a context, not with the confines of a vocabulary previously weeded, as the classicists would have it: what would you think of a botanical handbook which excluded certain plants! The appropriateness of any word is entirely dependent upon the con- text: when Beaumarchais calls his Suzanne Suzon or Suzette, the three possi- bilities offered by the language, because of their opposition in the text of the Mariage de Figaro, have a comparative value found nowhere else, expressing as they do three different psychological aspects of the character. The fundamental criterion of Hugo’s poetics is thus the prevailing impor- tance of the work as an organic whole over any intrinsic value its components might have in other contexts. The poem is a closed world, which dictates its own standards and yardsticks; it is an “entity like nature.”® Little matter if it shocks tastes for which it was not created. What counts is its harmony in re- lation to itself. The savage story of Iphigenia, for instance, is beauty and verisimilitude in the wide world of Aeschylus’ kings of prey; the same story becomes revolting when garbed in the polite conventions of Racine.®* Thanks to this concept of the poetic work as an autonomous body, what would be normally considered a defect becomes in this singular whole a stress, an ac- cent; the only real defect is a lacuna in the ensemble.“ It all comes back to “giving each component the amount of space it demands.”* True, these quan- , p. 514, 60. WSR, p. 340. 1. WSR, p. 351. 62. PS, pp. Sil-2. 63. WS, p. 168. 64, PS, pp. 523-4. 65. WS, p. 153. 66. WSR, p. 344, 57. WS, p. 154; WSR, pp. 289-90. 68. WS, p. 117.160 Micuaet RIFkATERRE tities, if translated from a work of genius into any other context might seem extreme or excessive.©? But it is precisely this excessiveness, this quid divinum, as Hugo calls it, that sublimizes reality. Virgil may be accused of servile flat- tering when he sets Augustus among the constellations. This is moral weak- ness in the eyes of men. But the reader, bewitched by style, steps into the world of poetry, leaving behind all moral considerations belonging to the ordinary world: “il entre en vision, le prodigieux ciel s’ouvre au-dessus de lui.””° Columbia University 69. WS, p. 126. 70. PS, pp. 483, 481.Copyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing