AJFS 55.2 2018 DOI:10.3828/AJFS.2018.

13

Unspeakable Monsters: Grotesque

Bodies and Discourse in Victor
Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and
L’Homme qui rit
JADE PATTERSON

Abstract
This article shows how the Hugolian monster’s speech metamorphoses into a
new deformed discourse. The hybrid and excessive physical forms of two key
monsters – Quasimodo of Notre-Dame de Paris and Gwynplaine of L’Homme qui
rit  –  become mirrored in the contours of their language. The text, in turn, transforms
into a foire-like spectacle where grotesque discourse is the headline performer. This
revolution of literary form invites discussion of the socio-political dimensions of
the works. Throwing a spotlight on reader-spectators as well as text-spectacle, this
study interrogates both the nineteenth-century desire for deformity and our own
contemporary thirst for the monstrous. 

When nineteenth-century physically deformed “monsters” are gazed upon, it is

with a medusa’s eyes. Exhibited in the foire and drawing spectators with magnetic
force to the famous Dupuytren “musée des monstres”,1 monsters are the object of
an immobilising gaze which seeks to render them static statues, commodities to be
viewed. They are, in some sense, the ultimate manifestation of the old adage; they
should be “seen and not heard”.2 The importance of the monster’s visual aspect also
surfaces in the literary sphere: Victor Hugo presents the reader with Quasimodo’s
catalogue of deformities in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), and the grotesque artificial
smile carved into Gwynplaine’s face in L’Homme qui rit (1869). Yet in a subversive
departure from the purely visual element demanded by the foire, Hugo fills his
monsters with words. What are the implications of this transition from “speaking
of monsters” to “speaking monsters”? Through the case studies of the inarticulate

1
  Patrice Josset, “Le musée Dupuytren, Quel avenir pour un « musée des monstres? »”, in
Anna Caiozzo and Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini (eds), Monstre et imaginaire social: approches
historiques (Paris: Créaphis, 2008), pp. 295–320.
2
 Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century
Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 45.
 Unspeakable Monsters  123

Quasimodo and the eloquent “spokesmonster” Gwynplaine, this article excavates

the chameleon effect which occurs between the monster’s grotesque body and its
words. After exploring how Hugo stitches together grotesque bodies on the page, I
draw on Saussurean semiology to examine how the monster’s words transform into
a new deformed discourse. Throwing a spotlight on these speaking monsters not
only illuminates the socio-political dimensions of Hugo’s works, but also illustrates
how the monsters’ subversive syllables can reshape and revolutionise literary form.

What makes a monster?

Before examining the contours of the monster’s words, it is important to identify the
shape of the monster itself. Yet defining the monster is no mean feat, as an extensive
body of criticism reveals; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory (1996), Stephen
Asma’s On Monsters (2009) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters
and the Monstrous (2012) all attempt the Herculean task of wrestling the monster
into a definition. Part of this difficulty stems from the dramatic evolution of the
term “monster”. Etymologically rooted in monere, to warn, and monstrare, to
show, in the medieval context physically deformed monsters were manifestations
of “la gloire de Dieu” or “son ire”.3 Whereas from the Renaissance, the physically
deformed “monster” was seen as a product of the maternal imagination imprinting
upon the foetus in the womb,4 in the eighteenth century the “moral monster” took
centre stage as the monster became defined by its actions. In addition to evolving
over time from divine portents to depraved humans, monsters can also assume
different shapes in the same context, emerging in diverse scientific, political and
literary spheres. The nineteenth century, for instance, in addition to forming the
stage for multiple political insurgences that marked “monstrous” departures from
the norm,5 saw the birth of “teratogenesis” in the scientific sphere – the goal of
which was “to study the genesis of deformities by actually producing monstrosities
in the laboratory”.6
As the monster drifts between definitions and assumes different shapes, a
similarly “in-between” framework must be used to identify it. Monsters should
be identified by a series of recurring characteristics which can apply to different
spheres of their existence. This framework correlates with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
theory of family resemblance as outlined in Philosophical Investigations (1953)
where categories are connected by a series of overlapping features rather than one

3
  Ambroise Paré, Des monstres et prodiges (Paris: L’œil d’or, 2003) [1573], p. 86.
4
  Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993).
5
 Amy J. Ransom illustrates how “overwhelming change” in “social phenomena […]
influenced a growing perception that the Revolution had gone too far in operating change”, The
Feminine as Fantastic in the Conte fantastique: Visions of the Other (New York: Peter Lang,
1995), p. 90.
6
 Huet, Monstrous Imagination, pp. 111–112.
124  Jade Patterson

characteristic common to all. To identify these characteristics, it is useful to turn

to the theory of the grotesque: a scaffolding which is central to Hugo’s creation
of monsters. In his Préface de Cromwell (1827), Hugo promotes “la combinaison
[…] de deux types, le sublime et le grotesque […] l’harmonie des contraires”.7
This statement contains kernels of the monster’s recurring traits: hybridity – the
fusion of disparate elements – and excess. These are the essential features of the
grotesque body; Mikhail Bakhtin notes in Rabelais and his World (1965) that
“[e]xaggeration, hyperbolism, excessiveness are generally considered as
fundamental attributes of the grotesque style”, whereas “half human, half animal”
hybrids have a “distinctive grotesque character”.8 Hybridity and excess can span the
monster’s physical appearance or moral character, and play a crucial role in critical
literature on monsters. Evanghélia Stead alludes to the monster’s “forme hybride”,9
whereas Christopher Lloyd suggests that monsters embody “the fascination of the
excessive”.10 These traits also apply to the “attraction-repulsion”11 reaction the
monster inspires, enabling the monster to be identified by both its image and its
reception.
The two monsters analysed here – Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris and
Gwynplaine of L’Homme qui rit – are both physically deformed monsters from
nineteenth-century French Hugolian literary texts. Their selection is anchored
both in consideration of the nineteenth-century notion of monstrosity as physical
deformity and in the socio-cultural and literary context of nineteenth-century
France. Both of these dimensions are intertwined; analysing physically deformed
monsters facilitates an exploration of the monster as a visible, commercialised
spectacle, calling into question the moral deformity of nineteenth-century society,
which exhibited or demanded physically monstrous beings both in the foire and in
the novel. Although much has been written on the “moral monster” – monstrosity
defined by one’s actions – this is not the focus of this article. Laying the monster’s
grotesque physical form out for analysis enables us to dissect how the same
narrative techniques are used to render the form of its speech grotesque.
The examples of Quasimodo and Gwynplaine also facilitate a detailed
discussion of the physically deformed monster’s relationship to language. Several

7
  Victor Hugo, La Préface de Cromwell, Maurice Anatole Souriau (ed.) (Geneva: Slatkine,
1973) [1827], p. 223.
8
  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1968) [1965], p. 345.
9
  Evanghélia Stead, Le Monstre, le singe et le fœtus: tératogonie et Décadence dans l’Europe
fin-de-siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2004), p. 70.
10
  Christopher Lloyd, J.-K. Huysmans and the Fin-de-siècle Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1990), p. 83.
11
  Anne-Laurent Milcent (ed.), L’inquiétante étrangeté des monstres: Monstruosité, altérite et
identité dans la littérature française XIXe – XXe siècle (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon,
2013), p. 11.
 Unspeakable Monsters  125

critics have explored the notion of the monster’s speech, including Peter Brooks in
his study of the “contradiction between the verbal and the visual”12 in the words of
Frankenstein’s monster. There is also a body of critical literature on this crucial link
between language, form and deformity. Karen Masters-Wicks indicates how the
“deformation” of language represented by slang means that the word “potentially
becomes monstrous and deformed”,13 whereas David Williams addresses the idea
of the monster’s deformed discourse in medieval thought.14 However, these critical
works leave a gap where the monster’s voice still clamours to be heard. Differing
from previous criticism both in scope and corpus, this article offers a comparison
of how the deformation of words takes place in Romantic literature, reshaping both
language and literary form.
Laurent Fourcaut makes many insightful points related to this article when
addressing the idea of a “parole-monstre” in his study on L’Homme qui rit.15
The focus of my study is broader; it examines Gwynplaine’s words in terms of
an evolution from his less eloquent counterpart, Quasimodo, thus giving insight
into Hugo’s changing perception of the poet. Whereas Hannah Thompson has
explored the monster’s language in the context of the “taboo” – its body becomes
“unspeakable” due to the difficulty in articulating monstrosity16 – it is the
articulation provided by the monsters themselves that is the object of this study.
Moving beyond “the depiction of monstrosity” that “poses a challenge to both
writer and reader”,17 this article will demonstrate how both monsters’ relationship
to language renders language “monstrous” in itself.

Articulating monstrosity: grotesque bodies

Quasimodo, the iconic hunchbacked bell-ringer designated as the “idéal du
grotesque”18 in Notre-Dame de Paris, is probably the most well-known of Hugo’s
monsters. On his first appearance (as the winner of a grimacing contest), Hugo
writes:
Nous n’essaierons pas de donner au lecteur une idée de ce nez tétraèdre,
de cette bouche en fer à cheval, de ce petit œil gauche obstrué d’un sourcil

12
  Peter Brooks, “What is a Monster?”, in Fred Botting (ed.), Frankenstein: Mary Shelley
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 84.
13
  Karen Masters-Wicks, Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” and the Novels of the Grotesque
(New York: Peter Lang, 1994), p. 94.
14
  David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought
and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), p. 11.
15
 Laurent Fourcaut, “La parole du monstre dans L’Homme qui rit”, in Michel Collot et
al.,“L’Homme qui rit ou la Parole-monstre de Victor Hugo (Paris: SEDES, 1985), pp. 181–198.
16
 Hannah Thompson, Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford:
Legenda, 2013).
17
  Thompson, p. 110.
18
 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 88.
126  Jade Patterson

roux en broussailles tandis que l’œil droit disparaissait entièrement sous une
énorme verrue, de ces dents désordonnées ébréchées çà et là, comme les
créneaux d’une forteresse, de cette lèvre calleuse sur laquelle une de ces
dents empiétait comme la défense d’un éléphant [...]. Qu’on rêve, si l’on
peut, cet ensemble.19
Quasimodo is spliced through the narrative gaze; Hugo invites the reader to consider
“ce nez”, “cette bouche”, “ce petit œil gauche” and “ces dents” as autonomous
individual entities. Yet although these features are dismembered and distinct, he
knits them together in a bizarre, excessive “ensemble” that swells with hybridity.
Quasimodo’s physical hybridity is reinforced as his features are associated with
incompatible things – his teeth are likened to a man-made “forteresse”, and a
protruding tooth is compared to the natural “défense d’un éléphant”. This hybrid
tension between the parts and the whole gives the impression of an excessive
bursting-at-the-seams. Quasimodo’s deformities not only exceed imagination but
also fail to fall within the confines of words. Despite the long, drawn-out description
which is halted and interrupted through punctuation, echoing the disjunction of
Quasimodo’s physical form, the omniscient narrator insists, through paralipsis:
“[n]ous n’essaierons pas de donner au lecteur une idée”; and challenges the reader:
“[q]u’on rêve, si l’on peut, cet ensemble”. A hybrid tension resonates between
the rich text, saturated with words, and the narrator’s rhetorical denial that any
description can be found therein.
Gwynplaine, unlike Quasimodo, does not hurtle into the text as a fully
formed monster. He appears as a young abandoned child, navigating a labyrinth of
ferocious natural elements to rescue not only himself, but also an infant girl who
is perishing in the snow on the corpse of her mother. After carrying the child to
safety – the two are welcomed by the kindly philosopher Ursus, who becomes their
adoptive father – the daylight reveals the extent of Gwynplaine’s deformities:
une bouche s’ouvrant jusqu’aux oreilles, des oreilles se repliant jusque sur
les yeux, un nez informe fait pour l’oscillation des lunettes de grimacier, et
un visage qu’on ne pouvait regarder sans rire. [...] Deux yeux pareils à des
jours de souffrance, un hiatus pour bouche, une protubérance camuse avec
deux trous qui étaient les narines, pour face un écrasement, et tout cela ayant
pour résultante le rire […]20
Hugo describes Gwynplaine’s features through a process of dismemberment,
dividing the individual traits of “bouche”, “oreilles”, “yeux” and “nez” before
panning out his narrative gaze to consider the “visage”, the “tout”. Whereas the
features of Quasimodo’s face are hostile in their manner of encroaching upon one
another, Gwynplaine’s traits extend seamlessly into one another with formulaic

19
 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 88.
  Victor Hugo, L’Homme qui rit (Paris: Éditions Pocket, 2012) [1869], p. 321.
20
 Unspeakable Monsters  127

precision – the mouth extends to the ears, which in turn extend to the eyes, which are
altered by the nose. This harmonious continuity of facial features fuses the familiar
until it becomes unfamiliar. As a result, at the end of the passage the features cease
to be functional facial apparatus, morphing into metaphors and similes.
The hybridity of Gwynplaine’s physical features is complemented by excess;
not only do they exceed their own traditional boundaries, but language wrestles to
pin them down. The bizarre likening of eyes to “jours de souffrance”, and the use
of images of absence – “trou”, “écrasement” – to describe the features present,
suggest a struggle to capture Gwynplaine’s likeness in words. The facial features are
approximations – “pareils” – and the metaphors employed, serving “pour bouche”
and “pour face”, are used to replace, not describe, his characteristics. These images
of absence and emptiness can also be likened to the white spaces of the text: places
where words fail to penetrate, yet are paradoxically essential for language to be
understood. In the same way, it is only through the absence or struggle of words
that the extent to which the monster eludes classification is revealed.
Both Quasimodo’s and Gwynplaine’s physical forms resonate with hybridity
and excess. In addition to the long, textual descriptions which cast a narrative
spotlight on their physical deformities, their grotesque bodies are exhibited, as
it were, in their respective novels. Quasimodo’s body forms a deformed centre
around which spectators orbit; they cluster to see him exhibited as a foundling
child, and flock to witness his torture in the pillory. Gwynplaine too, becomes a
spectacle to such a degree that it becomes his occupation: as a “saltimbanque” he
becomes the headline performer of a play entitled “Chaos Vaincu”. At the play’s
conclusion, “un jet de lumière frappait Gwynplaine en pleine face. On voyait dans
ces ténèbres le monstre épanoui” – a revelation which draws together an immense
crowd of spectators from every age demographic and social status, in a radiant
“soleil de rire”.21
The grotesque bodies so starkly on display in these texts hark back to the
nineteenth-century foire, a cultural phenomenon where “l’exhibition de l’anormal”
was commonplace and “le regard parcourait sans gêne le grand déballage des
étrangetés humaines”.22 Monsters drew people with magnetic force to the stages of
foires and freak shows. Patrice Josset describes how crowds also clamoured to mull
over monsters in museums:
Au XIXe siècle, le musée Dupuytren est extrêmement connu et fréquenté, le
dimanche, il est un des buts de visite préférés des Parisiens […] Qu’est-ce
qui attire ici les visiteurs ? Les monstres assurément.23

21
 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, p.360.
22
  Jean-Jacques Courtine, “La désincarnation des monstres: Des entre-sorts au cinema”, in
Anna Caiozzo, Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini (eds), Monstre et imaginaire social: approches
historiques (Paris: Créaphis, 2008), pp. 269–294 (p. 272).
23
  Josset, p. 297.
128  Jade Patterson

This nineteenth-century link between grotesque bodies and spectacle is central

to Guy de Maupassant’s La mère aux monstres – a haunting tale of a mother
who churns out physically deformed “monster” babies by binding her stomach
during pregnancy: “[elle] met au jour chaque année, volontairement, des enfants
difformes, hideux, effrayants, des monstres enfin, et [elle] les vend aux montreurs
de phénomènes”.24
The hungry gaze of the spectators of phénomènes monstrueux is mimicked
by the reader who peers into the monsters’ cages as she/he turns the novel’s pages.
The thirst to witness monstrous display is reflected in the presence of the text
itself. The text becomes a stage where the monster is exhibited, and the reader is a
spectator. Phillipe Hamon has shown the connection between text and exhibition
by describing how “descriptions” become “spectacles”, and the text becomes a
“spectacle-document”.25 Thompson, too, alludes to how the transformation of
the text into a sort of freak show casts not only the reader as “the fascinated and
repulsed spectator”, but also the “writer […] as the Barnum-esque exhibitor”.26
In his texts, Hugo exhibits more than the monsters’ grotesque forms – he holds
a mirror up to his reader-spectators. By thirsting to view physically monstrous
beings on the page or in the foire, society exhibits its own moral deformity. If, as
Asa Simon Mittman claims, “monsters show us how a culture delimits its own
boundaries”,27 the nineteenth-century literary monster is a representation of how
difference is conceived, portrayed and received. The literary monster could be
seen as a caricature of nineteenth-century society’s own moral monstrosity – its
excessive breaches of moral codes of compassion – rendering it a physical mirror
of an inner deformity.28

Monsters’ articulation: grotesque discourse

Swelling with hybridity and staggering with excess, the grotesque forms of
Hugo’s monsters are viewed with delight and dismay; spectators noisily debate
Quasimodo’s origins and rave raucously about Gwynplaine’s play. Yet if words
are projected at these monsters, the monsters themselves also take up the crossbow
of language. From infancy, Quasimodo speaks. When recounting the tale of his

24
  Guy de Maupassant, “La mère aux monstres”, Toine et autres nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard,
2008) [1883], pp. 120–125 (p. 120).
25
  Phillipe Hamon, Texte et idéologie: valeurs, hiérarchies et évaluations dans l’œuvre (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), p. 110. See also Hamon, Expositions: Littérature et
architecture au XIXe siècle (Paris: Corti, 1989).
26
  Thompson, p. 108.
27
 Asa Simon Mittman (ed.) with Peter J. Dendle, The Ashgate Research Companion to
Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 13.
28
  For Hugo, these codes are founded in Christian ideology; their breach echoes the failure of
a key Biblical commandment: “tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-même”, Matthieu 22: 39, La
Sainte Bible (Lausanne: Henri Vincent, 1807), p. 920.
 Unspeakable Monsters  129

discovery, when the deformed child is switched with la Chantefleurie’s beautiful

daughter Agnès, Mahiette informs her interlocutor:
C’était un monstrueux enfant de quelque égyptienne donnée au diable. Il
paraissait avoir quatre ans environ, et parlait une langue qui n’était point une
langue humaine ; c’étaient des mots qui ne sont pas possibles.29
Little about Quasimodo is concrete – the text teems with terms of approximation
and seeming: “quelque”, “paraissait”, “environ”. However, one thing is certain: the
creature’s capacity for language. Hugo creates a hybrid image of the monster-human;
Quasimodo is a paradoxical “monstrueux enfant”, both a child and unchildlike.
In the same way, his childhood speech is both language and not language as we
understand it. By asserting that his language “n’était point une langue humaine”, the
description shifts his speech into the inhuman realm of the animal or the diabolical.
Quasimodo’s physical form becomes mirrored in his speech. His words, like the
deformed contours of his body, appear not quite human, and impossible.
Quasimodo speaks, but is not comprehended. As he grows, this chasm
between speaker and listener widens as he is forced from incomprehensible
words to increasingly uncommunicative silence. This void between sound and
sense is marked when Hugo describes how deafness erodes Quasimodo’s access
to comprehensible words, thwarting the teaching attempts of his adoptive father
Frollo: “une nouvelle infirmité était venue le parfaire ; les cloches lui avaient brisé
le tympan ; il était devenu sourd. La seule porte que la nature lui eût laissée toute
grande ouverte sur le monde s’était brusquement fermée à jamais.”30 The way that
this infirmity “perfects” his monstrosity can be understood in light of the Romantic
opposition between nature and artifice; a duality inherited from eighteenth-century
philosophers, notably Rousseau. Romantic nature is God’s creation, and the means
by which the poet connects with God; it is presented in opposition to a corrupting,
oppressive society. When Hugo demonstrates how Quasimodo is distanced both
from the natural “norm”, yet stresses how this fails to bring him closer to society,
Quasimodo is suspended and lingers in the hybrid monstrous realm of the in-
between.
The hybridity of Quasimodo’s physical form also extends to the language he
uses. This is clear when he addresses his beloved bells:
— Va, disait-il, va, Gabrielle. Verse tout ton bruit dans la place. C’est
aujourd’hui fête. —Thibauld, pas de paresse. Tu te ralentis. Va, va donc ! est-
ce que tu t’es rouillé, fainéant ? —C’est bien ! Vite ! vite ! […] Bien ! bien !
ma Gabrielle, fort ! plus fort ! — Hé !31

29
 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 285.
30
 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 206.
31
 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, pp. 339–340.
130  Jade Patterson

Quasimodo’s language is childlike; the largely monosyllabic words, the brief

exclamations and the rampant repetition combine in a juvenile eruption of
discourse. The unpredictable surfacing of repeated words (“va”, “bien”, “fort”),
interjected with utterances that are more sounds than words (“Hé”) discordantly
punctuate the phrase. Quasimodo’s utterances are more sudden bursts of sound than
fluent speech. His words are monstrous in that they are monologue masquerading
as dialogue, a hybrid fusion of communication and inner reflection. Although
he sprinkles his speech with questions and imperative demands, these words are
addressed to inanimate objects which are incapable of human response.
In a way, there is little difference between the bells and the crowds as recipients
of Quasimodo’s speech. Although both reply with sound (the pealing of the bells
and the crowd’s peals of laughter), this noise has no correlation with the words the
monster expresses. Bakhtin describes how “[t]he word in living conversation is
directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer,
anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction”.32 Where the monster is
concerned, the hope for a relevant future answer-word is futile. Quasimodo speaks
into the void. This failure of words leads to his attempt to abdicate completely
from spoken language. His “speech” becomes silent gestures, words are torn from
sounds as he communicates with his adoptive father, Frollo, through an intricate
series of signs: “Quand le pauvre sonneur de cloches était devenu sourd, il s’était
établi entre lui et Claude Frollo une langue de signes, mystérieuse et comprise
d’eux seuls.”33
Quasimodo’s fraught relationship to language allies the misfortunes of the
monster to the plight of the poet. The Romantic poet, too, is not deprived of a
voice, but of a listening and sympathetic ear. The idea that Hugo highlights not
only the deformity of the mouth that speaks, but of the ear that listens is magnified
almost four decades later in L’Homme qui rit. Gwynplaine, unlike Quasimodo,
is an erudite master of rhetoric. When his true identity as the Lord Clancharlie is
revealed, he delivers an impassioned speech to the House of Lords, condemning
their greed and imploring them to acknowledge the misery and poverty of the
lower classes:
Vous profitez de la nuit. Mais prenez garde, il y a une grande puissance,
l’aurore. […] Vous, vous êtes le privilège. Ayez peur. Le vrai maître de la
maison va frapper à la porte. […] Mylords, je suis l’avocat désespéré, et je
plaide la cause perdue. Cette cause, Dieu la regagnera. Moi, je ne suis rien,
qu’une voix. […] Je parle, parce que je sais. Vous m’entendrez, mylords.34

32  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 280.
33 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 213.
34 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, pp. 684–686.
 Unspeakable Monsters  131

Gwynplaine’s language is riddled with powerful metaphors; in addition to

juxtaposing images of darkness and light, he skilfully combines direct appeals
(addressing “vous” and “Mylords”) and powerful imperative commands (“ayez
peur”, “prenez garde”) to attempt to transform his listeners. Hugo emphasises the
learned nature of Gwynplaine’s speech through the Biblical and philosophical
allusions he makes: the true master who comes knocking at the door parallels the
Parable of the Faithful Servant as recounted in the gospel of Luke,35 whereas the
image of the voice clamouring in the desert alludes to John the Baptist.36 In addition,
“Je parle, parce que je sais” has Cartesian echoes, as it can be read as a deformed
version of “Je pense, donc je suis”.
In his speech to the House of Lords, Gwynplaine adopts the features of what
I define as a “spokesmonster”, a politicised role characterised, first, by the mastery
of human and inhuman language. He claims:
Je parlerai pour les muets. […] Je serai le lord des pauvres. […] Je traduirai
les bégaiements. Je traduirai les grondements, les hurlements […] les voix
inintelligibles, et tous ces cris de bêtes qu’à force d’ignorance et de souffrance
on fait pousser aux hommes. […] Je serai le Verbe du Peuple. Grâce à moi, on
comprendra. Je serai la bouche sanglante […]37
Gwynplaine wishes to lend his voice to all people regardless of age, status or
character. He sheds his skin of monstrous deformity to become every man, speaking
for all, for the immense collective: “le peuple”. Gwynplaine also becomes this skin
– it is because of his exceptional deformities that he has the ability to commune with
inhuman language. The voices of humankind excessively strain within his solitary
physical form. Yet although he is “le peuple”, he is also an exceptional individual
elevated above them – “le lord des pauvres”. This elevated status is accentuated as
almost every sentence begins with “[j]e”: Gwynplaine comes first. His monstrosity
enables him to understand every nuance of the human tongue. Repeatedly evoking
the notion of translation with the active “[j]e traduirai”, Hugo provides a long list of
indecipherable sounds which Gwynplaine can convert into human language, from
deafening “hurlements” to inaudible, unintelligible utterances.
The second feature of the “spokesmonster” is its capacity to illuminate
social injustice. The society Gwynplaine condemns, in its perpetuation of injustice
and excessive breaches of moral codes, can be viewed as a moral monster itself.
Kathryn Grossman describes how, by allying “the materially repulsive and the
politically dystopian”, Hugo demonstrates that “human society can produce moral

35
 “Que vos reins soient ceints, et vos chandelles allumées. Soyez comme des gens qui
attendent que leur maître revienne des noces, afin de lui ouvrir dès qu’il viendra et qu’il heurtera”,
Luc 12: 35–36, p. 975.
36
  “La voix de celui qui crie dans le désert dit: préparez le chemin du Seigneur [...] Jean
baptisoit dans le désert, et préchoit le baptême de la repentance”, Marc 1: 3–4, p. 931.
37
 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, pp.719–720.
132  Jade Patterson

monsters and oppressive regimes as abhorrent as anything produced by nature”.38

Yet the apocalyptic warnings of the “spokemonster” also evoke the notion of social
regeneration. By offering “a vision of a better, republican future”39 Hugo – through
the mouthpiece of Gwynplaine – pleads for a return to Christian moral codes where
the most vulnerable in society are not exploited, but protected.40
In giving voice to the cause of all those who suffer at the hands of a corrupt
and conniving society, the “spokesmonster” can be likened to the poet. The notion
of being elected to speak for the innumerable masses parallels the prophetic purpose
of the poet: speaking for, yet also back to, the people. Gwynplaine’s dialogue is
mirrored in Hugo’s “Réponse à un acte d’accusation” (Les Contemplations, 1856):
Donc, c’est moi qui suis l’ogre et le bouc émissaire. […]
Je me borne à ceci : je suis ce monstre énorme
Je suis le démagogue horrible et débordé,
Et le dévastateur du vieil A B C D41
The poet is an “ogre”, a “monster”, an exceptional, unnatural character who is the
scapegoat or articulator of monstrosity. The “dévastateur du vieil A B C D”, he
ravages traditional classical form to speak with a new monstrous voice. Gwynplaine
too articulates monstrosity; he is dehumanised by becoming “le cri”, shouldering
all the despair of “la cause perdue”42 – the plea for the impossible compassion of
the privileged. Hugo himself forges language that adheres to a political agenda. He
employs an arsenal of words, speaking through the narrator-mouthpiece. Penning
the discourse of Gwynplaine, Hugo’s “literature takes on a subversive role, hounding
and questioning the social order”.43 Hugo’s own distaste for the shortcomings of
society arises not solely in Gwynplaine’s voice in L’Homme qui rit, but elsewhere
in his literary footprint: Marva A. Barnett points out how this “questioning of [...]
society’s norms [surfaces] in his speeches and letters”.44 Yet Hugo’s choice to voice
these political views by speaking through the unique, solitary figure of the monster
places the reader in the position of observer of the spectacle. The thunderous
laughter that greets Gwynplaine’s plaintive pleas for compassion posits a choice for

38
  Kathryn Grossman, The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics
of Transcendence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 95.
39
 Grossman, p. 3.
40
  “Ne faites point de tort à la veuve, ni à l’orphelin, ni à l’étranger, ni à l’affligé”, Zacharie
7: 10, p. 801.
41
  Victor Hugo, “Réponse à un acte d’accusation”, Les Contemplations (Paris: A. Colin, 1964)
[1856], pp. 20–21.
42
 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, p.685.
43
  Mario Vargas Llosa, The Temptation of the Impossible (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007), p. 175.
44
  Marva A. Barnett, Victor Hugo on Things that Matter (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2010), p. 12.
 Unspeakable Monsters  133

the reader: to share in Gwynplaine’s (and, by extension, Hugo’s) social outrage, or

slip into a silence which would appear unsettlingly complicit with social injustice.
This social outrage is heightened by the fact that Gwynplaine’s audience
sees no further than the grotesque contours of his face. Just as his erudite language
is undermined by abrupt bursts of laughter, the mighty, winding sentences of his
rhetoric are suddenly struck down by three brief final sentences: “Hélas ! il avait
avorté. Il avait avorté irrémédiablement.”45 The disillusionment and disappointment
this reaction engenders reinforces Gwynplaine’s likeness to the Romantic poet. The
poet’s elect status comes at the price of isolation, a condemnation to exist eternally
on the fringes – both part of, and parted from, society. Hugo was no stranger to
this frustration himself. In addition to a fifteen-year political exile on the island
of Guernsey from 1855, his own attempts to serve eloquently as the “‘Verbe du
peuple’ failed to move his fellow representatives in the National Assembly”, just as
Gwynplaine is “doomed to disappointment in his powers of rhetoric”.46
Gwynplaine’s failure to be acknowledged as a voice stems from the
clamouring distraction of his physical features. The same process can be seen when
Quasimodo bellows for help in the pillory:
Cette exclamation de détresse, loin d’émouvoir les compassions, fut un
surcroît d’amusement au bon populaire parisien [...]. Il est certain qu’en ce
moment il était grotesque […] avec sa face empourprée et ruisselante, son
œil égaré, sa bouche écumante de colère et de souffrance, et sa langue à demi
tirée. [...]
  Au bout de quelques minutes, Quasimodo […] répéta d’une voix plus
déchirante encore : — À boire !
  Et tous de rire.47
A significant proportion of the passage focuses, like the crowd, on the physical
grotesqueness of Quasimodo’s appearance. A winding phrase dismembers
Quasimodo through language; the individual spotlight on his “face”, “œil”, “bouche”
and “langue” give more credence to his features than his brief, monosyllabic
speech. This dismemberment through language also echoes the dismemberment
of language. The lolling tongue, “demi tirée”, creates a wordplay with the other
sense of “langue” as language. Quasimodo’s language is a half-language: part
bestial bark (“aboie”), part human speech. Language is doubly mutilated. First, in
the sense that his words can be broken into animal-like sounds; and in the second
strike, that they are not comprehended as communication and are smothered by his
physical appearance.
When the monster’s words are eclipsed by its physical deformities, they

45
 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, p.720.
46
  Grossman, pp.120–121.
47
 Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 305.
134  Jade Patterson

are wrenched from their meaning. In Saussurean terms, the signifier and the
signified become disassociated.48 Gwynplaine declares that “[l]e bruit des hommes
est inarticulé comme le bruit du vent ; ils crient. Mais on ne les comprend pas,
crier ainsi équivaut à se taire”.49 Speech, even when deafeningly loud, if not
understood is equivalent to silence. Although the monster may speak, its words are
not recognised as meaningful. Isabelle Cani-Wanegffelen stresses how the visual
aspect of the monster always precedes and overpowers the verbal: “[l]e monstre
hugolien s’adresse au sens de la vue, il est surtout un spectacle et guère une voix”.50
I would argue, however, that the monster’s voice is a key component, a headline
performer, in this “spectacle”. When signifiers are detached from signifieds, words
themselves become deformed freak show curiosities.
The overwhelming physical deformity of the monster taints the words they
speak by overshadowing their meaning. However, there is a second reason why
the monster’s speech is not understood: it is deformed and subversive in content.
Whereas Quasimodo’s childlike language and plaintive cries cast judgement on the
society that tortures him, the “spokesmonster” Gwynplaine, as indicated above,
directly questions the corrupt practices of the House of Lords. Speech, for the
Romantic monster, is a vehicle of resistance. This correlates with Fred Botting’s
views on the monsters of the French Revolution:
Incarnated in identifiable shapes, monsters begin to be defined by the
dangerous words they speak, words that question and resist […] the terms
of the system into which they are born. Such resistance, indeed, partially
accounts for the identity of “monster” that is given them.51
In Botting’s view, dangerous and subversive words create the monster. The status
of “monster” can be the means of rejecting individuals who denounce society’s
accepted norms. However, subversive words can themselves become monstrous. If
the monsters’ words resist, so do the auditors. They do not wish to hear views which
affront their own perceptions, and thus hear the sounds with little regard to the sense
behind them, voluntarily separating signified from signifier. Quasimodo’s language
indicates the monster’s humanity, and Gwynplaine’s voices the corruption of those
with wealth and power. Both are uncomfortable truths for Hugo’s contemporary
nineteenth-century society, which delights in viewing deformity, and where
poverty pervades. Just as Hugo creates his grotesque, hybrid bodies by slicing and

48
  Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye
(eds) (Paris: Payot, 1972) [1916].
49
 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, p.719.
50
  Isabelle Cani-Wanegffelen, “Visage, Masque, Grimace: de la nécessité des monstres”, in
Yann Jumelais and Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne (eds), Victor Hugo ou les frontières effacées
(Nantes: Pleins Feux, 2002), pp. 351–368 (p. 360).
51
  Fred Botting, “Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity”, in Philip W. Martin and
Robin Jarvis (eds), Reviewing Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 51–59 (p. 51).
 Unspeakable Monsters  135

re-joining diverse categories, the monster’s words become grotesque through the
mutilation of signifier from signified, and can be described with the same excess
which characterises the monster’s physical appearance: “[ce que] ces paroles
avaient d’extravagant”.52
The presence of the hybrid, deformed monster within the Hugolian novel
provokes reflection on the hybrid combination of novelistic discourse as a literary
deformation. Hugo combines different extremes of register, both high and low,
subverting the Classicist model by bringing together “discourses of opposing
realities, specifically slang and normative speech”.53 His fascination with slang
or “Argot” as a phenomenon where “[l]es mots sont difformes”54 and “[o]n croit
entendre des hydres parler”55 also resonates in Les Misérables, where an entire
“book” (Book Seven of Part Four) is dedicated to the subject. The distorted
discourse of the monsters contrasts with the more conventional forms of discourse
in the novel (for instance, the high register formal discourse used in the House of
Lords in L’Homme qui rit), thus rendering the totality of the novel’s discourse a
hybrid, monstrous whole.

A literary rupture: the roman-monstre

Inserting the monster’s grotesque discourse into the novel illuminates another
resistance: the struggle against the order of Classicism, which is conventionally
viewed as “un art de mesure, de lucidité, d’ordre, d’équilibre”.56 Classicism
prized reason, “le bon sens”, and a “qualité des œuvres littéraires qui s’oppose
à l’imagination et aux excès de la fantaisie”.57 The monster’s hybrid, excessive
physical form not only colours the grotesque language it uses, but even extends to
the form of the novel itself, creating a roman-monstre. José Manuel Losada asserts
that: “La juxtaposition de qualités est une condition indispensable pour Hugo [...]
Privés de cette juxtaposition, ses romans donneraient dans la monstruosité et le
ridicule.”58 Although such juxtaposition is indeed “indispensable” in the Hugolian
œuvre, Losada’s assertion that the novel would fall into “monstruosité” if hybridity
did not exist is contestable. Hybridity, when considered in terms of the novel’s style,

52
 Hugo, L’Homme qui rit, p. 691.
53
  Masters-Wicks, p. 84.
54
  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, vol. 3 (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1972) [1862],
p. 12.
55
 Hugo, Les Misérables, vol. 3, p. 13.
56
  Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que le classicisme ?: Essai de mise au point (Paris: Droz, 1933)
p. 27. Although some critics such as E. B. O. Borgerhoff in The Freedom of French Classicism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950) show how Classicism cannot be reduced to these
principles, they can nonetheless be taken as general characteristics.
57
  Peyre, p. 50.
58
  José Manuel Losada, “Victor Hugo et le grotesque”, Thélème. Revista Complutense de
Estudios Franceses, 21 (2006), p. 120.
136  Jade Patterson

enhances rather than removes the monstrosity of the text. The literary structure of
Notre-Dame de Paris pushes and challenges the boundaries of traditional literary
genres. Huge digressions from the plot could be likened to excessive monstrous
growths in the text; Book Three is dedicated almost exclusively to the architecture
of the Cathedral and the historical layout of Paris in the fifteenth century. With these
enormous digressions, Hugo blurs the boundaries between Romantic literature,
historical fiction and the architectural treatise.
In the same way, L’Homme qui rit shows how the novel can assume a hybrid
form. The erudite, first-person monologue of Gwynplaine in the second chapter
of Book Nine could be likened to a prose poem. It has a different narrative “je”
from that of the narrator, and could be seen as a closed, complete unit; despite its
position within a novel, it has an “unité textuelle” which renders it “une totalité
close [...] et relativement courte”.59 Hugo also nudges the boundaries of literary
genre when he deposits the entire text of the fictional play “Chaos vaincu” into the
novel in the ninth chapter of the Book Two. This not only reinforces the idea that
the text is a stage where the monster can be viewed by the reader, but it renders the
text monstrously hybrid in form. The excessive blend of genres renders these texts
akin to the “loose baggy monsters” alluded to by Henry James.60

Conclusion
The hybrid, excessive traits which make up Hugo’s grotesque physical monsters’
appearance dynamically shift to their discourse. His monsters are seen and heard,
but they are not listened to. However, even when the monster’s voice is not heard by
its interlocutors in the text, it resonates with the reader. It bellows in the disjunction
between words’ form and content, and in the hybrid compilation of different types
of register and discourse which mirror the monster’s physical form. In this sense,
Hugo’s texts become like the spectacle of the foire, where grotesque bodies and
discourse take centre-stage.
The socio-political implications of throwing a narrative spotlight on these
“monsters” extend beyond Hugo’s nineteenth-century audience. By holding up
a mirror to the moral monstrosity of those who delight in gazing upon physical
deformity, Hugo’s words interrogate our contemporary thirst to view the
“monstrous”; for instance, the episode titles and subjects of the British Channel
4’s documentary series Bodyshock (2003–2013), including “The Girl with Eight
Limbs” and “Born with Two Heads”, are not too far removed from slogans of
the nineteenth-century foire. In addition to pushing for social change through the
warnings of his “spokesmonsters”, Hugo’s grotesque monsters evoke change in the
literary sphere. The chameleon effect that renders the monster’s words “monstrous”
extends to the novel itself, giving birth to a subversive roman-monstre. Hugo’s

59
  Dominique Combe, Les Genres littéraires (Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 1992), p.71.
60
  Henry James, The Tragic Muse (London: Elibron Classics, 2018) [1890], p.xi.
 Unspeakable Monsters  137

grotesque monsters are ultimately harbingers of new literary forms; their distorted
forms and discourse signal a rupture with Classicist models.

University of Melbourne