Inventing the Enemy: Essays (15 page)

D
ISCUSSIONS ABOUT
Victor Hugo usually start with a comment by Gide who, when asked who was the greatest French poet, replied, “
Hugo, hélas!
” (“Hugo, alas!”).
¹
Anyone wanting to hit harder might go on to quote Cocteau: “Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo.”
²

Gide’s lament meant many things, but now tends to be read as meaning that Hugo (and perhaps, in particular, Hugo the narrator) is a great writer despite his innumerable defects, his bombast, his sometimes insufferable rhetoric. Cocteau’s quip, however, is not quite correct: Victor Hugo was not a madman who believed he was Victor Hugo—Victor Hugo simply believed he was God, or at least his official interpreter.

In Hugo there is always an excess in the description of earthly events, and an indomitable desire to see them always from God’s point of view. The taste for excess leads him to descriptions that become interminable lists, to the creation of characters whose psychological workings are always regarded as unsustainable, rough-hewn, but whose passions are taken to such levels of paroxysm as to become memorable, a sign of the forces that move history. His desire to be God enables him to see the great forces that move human history, above and beyond the events in which his heroes are involved, and if it is not God then it is Fate, a Destiny that is sometimes presented as providence and sometimes as an almost Hegelian plan that dominates and directs the desires of individuals.

The taste for excess explains why one could mistake Hugo for the Almighty, a personality who, by definition, is larger than life, who convulses the abyss to create heaven and earth, unleashes universal floods, plunges sinners into the fiery bowels of Gehenna, and so forth (a little moderation, please!), and also justifies the plaintive lament from Gide, who evidently identified art with Apollonian poise and not with Dionysian frenzy.

I am perfectly aware of my passion for Hugo. Elsewhere I have praised his sublime excess: and excess can turn even bad writing and banality into a Wagnerian tempest. To explain the fascination of a film like
Casablanca,
I have noted
³
that while a single cliché is kitsch, shamelessly letting fly a hundred clichés makes an epic; and I have noted how the
Count of Monte Cristo
might be badly written (unlike other novels by Dumas, such as
The Three Musketeers
) and may be rambling and verbose, but it is precisely because of these defects, taken beyond reasonable limits, that it reaches that Kantian vision of the sublime, and justifies the hold it has had, and still has, on millions of readers.
⁴

But returning to Hugo, let us look at an area typical of Romantic excess, the representation of ugliness and evil.

From the time of Achilles to the dawn of Romanticism, the hero was always handsome, while from Thersites up until more or less the same period, the villain was always ugly, hideous, grotesque, or absurd. And when a hero is made from a villain, he becomes handsome, as with Milton’s Satan.

But by the time we reach the gothic novel, the picture is reversed: not only does the hero appear unsettling and fearsome, but the antihero also, in his darkness, becomes if not appealing at least interesting.

Byron says of his Giaour that the glare beneath his dusky cowl was “dark and unearthly,” and his eye and his bitter smile aroused fear and guilt. And Ann Radcliffe, describing another dark spirit in
The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents,
tells us that his appearance was striking, his limbs large and uncouth, and as he stalked away, wrapped in the black habit of his order, his features expressed something terrible and almost superhuman, while his cowl, casting a shadow over the livid paleness of his face, gave a sense of horror to his large melancholy eyes . . .

The figure of William Beckford’s Vathek was pleasing and majestic, but when angry, one of his eyes became so terrible that no person could bear to behold it, and the wretch upon whom it was fixed fell instantly backward and sometimes died. For Stevenson, Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, behaved himself with a disturbing mixture of timidity and boldness, and spoke with a husky, whispering, and somewhat broken voice, which inspired disgust, loathing, and fear.

Of Heathcliff, Emily Brontë writes that his forehead was shaded with a heavy cloud, his eyes were basilisks, and his lips seemed sealed in an expression of unspeakable sadness. And here is how Eugène Sue describes the Schoolmaster in
Les mystères de Paris:
his face scored in all directions with deep, livid scars; his lips swollen by the corrosive action of vitriol; the cartilage of his nose cut; his nostrils replaced by two shapeless holes; his head was disproportionately large; he had long arms and short, stubby hands, with hairy fingers, and bow legs and restless, mobile eyes, flashing like those of a wild beast.

But Hugo too is excessive in his descriptions of ugliness, for reasons set out in his famous preface to
Cromwell,
where he theorizes comprehensively on the revolution of beauty, which, in the Romantic period, is transformed into its opposite—into ugliness and deformity, or at least into the grotesque.

Modern ingenuity—he says—transforms giants into dwarfs; from Cyclopes gnomes are made. Contact with deformity has given modern sublimity something greater, more sublime than ancient beauty.

The grotesque is the other face of the sublime, as shadow is to light. Grotesqueness is the richest resource nature can offer art. The universal beauty that antiquity solemnly gave to everything was not without its monotony, and this impression can produce tedium through repetition. Beauty is only of one kind; there are a thousand kinds of ugliness. It is difficult to compare one sublime with another, and we need to take a rest from everything, even from beauty. The salamander makes the Ondine more attractive; the gnome makes Sisyphus more handsome.

But Hugo is more radical when he is creating than when he is theorizing. Deformity is not only a form of evil that contrasts with beauty and goodness; it is, in itself, an atrocious and unsought modesty, as if God had wanted to conceal from others, under the guise of external ugliness, an inner beauty that is destined nonetheless to be lost. Hugo softens the irredeemable ugliness of the spider and the nettle (“I love the spider and the nettle / because they hate us. / O passer-by, forgive / that obscure plant, / that poor animal, / for their ugliness and their sting. / Have pity on evil!”).

Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame, has a tetrahedral nose and a horseshoe mouth; his left eye is obstructed by a red, bushy brow, while his right disappears under an enormous wart; his straggling teeth are broken here and there like the battlements of a fortress; a tooth protrudes from his callused lip like the tusk of an elephant . . . He has a huge head, bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump; large feet, monstrous hands, legs so strangely aligned that they could touch each other only at the knees and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles . . .

To contrast this repellent aspect, Hugo gives Quasimodo a sensitive soul and a great capacity to love. But he reaches the highest point with the figure of Gwynplaine, the Man Who Laughs.

Gwynplaine is not only the ugliest of all and, due to his ugliness, the unhappiest; he is also the most pure-spirited of all, capable of infinite love. And—paradox of Romantic ugliness—monstrous as he is, and precisely because he is monstrous, he stirs the desires of the most beautiful woman in London.

For those who have forgotten the story, let us summarize it. The scion of a noble family, kidnapped as a child in a political feud, Gwynplaine is transformed by
comprachicos
into a grotesque mask, his features surgically disfigured, and he is condemned to an eternal smile.

Nature had been prodigal of her kindness to Gwynplaine. She had bestowed on him a mouth opening to his ears, ears folding over to his eyes, a shapeless nose to support the spectacles of the grimace maker, and a face that no one could look upon without laughing . . .

But was it nature? Had she not been assisted? Two slits for eyes, a hiatus for a mouth, a snub protuberance with two holes for nostrils, a flattened face, all having for the result an appearance of laughter; it is certain that nature never produces such perfection single-handed . . .

Such a face could never have been created by chance; it must have resulted from intention . . . Had Gwynplaine when a child been so worthy of attention that his face had been subjected to transmutation? Why not? Needed there a greater motive than the speculation of his future exhibition? According to all appearance, industrious manipulators of children had worked upon his face. It seemed evident that a mysterious and probably occult science, which was to surgery what alchemy was to chemistry, had chiseled his flesh, evidently at a very tender age, and manufactured his countenance with premeditation. That science, clever with the knife, skilled in obtusions and ligatures, had enlarged the mouth, cut away the lips, laid bare the gums, distended the ears, cut the cartilages, displaced the eyelids and the cheeks, enlarged the zygomatic muscle, pressed the scars and cicatrices to a level, turned back the skin over the lesions whilst the face was thus stretched, from all which resulted that powerful and profound piece of sculpture, the mask, Gwynplaine. (part 2, book 2, chapter 1)

With this mask, Gwynplaine becomes an acrobat, highly popular with audiences. Since childhood he has been in love with Dea, a blind girl who performs with him. Gwynplaine had eyes for only one woman in the whole world—that blind creature. Dea idolized Gwynplaine. She would touch him and say, “How beautiful you are.”

Until two things happen. Lady Josiane, the queen’s sister, adored by all the gentlemen of the court for her beauty, sees Gwynplaine at the theater, sends him a letter: “You are hideous, I am beautiful. You are a player; I am a duchess. I am the highest, you are the lowest. I desire you! I love you! Come!”

Gwynplaine grapples between his feelings of excitement and desire, and his love for Dea. Then something happens. He thinks he has been arrested. He is questioned, and brought face to face with a bandit who is dying; in short, all of a sudden he has been recognized as Lord Fermain Clancharlie, baron of Clancharlie and Hunkerville, marquis of Corleone in Sicily, and an English peer, who had been kidnapped and disfigured at a tender age in a family feud.

We move onward by leaps and bounds, as Gwynplaine suddenly finds himself propelled from the gutter to the stars, hardly realizing what is going on, except that at a certain point he finds himself, extravagantly dressed, in the room of a palace that, he is told, is his.

It seems to him like an enchanted palace, and already the series of marvels he discovers there (alone in the resplendent desert), the succession of halls and chambers, is bewildering not only to him but to the reader. It is no coincidence that the title of the chapter is “The Resemblance of a Palace to a Wood,” and the description of what seems like the Louvre or the Hermitage takes up five or six pages (depending on the edition). Gwynplaine wanders, dazed, from room to room until he reaches an alcove where, on the bed, beside a tub of water made ready for a virginal bath, he sees a naked woman.

Not literally naked, Hugo tells us. She is clothed. But the description of this clothed woman, especially if we see her through the eyes of Gwynplaine, who has never seen a naked woman, certainly represents one of the heights of erotic literature.

At the center of this web, where one might expect a spider, Gwynplaine saw a formidable object—a woman naked.

Not literally naked. She was dressed. And dressed from head to foot. The dress was a long chemise, so long that it floated over her feet, like the dresses of angels in holy pictures, but so fine that it seemed liquid. From here, the appearance of female nudity, more treacherous and dangerous than real nudity . . . The silver tissue, transparent as glass, was a curtain. It was fastened only at the ceiling, could be lifted aside . . . On that bed, which was silver like the bath and the canopy, lay the woman. She was asleep . . .

Between her nudity and his gaze there were two obstacles, her chemise and the silver veil, two transparencies. The room, more an alcove than a room, was lit with a sort of discretion from the light reflected from the bathroom. The woman may have had no modesty, but the lighting did. The bed had neither columns nor canopy, so that the woman, when she opened her eyes, could see herself a thousand times naked in the mirrors above her. Gwynplaine saw only the woman. He recognized her. She was the duchess. Again he saw her, and saw her terrible. A woman naked is a woman armed . . . That immodesty was merged in splendor. That creature lay naked with the same calm of one with the divine right of cynicism. She had the security of an Olympian who knew that she was daughter of the depths, and might say to the ocean, “Father!” And she exposed herself, unattainable and proud, to everything that should pass—to looks, to desires, to ravings, to dreams; as proud in her languor, on her boudoir couch, as Venus in the immensity of foam. (part 2, book 7, chapter 3)

And so Josiane awakens, recognizes Gwynplaine, and begins a furious seduction, which the poor man can no longer resist, except that she brings him to the peak of desire but does not yield. She erupts into a series of fantasies, more stimulating than her own nudity, in which she reveals herself as a virgin (as she still is) and a prostitute, anxious to enjoy not only the pleasures of the teratology that Gwynplaine promises her, but also the thrill of defying the world and the court, a prospect that intoxicates her. She is a Venus awaiting the double orgasm of private possession and public exhibition of her Vulcan: