ÉTAT PRÉSENT: Victor Hugo ('French Studies' 63: 1 [2009]: 66-74) (original) (raw)

Los dibujos arquitectónicos de Víctor Hugo: Entre la realidad y la ensoñación

EGA, 2014

Víctor Hugo no era ni pintor ni arquitecto, por lo que la búsqueda desarrollada en sus dibujos no fue tanto formal como conceptual. Sus dibujos buscan profundizar en el alma creadora del artista a través de la experimentación y del azar; incursiones en el mundo interior que subyace tras el mito creador. Son reflejo del mundo en el que se desarrolla su obra literaria, no de una forma literal, sino simbólica. Víctor Hugo no dibuja arquitectura, dibuja el caos, la exaltación, lo sublime. Hugo explora a través del dibujo el universo espacial en el que se ubican sus ficciones literarias: la Arquitectura como metáfora del hombre empequeñecido por la inmensidad, casi metafísica, de la Naturaleza y el Cosmos

"Victor Hugo and the Melancholy Novel: Reading the Haitian Revolution in Bug-Jargal" (2018)

French Studies

In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency , to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of 'traumatic' loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, as the culminating expression of those melan-cholic narratives lamenting the loss of France's precious 'pearl of the Antilles'. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo's novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre's Campagnes des Français a ` Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo's word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic 'immaturity' of Bug-Jargal. A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo's novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying — in its purest, most 'mature' form — a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed 'postimperial melancholia', and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.

Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize)

2015

Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-Three in its English translation) was Victor Hugo's last novel, published in 1874, twelve years after Les Misérables.[1] Though he had originally conceived the idea for the novel several years before the Paris Commune of 1871, he undoubtedly had the Commune in mind as he wrote it, above all that terrible week in May 1871 when many thousands of insurgents were killed on the streets of Paris. Yet Hugo's subject was not the present but the past: the greatest-and most terrible-period of the French Revolution-the year 1793. Hugo had seen the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 at first hand; he believed passionately that the revolutionary cause was a just one, and that ultimately it would triumph. He had shown that commitment in his account of the life-and-death struggle on the barricade that forms the climax to Les Misérables (though people whose knowledge of Hugo's politics begins and ends with the musical version of "Les Mis" may not be aware that he saw the slaughter on the barricade as a pointless loss of life).[2] In Quatrevingt-treize he returned to confront this theme and to tackle the first French Revolution. His task might have been pleasanter had he set his novel in 1789, the time of heady optimism when, to invoke the phrase so often used since, France gave the world "liberty, equality, fraternity-and the rights of man." But that was not Victor Hugo's way. He did not shy away from the time four years later when political violence, betrayal and terror overtook the early idealism. He took as his subject