Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
Et tu, Hugo
By Frederick Brown
Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel
by Victor Brombert
Harvard University Press, 286 pp., $20.00
The poet who unsmilingly designed for himself a coat of arms that featured the motto 'Ego Hugo' would seem to have earned Jean Cocteau's epitaph: 'Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.' But as Professor Brombert demonstrates in his astute examination of Hugo's novels, the mirror images, redeeming abysses, and inverted perspectives from which Hugo created his fictional universe reflect a mind incessantly at odds with life. Truth might have been better served had Cocteau proposed that Hugo was never quite mad enough to hear archangels whisper cues to him or sober enough to relinquish his dream of transcending his divided self. 'Totus in antitheti,' he wrote in an essay on Shakespeare, implying that between Ego and Hugo there was, at times, almost unlimited room for doubt.
Review, 3964 words
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