Victor Hugo was methodologically excessive – both as a person and as a writer

In the novel “The Workers of the Sea”, published in 1866, Victor tells, among other things, an encounter with an octopus. The slimy animal lives in a crevice in the rock, would happily eat a human and has four hundred suckers. The fictional monster became so popular with this work that a tentacle fashion broke out in Paris. She didn’t shy away from the ladies’ hats. The book also contains a love story, a legend of saints, an adventure novel – and, last but not least, some of the most powerful descriptions of nature in the history of literature. This is something like what happens when Victor Hugo describes a storm (in the translation by Rainer G. Schmidt): “An extremely heavy cloud tears in the middle and falls in pieces into the sea. Other clouds, purple, flash and rumble, then darken eerily; when the cloud has shed its lightning, it becomes black; an extinct coal. Rain bags burst into clouds of mist. Here, where it rains, a fire pit; “There is a wave where flames rise.” The reader can count himself lucky if the flames do not crash over him.

Victor Hugo, born in 1802, died in 1885, is no longer one of the widely read writers. Also known is the “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, because of its film adaptations, and “The Miserables”, the musical with the title “Les misérables”, which has been playing across the world’s stages for more than thirty years and more so far was seen by more than 130 million people. But the books? Forget the poems, many of them in large format. Fades the plays, even “Hernani”, the work that founded the romantic drama (and which provided the template for Giuseppe Verdi’s opera of the same name). The political prose, the pamphlets and the open letters fade away, the travel report across the Rhine fades away, and even “1793”, the novel about the late years of the French Revolution, fades away. That’s quite astonishing. Because Victor Hugo is a literature of excitement and great scenes, it is melodrama, a sweet idyll and a powerful uproar at the same time and above all: it is at least half of the 19th century, condensed into a heroic poetic figure that did not exist before and how it should not return, inspired by a powerful pathos of the good and just, with full commitment of the person.

Walburga Hülk describes Hugo with a casual overview and impressive skill

For a biographer, this juxtaposition and intermingling of author and work, of public figure and literary production, must be both an invitation and a seduction: in France, Victor Hugo may be a familiar figure, which means that one is always moving in half-explored territory and can leave some things out. In German-speaking countries you are entering foreign territory. You have to create the entire material, substantiate it and explain it – and that with a character who is characterized above all by his methodical excessiveness.

Walburga Hülk, emeritus professor of Romance languages ​​at the University of Siegen, handles this task with a casual overview and impressive skill. While at the beginning of Victor Hugo’s life story it looks as if she is occasionally seeking refuge in off-color platitudes – “the Paris cultural scene was… heated and combative” – ​​the portrayal becomes confident in the second third: Then Walburga Hülk has her own way of access found. One might call it an academically domesticated enthusiasm, with both sides, science and enthusiasm, showing their best sides.

If you don’t read Hugo, you’re missing out on a big piece of the 19th century

Walburga Hülk’s biography is the story of a public intellectual who was also a writer, not the other way around. His place was not the window from which one could look out onto the street, he was the opposite of a stroller, the master of distant closeness. Where he was there was agora, there was a market place and crowds. There he raised his voice and spoke to the people, and if he lived in exile for almost twenty years, first on the Channel Island of Jersey, then on the neighboring island of Guernsey, that only meant that the people had to travel by ship – or ( (which was more likely to be true) that modern media, especially newspapers, were so advanced that they could replace physical presence. A large part of Victor Hugo’s works are set in the past, such as “The Miserables” (from 1815 to 1832), such as the drama “The King Amuses Himself” (around 1520), such as the philosophical poem “The Donkey” (world history ), and the author did not lack historical research. But inside every story there is a small Republican power plant wheezing. Walburga Hülk sees it all steaming up, against Napoleon III. and the rule of an aristocratically inflating financial capital, against slavery, for the survivors of the Paris Commune, and she looks at it, if not with sympathy, then at least with sympathy.

In case of doubt, the sympathy is discreet, but it leaves nothing out, not even when it comes to morally ambiguous things in the poet’s life, for example the excessive power that the family man Victor Hugo represented for his loved ones. His daughter Adèle lost her mind over it (François Truffaut made one of his best films out of this material in 1975). Or when we have to talk about the erotic fury with which Victor Hugo turned to women well into his old age – which, among other things, led to at least one of them, namely the actress Juliette Drouet, serving him for the rest of his life. Walburga Hülk calls the man a “man of the century”. The name is correct and well chosen: the nineteenth century was reflected in this writer, from the July Revolution in 1830 to the conjuring of ghosts to the Paris World Exhibition in 1878, from the disputes over copyright to the cluttered interiors in which not an inch was without symbolism. Victor Hugo may be a writer whose works are no longer read in this country. But this biography makes it clear what is being missed: perhaps not a whole century, but a large part of it.