Sartre's second century

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 131
This undertaking becomes considerably smoother by acknowledging
that the citations here come not from Sartre but from Hugo himself,
immediately hinting at the latter's own perturbations. 25 More fascinating
still, Sartre uncannily talks of Hugo in the same discordant tone as the
"new" Sartreans speak of Sartre. His attraction towards Hugo is clearly
hesitant, no doubt informed by that Flaubertian apprehension towards
Hugo's stature, but it is also undeniable, commendable even, for the
critical balance that it puts in place vis-a-vis the Hugolian stereotype.
During an interview in 1975, Michel Contat reminds Sartre that he had
once admitted to an admiration for Hugo. Nearly three decades earlier,
Sartre had indeed praised Hugo for his cultivation of writing as a form of
commitment. In Sartre's eyes, Hugo was equally committed to the
ideological liberties that appealed to the bourgeois sensibility as he was to
the material liberties that the proletariat was clamouring for. In other
words, Hugo did not allow the intuitive world of his imagination to
overtake the immediate world of his reality. His determination to address
the key principle of freedom from both an aesthetic and a social
perspective connected his work to a mass audience: "He was one of the
only, perhaps the only, one of our writers who was truly popular." 26
Sartre's knee-jerk reaction to Contat's reminder is to tone down his
admiration:
Oh, only a little. I can't give you any precise feeling toward Victor Hugo.
There are many things to reproach him for, and others which are really
quite wonderful. My feelings are confused and jumbled, so I would get out
of this by saying that I admired him. But in truth, I don't admire him any
more than I do anyone else. 27
But Sartre quickly reinstates his attraction nevertheless, concluding that
these sentiments are more a question of esteem than admiration.
Sartre had in part elucidated this esteem in his account of Flaubert's
literary background in L'Idiot de la famille. In the second volume, and
more particularly in the third, Sartre touches upon a philosophical tension
"Le total echappe [...] approcher toujours, n'arriver jamais" (Le Droit et la loi>
41,42).
26 "C'est un des seuls, peut-6tre le seul de nos ecrivains qui soit vraiment
populaire" ("Qu'est-ce que la literature?", 126).
"Oh, bien peu. Je ne peux pas vous dormer de sentiment exact pour Victor Hugo.
II y a beaucoup de choses a bl&mer en lui, et d'autres qui sont vraiment tres belles.
C'est confus et m§le\ alors je m'en tirerais en disant que je l'admirais. Mais, en
ventd, je ne 1'admire pas plus qu'un autre" ("Autoportrait a soixante-dix ans",
195).