Sartre's second century

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Chapter Nine
in Hugo surprisingly similar to his own, although his focus on Flaubert
keeps him from reflecting in more detail on this similarity. Flaubert's
grand crocodile represents for Sartre a sort of chameleon, able to flicker
between "enlightened order" and "a tumultuous and inexplicable
disorder": 28
Hugo, optimism incarnate, the vatic poet, recognised by God as the only
worthy interlocutor, the courageous defender of the Communards [...], this
bard of the poor, [...] this astonishing man, half priest and half anarchist,
incontestable sovereign of the century. 29
Here he identifies two Hugos, contradictory and yet cohabiting, both of
whom are strikingly similar to the "new", double Sartre of uniformity and
multiplicity. Even though Hugo thrives off divine inspiration, he still
believes himself imperfect since he is human after all, subject to alienation
and loss. God speaks, but what Hugo hears are whispers from an uncertain
space that lies beyond this world, outside of all reason. We are thus
brothers with an absent father. Whilst mortal, man must find his own way,
exercising his creativity to make something of this existence: "He has no
cause to die to this world: on the contrary, he must live in it and engage
with it." 30 Hugo resolves to make sense of a senseless world in the
immediate absence of God, exercising the human inventiveness which
foregrounds Sartrean self-determination, as well its lack of fixity.
Sartre's observations actually anticipate a strand of nineteenth-century
studies that has promoted the idea of Hugo as a distinctly complex figure.
These readings bear considerable resemblance to those found in Sartre
scholarship, emphasising dialectic, not unity. Alongside Hugo's "longing
for order", Victor Brombert notes the "surprisingly modern nature of his
fiction-making, which undermines and decentres the subject". 31 Kathryn
Grossman likewise describes his "fundamental playfulness, an element all
too ignored in Hugo", whereby "opposites mix rather than confuse". 32 To
"La lumiere d'ordre", and "un desordre tumultueux et inexplicable" {L*Idiot, III,
123).
29 "Hugo, Foptimisme incarnd, le poete-'vates', reconnu par Dieu comme seul
interlocuteur valable, le ddfenseur courageux des Communards [...], ce chantre des
pauvres, [...] cet homme dtonnant, moide* pretre et moide* anar, incontestable
souverain du siecle" (ibid., 383).
30 "[I]l n'a pas besoin de mourir au monde: il faut qu'il y vive au contraire et qu'il
s'y engage" (L'Idiot, II, 1968).
31 Hugo, 1-5.
32 The Early Novels, 16,197.