Sartre's second century

Reading Sartre with Victor Hugo 133
these voices I myself have added Walter Benjamin's favourable appraisals,
which have mostly fallen off the critical radar:
Hugo reflected the superficial views of the day as well as a blind faith in
the future, but he also had a profound vision of the life that was forming in
the womb of nature and of the people. Hugo never succeeded in fashioning
a bridge between the two. He saw no need for such a bridge. 33
Benjamin outlines how Hugo never denied the lure of our fantasy for a
total sense of being, rather the possibility of its realisation. As a poet, he
acknowledged both the imaginary and the real, but refused to assimilate
the two into some mythic truth that could pretend to validate our existence.
The "Rules" of Engagement
Like Sartre, Hugo believes that the human condition moves between
both the immediate and the transcendent as part of an existence
characterised by its elasticity. Reading their thinking alongside each
other's, we see that the notion of totalisation which earned Sartre so much
Structuralist criticism cannot be neatly dismissed as naive idealism. The
concept of an essential mode of being as elusive is vital. To forward the
idea of man as a free yet responsible being, Sartre's philosophy has to
point to the metaphysical quicksand on which it treads. We must not
overlook how, within their differing points of origin, Sartre and Hugo
therefore construct the makings of both an imaginary release from
alienation, and an immediate apprehension of its material reality. Elements
of both bad faith and acute self-awareness abound, as man forever tries to
fit with his world like the missing piece of a puzzle. This ambiguity is
evident in the ways in which both men's thinking inevitably sits atop the
flipside that the other represents. The Romantic ideal of man and world in
unison, and the existential reality of alienation, prove themselves two
poles within a similar philosophical structure of human being that
necessarily attract as much as they repel. Pivotally, Sartre's and Hugo's
different choices of precedence do not prevent either from crossing paths
in this double-bind and making strikingly similar demands of engagement
on their fellow man. It is to these demands, in light of the duality which
attracted Sartre to Hugo, that I now wish to turn in the closing section of
this chapter.
Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 65. See my article "Reading Walter Benjamin's
Concept of the Ruin in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris", French Studies, LXI,
2, April 2007,155-66.