Discover Victor Hugo
A Teaser to the Art of Victor Hugo
Today marks Victor Hugo’s birthday, which gives me reason to renew my pledge to read and re-read his writing and study his works of art—his poetry, plays and novels and sketches—and draw strength and joy. Hugo is the primary literary influence on my favorite writer, Ayn Rand. As Rand’s biographer, Shoshana Milgram, a scholar of Hugo’s work, observes in Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, throughout her career, Rand “quotes [Hugo] more than she quotes any artist other than herself.”
“What Ayn Rand loved about Victor Hugo,” Dr. Milgram writes, “when she discovered him in her early teens, was that he made ‘everything important and he feature[d] that which is dramatic and important,’ that she found in him ‘the grandeur of man and the focus on man,’ that his drama was ‘magnificent.’ She felt, she said, that Les Misérables was so ‘grand scale that I became almost possessive about that book’ and thought of ‘anything from Les Misérables, whether the name Jean Valjean or Gavroche or any of the lesser characters [as] the souvenirs of my loved ones. Everything was holy to me in that sense.’”
Ninety-Three, The Man Who Laughs, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Toilers of the Sea and, of course, Les Misérables—these are among his best known works. Within these novels, Hugo also wrote historical and political essays. Hugo wrote plays, such as Hernani, stories and poems. I’ve attended lectures, visited a Paris museum and explored exhibitions of his drawings. I’ve seen and reviewed the popular Broadway stage musical version of Les Misérables and seen various TV and movie adaptations, including the 1935 film, Liam Neeson as Jean Valjean and the recent PBS miniseries, which is very good. In Western art, archives, places, quotes and culture—from Giuseppe Verdi and Benjamin Britten to Disney’s 1996 animated musical and Susan Boyle—Hugo’s influence abounds. Whether Lon Chaney, Conrad Veidt, Charles Laughton, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Hopkins or Neeson, Jackman or West, Hugo’s characters forge our greatest actors. From Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind to the creators of Batman and Nero Wolfe, Hugo’s writing leaves an imprint on much of what one sees, reads and knows.
Hugo, as Rand points out, depicts the heroic and larger than life. The scale alone is tantalizing. Jeanine Basinger writes in Silent Stars that “The Hunchback of Notre Dame ... was a massive [cinematic] undertaking for 1923, requiring 750 crewmembers to build its huge re-creation of the medieval world, a set that covered 19 acres of land on the Universal lot.” Basinger reports that Lon Chaney carried 40 pounds of rubber on his back and shoulders in order to produce the hump, “added another 30 pounds of weight with a breastplate and leather harness, and blocked out most of the vision in his right eye with a specially made eyepiece that distorted his face.” Hugo’s hunchback inspired composer and lyricist Lionel Bart, who created the music for Oscar’s 1968 Best Picture Oliver!, based on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, to attempt a musical version. According to Bart’s friend, writer Noel Coward, Bart considered simply calling it Quasimodo.
Hugo’s impact endures. Industrialist and inventor Thomas Edison also admired one of Hugo’s heroes; he was inspired by the fisherman in Hugo’s 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea. Besides Rand, Hugo influenced Camus, Dickens and Dostoevsky. In her September 16, 1962 column in the Los Angeles Times, Rand wrote that, when asked to write an introduction for a new translation of Hugo’s last novel, Ninety-Three, published in paperback by Bantam Books, she almost envied “the readers who can discover Victor Hugo for the first time.”
Rand noted that Victor Hugo:
is not a reporter of the momentary, but an artist who projects the essential and fundamental. He is not a statistician of gutter trivia, but a romanticist who presents life as it might be and ought to be. He is the worshipper and the superlative portrayer of man’s greatness. If you are struggling to hold your vision of man above the gray ashes of our century, Hugo is the fuel you need. One cannot preserve that vision or achieve it without some knowledge of what is greatness and some image to concretize it. Every morning, when you read today’s headlines, you shrink a little in human stature and hope. Then, if you turn to modern literature for a nobler view of man, you are confronted by those cases of arrested development — the juvenile delinquents aged 30 to 60 — who still think that depravity is daring or shocking, and whose writing belongs, not on paper, but on fences. If you feel, as I do, that there’s nothing as boring as depravity, if you seek a glimpse of human grandeur — turn to a novel by Victor Hugo.”
I aim to re-discover, re-read, learn, know and understand Hugo. Mine is a remedial, restorative goal to counter the impoverishment of being among those Miss Rand called Comprachicos (a term borrowed from Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs) to describe the harm of modern education. If you think you might be one of the Comprachicos, too, consider joining the quest to read Hugo. Call it an uprising. As Victor Hugo once wrote: “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”