Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW

Notre Dame de Paris has already, within a few months of its publication, run through several editions; and as long as a taste remains for the extraordinary, or perhaps it should be called the tremendous, such works must be popular. They appeal to an appetite which is shared by the peer with the peasant. Victor Hugo is not a writer in whose hands the power of moulding the human sympathies is likely to be idle. He is eloquent, his fancy is active, his imagination fertile; and passion, which gives life and energy to the conceptions of a writer, and which, acting upon ideas as fire does upon the parched woods of America, sets the whole scene in a flame, is in him readily roused. Hugo may be called an affected writer, a mannerist, or a horrorist, but he can never be accused of the great vice, in modern times, the most heinous of all—dullness. A volume of Hugo is an active stimulant.

—July 1831

 

THE ATHENÆUM

It is especially in Notre Dame de Paris—a terrible and powerful narrative, which haunts the memory with the horrible distinctness of a nightmare—that M. Victor Hugo displays, in all their strength, at once the enthusiasm and self-possession, the boldness and flexibility of his genius. What varieties of suffering are heaped together in these melancholy pages—what ruins built up—what terrible passions put in action—what strange incidents produced! All the foul-ness and all the superstitions of the middle ages are melted, and stirred, and mixed together with a trowel of mingled gold and iron. The poet has breathed upon all those ruins of the past; and, at his will, they have taken their old forms and risen up again, to their true stature, upon that Parisian soil which toiled and groaned, of yore, beneath their hideous weight, like the earth under Etna. Behold those narrow streets, those swarming squares, those cut-throat alleys, those soldiers, merchants, and churches; look upon that host of passions circulating through the whole—all breathing, and burning, and armed!

—July 8, 1837

 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of Notre Dame de Paris was (he tells us) to “denounce” the external fatality that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition. To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do with the artistic conception; moreover it is very questionably handled, while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate success. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat-shaped island “moored” by five bridges to the different shores, and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of admirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude from this, that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so: we forget, indeed, the details as we forget or do not see the different layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the “Gothic profile” of the city, of the “surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and belfries,” and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clew, and already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that central building by character after character. It is purely an effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois smugness, with passionate contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Don Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?

—The Cornhill Magazine (August 1874)

 

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

[Hugo,] the greatest poet of this century [,] has been more than such a force of indirect and gradual beneficence as every great writer must needs be. His spiritual service has been in its inmost essence, in its highest development, the service of a healer and a comforter, the work of a redeemer and a prophet. Above all other apostles who have brought us each the glad tidings of his peculiar gospel, the free gifts of his special inspiration, has this one deserved to be called by the most beautiful and tender of all human titles—the son of consolation. His burning wrath and scorn unquenchable were fed with light and heat from the inexhaustible dayspring of his love—a fountain of everlasting and unconsuming fire.

—Victor Hugo (1886)

 

VICTOR BROMBERT

The principle of effacement in Hugo’s work has far-reaching implications. It not only signals a steady displacement of the historical center of gravity but corresponds to the dynamics of undoing that Hugo reads into the process of nature and of creation. It also denies the priority, and even the status, of the historical event. History itself—both as event and as discourse on the event—must ultimately be effaced in favor of transhistorical values. To be historically committed is a moral responsibility. But more important still is the need to understand that beyond history’s inability to provide meaning, there is history as evil. What is involved is not a banal inventory of history’s horrors—the brutalities, contusions, fractures, mutilations, and amputations attributed to man throughout history by the narrator of Notre-Dame de Paris as he considers the historical ravages that disfigured gothic architecture. More fundamentally, evil is linked to the very notion of sequentiality.

—Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984)

Questions

1. Through the character of Pierre Gringoire, how does Hugo represent the figure of the writer/artist? What kinds of conclusions can we draw from this vision?

2. Who is the villain of the novel? Claude Frollo? Phoebus de Châteaupers? The king, Louis XI? What does this ambiguity suggest?

3. In the French original, the titular hero (so to speak) of this novel is the cathedral of Notre-Dame, not the “hunchback.” Which title-Notre-Dame de Paris or the title given in the English translation, The Hunchback of Notre Dame— more accurately names the novel’s thematic core?

4. In the manifesto-like preface to his play Cromwell, Hugo called for a new aesthetic that brought together the grotesque and the sublime. Clearly, The Hunchback is informed by this aesthetic. Is the result to be admired or deplored? What, for example, is the effect on characterization?

5. The Hunchback of Notre Dame has been popular for roughly 170 years. It has generated many movies, musicals, plays, and a library of commentary. How would you explain this enduring popularity?