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neilrcoulter 's review for:
Notre-Dame de Paris
by Victor Hugo
I started reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris with very little knowledge of what the novel contains. I knew there was a hunchbacked bell-ringer named Quasimodo (but didn’t realize that his name comes from the Sunday after Easter in the church calendar), a woman named Esmeralda, and a bad priest. I think I watched the Disney cartoon years ago, but (probably mercifully) didn’t remember much about it. I’d been told that the novel includes long sections about the architecture of Paris. But that was it. And that lack of prior knowledge was a blessing. It made the reading very exciting, because as Hugo introduces a large number of characters early in the story, I had no idea which characters would become important, nor what their narrative trajectory was going to be. In hindsight, I find it fascinating that Hugo immediately brings us into a scene that includes almost all of the characters who will prove to be important to the story, along with other characters and actions that have much less significance. It’s a technique Hugo employs throughout the novel that I loved: show the reader something whose importance won’t be clear until much later in the book. It’s one of many ways that Notre-Dame de Paris reminded me of Dickens, as Hugo weaves different characters together in ways that are just on the edge of being too coincidental, but that usually made me smile when the connections were made clear.
In his introduction, translator John Sturrock notes the “feverishly operatic plot” of the novel, and I think that’s an apt description. The story Hugo spins always veers toward the sentimental and melodramatic, and I could see the characters as stock types who come onstage and play their expected roles. (Pierre Gringoire, the philosopher and writer, seems to come straight out of a Shakespeare play.) But what grounds Hugo’s writing and elevates it above just the story itself is the larger ideas the author is incorporating into it all throughout. Hugo is concerned with the deterioration of Paris’s architecture, and so he invites us to ponder the ways that we ourselves, as individuals and society, might be changing and even deteriorating. Claude Frollo’s early promise in his studies and career descends into madness; Louis XI is presented as feeble and fickle; Jehan and Gringoire are never able to rise to their true potential in society, and in fact everyone seems in danger of being pulled downward to the criminal truant community. Characters who do experience some form of redemption and completion (Quasimodo, La Esmeralda, Sister Gudule) only come to it after extreme persecution from society, and they don’t live long enough to enjoy the other side of redemption; so we feel a sense of hopelessness in Paris 1482, as Hugo tells it (though, intriguingly, he is also setting up the foundation for the French Revolution, three hundred years after the events in this novel). In the thirty years between Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Hugo found ways to deepen the idea of redemption, making Jean Valjean’s story much more compelling and complete than anything in the earlier novel.
Hugo is also suggesting that the deterioration of architecture (the result more of humans’ poor decisions than of time and the elements) is connected to the rise of the printed word—another “in hindsight” insight, as he’s writing about events in 1482. Architecture, Hugo asserts, was the common language of humanity before the writing took over. With his focus on inevitable deterioration and unwise human choices, Hugo might suggest that writing will also be eclipsed by something else. Hugo wouldn’t have known that the “something else” would be the moving image, but looking at changes in common communication since Hugo’s time, we might easily apply his own concept of hindsight and see that his ideas continue to have merit.
These larger ideas that Hugo weaves into the novel are not seamless, and chapters about the minute details of medieval Paris architecture might seem out of place. But I actually love that aspect of the novel. As I read, I got the sense that Hugo felt like there was too much going on in his mind, and he was struggling to keep it all contained in novel form. There is so much that he wants us to know, and he truly believes it’s all vital to the story he’s telling. The chapter about the cathedral’s history and architecture does help us understand Quasimodo’s world later in the book; and the chapter about Paris’s architecture becomes more important when Claude flees the city, and we can picture where he is with much more precision than we would otherwise. But even apart from direct connections that allow these seemingly extraneous chapters to make sense, I love Hugo’s delighted excessiveness in wanting to tell us so much. It’s like Dickens and other novelists, but it’s its own style.
After knowing about this book for so long, I’m really glad I finally read it. It’s challenging in the ways that I like, and it’s given me a lot to think about, all the way through.
In his introduction, translator John Sturrock notes the “feverishly operatic plot” of the novel, and I think that’s an apt description. The story Hugo spins always veers toward the sentimental and melodramatic, and I could see the characters as stock types who come onstage and play their expected roles. (Pierre Gringoire, the philosopher and writer, seems to come straight out of a Shakespeare play.) But what grounds Hugo’s writing and elevates it above just the story itself is the larger ideas the author is incorporating into it all throughout. Hugo is concerned with the deterioration of Paris’s architecture, and so he invites us to ponder the ways that we ourselves, as individuals and society, might be changing and even deteriorating. Claude Frollo’s early promise in his studies and career descends into madness; Louis XI is presented as feeble and fickle; Jehan and Gringoire are never able to rise to their true potential in society, and in fact everyone seems in danger of being pulled downward to the criminal truant community. Characters who do experience some form of redemption and completion (Quasimodo, La Esmeralda, Sister Gudule) only come to it after extreme persecution from society, and they don’t live long enough to enjoy the other side of redemption; so we feel a sense of hopelessness in Paris 1482, as Hugo tells it (though, intriguingly, he is also setting up the foundation for the French Revolution, three hundred years after the events in this novel). In the thirty years between Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Hugo found ways to deepen the idea of redemption, making Jean Valjean’s story much more compelling and complete than anything in the earlier novel.
Hugo is also suggesting that the deterioration of architecture (the result more of humans’ poor decisions than of time and the elements) is connected to the rise of the printed word—another “in hindsight” insight, as he’s writing about events in 1482. Architecture, Hugo asserts, was the common language of humanity before the writing took over. With his focus on inevitable deterioration and unwise human choices, Hugo might suggest that writing will also be eclipsed by something else. Hugo wouldn’t have known that the “something else” would be the moving image, but looking at changes in common communication since Hugo’s time, we might easily apply his own concept of hindsight and see that his ideas continue to have merit.
These larger ideas that Hugo weaves into the novel are not seamless, and chapters about the minute details of medieval Paris architecture might seem out of place. But I actually love that aspect of the novel. As I read, I got the sense that Hugo felt like there was too much going on in his mind, and he was struggling to keep it all contained in novel form. There is so much that he wants us to know, and he truly believes it’s all vital to the story he’s telling. The chapter about the cathedral’s history and architecture does help us understand Quasimodo’s world later in the book; and the chapter about Paris’s architecture becomes more important when Claude flees the city, and we can picture where he is with much more precision than we would otherwise. But even apart from direct connections that allow these seemingly extraneous chapters to make sense, I love Hugo’s delighted excessiveness in wanting to tell us so much. It’s like Dickens and other novelists, but it’s its own style.
After knowing about this book for so long, I’m really glad I finally read it. It’s challenging in the ways that I like, and it’s given me a lot to think about, all the way through.