The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

Why is The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, for all its obvious brilliance and energy, a bad book? One could point to the many irritating and verbose characters, the faulty construction of the plot, the simplistic passions which drive the principle actors, or the numerous overwritten and grandiose pronouncements during which the story vanishes entirely. For all its erudition and detail, the events and people in the novel belong to the heated logic of opera, not to life.

What strikes me as most flawed, however, is the interplay between the story and the historical setting. Using a device he will also employ in his later novel Les Misérables, Hugo has all the different plot strands gather around a popular uprising. The rabble of Paris attempt to storm the cathedral in order to rescue the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda (who has been saved from the gallows by the hunchback Quasimodo, who has claimed sanctuary from temporal justice for her as long as she remains within the church) with cudgels and torches and scythes. And, as in the June Rebellion of 1832 depicted in Les Misérables, this is a failed insurrection: King Louis XI sends mounted troops who easily rout the mob and (skipping ahead through some plot complications) succeed in hanging Esmeralda.

In the words of one of the King’s advisers, “the people’s time has not come.” The problem of the novel is Hugo’s own judgment on this actor, the people, and the looked-for moment when its time will have come. 

Who belongs to “the people”? Among the tramps, we find the philosopher and tragedian Pierre Gringoire, a Bohemian, and Jehan Frollo, the archdeacon’s brother and member of the petite noblessse. These two characters figure disproportionately in the novel, with many pages given over to their tedious jibes, but they play no essential role in the plot—they are like gears that spin but are not connected to any moving part. And then the two most wretched characters in the novel, Quasimodo and the Sack Woman, are also the most isolated, and set themselves up in opposition to the rabble. (Esmeralda, it turns out, is not a gypsy at all!) Readers of Les Misérables will recognize this situation from the barricades in that novel, where the main action consists of a capitalist and former Mayor, Jean Valjean, rescuing Marius, who is the grandson of a Baron. Hugo certainly has a very strange idea of who comprises a popular uprising.

The problem is not an abstract Marxist criterion—that Hugo fails to represent the “true” proletariat and instead stacks the deck against the masses by making them ridiculous and unmotivated, always bursting out when the moment is not ripe—but a deficiency of plot. The appearance of the crowd, so dramatically memorable for readers of these novels, is always an anti-climax. Jean Valjean has no commitment to the cause of the barricades, and if he saves Marius, he also spares Javert. The villain Claude Frollo has the same objective as the Tramps—to rescue Esmeralda—but he accomplishes with a key what they fail to achieve with a battering ram.

It seems to me that Hugo sets up an opportunity to bring the masses and their uprising into play in a way that would draw in the plot and history around it—and then squanders this opportunity. In Book X, Chapter V, King Louis XI observes the tumult at the cathedral with strategic caution, from within his tower at the Bastille. He interprets the uprising at first as an insurrection against the Bailiff of the Palace of Justice—that is, not against his own authority, but against a separate feudal jurisdiction. Hugo details the intricate and overlapping array of powers pertaining to medieval sovereignty:

A city was an assemblage of a thousand fiefdoms, which cut it up into compartments of all forms and dimensions. Therefore, there were a thousand contradictory policies, that is to say, no police at all. In Paris, for instance, independently of the one hundred and forty-one fiefdoms claiming manorial rights, there were twenty-five who claimed the right of administering justice, from the Bishop of Paris, who had five hundred streets, down to the Prior of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, who had four. The sovereign authority of the King was only nominally recognized by all these feudal agents of the law.

 In his reign, Louis XI has initiated “the demolition of the feudal edifice” and “tried to break this web of fiefdoms spread out over Paris,” and so he rejoices in the possible unconscious aid rendered by the crowd at this moment. Perhaps they will raze the Bailiff’s house and hang him, which would be a blow struck for the unification of powers in the monarch. (A similar crisis is dramatized in possibly the greatest film ever made, Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.)

What we are seeing here is the genealogy of the absolute monarch, of everything that would be accomplished by Louis XIV at Versailles. This is precisely the problem, because Hugo is required here to make a complex judgment about this historical disposition of forces. Does he side with the rabble (which he has constituted with Bohemians, false Gypsies, goats, and aristocrats), or with the proto-absolutist forces represented above all by the Bastille? 

For a moment, it seems that the people are also involved in “the demolition of the feudal edifice,” i.e. that they are a progressive force, however they may be playing into the King’s own objectives. We might then see the full apparatus of feudal imbrications, allegiances, institutions, and ideologies sucked into the conflict—with all the dramatic possibilities of characters having to choose (social-historical) sides relative to their personal-intellectual insertion in the story. But this is not what happens. Instead, Hugo has Louis XI receive better intelligence from his advisers—it is not the Bailiff which is under attack, but the Church (under his protection) and his Parliament’s decrees. He then can crush the uprising with his cavalry.

In the final account, the fulcrum of the story is not any reckoning of historical actors engaged in a substantial social struggle, but the flaring-up of a thrilling background as a kind of pyrotechnic reflection of a love triangle. This evasion is what Georg Lukács is referring to in The Historical Novel, when he takes Victor Hugo to task for his “decorative subjectivization and moralization of history.” The marshaling of the illiterate, superstitious, destitute, proud, motley, and profane crowd of the medieval city, whether to be aligned with or against the shriveled, cynical cruelty of the feudal monarch—is a calling-to-account which never comes off. The decisions and recognition scenes that populate the final act—Quasimodo turns against Frollo; Esmeralda is not a Gypsy; Phoebus leads the witch hunt to find her; Frollo turns her over to the executioner—are arbitrary flourishes which leave the great conflict (the becoming of the people and their historical mission against tyranny) untouched. As Walter Benjamin remarked long ago, Hugo “had a profound vision of the life that was forming in the womb of nature and in the womb of the people. [He] never succeeded in fashioning a bridge between these two.”

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

In the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the catastrophes which befall the heroes are announced beforehand. In the Agamemnon, Cassandra foretells her slaughter and Agamemnon’s by Clytemnestra, and the subsequent revenge by Orestes. In the Oedipus Rex, both Tiresias and the Delphic Oracle presage the horrible self-discoveries which remain to be made by Oedipus.

This foreknowledge raises questions of responsibility and freedom. If things have to be this way, am I truly free to avoid them? And, if it is not my actions which made it so, then in what sense am I accountable for what happens? For the tragedians, the answer was: the difference one can make is precisely one’s being. Character is fate. There is no escaping pain or the change it makes in us, but we do not only suffer blindly—we make this fate our own.

As Bernard Williams writes in Shame and Necessity, the later Athenians imagined that it was possible “to control the political and practical world by empirical, rational, planning… There is a game against circumstances, but it is one that we might be able to win, because it is stupidly played by the other side.” This, he argues, hopes to trade one kind of constraint (the arbitrary irony of destiny) for another (political power and coercion over other agents). Plato and Aristotle are “on the same side, [both] believing in one way or another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can, when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations.”

This latter viewpoint is that of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, in which the scientist Hari Seldon is able, by a statistical method called Psychohistory: “that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli,” with the “necessary assumption… that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random.”

In this first volume of the Foundation series, psychohistory predicts the downfall of the Galactic Empire due to its own inertia and excessive size, and the Seldon Plan is a guiding mechanism to ensure that the collapse will be minimally disruptive and that a second Empire (rather than barbaric chaos) will arise in its place. That is, unlike Greek tragedy, Asimov skips quickly over the negative prediction (the downfall) and concentrates on the ameliorative process of the recovery.

Foundation is not really a novel, but rather a collection of short stories, held together by the premise of inevitable and foreknown “Seldon Crises,” in each of which “freedom of action will become… circumscribed so that [one] will be forced along one, and only one, path.” In each crisis, one is “faced by hard necessity, and… action is forced on you. The nature of that action—that is, the solution to your dilemma—is, of course, obvious!” The consoling teleology: “Whatever devious course your future history may take… , the path has been marked out, and that… end is new and greater Empire!”

On occasion, Seldon himself appears in pre-recorded messages to inform the actors of their progress according to his plan, but the purpose of these is inscrutable and probably merely to reinforce the narrative conceit. The Seldon Plan begins with an initial deception to hide the purpose of the Foundation from its operators, but each time he reappears, he remains bound to conceal his foreknowledge and guidance from the blind bearers of his statistical predictions. This means that the Seldon Crises are pre-resolved, they are turning points, but their outcome is not in question.

Here we can see the difference between the tragic foreknowledge of the Greeks. The tragic hero knows, but can do nothing with this knowledge (except suffer regret and an obscure responsibility). Oedipus tries to evade his prophesied outrages, but it is precisely this evasion which ensnares him. In Foundation, we have the much less interesting prospect of acting, without foreknowledge (Seldon cannot tell the Foundation any specifics, since this would throw off the statistical model) but also without consequences (since whatever happens is already guaranteed to work out, ultimately, for the pre-ordained good).

This outlook can be criticized in ethical, ideological, or religious terms (Dostoevsky’s parable of “The Grand Inquisitor” has anticipated and devastated Asimov’s position in advance), but it simply is unsatisfying narratively. The interesting thing is to act without guarantee; time and again Asimov shows us “risky” and dynamic solutions to the political crises that arise. Why then drag out Seldon to assure us that this was not, after all, exciting and courageous, but merely necessary and obvious?