The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Dealing with all this, if Hugo is not to emerge as either a pathological self-deceiver or a blatant liar, is a matter of negotiating the contradictions, and it is best if, like Robb, you have a flair for paradox and prefer definition by metaphor to psychoanalysis (though the temptation, given the younger Hugo’s obsession with hunchbacks and red-headed dwarfs, must have been considerable). So Robb can write: ‘In Hugo’s moral universe, there was sometimes little difference between an act of cowardice and an act of courage; both meant ignoring the usual code of conduct.’

  This seems to me to get the man right. It sounds like Hugo, who defined boredom as a state in which ‘life seems entirely logical’; who, when asked the point of Les Orientales, in which he had discovered for poetry a process in which language itself drives the poem, replied: ‘The author has no idea … He has never seen any roadmaps of Art, with the frontiers of the possible and the impossible drawn in red and blue.’ Or to choose two other examples, both of an astonishing modernity: ‘As a person one is sometimes a stranger to what one writes as a poet’; and ‘All great writers create two oeuvres, one deliberate, one involuntary.’

  As Robb suggests, referring to the adjustments by which Hugo made it appear that key works such as Hernani and Notre-Dame de Paris coincided with and may even have precipitated revolutionary events: ‘These lies are probably closer to the truth that matters than accurate statements. By adjusting his chronology, Hugo was hinting that though he himself may have been deaf to the evidence, his works had already known that he was on the side of the masses.’

  Hugo, in Robb’s generous view, is like some early example of multiple personality disorder, ‘not just a real person with several masks, but a limited liability company of egos, each one feeding off the other and maintained by an army of commentators’. He even offers a kind of answer to Cocteau. ‘Everyone is a lunatic in the privacy of their own mind, and, considering the treasures in Hugo’s unconscious, his apparent sanity is a far more remarkable phenomenon.’

  And the works? We can, each one, have no more than a fragmentary response to that vast outpouring: to Notre-Dame, Les Misérables and Les Travailleurs de la Mer read in early adolescence; to plays discovered through favourite operas; to poems such as ‘Oceano Nox’ and ‘Les Djinns’, learned by heart at school, and others read in a more general way later, ‘Booz endormi’, ‘A Villequier’, ‘Demain dès l’aube’.

  When we read out of another language, out of French or German or Russian, what emerges in us is another reader. Life in that other order of experience – the way objects there are related to the senses, the balance between public and private selves, the part sex plays in one’s image of oneself, to name only a few aspects of the thing – all this is sufficiently different to call up a self we may never come upon if we read only in our native tongue.

  I began to grasp something of this when I first read The Count of Monte Cristo. I was ten, maybe eleven. Soon afterwards my parents bought me a whole set of Dumas, twenty volumes in morocco leather; I read them all, one after another, and went on quickly to René, Atala, Paul et Virginie, and after seeing the Charles Laughton film, to Notre-Dame.

  What these books offered an over-imaginative pre-adolescent, beyond sensational plots and another version of history, was something I had not encountered till then: the stimulation of a side of my nature, all the more potent for being unspecific, that kept me in a state of almost continuous physical excitement.

  Sometimes the appeal was sadistic, as in an early chapter of La Tulipe Noire (my only other response of this kind was when, at sixteen, I got to the end of that orgy of erotic delights, Salammbô). I was disturbed, a little frightened even, by my own excitement. But it was something closer to normality, La Reine Margot I remember, that hit me hardest. Finishing it under the bedclothes at night, I had a fit of hysterical weeping and was forbidden any more of these secret readings – though not, oddly enough, the reading itself. Only one book was forbidden, La Dame aux Camélias. I read it, of course, and was disappointed. The sex there was overt and what I had been reading for was something different – the over-all sexiness of eroticism: erotic subtext. Best of all for that was Notre-Dame.

  Intriguing, then, to discover that Hugo called reason ‘intelligence taking exercise’ and imagination ‘intelligence with an erection’. Also to hear from Robb that ‘Hugo’s most successful relationships were with people under the age of ten’ (that is, as sexually awake as he was at nine, but immature) ‘or with the ten-year-old parts of their personality’.

  The erotic subtext of Notre-Dame is still strong – it is as if Hugo were writing in a state of continuous arousal – but the adult reader will find its real interest elsewhere: in the comic lightness of the first hundred pages, which mainly follow Gringoire, and especially in the Rabelaisian grotesquerie of the Court of Miracles; even more in the essayistic chapters that follow: ‘Notre-Dame’ and ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris’, with its lyrical coda on the bells: ‘Ordinarily the murmur that escapes from Paris in the daytime is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to the tutti of the steeples.’

  Most dazzling of all is the chapter called ‘This Will Kill That’, on the displacement of the ancient and medieval worlds by the modern, and of architecture by the printing press. It is here that we see Hugo’s astonishing energy and originality as he throws off idea after idea that will be essential to the new way of perceiving. ‘When a man understands the art of seeing,’ he writes, ‘he can trace the spirit of the age even in the knocker on a door.’ This is the Hugo who, travelling for the first time by train, in 1841, sees immediately that travelling at speed changes and disintegrates everything we look at, and so becomes one of the precursors of impressionism.

  This capacity for experiencing from within is everywhere in Notre-Dame. In an act of bold appropriation, he takes a mouldy, unfashionable half-ruin and brings it to life again, but in a new form: cathedral as book. Its silhouette, H, becomes his personal monogram. He enters its stone life (partly through the double identification with Quasimodo) and re-creates it as text. He occupies and makes it, this monument at the heart of Paris (as he had already made the Comédie Française and would in time make the Académie, the Assemblé, the Place des Vosges and at last even the Panthéon), a monument to himself; proving his thesis that This Will Kill That by replacing stone with a print work whose multilingual inscriptions and private references anticipate Ruskin, Proust and a host of twentieth-century theorists, and make Eco look like a lazy schoolboy. In the light of all this, even the descent into the underworld of nightmare and folklore out of which he drew Quasimodo, impressive as it is, seems like child’s play.

  And the plot?

  One of the revolutions wrought by Romanticism, which came late to France – they were occupied with changes of another sort – was in the nature of the audience. The real scandal of Hernani was the invasion of the Comédie Française by an audience of the people, and it was this new audience, with its own ideas of what would please, that changed the nature of writing in the 1830s.

  The problem for the novelist who needed to sell (not Stendhal, of course, who clung proudly to the Happy Few) was how to reconcile the sensational requirements of a new readership, the general reading public, with serious literary values. Balzac did this by fashioning his plots out of intrigue, deception, and by making the pursuit of sex, power and commercial advantage – from the top to the bottom of society, as the Human Comedy presents it – forms of the same vital force. The Brontës took the Gothic and domesticated it, transposing its mysterious, supernatural elements to the landscape or weather and making ‘love’ a kind of possession or haunting. Dickens, most powerfully of all, used coincidence and revelation to lay bare, under the ordinary fabric of society, a set of hidden relationships where what defined and linked his characters was not family or class but old half-forgotten passions, crimes or even darker, more secret affinities.

  And Hugo? One of the
inscriptions on a wall of Notre Dame is the Greek word ‘ANATKH’ – fate.

  In Hugo, all the major characters are linked by what he would have us believe is destiny. So Quasimodo is the baby monster left in place of Sachette’s stolen child, Esmeralda, and when Frollo decides to adopt him it is because he is thinking at the moment of his baby brother, Jehan. Esmeralda, Quasimodo and Jehan are fatally related and This Will Kill That – in a way that is shocking enough, but entirely gratuitous.

  Nothing in Hugo happens naturally. It is all stage-managed by a God called Hugo, a sanctimonious old ruffian who will not let his characters go. And everything in Hugo is built on antithesis – a stylistic device, he reminds us, that God also uses. Light/dark, male/female – so why not beauty/ugliness, saint/sinner, policeman/criminal?

  ‘Valjean,’ he tells us, ‘had this trait, that he might be said to carry two knapsacks – in the one he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other the impressive talents of a convict.’ But these two sides of Valjean belong to geometry rather than psychology, they are neither in conflict nor in alliance; and Valjean is less a victim of society, or fate, or mischance, than of the plot Hugo has fabricated around him, which he has to use all his talents to escape. He is no more complex in the end than his nemesis Javert, that barbarian in the service of civilisation who, when he discovers that Valjean is not simply a convict, has no other recourse, his oppositional view of the world having entirely disintegrated, than to drown himself.

  Very different is that other great fictional convict of the period, Balzac’s Vautrin, whose genius for disguise and transformation, for entering into the soul of others – as idle man of affairs, Spanish cardinal, Mephistophelian seducer of naïve but ambitious young men – makes him the prime mover of his world, its great manipulator and vengeur. In his last incarnation (no easy antithesis here) he himself becomes the law, in the form of chief of the Parisian police, a role for which, in Balzac’s cynical view, his criminal career is the ideal preparation. This sort of playfulness and subversive provocation is beyond Hugo. Vigny, one feels, was right. After the brilliant maturity of his youth (Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné, Notre-Dame) he declined into shallow youthfulness, fell into what Balzac – that Catholic royalist who was also the favourite novelist of Lukács and Marx – called ‘the democratic vertigo to which so many blind writers succumb’; became the universal signer of petitions and supporter of freedom fighters in every part of the globe; the first pan-European; courageous opponent of the death penalty, slavery, the Church and every form of ignorance; passionate believer that universal education, ‘identical schools, Light, Light!’ would eradicate all the injustices and evils of society, indeed evil itself – a ‘sublime cretin’ (Dumas fils), ‘stupid as the Himalayas’ (Leconte de Lisle) – who when he died at eighty-three was the best-known citizen of our planet.

  And the future he hailed in such glowing terms? (‘Citizens, the nineteenth-century is great but the twentieth-century will be happy … War will be dead; the scaffold, hate, royalty, frontiers and dogmas will all be dead.’) Well, we have seen that. We are living with it. It is Auschwitz, Bosnia, the Gulags, Rwanda, Les Miz, and the best guide to its splendours and miseries, its vulgarity, its follies, its cruelties great and small, is the best guide we have to Hugo’s century as well, the author of La Comédie Humaine.

  The Australian Review of Books, 1997

  READING THE SIGNS: JANE EYRE

  THERE ARE SOME BOOKS that make such a vivid impression on us, put us so deeply under their spell, that our first acquaintance with them becomes a watershed in our lives and the actual reading – the excited turning of pages over a period of hours or days – seems in retrospect to have taken place in a country all its own, with a light and weather like no other we have ever known.

  I read Jane Eyre in the Christmas holidays – the long summer break – between primary and secondary school; I was not quite thirteen. Some of it I read slumped in a canvas chair on our beach-house verandah, within sound of the surf; some of it on the beach itself between swims. What extraordinary creatures we are that we can be, on the same occasion, in two quite different places; and what a business reading is that fifty years after the event the landscape of Thornfield in the frost, as I first came upon it, is as present in my memory as the hot sands of Main Beach Southport and my own body under the blazing sun. What did I get from the book that it should have hit so hard?

  The voice of the narrator, first of all, which once you have given yourself up to it is irresistible; so close, so much part of your own inner world that everything Jane sees and feels is immediately a revelation. It is as if you had discovered the key not just to a book but to the world – a world full of signs to be read, and interconnections you had not previously imagined.

  One of those interconnections is between individuals. Ardently romantic, the announcement of it comes to the adolescent of either sex as a lightning flash.

  ‘He is not of their kind,’ Jane tells herself of Mr Rochester, rejecting at a stroke all the circumstances that divide them. ‘I believe he is of mine; I am sure he is, – I feel akin to him, – I understand the language of his countenance and movements; though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and veins, that assimilates me mentally to him.’

  Rousing stuff, this bold assertion of the primacy of feeling, this sympathy between souls that can leap across real space as well as social barriers, and is grounded in the physical but can so immediately transcend it. Jane is not even in solitude when she hears the voice of Mr Rochester calling to her out of the night. ‘The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that filled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock; but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor; from which they were now summoned, and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited, while the flesh quivered on my bones.’

  One of the things that convinces us most in this passage is that in describing the state in which Mr Rochester’s voice comes to her, the words Jane finds, in their rhythm, in the intensity with which the physical and the mental become one, reproduce just the state in which Jane’s voice, as narrator, comes to us. We believe utterly in the form of sympathy she proposes because we ourselves are the subject of it.

  Late in the book, Jane pictures the world as a network of such correspondences or sympathies – between individual souls, between individuals and what they produce – her pictures, for example, which Mr Rochester takes as clues to her inner world – between events in the human sphere and their reflection in Nature. Interpreting the world is a matter of reading ‘signs’. ‘Presentiments are strange things!’ Jane tells us. ‘And so are sympathies; and so are signs: and the three combined make one mystery of which humanity has not yet found the key.’

  As for the tale she has to tell, Jane is so sympathetically attuned to the events of it that they seem at times to be no more than a projection of her own intimate yearning. She stands, as a narrator, somewhere between Catherine Morland of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, whose thinking is so conditioned by the sensational novels she has absorbed that she mistakes the oddness of people, and the strangeness of real life, for the making of yet another Gothic fiction, and that other governess and servant of an absent master, the anonymous narrator of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw – ‘young, untried, nervous’ – whose account of the ‘mysteries’ at Bly hovers so ambiguously on the edge of neurotic fantasy.

  There is no ambiguity in Jane’s case. In her down-to-earth way she resists the suggestion that Thornfield may house a mystery. But the world of story – ‘Passages of love and adventure taken from old fairytales and other ballads or (as at a later period I discovered) from Pamela’ – has a strong influence on what she has to tell.

  Writ
ing of her free hours, she tells us: ‘The restlessness was in my nature … Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it … and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended – a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.’

  The place Jane chooses for her reveries, the corridor of the third storey, is itself significant, though she does not as yet know it. ‘One would almost say,’ Mrs Fairfax tells her, ‘that, if there were a ghost at Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt.’

  There is no ghost, but Jane, with her usual prescience, does see something. ‘With its two rows of small black doors all shut,’ it is ‘like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle’. When, later, she sits alone at dusk on the stile in Hay Lane, and hears the approach of hooves, ‘all sorts of fancies’, she tells us, ‘bright and dark tenanted my mind: the memories of nursery stories were there amongst other rubbish’.

  The sturdy common sense of that ‘amongst other rubbish’ speaks for the side of Jane’s nature that is suspicious of mysteries and of the irrational. The dash of cold water it provides (quite literally and comically in the case of Mr Rochester’s bed) is meant to save her from falling into Catherine Morland’s error; whereas it is only by accepting the irrational, and making a place for the extreme, that she might have discovered, behind Grace Poole with her ‘pot of porter’, the even darker figure of Mrs Rochester. She even misreads the events in Hay Lane. ‘The incident had occurred and was gone for me: it was an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a sense.’