| Tower of Darkness: Victor Hugo's Babelic Vision is a study of Victor Hugo's fiction in the light of an intricate figurative system centered around the notion of Babel as both architectural and linguistic entity. This polyvalent and Protean metaphor pervades the fabric of Hugo's five major novels (Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Miserables, Les Travailleurs de la mer, L'Homme qui rit, and Quatrevingt-Treize), and channels the energies of the text toward the articulation of an underlying dilemma. In different fashions in each of the novels, the configuration of Babel poses essential questions about the role of art in relation to human Progress, the cause of the oppressed people, and the utopian, redemptive ideals which Hugo associates with his authorial enterprise. Often disturbingly at odds with the tenor of Hugolian rhetoric, the Babelic figures of the text suggest instead the artist's profound complicity, not with progress but with the dark spirit of the Past, not with the oppressed victim but with the criminal oppressor, not with illumination or transparency but with opacity and enigma, with a realm of spiritual and metaphysical darkness.; In the Hugolian imagination, the prodigious, incomplete construction (Babel) is the very model of the work of art--an image, moreover, which is marked by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, the structure of the ascending Tower coincides with the spiral of Progress, and becomes the emblem of transformational activity, of humanity's evolution toward the ideals' of liberty, understanding, revealed meaning and spriritual regeneration. Yet on the other hand Hugo's text generates the image of a plunging or subterranean edifice (associated also with the notion of linguistic chaos and enigma) which inverts the aspirational aspect of Babel into a labyrinthian descent into darkness. This tenebrous Babelic construction is not the work of humanity, but rather the inscrutable, sinister text of nature and history, molded by the Divine artist-genius. An implicit model for Hugo's own vast and ambivalent textual project, the cosmic Babel raises qestions about the artist's affinity with realms of darkness, terror, criminality and evil which are incompatible with any progressive or redemptive conception of the artistic enterprise. |
