THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1831)

 In this review I'll use the English language title for Victor Hugo's novel rather than the French one. One reason is that the word HUNCHBACK is easier to use as a short form for the title. But I also think it's a better title. Quasimodo is indubitably the novel's central icon, and as important as the 15th-century Parisian setting is, that importance is secondary. Supposedly foreign tourists became more interested in the Notre Dame cathedral after the publication of Hugo's novel. But I'd bet few tourists came to observe the cathedral's architectural wonders, but rather thought about the setting in which the pitiable hunchback came to his sad end.                                                       

In contrast to some 19th-century novels that I have frequently reread, like MOBY DICK and FRANKENSTEIN, I only read HUNCHBACK once before, thirty-forty years ago. I don't remember most of my impressions from the first reading. I had probably seen the classic 1939 movie adaptation and may have heard that it was not entirely faithful to the Hugo novel. I probably didn't know that Esmerelda too meets a terrible fate, and back then, I might have called that end "tragic." But on this reread, I realized that almost everything about the Hugo book is oriented toward the mythos Northrop Frye termed "irony." Esmerelda is the only character who incarnates any potential for good, and that means that she must be sacrificed to the stupidity and venality of 15th-century Paris. Quasimodo's claim to goodness is shakier, but he starts out with all the odds massed against him, so he too is doomed. Of the few characters in HUNCHBACK who prosper, all are utterly unworthy. 

   Often HUNCHBACK has been adapted in other media that obscured the book's ironic mode, focusing on the pathos of Quasimodo rather than his inevitable doom. Some versions also give Esmerelda a "happy ending" with her beloved guardsman Phoebus, one of those worthless characters mentioned above. But I've yet to see a truly ironic version, one that follows the book in depicting the entire society as informed by cruelty and rapacity. Usually all the negative aspects of Quasimodo's world are channeled into the hunchback's father-figure Frollo, who becomes obsessed with the beautiful Esmerelda's physical charms. Ironically, Esmerelda herself is no less captivated by beauty, becoming smitten with Phoebus for his looks (the reference to Apollo is a telling one). Quasimodo may be the one individual, even with his limited mentality, who appreciates Esmerelda as much for her kindness as for her beauty.           

 

Hugo is sometimes linked with the artistic movement called "Romanticism," but I don't think HUNCHBACK is a Romantic novel, as are both MOBY DICK and FRANKENSTEIN. It contains larger-than-life scenes that everyone with a basic education knows, like Quasimodo's public flogging and the mercy shown him by his sort-of victim Esmerelda, and the hunchback's dramatic rescue of Esmerelda from the hangman's noose. But HUNCHBACK also contains reams of incredibly prolix prose, as Hugo burns up space descanting on the foolishness of the Parisians, from the highest to the lowest. Hugo acts as if he thinks he invented satire, with the result that most of the other characters are superficial. HUNCHBACK is one of those rare novels which has become a sort of secular literary myth, at least in the sense that most people have at least a broad knowledge of its nature. Yet Hugo's mythopoeic powers are at odds when his didactic ones. For instance, one of the novel's most mythic moments takes place when one of Hugo's POV characters is victimized by the denizens of The Court of Miracles, possibly the first "city of thieves" in canonical literature. This is a great nightmarish scene, potentially portraying the thief-society as the inversion of normal Parisian existence. But once I saw that "overground" Paris was just as rotten and arbitrary as "underground" Paris, I felt that Hugo was making a very superficial equation between the two. In the end, HUNCHBACK is a classic novel that I can admire in many respects. But because of the conflict I perceive between Hugo's intellectual and imaginative powers, it's not a novel I like.                                                                                                       

Unlike most of the "monsters" who appeared first in 19th-century fiction, Quasimodo is never as imposing a menace as Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster or even Mister Hyde. I still believe he belongs to the domain of the uncanny because his crippled-yet-powerful status is not completely in the naturalistic mode.