Figures of Nothingness in Hugo's Poetry

Abstract

The figure of the shadow occurs frequently in Hugo's poetry, and possesses a value different from the one inherited from Plato. Early on, shadow is an image: as in Plato, the shadow in Hugo allegorizes the body whose form it displays, but for Hugo, shadow tells the truth, while light communicates illusion. Later, in ‘Ce que dit la bouche d'ombre,’ Hugo abandons this allegorical model, and fusing body and shadow, writes that bodies only cast shadows because of past misdeeds. Thus the bodies we see are the shadows of earlier crimes: Tiberius has become a stone; Sejanus has become a snake. Importantly, he leaves off identifying earlier avatars of what we see: the flower casts a shadow, indeed, but why it does so is left to the reader. The world for Hugo becomes a vast penitentiary, where fallenness and lack of substance prefigure the existentialist's predicament.