Fragmentation and bricolage in Victor Hugo’s Hauteville House

Abstract

ABSTRACT Soon after his move, in 1855, to the Channel island of Guernsey, Victor Hugo bought a large house, which he called Hauteville House after the quarter of Saint Peter Port in which it was located. Over the next six years, he led a massive decoration campaign, during which he transformed the interior of the house into what many contemporaries saw as an ultimate form of self-expression. One of the main characteristics of the Hauteville House interior was that it was furnished entirely with antiques and bric-à-brac that Hugo had acquired in Guernsey as well as on the European continent. The poet was a passionate collector who scoured the antique shops in Guernsey for old chests, furniture, fabrics, etc. These he brought home not to restore them to their former glory but to take them apart and make new pieces of furniture out of them. In this article I link Hugo’s process of fragmentation and reformulation to his writing method, especially his historical novels and historical dramas, as well as to contemporary historiography. I also link his process to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage in an effort to show that Hugo’s opportunistic strategy of using available fragments of earlier cultural epochs and remaking them into new forms is analogous to the process of mythical thought. Indeed, I argue that Hugo’s bricolage process in Hauteville House was a conscious process of self-mythologizing.