Hallucinatory History: Hugo's Revolution

Abstract

Readers of poetry and its criticism have long been accustomed to mixed reviews of its alleged autonomy. The lyric is generally the target here, although other poetic forms are also open to the charge of retreat from the public arena of history and politics. The loss of reference to empirical experience, deplored by some, has been felt by others to be a sacrifice made for gain: what poetry loses in concrete historical veracity, in attachment to a context, it makes up for by its achievement of the self-sufficiency and meaningful ideality of a fiction. What poems sacrifice in the way of a capacity to portray events or historical personages, they regain by depicting the human in all its generality. Structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of the subject have modified this assessment somewhat. A theory of' texts as self-reflexive structures has dispelled the illusion that poems represent a generalized, fictional self. One tends in recent times to praise poetry for its undoing of ideal fictions, rather than for its production of them. It is no doubt natural that, in the wake of the undoing of the self' as the meaning of the lyric, critics should cast around for something to put in its place and should ask whether they had not been too hasty in accepting the poem's autonomy. Even a poem understood to forego the representation of empirical experience can be considered in terms of a referent-for instance, as portraying a