Kathryn Grossman - A Guidebook to Les Travailleurs de la mer: Hugo's 'Channel Archipelago'.

In presenting a reverse image of his absent homeland, Hugo's exotic preface to Toilers of the Sea (1866; Les Travailleurs de la mer subtly orients the reader toward a political reading of the novel, which extends the shadow history of the Second Empire laid out in Les Misérables (1862).

On the eve of publishing his monumental prose epic, Toilers of the Sea (1866), Victor Hugo received a letter from his friend and confidant Paul Meurice lamenting that the original preface - a twenty-chapter guide to the Channel Islands - had been inexplicably suppressed in the proofs. As Meurice put it, "The reader is not introduced. He [...] gets used right away to this milieu that you render so real, but he is at first a bit disoriented." The poor French reader feels quite out of his element in this strange fictive land.

While the exiled poet responded by acknowledging the reader's impression of being thrust into an "abrupt local newness," he outlined the powerful reasons that prevented him from using "The Channel Archipelago" to preface his novel: "This preliminary chapter is a whole book. [...] When I wrote it, I believed myself to be poeta integri status; I didn't know about the bizarre ambush organized against me by the Bonapartists, the Neoclassicists, the sanctimonious, and those Republicans pleasing to the police; today I am informed and warned. It is necessary to remove the pretexts to these violences." Against the charms of Hugo's guide to his home away from home was aligned a veritable cabal of reactionary forces.

But what "violences" could possibly be aroused by this orientation to the islands' exotic geology, geography, flora, and Anglo-Norman mores? Can the edenic-utopian cast of Hugo's descriptions be read in more than one way? And does his primer on the Channel Islands, with is aesthetic of the "celestial grotesque," also serve as a guide to the spectacular voyage of the imagination that awaits the reader of Toilers of the Sea? I propose to investigate these critically neglected issues, so crucial to unraveling the peculiar pleasures of the text, which ranks with Les Misérables (1862) as one of Hugo's greatest works.