Laurence M. Porter - Home away from Home: The Exile's Homage to Guernsey in Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866).

Developing some intersubjective dimensions of character theory, this essay examines how Hugo weaves a rich texture from the contrasting motifs of home and exile while preserving an equilibrium between veiled autofiction and allegory.

In terms of character portrayal, Hugo's omnicompetent Gilliat dominates Les Travailleurs de la Mer more than any other character dominates the rest of his novels - if you exclude Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné à mort. We shall ask why this is so, and how Gilliat can be distinguished among his fellows in the line of melancholy, suicidal male protagonists that extends from the eponymous hero of Bug-Jargal to Gauvain in Quatrevingt-treize. Perhaps most striking is his exceptional connectedness to the material world, anticipated but not approached by the cobbler-delegate Jacques Coppenole in Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482. Yet his quest fuses the real and the ideal, Nature and Culture, and the local and the cosmic in way that make him a crux of representation like Hugo's thistle, spider, or crucified owl in Les Contemplations.

Like those entities, Gilliat's destiny raises the issues of what we are good for, and where we belong. Whereas Hugo's friend Charles Nodier characterized the human condition by saying "Nous suspendons le rêve de notre existence entre deux paradis," Hugo suspends it between two voids. In compensation, he deploys the sentimental power (I allude to Jane Tompkins' famous essay on Uncle Tom's Cabin) of a rhetoric of intersubjective connectedness to imply and foster bonds between the protagonist, the implied author, and the reader, until our recognition of affinity becomes a principle of character portrayal, and until that recognition shifts from the dry intellectual dictum of Terence: Nihil humanum me alienum puto, to the impassioned authorial cry that concludes the preface to Les Contemplations: "Ô insensé qui crois que je ne suis pas toi!"