Some authors we love for the beauty of their texts. This is the purest sort of reader-writer relationship, the closest to perfection. Other writers leave their imprint on us because of their life stories, their passion for writing, or their place in history. For me, Victor Hugo belongs to that second group. In my youth i knew him as a novelist, as the author of Les Miserables. I loved him for the way he conveyed the chemistry of great cities, the high drama of their streets, and for the way he could show the logic by which two entirely unrelated things could happen in a city at the same time (as Parisians are attacking one another's barricades in 1832, we have the sound of billiards coming from two streets away). He influenced Dostoyevsky; when i was young, and wedded to a melodramatic vision of cities as dark and dirty places where the poor and defeated congregate, he influenced me too. When i grew a bit older, Hugo's voice began to annoy me; I found it pompous, affected, ostentatious, and artificial. In his historical novel Ninenty-Three, he spends a great many annoying pages describing a loose cannon rolling back and forth on a ship in a storm. When he took Faulkner to task for being influenced by Hugo, Nabokov offered a cruel example: "L'homme regardait le gibet, le gibet regardait l'homme." What has influenced me the most - and disturbed me most about Hugo's life - was his use of emotion (in the negative sense of this romantic world!) to confect greatness through rhetoric and high drama. All French intellectuals, from Zola to Sartre, owe a debt to Hugo and his passion for greatness; his concept of the politically engaged writer as champion of truth and justice has exerted a deep influence on world literature. Overly aware of his passion for greatness - and mindful of the fact that he had achieved it - Hugo became a living symbol of his ideal, thereby turning himself into a statue. His self-conscious moral and political gestures gave him an artificial air, and that cannot help but make a reader uneasy. In his discussion of "Shakespeare's genius," Hugo himself said that the enemy of greatness was falseness. In spite of all his posturing, Hugo's triumphant return from political exile endowed him with a certain authenticity, as did his flair for public speaking, and his heroes live on in Europe's - and the world's - imagination. Perhaps this is simply because France and French literature were for so long at the forefront of civilization. Once upon a time, and no matter how nationalistic they were, France's writers spoke not just to France but to all of humanity. But it's not that way today. Perhaps that is why France's continuing affection for this strangest of great authors speaks above all of nostalgia for her lost days of glory.
Orhan Pamuk: Others Colours, ESSAYS AND A STORY, Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities.
