Thoughts on Man Who Laughs? Why is Ursus the best character ever written by Hugo? Is the theme of this book sex, having to hide your true self behind fake happiness or the profound antipathy Hugo has for English customs?
Ursus is the Most Character Hugo ever wrote because Hugo has two favorite Kinds of Guys to Write, Tragically Isolated Moral Paragon Father Figures and Long Winded Opinionated Theater/Arts Weirdoes , and Ursus allows Hugo to write them BOTH in the SAME CHARACTER
(Hugo's second two Favorite Types to write are Otherworldly Pure Souls :Doomed Moral Leader version and Maiden in Love version. That's Gwyn and Dea, of course. The only thing we're missing is a mother who has to Endure Hardships For Her Child, but the moms all die before the story really kicks off.)
I really have so much I want to say about LHQ as sort of a stylistic callback to the 1830s Romantic style vs Hugo's later novels! I remember a contemporary commenting on Les Mis that while it had good bits, it made him overall miss "the Victor Hugo of Hernani and Petrus Borel" and that's what it feels like, like Hugo taking out his old frenetic gear and playing with it again. It's a weird little novel, structurally, way Weirder than LM , which is structurally Pretty Normal (albeit brilliantly fractal with itself). But this is where my lack of formal training fails me, and I can only point at the medievalism, the tilt to specific physical torture and much more explicit sexual themes, and the somewhat odd structure, and go "you see it, right??" and hope other people do in fact see it, instead of being able to cite specific literary devices....
Anyway. The Moral is "There Was a Babysitter Wolf".
