Fictional Fathers and Fathers by Fiction: The Surrogate Father As Novelist in the Work of Victor Hugo

The threatened paternity described in Victor Hugo's novels entails not only historical and psychoanalytical but also artistic significations, due to their evocation of a surrogate father who becomes a figure for the novelist, replacing the biological father through fiction. In the adoptive fatherhoods of Les Misérables (1862), Quatrevingt-Treize (1873) and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866), is witnessed the parallelism between artificial paternity and artistic and linguistic creation, as well as the surrogate father's reflection of divine creation, in his use of words. Yet his words never become flesh, unlike those of a true father and a true God, but finally, like those of the novelist himself. (GG)