The Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

Since then, Hugo’s vast oeuvre has effectively been whittled down to a few hundred pages. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables are now the only visible peaks of a literary continent that comprises seven novels, eighteen volumes of poetry, twenty-one plays, a small museum of paintings and drawings, and approximately 3 million words of history, criticism, travel writing, philosophy, and coded diaries. Hugo would not have been surprised by this submersion of his work. All his novels end with images of erasure and decay. He knew that even masterpieces fall into disrepair and are eventually engulfed by incomprehensibility. But in The Toilers of the Sea, it is still possible to experience the great outdoors of an inexhaustible imagination. This is not a novel for tidy minds who like to read classic fiction in their Sunday best. As the genteel reviewer of Fraser’s Magazine remarked in 1866, after reading “A Word on the Secret Cooperation of the Elements,” Hugo seems intent on “troubling us, offending us, buffeting us in the face; we come out of this chapter in a dishevelled unseemly condition.”