Victor Hugo and His Paragraph Dance

Page layout for eye and ear

Victor Hugo was a poet. He was also a politician, statesman, revolutionary, anti-imperialist, dramatist, critic, and novelist. He was the Romantic movement’s Colossus in France through the 19th century.

The way Hugo composed paragraphs was extreme. (The Romantic Movement eschewed all moderation.) He used at base two kinds of paragraphs, long ones and short ones.

The long were quite long. In the smaller sized printed volumes (octavo or duodecimo) a long paragraph might well fill up a page and spill out into the one before and the one after.

The short were quite short. One word.

Hugo made his readers feel the extremes of these two kinds of paragraphs when he smashed them next to each other. (This is how I came to see this when I was a boy and read Hugo for the first time.)

Three or half a dozen paragraphs would run up to the cliff or one or two one-line paragraphs. Or else Hugo would make a whole chapter out of one line paragraphs in rat-tat mode. (This would be all talk, it would lack attribution or any stage direction, and would be quite terse. You could take pages out of Hugo and drop them into a Black Mask hard boiled tough guy tale with no trouble at all.)

This strikes your eye when you look at it printed out, the big fat blocks of long paragraphs and the thin staircase cliffs of the short ones. A page with no white space inside its margins, a page whose white space makes up more than half its text block, a page where a big dark block of text cuts off with one or two half-line paragraphs.

This makes us want to think Hugo wrote but to be read, that he wrote with the thought his words would be set in print and seen on a page.

But when you read him, you hear a change in the sound of Hugo’s prose that goes along with this rhythm of the print. The long paragraphs toll in your head like a speech that a great orator gives you, in heat with his deep lungs. But the orator runs at last out of breath. He gasps and comes up short.

Then a pause. A breath. And the one-liner, as terse as he can give it, caps off the long speech and drives his point home.

Or the long stretch of dialogue one-line paragraphs quick, hot, that shoot at you like rain in a storm and won’t let up. Until at last he lets you go into a shelter where the calm of a long paragraph lets you ease up, take thought, unwind and get a break.

In this way the extreme of the one kind of paragraph sets up for relief when we can’t take it any more, in the other kind.

Long and long and long and long — then short.

Short. Short. Short. Short. Long and long once more, at last.

Like I said: Hugo was a poet.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday 6 February 2008)