The Incorporation of Thought in Victor Hugo’s “Le Satyre”

Abstract

Hugo's poetry draws on the ideas of contemporaries such as Saint-Simon, Leroux, Reynaud, and Ballanche, 1 but its interest derives from the specific ways in which he reinvents those ideas in verse form. As Helen Vendler points out, "poets writing what we call 'philosophical' verse are well aware of the degree to which, once domesticated in the topologically flexible bed of poetry, 'ideas' are bent into peculiar shapes" (12). This article will reconsider one of Hugo's best-known philosophical poems, "Le Satyre", by showing how it presents the idea of progress in resolutely material terms. Philosophical poetry is of course never purely abstract.As Susanne Langer indicates, it relies on the evocation of immediate physical experience just as much as other genres, for even when poetry appears to be a statement of opinions it creates "the semblance of events lived and felt", organizing them to "constitute a purely and completely experienced reality" (212). "Le Satyre" is a particularly striking example of a poem in which ideas are conveyed through a vivid evocation of sense experience. Unlike some of Hugo's more abstract poems about progress, such as Le Verso de la page (OEuvres complètes, Poésie IV: 1085-1109), "Le Satyre" is not uttered by an impersonal voice but represents the actions and performance of the eponymous satyr, a rebellious and energetic persona who climbs up Mount Olympus to challenge the Greek gods, and reveals their shortcomings by singing of humanity's potential for self-transformation in an almost theatrical context. Hugo presents the satyr as a thinker firmly situated in the material environment, who reacts physically to his own ideas, and articulates concepts in highly concrete metaphors. My study of this close connection between sense experience and thought in "LeSatyre" is informed by the assumptions of recent cognitive theory, that reason and emotion, perception and cognition are inextricably linked. While my reading of this poem is in no sense a systematic application of cognitive science, it has been shaped in two distinct ways by