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Written by Dario Jaramillo
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Victor Hugo (1802-1885) believed The man who loves to laugh This is his best novel. He himself said: “If you ask the author of this book why he wrote The man who loves to laughwould respond that as a philosopher he wanted to affirm the soul and conscience; as a historian he wanted to reveal little-known facts about monarchs and inform democracy; as a poet he wanted to write a drama. In the author’s intention, the book is a drama. The Drama of the Soul.
His best novel is easy to name for anyone except, precisely, the author of Victor Hugo. Those miserable people and Notre Dame de Parisconsensus will always place these two narratives in the list of the top ten novels Don Quixote There are at least fifteen more novels: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Red and black yes White Whale, Among the fixed.
Yes, his best novel, the only fear is to read it to the end, and certainly to reread it immediately after finishing it. Well, this is not the only fear. There is another work that beautifully depicts the admiration, surprise and dismay that arises as things progress. Because this chronicler is a highlighter, an involuntary hunter of aphorisms and unique passages. So the question is The man who loves to laugh It’s so absolutely exceptional that you want to underline everything, so much so that halfway through I’d have less work to do if I’d marked the parts that weren’t worth underlining. It turns out that Victor Hugo achieved his purpose perfectly: “I want to force the reader to think about every line”.
At one point in the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo believed The man who loves to laugh It will be part of a trilogy in which this novel will be a portrait of the nobility. Then there will be another, unwritten, which will allude to the monarchy, and a third, this one written—and also magnificent—alluding to the revolution against the nobility, Ninety-three. This is what he said in his initial note.
Buyer. The version translated by Victor Goldstein is over a thousand pages long, and I would be doing a disservice to my readers if I tried to summarize the argument., He was a boy from a noble family who was taken over by the “comprachicos” gang. When he was two years old, these thugs commissioned people with special skills to perform a very cruel operation on the creature, called Fixed portwhich deforms the face with the smile mark. The victim may make very painful efforts to stop smiling, but when he does, what he sees in the mirror is an ugly face. The band is shipwrecked in a storm and everyone dies, before dying they throw a bottle into the sea to tell their story. The only one rescued is Gwynplaine, who is looking around for a house and stumbles upon Dea, a little girl crying over her mother’s body. Gwynplaine takes her with him until he finds Ursus, a wandering philosopher who freely hates humans and the strong, who lives in a mobile home with a tame wolf “Humanus” and adopts Gwynplaine and the blind Dea. Becomes his father.
This can be understood as a starting point The man who loves to laughWhat follows is the love story between Gwynplaine and Dea, and the journey of traveling artists by Ursus and his team. In the finale, all the plot points raised in the beginning will be unravelled under the clear, brutal and vivid portrait of European aristocracy, highlighting the peculiarities of the French and the British.
Los Comprachicos was a famous band from the 17th century that was later forgotten. The children were not stolen, but bought. “What did they do to those children? Monsters. For what monsters? Laughter. People need laughter. Kings too. The square needs comedians, the palace needs clowns. (…) A man was taken and turned into an abortion; he had a face painted and a nose made. Growth was squeezed; physiognomy was kneaded.”
“James II, a fanatic who persecuted Jews and stalked Gypsies” He supported the Komplachko family and sold the child to them. “An unpleasant young heir, taken away and manipulated by them, lost his form. This facilitated confiscation and simplified the transfer of lordship to favorites.”
But in The man who loves to laugh The protagonist of this novel is someone else, not Gwynplaine. The central protagonist is Ursus. Although he is a doctor and Victor Hugo is not, although he is a tramp and Victor Hugo is not, although Ursus has a wolf and Victor Hugo never had one—as far as we know—and although Ursus is a ventriloquist and Victor Hugo is not, I suspect that Ursus is Victor Hugo’s invention of Victor Hugo. Cocteau’s judgment has been widely repeated: Victor Hugo is a madman who thinks he is Victor Hugo. I fear that he is also a madman who believes he is Ursus.
“Ursus and Homo sapiens are united by close friendship (…). The wolf was gentle, graceful and lovable. I like to see well-trained animals. (…). When the carriage stopped at the fair, when the wives came over with open mouths, when the curious gathered around the carriage, Ursus spoke, and the Homo sapiens agreed. And this one, with the bowl in his mouth, kindly collected in the audience. They make a living. Wolves are cultivated, and so are people. Wolves have been trained by humans, or rather wolves themselves have been trained, with all kinds of wolfish qualities that increase income. “The most important thing is not to degenerate into a man,” his friend told him. Wolves never bite people, and people sometimes (…). Ursus was a cynic, and to emphasize his cynicism, he became a comedian. Also to survive, because the stomach imposed its conditions. Moreover, that world-weary comedian, both to complicate his life and to make it complete, was a doctor. The doctor was still young. Ursus was a ventriloquist. It could be seen that his mouth did not move when he spoke. He perfectly imitated anyone’s accent and way of speaking; his ability to imitate voices was so good that he thought he could hear others speak. He alone caused the crowd to whisper. “–
Evil tongues say that Ursus was locked up in a lunatic asylum, to which Victor Hugo commented: “They had the honor of treating him as a fool, but when they realized he was nothing more than a poet, they released him.” “Ursus excelled at monologues. He was surly and talkative, didn’t want to see anyone, needed to talk to people, and he got out of trouble by talking to himself.
Something with depth. Victor Hugo is not at all a traditional narrator, nor does he respond to the plot common in 19th-century novels. The man who loves to laugh He repeatedly uses the procedure of changing the subject abruptly from one chapter to another. The reader who appreciates it reads with renewed interest, supposing that the narrator is taking us somewhere, without our knowing anything about the relation of this turn to fact. Corpus What you have been reading. It could be called “suspense”, but no, it is not just a trick, it is something deeper, given its connection to the content of the story being told. For example, the sudden appearance of Lord Charles of Cranbrook, a very powerful noble who supported Cromwell and never withdrew his support, a problem that forced him into exile: “He might have been a peer, but he preferred to be an outlaw; and thus, as the years passed, he grew old in his loyalty to the dead republic.
For Gwynplaine’s laughter, “Nature (…) gave him a mouth that opens to the ears, ears that fold back to the eyes, an unformed nose suitable for a clown’s spectacles, and a face that makes anyone laugh (…). But is this nature? Didn’t they help her? Two slit-like eyes, a slit that is a mouth, a flat protuberance with two holes for a nose, a squeeze instead of a face, the result can only make you laugh.”
“To see Gwynplaine meant to try not to laugh too much. He was talking and people were rolling on the floor. It was the opposite of sadness. On the one hand, spleen In Another Gwynplaine (…). Gwynplaine laughed in a way that made people laugh. But he did not laugh. His face was laughing, but his thoughts were not laughing.“. This made them rich. On the front of their mobile home, which they traveled around the world, Ursus posted a sign that read: “Here we find Gwynplaine, the ten-year-old who was abandoned on the shores of Portland by the notorious Complachicus on the night of January 29, 1690, now grown up and known as the Laughing Man.”
In addition to adventure and suspense, in addition to the vivid and very cruel portrayal of the nobility, The man who loves to laugh A beautiful love story is included. And, although this may seem impossible for love stories, they are all very similar, but this is a very original story.
In 1707, fifteen years had passed since Gwynplaine brought one-year-old Dea to Ursus’s home, and Ursus welcomed them and assumed the role of their father. Now Gwynplaine was twenty-five years old and Dea was sixteen years old: “Pale, brown hair, sparse, fragile, almost trembling with fragility, as if afraid to break her, admirable beauty, eyes full of light, blind.”
“If human suffering could be summed up, it would be in the work of Gwynplaine and Dee. They seemed to have been born in different compartments of a tomb, Gwynplaine in the awful place, Dee in the dark. Their existence was made of another kind of darkness, taken from two awful aspects of life. (…). Yet they were in heaven. They loved each other. Gwynplaine adored Dee. Dee adored Gwynplaine greatly.”
After going around and around the island, always with success, they finally arrived in London, where success was resounding, whether it was Ursus’s plays, his imitations, the outrage of his critics, his humor without a smile, just like Gwynplaine, with his eternal smile, with his agility, with his grace. Not to mention the beautiful Dei. Until one day, Gwynplaine was arrested and thrown into prison, and Ursus followed him until he disappeared at the dungeon door. Gwynplaine was waiting for the court when it opened, and the court asked a witness about Gwynplaine’s identity. That witness recognized him. Gwynplaine, distraught, told the magistrate: “I don’t know this man.”
The judge responded: “‘I stand before Lord Feyman Clanchari, Baron Clanchari, and the Marquis of Sicily Corleone, and the nobleman of England, Mr. Henkville.'” The bailiff continued to speak, telling Gwynplaine that he “He was sold at the age of two by order of His Most Gracious Majesty King James II. (…). He was the heir to his father’s fortune and title. That is why he was betrayed, mutilated and disappeared by His Most Merciful Majesty.”
What happened next? Well, we won’t tell it. They will find out how these stories end when they become readers of one of the best novels by one of the best novelists.
The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo. Os., 2023. Valencia, 1,048 pages. Translated by Victor Goldstein.
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