Victor Hugo's conversations with the spirit world...
by Tom Ruffles
[ strangeness | bookreviews ]
Victor Hugo was one of France's greatest literary figures and one of its most significant political exiles. As a prominent opponent to the tyrannical Napoleon III, he spent 19 years first on Jersey and then on Guernsey. While still in mourning for his daughter who had died 10 years before, he was introduced to table turning, whereby spirits communicate via raps of a table leg, by an old friend, Delphine de Girardin, in September 1853. During his time on Jersey he, with his family and close associates, produced a huge volume of scripts which recorded their séances.
The séance conditions were quite unusual, and not in accord with the usual conception of a small group sitting round a table. Chez Hugo, only two people participated at a time, using a small three-legged table balanced on a larger dining room table. Other members of the party would wander in and sit around listening or reading until they felt the urge to take a turn. Messages were tapped out by the table a letter at a time. Given that les tables tournantes used a simple mechanism of running through the alphabet, one rap for A, two for B and so on, the quantity of material generated at these séances during a two-year period is simply astonishing. Despite only two-fifths of the transcripts being still in existence this is a substantial book with generous quantities of the texts translated.
The sitters received messages from about a 110 entities, including the living but apparently sleeping Napoleon III. There were a number of historical figures such as Byron, Marat, Robespierre, Rousseau and Voltaire, but there were also communications from abstractions such as Comedy, Poetry, Prayer and Reverie. Entire countries dropped by, for example India and Russia, plus a chap called Tyatafia, who hailed from Jupiter. There was the chatty Lion of Androcles, who visited the table no fewer than 18 times and Balaam's Ass. Some were even more bizarre than talking animals, such as The Finger of Death (as opposed to Death, who also made a number of appearances, presumably minus the digit which had its own career), The Iron Mask, The Grim Gatekeeper, the Sea Wind and the Shadow of the Sepulchre.
Among many Biblical characters, Jesus appeared several times, and there is an endearingly entitled chapter Jesus Christ Revises His Thinking in which He propounds a new religion that would supersede Christianity with, perhaps not surprisingly, Victor Hugo as its prophet. Shakespeare came (Hugo's son François-Victor was the first person to translate the whole of Shakespeare into French), and there is an appendix with the first act of a play allegedly dictated by the Bard, though in a very different style to that he used while in the body. The spirits generally tended to pontificate generalities in that dogmatic manner that they often adopt at séances, which can make for dull reading.
Sometimes questions were asked of the spirits in verse - Aeschylus, Molière and The Lion of Androcles insisted, and replied in the same manner. There were elements of wishful thinking in the exchanges with spirits, as when the sitters were told that Napoleon III would die in two years, causing a crisis of confidence when the prediction failed to come true. Shakespeare told the company that he would recite a poem and when Hugo asked whether in English or French, Shakespeare replied "The English language is inferior to the French", which might suggest a sea-change in his opinions on the two countries since writing Henry V.
Chambers considers the possibility that rather than communicating with spirits, the sitters were telepathically picking up either on Hugo's thoughts alone, or amalgamated with those of others present in the room, bearing in mind that the spirits' pronouncements tended to be in accord with ideas that Hugo had been thinking about for years. There were uncanny parallels between what Hugo had written and what the spirits communicated, even when Victor himself was not sitting at the table, and nobody else, or so it was claimed, had seen his manuscripts. One is reminded of the 'Philip' experiments carried out by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research in the early 1970s, where the sitters managed to generate a 'ghost' that was the product of their collective imaginations, although with only two sitters at a time in the Jersey séances, conditions were slightly different.
There is also the possibility that Hugo elaborated the scripts after a séance. Chambers discusses the volume of text, and the argument that it would not have been possible to generate the number of words by such laborious means in the time available. Chambers defends the authenticity of the scripts on two grounds. The first is that the group did not necessarily wait for the 'spirits' to finish a sentence but could have completed it once the sense was understood, thereby speeding up the process considerably. The second, weaker, defence is that Hugo might indeed have added to the original scripts outside the séances. Chambers points out that Hugo was very controlling and meddled in all forms of writing in the family, even down to dictating the contents of his daughter's diary, but despite this reasonable concern concludes that: "This is not to say, however, that he changed in any way the essence of the séance contents as they were dictated by the 'spirits'", which seems an optimistic conclusion, though reasonable if one assumes that their messages were in accord with his thinking in any case.
There are a few flaws in the book. The section on the early work of the Society for Psychical Research and its American counterpart relies rather too heavily on Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters, with its undue focus on William James and the American scene, to the extent that Chambers considers one of the SPR's founders and its first president, Henry Sidgwick, to be an American Society for Psychical Research investigator. Chambers generally refers to Jersey as 'Jersey Island', which is irritating, and presumably done so that American readers will not think he is referring to New Jersey. Some of the story is told in a novelistic style that has the effect of making one wonder how much licence Chambers has taken with the primary sources. Citing the film François Truffaut made about Victor Hugo's daughter (L'Histoire d'Adèle H) as a source does not seem particularly rigorous, and it is unlikely that the man with whom she was in love was given the choice either to go to prison or become an officer in the British army; until 1871 commissions had to be purchased, and, Flashman notwithstanding, it was assumed that the primary characteristic of an officer was that he was a gentleman (apart from the ones who actually got their hands dirty like officers of artillery and engineers).
Chambers opens the book out from the spirit messages, discussing ideas that influenced Hugo, in particular the Zohar, the collection of Jewish Kabbalistic texts. However, making a long book even longer are a couple of digressions that are not strictly necessary to an understanding of Victor Hugo's activities on Jersey. One is a discussion of The Da Vinci Code and Hugo's alleged participation in the Priory of Sion. The other, taking up even more space, is an examination of the poetry of James Merrill, much of which was built on ouija board communications, with results similar to those obtained by Hugo. Chambers knew and clearly admired Merrill, but even though the parallels between the two writers are interesting, it is hard to justify the number of pages allocated to Merrill. Simply because he and Hugo wrote about similar themes does not entail any validation of the communications that either received.
Conversations with the Spirit World expands the couple of pages that John Warne Monroe devotes to Hugo in his Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism and Occultism in Modern France, and they make useful companions, as Monroe writes more widely on the French intellectual and religious context but Chambers fills out this episode in Hugo's life, not just the séances but also a large amount of detail about his life and family, and what it was like to live in the febrile atmosphere of the exile community in the Channel Islands during the Second Empire. The late Martin Ebon contributes a fascinating introduction that gives a brisk overview of Hugo's life and also he discusses the Vietnamese religion of Cao Dai which holds Hugo to be a major saint.
Hugo apparently had his doubts about the validity of the spirits but seems to have accepted their pronouncements because they chimed with his own beliefs. Perhaps there was a tension between the implication that the spirits, by endorsing his attitudes, bolstered his sense of his own genius, and the feeling that, if he were merely echoing what the spirits knew, his genius was thereby diminished. The philosophy expounded by them is a most dismal one, and as Chambers points out, mirrors the sort of pessimistic outlook that the exiles living on Jersey themselves had. The universe as described by the Hugos' otherworldly visitors is a depressing place, with the earth and other planets in the solar system prisons for evil souls and a hierarchy of reincarnation that runs from stones through plants, animals to humans.
Hugo comes across as a complex man - as one would expect - egotistical and selfish, overbearing towards his family, yet sensitive and passionate on occasion. He was also capable of surprising insights, musing on time running backwards, or prefiguring David Bohm's holographic universe. While not convinced that the séances were "the greatest... adventure into the supernatural that has ever been recorded", I would agree that this is a fascinating story, and it is told in an engaging way.
