Ego Hugo

Salatino discusses Stones to Stains: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, exhibition catalogue with essays by Cynthia Burlingham, Allegra Pesenti, and Florian Rodari. Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, University of California, 2018. ISBN: 9783791357645. 208 pp., with 126 illus. in color. $50.00. Although Hugo produced an estimated 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, of which approximately 3,000 survive, he always treated his graphic art as something of a diversion: "mediocre pen-and-ink lines awkwardly put down on paper by a man who has other things to do," as Hugo himself explained with flagrantly false modesty.5 Elsewhere, he wrote, "I would never have imagined that my drawings... could attract attention," and he referred to them as "these things people insist on calling my drawings. "6 To his public, Hugo disingenuously presented his graphic art as an afterthought: "Chance has brought before your eyes a few of my attempts at drawing, made in the margins or on the covers of manuscripts during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of ink in my pen. "7 unconscious," and "reverie" are "Chance," key (if unintentional) signifiers here, expressing fundamental features endemic to the drawings themselves, to their essence and import and not simply to their production, as Hugo would have us believe. His reference to using the ink that remained in his pen (the dregs, as it were) to make his drawings privileges the pen itself, the instrument he wielded both to write and to draw, while also privileging the (conscious) act of writing over the (unconscious) act of drawing.