“I Donate all my Manuscripts” or the Two Bodies of the Writer

Abstract

In the famous 1881 codicil to his testament, Victor Hugo gave to the Bibliothèque nationale “everything that will be discovered written or drawn” by him. This gesture is truly founding, as its direct consequence would be the foundation of the Department of Modern Manuscripts, and its indirect consequence the very existence of genetic criticism. But it was also the result of a long process, which, in Victor Hugo’s mind, made of his manuscripts a treasure to be preserved similarly to historical monuments. This corpus, available and protected, meant to survive the author, gives form, so to speak, to the glorious form of his biological and perishable body. If Hugo so patiently constructed, against all odds, the symbolic edifice of a work re-established in its autographic authenticity, it was to hand it down intact to posterity, with all its unpublished texts, as a store of meaning giving access not only to the texts but also to writing itself.