The workers of the sea
The workers of the sea also The Devil's Ship (in the original: Les Travailleurs de la mer ) is a novel by Victor Hugo from 1866. The setting is the island of Guernsey in the English Channel , on which Hugo lived during his exile in the Hauteville House and where he lived extensively Studies of the island's geography, nature and population were conducted.
The novel is set in Guernsey around 1820. It tells the melodramatic story of the fisherman Gilliat, who is in love with Déruchette, the niece of the shipowner Lethierry. In a dramatic battle with the forces of nature, the hero succeeds in salvaging the precious machine of a ship owned by the shipowner that is in distress due to sabotage . When he learns that Déruchette loves someone else, whom the uncle rejects as an applicant, he selflessly helps the young couple to escape.
action
The Guernsey captain Lethierry has two things that are dear to him: the steamship Durande , which embodies his entire economic and social existence, and his orphaned niece Déruchette, whom he spoils as much as he can.
Through the fault of the abysmally bad skipper Clubin, who wants to get away with the captain's fortune, the Durande runs onto a notorious reef and shatters. The rescued passengers (except for Clubin, who apparently remains heroically) testify that the steamship's engine remained intact. The desperate Lethierry now promises the hand of his niece to whoever retrieves the machine and brings it back. The only one who wants to dare this almost hopeless endeavor is Gilliatt, a poor, lonely fisherman whom the island people suspect of witchcraft and who is in love with the beautiful, arrogant Déruchette.
Gilliatt sets out for the reef at night and in fog. In weeks of grueling work using all his strength, he succeeds in recovering the machine; he survives the cold, hunger, a storm and the fight with an octopus until he can finally return to Guernsey by machine. There he is received with jubilation, and grateful Lethierry wants the wedding to take place the next day. But, as Gilliatt finds out, Déruchette is in love with a young priest. Without hesitation, he sacrifices his hard-won luck to her and enables the lovers to secretly marry and flee, after which he drowns himself in the rising tide, watching the departing ship of the two.
As in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and The Wretched , the plot is interspersed with Hugo's personal considerations, here mostly about the nature and metaphysical meaning of the sea and its inhabitants. The first quarter of the book in particular is characterized by detailed descriptions of the landscape and nature.
The narrator
The novel is written from the perspective of the omniscient narrator . The extradiegetic separation from his characters enables the narrator to have an outside perspective of what is happening. The narrator takes a heterodiegetic point of view, his opinion on the plot is personal and is shown, for example, in an ironic narrative style and judgmental comments on the event. Although the narrator is integrated into the narrative itself through strong personalization, but without losing his omnipotence . He takes on a moralizing role, especially in the comments on his hero Gilliat. This gives the narrator more presence in the novel than the other main and secondary characters. His “omniscience” allows him to always see all the characters, spaces and time relationships in the novel. It is he who selects information, makes hints, leads the reader to speculation, in order to stimulate and direct the emotional participation of his readers.
main characters
- Gilliat, le malin
Gilliatt's origins are surrounded by secrets. Whether he is the son, nephew or grandson of "La Gilliatte", after whom he is named Gilliatt, le malin (= Gilliat, the clever head ), and who is both first and last name, remains in the dark.
His most prominent character trait is contradiction in terms of his physical characteristics and mentality as well as his behavior towards his environment. On the one hand, as a fisherman, he is tanned by the weather and looks older than he is, on the other hand, his attitude and his dealings with women are more boyish, shy and immature, which goes hand in hand with an idealization of women. He lives in a neglected hut, is an avid reader and self-taught and sees himself isolated as an atheist in the midst of a bigoted and hypocritical island population. He knows nature and is a skilled craftsman. He has completely mastered all the skills a fisherman needs, and also has creative powers. He draws his creativity from the dream, which as "l'aquarium de la nuit" (= literally "nocturnal aquarium") gives him access to the subconscious. As “homme du songe” (= person of dreams ) he has a visionary view of things that remain closed to the superstitious islanders.
- The antihero Sieur Clubin
Giliat's opponent is Sieur Clubin. He is characterized as sensible, calculating, refined, cold and at the same time quite willing to take risks. He builds on his reputation all his life to finally commit the perfect crime: the shipwreck of the "Durande" and his escape with Lethierry's fortune. The islanders are fooled by his "mask": he is respected and valued as a pious and capable captain. Clubin embodies the ideal social type of a "homme de l'ordre" (= man of order ).
Unlike Gilliat, life at sea has left no marks on Clubin's face, his skin is pure, as if made of wax. Behind his flawless outward appearance he hides malice and malice. Hugo pointedly shows the contrast between the two men in their handling of money: Gilliat gives, does not exchange and does not count, does not act very rationally and embodies the disorder, Clubin on the other hand plan and system.
- Mess Lethierry, the parallel hero
Lethierry is the owner of the island's first steamship, is considered a revolutionary and a man of progress and wants to revolutionize local shipping by investing in a steamship. As a free thinker and rationalist, he is hostile to the church and the clergy . His intellectual independence connects him to Gilliat, both read Voltaire and both are equally suspicious of the conservative islanders. Gillat loves Druchette, the shipowner's niece, who, to the displeasure of her uncle, is in love with the island's pastor.
fiction
He meets the romantic demand for realism in the novel by spreading out meticulous descriptions of sea and land, explaining scientific phenomena and explaining nautical techniques. This gives the novel a "scientific" flavor . The use of specialist vocabulary and foreign words that are translated or explained to the French reader in footnotes and passages in the Anglo- Norman dialect of the island population as well as the dialogues of the smugglers in Spanish create an atmosphere that is both authentic and exotic.
Hugo makes the Anglo-French island of Guernsey the setting for the novel. The action takes place in an isolated framework familiar to the French reader. Through his position as an omniscient narrator and through historical events in Guernsey, the author gives the impression that the story of Gilliat actually took place there in the 1820s.
Hugo can present his criticism, embodied in a concrete island population, without offending the readers who take part. He condemns the vices of society - egoism , superstition , bigotry - and at the same time contrasts his heroic protagonists with the ruling social system . At its core, such optimism is based on the glorification of human work. The main part of the novel is devoted to Gilliat's Odyssey . In these passages that are reminiscent of an adventure novel , the narrative takes on fantastic traits. Gilliatt ekes out the existence of a Robinson , does work that would be worthy of a Hercules and fights like the knights of Chrétien de Troyes against a monster. The superhuman Gilliats requires a realistic framework to allow the novel to the reader at least a morally compelling role model holds.
intention
In the foreword to the workers of the sea , Hugo wrote that with this work he had completed a trilogy , each of which dealt with one of the overwhelming powers to which man is exposed: in the bell ringer the dogma in the form of religion, in the wretched the laws in the form in human society and in the workers of the sea nature in the form of the sea. This is expressed in Gilliatt's heroic struggle against the unbridled power of the elements as well as in Durande itself, which, as a symbol of human ingenuity, moves on its own instead of being steered by the wind like sailing ships and which ultimately triumphs over wind and water .
The conception of the novel goes beyond the boundaries of a prose text. “Le roman c'est le drame hors cadre”, Hugo's quote applies to the dramatic direction of Les travailleurs de la mer . In the theatrical subdivision of the novel, the complexity of the plot with its several chronologically entangled storylines, the intended cathartic mode of action, the archetypal conception of the characters and the means of the panoramic view, Hugo's intention to create a drama that is too extensive to show to find a place on any stage.
The novel can be seen as a seismograph of romanticism . Hugo meets the demand for realism by using inferior scientific explanations. The drawing of the hero, who suffers from society because of his indeterminate origin, who has access to the world of the unreal through dreams and who, driven by his sensibility, flees into nature, is part of the romantic tradition.
The local color of the Channel Islands paired with the exoticism of the smugglers' countries of origin, as well as the adventurous life of seafarers are characteristic features of this era. The novel also fulfills the functions of the exile novel ; Hugo transforms personal experiences into the fate of the hero who initially saw Guernsey as his grave. This is where the most profound criticism begins.
«Parmi ces travailleurs personne ne travaille. Lethierry spécule, Rantaine vole Lethierry, Clubin dépouille Rantaine des fruits de son vol; Gilliatt songe, rêve, flâne et soupire toute l'année, et ne travaille deux mois que parce qu'il croit gagner dans un combat en champ clos contre l'Océan la main de Mlle.Déruchette. »
The quotation from Alfred Nettement presupposes false expectations. Hugo's goal is not to make maritime professions immortal and, moreover, to attack their working conditions like Émile Zola in Germinal . The essence of the work of a man as epic conflict and the humanistic to present belief in progress, can be seen as intention Hugo.
In implementing this theme in the psychology of the characters, the novel falls off in the implied trilogy. So the figures are designed on one side. Most of the few dialogues also lack emotional depth. It is the artistic mastery, Hugo's “clarté visuelle”, that gives the novel its real charm and sets it apart from its predecessors. The author illustrated the novel with 356 of landscapes and figures. The literary critic Jules Levallois came to the conclusion:
“Il n'a jamais été mieux comme peintre. »
If you see the focus of the novel here, the lack of understanding of seeing nature as human fate loses its significance. Hugo's point of view will probably retain his biographical attribute. And finally, the novel is recognized from Hugo's own point of view: « Le poète fait plus que raconter, il montre. »( Victor Hugo : William Shakespeare)
filming
The book was released in 1918 under the title "Les Travailleurs de la mer", directed by André Antoine and Léonard Antoine. Edmond Séchan made a second film in 1986 as a French / Soviet miniseries .
expenditure
- The sea workers . Translated by the Otto Janke publishing house. Berlin 1866
- Men of the sea . Translated from Lisa Haustein. Reutlingen 1949, Berlin 1949
- The workers of the sea . Foreword by Herbert Kühn. Translated from Lisa Haustein. Leipzig 1954
- The workers of the sea. Afterword, trans. Rainer G. Schmidt . Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-928398-82-2 ; again Mare, Hamburg 2017 (new translation by Schmidt)
literature
- Karlheinz Biermann: Victor Hugo . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-499-50565-7
- Christoph Bode: The novel . Tübingen 2005.
- Chantal Brière: Victor Hugo et le roman architectural . Paris 2007.
- Victor Brombert: The hidden reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1988.
- Victor Brombert: Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1984.
- Marianna Carlson: L'art du romancier dans Les travailleurs de la mer . Paris 1961.
- Simon Leys: La mer dans la littérature française: De Victor Hugo à Pierre Loti . Paris 2003.
- Pierre-André Rieben: Délires romantiques. Musset - Nodier - Gautier - Hugo . Librairie José Corti, Paris 1989.
- Frank Wanning: French literature of the 19th century . Stuttgart 1998.
- The Hermit of Guernsey . In: The Gazebo . Issue 14, 1866 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).
