"Since I have, in this book, recorded my days" Victor Hugo's Contemplations as Poetic Diary, between Formal Proximity and Factual Ambivalence

This article addresses the relations between Victor Hugo's Contemplations (1856) and the genre of the diary. Based on the dating of the poems and the author's claim in the preface to have depicted twenty-five years of his life, it studies the effects of the system reference to a factual genre. The paper postulates that the ambivalent structure of the Contemplations, which oscillates between a simultaneous and a retrospective perspective, could act as a signal of fiction. The lyrical modelling of the own existence and the intimate grief, which is at the centre of the poetry book, occurs through the fictionalisation of the dates. This strategy ascribes to the individual life an internal coherence and a universal dimension. The contemporary reception of and the reactions to the publication of the manuscript in 1905, which revealed Hugo's fictionalisation strategy, are attributed to the volume's proximity to the genre of the diary. Finally, the article analyses the constitution of the (lyrical) subject and the self-staging of the author by means of the fictionalisation of his own life.