Victor Hugo had been in exile on the island of Guernsey for 15 years. Such was his fame that some of his mail was addressed to “Victor Hugo – Ocean”. In 1866, four years after Les Misérables came out, he wrote Toilers of the Sea in homage to his host island. The main character, Gilliatt , is a social outcast – and a shipwreck survivor. In the book, he battles with the giant Octopus (see the original text).
The Pieuvre is Hugo’s brainchild – it is a terrible monster, the prime negative example of the Creator’s handiwork. Victor Hugo takes twenty-odd pages to depict it, striking chords in every one of the reader’s five senses to hammer home a devastatingly repulsive and frightful impression. The generally sweet and lovable poulpe turns into something absurdly gargantuan and cruel. (Likeable features such as the beast’s colour- and shape-shifting were deliberately ignored). Hugo’s literary invention spread like wildfire, sparking off the creativity of other writers, artists, drawers and painters worldwide, who made it into a metaphor of evil; even today, the image retains all its power.
While the word pieuvre made its way, via translation, into Italian (“piovra” has been used for many years now to indicate the Mafia, as has “octopus” in English), the English language lacks this poulpe-versus-pieuvre distinction and makes do with the word “octopus”. In 1973, French scholar Roger Caillois penned a long essay stating that the pieuvre was the archetype animal for describing the logic of human imagination. Painter Jean Arnaud did the same in a 2007 conference, illustrating the evolution of poulpes and pieuvres in the figurative arts.
thanks to: SKDav on Deviantart
