My Destiny

Regarding the art of the slab, Victor Hugo liked it thicc. It’s unlikely that the renowned author was even remotely aware of surfing’s existence half a world away in the nineteenth century. After all, he was busy penning some of the most foundational texts of France’s cultural identity during a century rife with revolution. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862) occupy prominent places in popular culture today— we can always count on Disney for their characteristically messy co-option of cultural capital—but praise for Hugo’s mesmerizing depictions of the sea goes largely unsung. 

The artist’s 1867 ink wash drawing  Ma Destinée (My Destiny) therefore comes as a total shock, as much for the force of its subject matter and date as for its existence  as an artifact within his largely uncharted body of visual art. Ma Destinée remarkably depicts a massive barreling wave destroying a ship in the distance. The wave’s gargantuan nature swallows us as viewers, addressing our gaze and physicality with a potent force. Quick brushstrokes along the face create a sense of momentum that draws us deeper into her cavernous frame. As we venture farther, light seeps into darkness and we arrive at the scene’s climax: a ship whose body and spires appear vaguely through shadowy ink, meeting her fate in the clutch of a towering lip. 

A “destiny” entailing a giant barrel like Hugo’s might be dream imagery for some surfers. It’s easy to imagine those within that masochistic lot frothing at the chance to get a shot at her formidable shape. But the chiaroscuro, the violent movements, and the appeal to individual subjectivity that Hugo’s piece demands—further suggested by its contemplative title—tell us that something more ominous than a pipe dream is at play here. Where Hugo’s literary canon was public-facing, addressing issues of political revolution, class, and religion during a century of radical social change, Ma Destinée suggests a visual art practice that turns inward, using the power of nature to negotiate the soul’s internal dealings with life, death, and fate. 

Hugo produced Ma Destinée while living on Guernsey, a small island in the English Channel where he’d self-exiled after Napoleon III’s rise. There, he fell in love with the sea and began developing his ink wash practice, a formal inquiry into water’s mutability. The piece reveals this inquiry at moments when ink is left to run, creating puddle-like spots with indistinct boundaries. Hugo hands the fate of the final composition over to chance by allowing the ink to move according to its own logic. The ink’s fluidity creates a sense of impermanence throughout the piece that echoes the futility of any attempt to capture and dominate the ocean. This futility is driven home by the black ship’s destruction, wherein humankind’s confrontation with nature inevitably becomes one with death.

It’s possible that Ma Destinée was inspired by the death of Hugo’s daughter, who drowned in the Seine in 1843 when her ship was wrecked by a tidal wave. The evidence of that being the case is unclear, but what Ma Destinée makes visible is the artist’s intimate relationship with water, complicated by death and amazement. As Hugo wrote in the preface to his novel Toilers of the Sea (1866), “Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, under the form of the elements.… There is the fatality of dogmas, the oppression of human laws, and the inexorability of nature. With these three fatalities mingles that inward fatality—the human heart.” 

Water, particularly the sea at Guernsey, became for Hugo a wondrous foundation for working through that “inward fatality” and ascribing form and meaning to his life in the wake of personal and political tragedy. It’s no secret that water often serves this purpose for those who gravitate to the ocean—maybe not always as a way to deal with tragedy, but as a way to revitalize us in the face of the everyday. 

Part of what feeds surfers’ addiction to the ocean is the mystical way waves can transport us momentarily out of time and space, providing a heightened sense of our relationship to ourselves and nature. It’s a sure thing that Hugo never surfed. However, Ma Destinée still somehow captures a wave’s unique ability to allow us to reframe these relationships, to see through whatever ails us and find that there are always waves to be had and beauty to be found.

[Feature Image: MA DESTINÉE (My Destiny), Victor Hugo, 1867, brown ink and wash and white gouache on paper, 6 ¾ × 10 ⅜ inches. For a critique of the acclaimed French Romantic author’s drawing, turn the page. Artwork courtesy of Maisons de Victor Hugo/Roger-Viollet.]