A month after the publication of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1821), an unnamed reviewer for the politically conservative Parisian newspaper Le Figaro wrote that, if novelistic unity is what you want, ‘n’en cherchez pas dans l’oeuvre de M. Hugo’ (Review 2). What one finds in the novel instead, the reviewer insists, is ‘a frightening phantasmagoria or a show of simple-minded fools, a circle of witches, a mystery, a nightmare, a deed without name’ that leaves readers ‘stunned, dazed, confused … as in a dream or attack of vertigo’ (2). The reviewer lists two main grievances: first, Hugo's blending of medieval history with melodrama and, second, the novel's multiple focalizations, of which he claims there are ‘no end’ (2). But to an anonymous reviewer for the more liberal Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, Notre-Dame de Paris's multiple focalizations prove Hugo’s artistry: the reviewer describes how Hugo's ‘scrutinizing glance’ reveals a ‘profound knowledge’ of ‘the crowd, the mob, of men who are vain, empty, glorious, beggars, vagabonds, scholars, sensualists; … of the heart of a young woman and the core of a mother, of the boiling passions of a delirious mind,’ all of which Hugo ‘manipulates according to his will throughout’ (‘Oeuvres’ 4). Both reviewers are right. Hugo's novel does not contain formal unity—but this lack of unity crucially underpins its artistic purpose; indeed, as I will argue, the disunity not only contributes to its aesthetic and political aims, but also suggests how the novel ‘thinks,’ as Nancy Armstrong might say, about disability.

In Notre-Dame de Paris, disability overtly functions as both grotesque and tragic spectacle. The novel opens with the celebrations of Epiphany 1482 in Paris and then follows the interconnecting stories of a dramatist-turned-vagabond, a disreputable knight, a virgin gypsy girl, a lecherous priest, a debauched young student, an insane hermitess, and—the most-remembered character of the novel—in the words of his mockers, a ‘hunchbacked … bandy-legged … one-eyed … deaf’ bell-ringer, Quasimodo (45). Quasimodo, raised by the priest Claude Frollo, lives entirely in Notre-Dame Cathedral as its bellringer. At the Epiphany festival that opens the novel, a crowd elects him the Pope of Fools due to his grotesque appearance. Claude Frollo lusts after the gypsy Esmeralda, who falls in love with the heartless knight, Phoebus, but marries (in name only) the dramatist Gringoire.