Shadows of a Hand

"Victor Hugo – he was one of the people experimenting with inkblots, and this is the most wonderful book. During his exile, partly imposed and partly voluntary, in the Channel Isles, Hugo stopped writing for a while and went into a fury of artistic production; and he liked to use very modern techniques that exploited chance to work up his effects. He rubbed coffee into the paper, he used lace, he spattered ink and folded the paper in half, creating Gothic scenes – towers, crags, abysses. But again, they were also self-portraits, sometimes psychological, sometimes typographic. He’d draw his initials, huge glowing initials in the sky. There’s a fantastic one of an octopus, with some of its tentacles spelling VH. Well, the surrealists took up a lot of his techniques, using chance as a starting point. So for example Baudelaire called him “Great, terrible, as immense as a mythic being, Cyclopean,” while Breton said, “Victor Hugo is a Surrealist when he is not stupid.”"