Besides his long and frequent digressions, his gassy sermons full of sentimental religion and morality, his bombast and relentless sentimentality, Hugo has occasional authorial interruptions, often of an explicitly biographical nature.
Postmodernism is not entirely new.
In some ways it is a return.
What would really be new in literature?
Some poet inventing meter.
Reading Les Miserables.
P.S.
Sentimentality aside, there is little more irresistible to Hugo than expounding, down to street level detail, the history and geography of Paris.
And there is a little of Mailer in Hugo, with his occasional celebrations of daring convict escapades, even apart from those of his central character, Valjean.
We see it as well in others of his works.
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