I listened to this novel
in the excellent reading by George Guidall of Julie Rose's translation. A little over 60 hours, or four and a half
days. For quotations and general double
checking I used the translation by Isabel F. Hapgood provided by project Gutenberg.
Hugo, who is
nothing if not articulate about what he believes are his goals and meaning in
this novel, declares that it is about the moral redemption of the principal
character, who, as I'm sure most of you know, begins as a petty thief condemned
to prison galleys, and c. 1500 pages later rises to ever higher moral nobility
until he dies of it, and after.
That's true, but
there are other important subjects in this vast work. One is an assertion of the Christian moral
nature of the world, although he is opposed to the institution of the Catholic
Church. Another is a human exploration
of Paris. Another is the process of France's
digestion of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. Another is the exposition of how
decision-making takes place. Another is
the exploration of youth versus age. Another
is his conviction that the author's views on anything at all are worth passing
on to the reader. Most fundamental is
his interest in the engagement of opposites.
A tight plot and
characters that are attractive and clearly either good or bad are the mainstays
of current popular fiction, as they were then, and limit the range and subtlety
of a book. Hugo makes up for that limitation
by his prose, what he writes about, and how he writes about it.
Hugo’s prose is
often described as ponderous, and it certainly can be. But in the long haul it is varied and
flexible. It is like a large-scale organ
with it’s ponderous pipes, it melodious pipes, it's shrill, at times racy, at
times witty pipes, etc. Indeed one of
the pleasures of this book is appreciating the resources of Hugo's style. Here's a guy who can describe the whole
world, or the tiniest corner of Paris, with equal aptness.
The book is highly digressive,
like Tristram Shandy. An example often
cited is the 2 1/2 hour description of the battle of Waterloo. A very minor incident in the battle is a
cornerstone of the plot, but he could have delivered that in five minutes. He describes the battle in some detail
including Napoleon’s debates with himself on strategy, and why, in Hugo’s view,
he lost.
But, unlike
Tristram Shandy, plot drives this novel.
One thing leads to another in intricate, supple, and tightly contrived
ways. There is a problem. The stereotype these days is that each author
gets to have one unlikely coincidence, the McGuffin. The plot of Les Miserables depends on one
unlikely coincidence following another like a pack train; there are
hundreds. It begins to feel as if Hugo
had his own special McGuffin: a free pass to unbounded unlikely
coincidence. That usage reflects his
idea that we are in the hands of fate, that is God.
Hugo likes to
describe characters in ways that will identify them as attractive or unattractive to the
reader . His attractive characters are
usually generous, friendly, and good looking; his unattractive characters are
selfish, surely, and plain. The social role of the character is always a
cornerstone of his or her depiction. You do not meet characters, as we often
meet in contemporary novels, who are a bundle of characteristics who happen to
have a social role as a kind day job. Jean Valjean is first of all a criminal;
Javert is first of all a detective; Cosette is first of all a marriageable girl
etc.. It requires the length of the novel to move Valjean out of the criminal category.
His self-acknowledgment that he can no longer fulfill the role of detective
drives Javert to suicide.
Characterisation is
in certain respects full, and in certain respects shallow. It is full with respect to establishing the
characters’ position on the ladder of good and evil. The ladder has many rungs but goes only up or
down. Of the moral standing of men he
sees as related to the French revolution, he writes:
"Below
John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is Descartes; below Descartes,
there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there
is Robespierre; below Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes on. Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which
separates the indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other gloomy men,
who perhaps do not exist as yet. ……"
It is also full in
the sense of describing the process of decision-making in dramatic detail. This decision-making portrays minds engaged
in internal rhetorical debate. For those
of us who live after a hundred years of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, it
seems a little stiff and awfully rational, but it is rich in vigorous and detail.
Hugo goes to
considerable trouble to portray youth an age.
He delights in the garrulousness of quirky old men; old women get scant
attention. He delights in the naïve enthusiasm of youth; pretty young women get
lots of attention. But you do not come out of this book with the gut feeling
that you know them personally. What will
the marriage of the ingénue couple (Cossette and Marius) be like in 20
years? We don’t even wonder. We know their societal niche and we know
their moral standing instead.
Hugo expects a reader well read in French and classical
history. He casually refers us to our familiarity with the Greek biographer
Plutarch and the Roman historians Livy and Tacitus, among others. Interestingly
he never cites Montagne; perhaps the mayor of Bordeaux was too skeptical for
him.
The anecdote that Chou En-Lie once remarked to Nixon (or
was it to Kissinger) that it was too soon to know if the French revolution has
been successful is probably a legend, but it’s endurance reveals an unmythical
concern. The French, and with them the
world, continue to try to come to terms with events and issues arising from the
overthrow of the Ancien Régime and to discover proper means of dealing with
them. Besides Chou En-Lie, Pol Pot, & Deng Xiaoping, among many others, studied in Paris in forming their
concept of revolution and governance. Hugo, who several times says Paris represents
the world, was only concerned with France, which went though a process of
digesting the revolution that is comparable in intricacy and painfulness to a
polity digesting itself.
The period of the action is 1815 - 1832, but by
frequent flashbacks, explanations, and references the book engages with history
from the beginning of the French revolution (1789). In those decades France was
governed or ungoverned successively by absolute monarchy, a period of chaos, a
couple of different imperious committees, an emperor, absolute monarchy again,
and constitutional monarchy and at all times by passionate and deadly
factionalism. In those years for anyone with anything to loose which side you
were on was a constant source of identity and anxiety.
The family of Marius, the ingénue hero, whose
experiences in the unrest of 1832 resemble those of Hugo, embodies the identifications
and tensions. His grandfather is a passionate monarchist, his father an equally
passionate Bonapartist. He has been raised by his grandfather to hate his
father, but gradually comes to respect him and absorb his political position.
This is the process of debate over governance embodied in the lives and feelings
of characters.
One of the most moving actual verbal debates comes between
the bishop of Digne and a former member of the convention that overthrew Louis
XVI (un conventionnel). The bishop was
appointed by Napoleon, almost by chance, that is fate, that is God. He is sort
of an anti-clerical clergyman, living simply and piously in the mountain
village of his bishopric, giving his salary mostly to the poor, etc. Acts of
empathy and generosity by the bishop save Jean Valjean from rearrest and set
him on the path of virtue. In the course of his pastoral care he seeks out a conventioneer,
as they were called, who is an atheist and a republican living as a hermit in a period of merciless reaction. The conventioneer is a man of great wisdom and dignity
who accepts his immanent death. They debate their respective faiths. Hugo is
evenhanded; he is interested in portraying the debate, not in settling it, and
it remains unresolved with each man thoughtfully moved.
First, as is typical of serious characters, the bishop
debates with himself:
"Nevertheless,
the Bishop meditated on the subject, and from time to time he gazed at the
horizon at a point where a clump of trees marked the valley of the former
member of the Convention, and he said, "There is a soul yonder which is
lonely."
And he added,
deep in his own mind, "I owe him a visit."
But, let us
avow it, this idea, which seemed natural at the first blush, appeared to him
after a moment's reflection, as strange, impossible, and almost repulsive. For,
at bottom, he shared the general impression, and the old member of the Convention
inspired him, without his being clearly conscious of the fact himself, with
that sentiment which borders on hate, and which is so well expressed by the
word 'estrangement'.
Still, should
the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No. But what a sheep!
The good Bishop
was perplexed. Sometimes he set out in that direction; then he returned."
The bishop journeys to the hut of the conventioneer,
and they debate the revolution. For a long time they trade citation of
atrocities, the bishop citing the atrocities of the revolution and the
conventioneer those of the Ancien Régime.
The conventioneer sums up:
"In any
case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most
important step of the human race since the advent of Christ.... The French
Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be absolved by the
future; its result is the world made better. From its most terrible blows there
comes forth a caress for the human race. ... Yes, the brutalities of progress
are called revolutions. When they are over, this fact is recognized,--that the
human race has been treated harshly, but that it has progressed."
The bishop respectfully
does not assent.
The title is
notoriously hard to translate. It means something like the poor or the
unfortunate or the outsiders. It implies that the subject of the book is the
suffering of people whom society does not nurture, who dwell outside the
empathy of the comfortable and well off. Hugo is criticising people's lack of
compassion and charity rather than society's very structure. Hugo stresses that
the lot of the poor could be improved by education, but beyond that what he
mainly does is admonished the rich to be nicer to the poor, rather than
imagining a way to eliminate the richness and poorness. Note that in his
hierarchical list of the intellectual fathers of the revolution, he puts Baboef
at the bottom. Baboef was the only one of the prominent revolutionaries who
proposed concrete plans for removing hierarchy from society in general.
