les misérables 24 September 2003 Les misérables is the sort of novel where, if you are carrying the lifeless body of the young hero through the sewers of Paris, you will inevitably step into quicksand. If you get out of the quicksand, you will meet your second-worst enemy in the world coming the opposite way. If your second-worst enemy unlocks the grating to let you out of the sewer, your worst enemy will be standing on the other side. Of course, as Jean Valjean's second-worst enemy, Thenardier, says quite reasonably: Un égout n'est pas le Champ de Mars . . . Quand deux hommes sont là, il faut qu'ils se rencontrent. [A sewer is not the Champ de Mars . . . When two people are there, they have to meet.] In Victor Hugo's Paris, the key people manage to meet even on the Champ de Mars, let alone in the sewers. There seems to be only one apartment building in the city, one park, one boulevard, one bridge, and though fifty million Frenchmen proverbially haunt such places, the same half-dozen characters keep meeting again, and again, and again. The most transparent words in Hugo's work are "un homme." When the narrator announces casually that "un homme" is walking along the Seine at dawn, or in the Jardin du Luxembourg at mid-day, that "homme" will turn out to be Jean Valjean. The implacable policeman Javert is usually not far behind, trailing him assiduously. Or perhaps "un homme" will turn out to be the young hero, Marius, trying to catch a glimpse of his beloved Cosette -- or alternatively, striding away from Cosette, devastated by some romantic reverse, in search of his own annhilation. Les misérables, the novel, is a little hard to perceive, buried as it is under layers of film and stage treatments. But as Oscar Levant said of Hollywood, just strip away the phony tinsel to find the real tinsel underneath. Les misérables is all melodrama, all the time. That it survives its over-the-top histrionics to be one of the world's great novels means one of two things: that Les misérables has virtues that outweigh its melodramatic qualities, or that melodrama isn't all that bad. Hugo's novel is constructed of intense narrative episodes punctuated by massive essays on subjects historical and philosophical. When, on page 1,484, the narrator says "ici un courte digression est nécessaire [here a brief digression is necessary]" you start laughing -- partly because he's never excused himself before, and partly at the thought that any Hugo digression could be brief. Hugo's skill in arranging digressions is dazzling, of course. Nowhere is it more in evidence than in the almost 300 pages of the barricade episode, where most of the major characters meet and risk their lives (with varied outcomes) in the abortive rebellion of 5-6 June 1832. Time and again, everything hangs in the balance as Hugo stops to consider the character of barricades past and present, or the nature of Progress. When Hugo tires of the authorial voice, one of his characters is happy to contribute a five-page riff on the history of urban uprisings, or something. One of Hugo's most persistent verbal habits is the interminable monologue that cannot be a realistic representation of what someone said on any occasion, but is instead a grab-bag of their obsessions, their catch-phrases, their interior speech. As essays, these riffs would be banal; delivered while reader and characters alike wait for the regiments to storm the barricade, they are compelling reading in several senses. Les misérables, like Hugo's early masterpiece Notre-Dame de Paris, is half yarn and half essay, cobbled together: or, if you like, half literature and half rhetoric. It is par excellence one of the "large loose baggy monsters" that gave Henry James such fits when he criticized his older contemporaries. War and Peace may be longer, but Les misérables is a strong candidate for the honor of loosest and baggiest 19th-century novel. It is also funnier than War and Peace or Middlemarch, grander than Vanity Fair, and more accessible than The Idiot. I'm still trying to figure out what Nastasya Filippovna wants in that one. What the characters in Les misérables want is obvious. Thenardier wants cash, Javert wants to send Jean Valjean back to the galleys, Marius and Cosette want each other, and Jean Valjean wants two things: "cacher son nom, et sanctifier sa vie; échapper aux hommes, et revenir à Dieu [to hide his name and to make his life holy; to escape from men and to return to God]." Well, that's four things. But you get the picture. Victor Hugo's characters are not, shall we say, nuanced. The novel begins with the least nuanced of them all, the Bishop of Digne. The first sixty pages of the novel -- before "un homme" enters the town of Digne and kick-starts the plot -- are devoted to a long catalog of this bishop's astonishing saintliness. He casts a long shadow over the novel. When he refuses to press charges against Jean Valjean, who has stolen the only silverware in his ascetic home, he sets in motion a wave of influences that washes into all corners of the story: refreshing the haggard prostitute Fantine, redeeming Fantine's enslaved daughter Cosette, exonerating the hapless Champmathieu, lifting a carriage off the trapped Fauchelevent, inspiring the pedantic Mabeuf, softening the heart of the acerbic Gillenormand, and ultimately saving the life of Marius and, for a short time, the life of Javert himself. But Jean Valjean, as he is making his life holy, is also hiding his name. He hides his past and that of others. Cosette never realizes that her mother was a cocotte and a whore. The whole story of the Bishop's saintly influence cannot be made known; even when Marius and Cosette learn the outlines of the story, they don't grasp its significance. The saintly glow of the Bishop of Digne dies with Jean Valjean. Marius and Cosette, though one wishes them well, are shallow; they have the stamp of young lovers, and neither one shows the slightest indication of deepening into characters out of a George Eliot novel. To make the world better requires suffering, requires being misérable. The people that les misérables like Jean Valjean, Mabeuf, and the young men who die at the barricades make the world better for may not even suspect that their lives are being made better. In a lovely digression during the barricade sequence, Cosette wakes up on the 6th of June, not a hundred miles from the battle, and spends a few pages prettying herself up, sniffling because Marius hasn't come to see her for a few days. He hasn't come to see her because he's getting himself shot up by the National Guard, but she doesn't have a clue. That's the genius of Victor Hugo: not that he creates complex characters, but that he juxtaposes terribly simple ones in gorgeously complicated ways. Les misérables is great art because it is contrived, two-dimensional, and pulpy; because it is the kind of book where the sewers are full of friends and enemies who simply have to meet. |