Miserables: Good Bad and Ugly, Part 1

 

"Fantine," by Margaret Bernardine Hall (1886)

           

            In 1986, some friends who had been spending time in England raved about a new musical based on Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.  When an American production was announced the following year, I asked my father if he could get us tickets for the next time we visited him and my mom in New York. The tickets were ridiculously expensive and almost impossible, but my Dad promised that if I read the Victor Hugo novel--complete and unabridged--he would get some.  Well, I did and he did.

            It was a good thing that our visit was months off, because Hugo's epic, over 1500 pages in the 1887 Hapgood English translation, took a long time to read.  In the manner of some 19th-century novels (think War and Peace, for example), spanning a number of years, it has a large cast of characters, and spends a lot of time ruminating about them and their thoughts and habits.  When you're done, you really know these fictional people in depth.  The author divides his epic into 5 volumes, each subdivided into books, and these in turn into chapters. Each has its own title. Embedded in the novel are tangential essays on topics such as the Battle of Waterloo (more than 60 pages long), a meditation on convents (50 pages +), street urchins, Parisian street slang, barricades and how to build them, and a tour and history of Paris's sewers. 

            For the modern reader, it's a slog.  Imagine, in the middle of a contemporary epic thriller, time out for a 50-page discussion of the D-Day invasion, merely because one of the character's uncles participated in it and a result had PTSD, which subsequently made it hard on his family, but only tangentially on the character herself?

"The Escalade"

            When the action moves along, the narration is riveting, for example when Valjean and Cosette, pursued by Javert and trapped in a blind alley, manage to escape in the dark by scaling a very tall wall, this being accomplished by skills that Valjean learned as a criminal, and helped in no small way by his phenomenal stamina and strength.  It was tense drama when I first read it, and remains so now on a second reading, even when I know how it turns out. 

            What most impresses me is that the principal characters in Hugo's novel, though very much embedded in their 19th-century world, are timeless, and they resonate in us to this day. Human nature, both positive and negative, transcends time.  This is hard-wiring.

            The two main antagonists, Jean Valjean and Javert are the most complex, and Hugo, by exploring their backstories, helps define this complexity.  Some critics have suggested that in some ways these two men are very similar, but it seems to this reader that they are polar opposites in the way they cope with the traumas and events in their lives.

            Valjean comes from a modest rural family.  When he commits what would now be considered a misdemeanor, he is sentenced to the galleys for a five-year prison term--not uncommon back then.  By the early 19th-century, criminals serving in galleys were no longer slave rowers. Many of them were physically housed on prison hulks by the city of Toulon, Tikkun Olam, "The Repair of the World."  The process is slow, and at first he robs a boy of some money almost as a knee-jerk throwback to his prison life, but the rest of this massive novel chronicles his journey.

Jean Valjean as Mayor Madeleine

and brought onshore to do chain-gang labor.  Because of several escape attempts, Valjean's prison term stretched out to nineteen years. Hugo endows Jean Valjean with prodigious strength, but he is at first an anti-hero, and even later, never a superhero, but a conflicted and human one.  On his release after 19 years, he must have been suffering from PTSD, not a condition known about back then, and at that moment anger at the society and system that incarcerated him.  It takes the saintliness of Bishop Myriel, who not only gifts him materially, but who instills in him an isotope of trust and faith, to begin his metamorphosis into humanity and a desire to practice what Jewish belief calls

            Hugo makes it clear that Valjean's own consciousness in his quest for self-redemption that when he surfaces in the town of "M sur M" and heroically rescues children from a fire, he  assumes the name "Father Madeleine," certainly an identification with that premier Christian example of redemption, Mary Magdalen. He thrives there (including using his great strength to rescue a man from under a collapsed cart), and uses his wealth derived from the Bishop's silver to help the town become prosperous, eventually having his own jet bead factory and being elected Mayor. But he is still learning the ropes, defining morality too narrowly, and dismissing Fantine from his factory because she has lied about her illegitimate child. Later, when he tries to help her--too late--he begins to understand that human nature is seldom black and white, nor are the vagaries of living.  It is then when his confrontation with his nemesis, the police inspector of his town, truly sets him on his own redemptive path, which will grow in him even through another, briefer prison term, from which he escapes, leaving him technically once again a fugitive.

Javert

            I wonder if it is the fact that Valjean had a normal life and familial connections for 27 years before he stole that bread helped in the recuperation of his humanity.  Is it this lack of a normal childhood that will determine the path of Inspector Javert?  According to Hugo's description of him, Javert's features somewhat resemble a gorilla, and we never learn his first name.  Hugo gives him a grim past: he is born within prison walls, his mother a fortune teller, his father a criminal.  He is like Valjean in a fierce desire to better himself, but with no real childhood or family life, there's no underlying foundation of humanity.  He will always see things strictly by his definition of lawful morality in black and white.  Upholding the law is his one and only anchor to direct him out of the prison ambiance, which makes him a rigid

fundamentalist. He sees right and wrong as exclusive opposites.  If you are in the wrong you can never be trusted because you can never rise above evil. It reminds me of some politicians now who cross off the eligibility of a candidate because he smoked a joint when he was 16.

            When Javert formally meets Valjean as Mayor Madeleine when he becomes police chief in M sur M, he instinctively recognizes him as a formal criminal, though it takes him time to narrow his former identity down to Jean Valgean who he observed as a on the chain gang 16 years previously. When in the end Valjean spares his life at the barricades, this glimpse of the possibility of change rips away his absolute, rule-bound anchor, and his life becomes meaningless; suicide is the only solution.

Mr. & Mrs. Thernadier

            Other principal characters in the novel also still resonate, though they are less nuanced.  Fantine, too innocent at first and too trusting of her lover (whom we could equate to a fraternity-boy stereotype), is an example of a good person making bad judgements.  She becomes a victim of the sex trade after leaving her daughter with strangers.  The Thernadier parents are scoundrels, rapacious and amoral.  They keep turning up like bad pennies, leaving train wrecks behind them.   Cosette also begins as a victim; I am surprised that her experience as Cinderella among the Thernadiers leaves her relatively unscathed--is Valjean's rescue and unconditional love timely enough to restore her innocence? And Marius, that privileged boy who manages to escape his monarchist, ultra-conservative grandfather's thumb, goes to the barricades not for any political ideal, but because he thinks he can't have the girl he loves?

            Those of us old enough to have lived through the student unrest of the late 1960's can certainly identify with the ill-fated students from the ABC tavern and their abortive revolution.  Enjolras is one of those pure political idealists who lives and dies for his ideology--but, like Javert, is completely lacking in compassion for the working poor he thinks he represents.  These are the same upper middle-class young men as the fraternity boys who play around with Fantine and her friends, though youthful idealism sets them apart. 

            The street people we meet, especially two of the five Thenardier offspring, can find their echo in poor kids of any working people's neighborhood, though contemporary American society is more marginally fluid than that of France of the 1830's. Éponine and Gavroche have no way out, once they are dragged from lower middle-class marginal

Marius Conforting the Dying Éponine

respectability to the urban streets, and their parents join the underworld of Paris.  These are intelligent children with initiative, and Éponine is the only female protagonist in the novel with who is independent-minded and mistress of her own fate, but at that time, there was really nowhere for her to go, and her attachment for the refined Marius is doomed from the start.  Maybe if she lived in the United States in Hugo's time she might have grown up to be a tough pioneer, or if she had lived a little later, Calamity Jane.

            I'm afraid this is a very superficial look at a very dense and complex novel.  I am no literary critic.  I have written these thoughts only to provide a basis for my next entry, which will deal with thoughts on Les Misérablesas it has resonated in some its retelling in various media in the 19th and 20th centuries.

            The best thing is to read the whole epic for yourselves. It is available uncut in the Hapgood translation online, and you can download the whole thing. It also includes the Gustave Brion illustrations for the original French publication of the novel in 1862. I will forgive you if you speed-read through or skip the Battle of Waterloo.

__________________________________________________________________________The project Gutenberg address for the Hapgood translation of Hugo's Les Miserables is at:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm

For an excellent synopsis and a lot of incidental information, see the Wikipedia entry:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Misérables

(an even more detailed synopsis can be found at the French Wikipedia site)

A plethora of 19th-century illustrations for the novel by various illustrators (and the source for the ones I use here) can be seen at:https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255s13/images/illustrations/page/image1.html