FYI

Two items of note appeared in the September 2009 issue of Writer’s Chronicle: (Moderately stale news, I admit)

• WC cited the Boston Globe report on area educators’ reading lists for the new year. Boston educators, in revamping high school summer reading lists, are including contemporary authors such as John Gresham and Dan Brown. Sigh…the rich are about to get richer. The idea here is simply to get the kids reading.

• In a New York Times report cited by WC, a Federal Department of Education survey indicates that middle schoolers’ achievements in arts-related skills is “mediocre.” In its details, the report indicates little interest in the arts. So, writers, here’s the gauntlet throw-down: write for older audiences, or write something so compelling that even middle schoolers can’t resist it.

One More Thing

I’ve spent some three months re-editing a novel manuscript written and classroom-critiqued, circa 2001-2003. Two things of note rose to the surface from this edit:

• I have (had) a tendency to include too much detail, particularly in my narrative sections. Now, these passages are more like an artist’s sketches, showing only the “lines” that need to be there to reveal the “picture.” It’s a balancing act to make such passages act less like dead data and more like living prose, a balance between the sensibilities of poetry and today’s urge to non-fiction.

• On the plus side, I had little to change structurally with the manuscript. A self-pat on the back for at least getting the overarching story right.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Five: Jean Valjean

The last part of Hugo’s great book begins in medias res: with the Army’s assault on the Rue Saint-Denis barricade in full force. Enjolras and the other revolutionaries have managed to capture Javert and are holding him, planning to kill him when time permits. M. Fauchelevent, our Jean Valjean, has also joined the men at the barricade, and Javert recognizes him as Valjean.

But things are looking bad for our revolutionaries; they have little ammunition, few other weapons, and they’re hopelessly outnumbered. The Army has posted a sniper to pick off our men. Valjean takes up a gun and continually shoots at the sniper—not to kill, but to keep him from being a threat to the barricade defenders.

Finally, the Army breaches the barricade, and the defenders retreat through a wine shop. Valjean, who has thought of Marius as a threat to his well-being (Remember? Marius would take away his beloved Cosette, he thought), picks up the wounded young man and carries him away—to safety, he hopes.

Escape, however, is problematic in a city in the throes of revolt, so Valjean takes to Paris’ sewers. Before he goes, however, he promises his mates he’ll kill Javert; instead, he lets him go.

At this point of the story, Hugo treats us to one more of his digressions, an exposition on the history of Paris’ sewer system and a rather detailed explanation of the history of human waste disposal.

In the sewers he encounters…yes! Thénardier. This foul excuse for a human being (okay, a different form of human waste) doesn’t recognize Valjean, nor does he recognize the unconscious Marius. He thinks Valjean is carrying away the body of someone he’s murdered. Thénardier, believing he’s encountered a like soul, must assist Valjean. He aids his escape from the sewers.

Meanwhile, Javert: Valjean’s act of kindness toward Javert has the policeman in the midst of an existential meltdown. His life has always been a cascade of cases in black and white, but Valjean’s act had created for him many shades of gray. Left with such cognitive dissonance, Javert lets himself drown in the Seine.

Finally, Valjean returns Marius to M. Gillenormand’s home. The old man has believed Marius dead; now he rejoices in him, despite Marius being near death. Marius recovers and asks the old man once more for permission to marry. This time, Gillenormand agrees. Valjean brings Cosette there, and the couple—and M. Gillenormand—become deliriously happy. But for Valjean, there’s only sadness. He realizes Cosette has been his reason for living, that despite her happiness with Marius, he's lost a part of himself forever. So, Valjean decides, he must make the break a clean one—he mustn’t linger in their lives.

At last, Valjean owns up to whom he really is—a former galley slave, and a fugitive from the law. But, after some consternation, neither Marius nor Cosette are particularly concerned with his identity. Valjean returns to his home in the slums, having given most of his fortune of six hundred thousand Louis to the couple.

With the loss of Cosette, Valjean’s life force begins to ebb. He grows frightfully ill.

This close to the story’s end, Hugo still has one more plot card to play. Enter Thénardier (for the last time). He tries to extort money from Marius regarding Valjean’s reputation. By now, Marius is showing signs of a mature man capable, not only of being a responsible husband, but of being able to handle persons like Thénardier. He does, however, give our villain enough money to make his way to the New World, where Thénardier becomes a slave trader.

In Hugo’s final scene, Valjean lies dying, Cosette and Marius with him. Valjean’s last request is that he be buried with a simple tombstone and no epitaph. And so Valjean is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris where, coincidentally, Hugo himself is finally laid to rest at the end of his days.

So what are we to make—in as few words as possible—of Valjean and this story of Hugo’s? Two quotes from Hugo’s text come to mind by way of explanation:

“There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the splendors below among the dregs.”

I think Hugo realizes that the affluent life, as well as the educated life are quite removed from the realities of the lives of most people. That is, these "normal" lives are sterile existences compared to “street life, it’s passion, its creativeness in staying alive. Consequently, in Hugo’s view, that life is “splendorous.” It’s in a certain sense the “real” life. Many of the passages I’ve marked in my reading of Les Misérables allude to this point in different ways.

“At intervals we see truth, that sunshine of the human soul, glimmering away there (in the stormy cloud of systems, passions, and theories).”

Here, Hugo clearly recognizes that, despite one’s life situation, despite all failed revolts, there’s something common to all, something divine, something that is essentially truth incarnated and, in the end, something that will out. Certainly, this is Valjean’s story. Hugo believed it was (and is) France’s story.
My hope is that it’s the story of us all.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Four: The Idyll Of The Rue Plumet And The Epic Of the Rue Saint-Denis

At the outset in this Part, Hugo demonstrates his understanding of the French society he’s haunted to yet another degree, that of the political ramifications of social unrest in the early nineteenth century. He begins with a sharply focused discourse on the July 1830 revolt. Here, the monarchy is restored and the bourgeoisie are the main recipients of the revolt’s outcome. Louis-Philippe, the new king, seems, in Hugo’s view, a nice guy representative of the status quo - hardly the leader France needed in a time of continuing turmoil.

Then we’re back to the aftermath of Javert’s raid on the Thénardier family. Of course, Cosette and M. Madeline are no longer strolling the streets, and Marius is a bit distraught over his “loss” of Cosette. The Thénardier daughter, Éponine is attracted to Marius, and to gain his favor, she tells him she can take him to the girl’s home.
Meanwhile, Valjean and Cosette have seen prisoners beaten on their way to prison and are disturbed enough by this to begin taking food and clothes to the poor. Little gamin Gavroche sees Valjean attacked by the robber Montparnasse and hears Valjean’s lecture on the wages of such sin. Gavroche apparently takes the lecture meant for Montparnasse to heart and finds Valjean’s purse, throws it to the financially struggling M. Mabeuf, thus becoming a benefactor of sorts.

Marius does locate Cosette, leaves a love letter for her. They meet and their romance begins for real.

Then Gavroche encounters Montparnasse once more. The thief shows the boy and three of his friends a large hollow elephant statue, in which they can find shelter.

Next in this dizzying Part Four, we gain another digression from Hugo, this time an extended one on slang. Hugo’s detailed linguistic analysis is there to make a point, I think. He wants the reader to understand that the language of the streets is as organic as the life there, that it’s as vital as the lives of these struggling people.

Then Marius decides to visit M. Gillenormand, his grandfather, to ask his permission to marry. The old man refuses.

Soon, it’s the summer of 1832, and Paris is a-twitter with revolt—touched off by the death of a General Lamarque, who is revered by the proletariat.
Marius, who is depressed over his grandfather’s refusal to allow him to marry, decides to throw in with the revolutionaries, as does Gavroche, who has stolen a pistol. Throughout Hugo’s subsequent dialogue, the gamin seems to be the most radical of the bunch.

This ragged lot makes its way to the Rue Saint-Denis. There, they begin to erect the story’s famed barricade and to fight the Republican Army. Éponine emerges from this fog of war to step in front of a bullet and save Marius’ life.

There’s no shortage of irony here. A few examples:

• The French Revolution was—as most revolutions tend to be—a partial one, benefitting few. The 1789 revolt was socially widespread and ousted France’s Bourbons. But the people weren’t ready to rule themselves, and the rest of Europe felt threatened by the monarchy’s overthrow. That led to Napoleon, who became an emperor, and his grand designs within Europe. The most significant role in this revolution was played by the Republican Army, which drew from all walks of life in a slightly more egalitarian way. Then, the revolt of 1830, which benefitted the bourgeoisie. This in turn led to the revolt of Hugo’s story, that of 1832. Once the door to revolution is opened, and despite obstacles, it goes to completion.

• The poor of Paris lived low but lived creatively. The hollow elephant, despite its almost comical nature, proves to be Hugo’s strongest metaphor for this ability. As if mere survival weren’t enough to depict this creativity, Hugo shows us how the poor of Paris changed the French language.

• Extreme poverty creates no inherent spiritual debasement in people—that comes from the manner in which people treat one another. Hugo’s best-characterized examples of this were Gavroche, who seems more politically aware and more humane than many of Hugo’s poor adults. And Éponine, who sacrificed her life simply out of unrequited love for Marius. And to further the irony, both Gavroche and Éponine were children of the wicked Thénardier family.


In the final Part Five of Les Misérables, we’ll tie up all the loose ends Hugo has strewn across France, Paris in particular.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Three: Marius

Hugo opens Part Three with a depiction of a street urchin: known simply as le gamin. Such children were turned out to live in the streets because of abject poverty or, as in the case of the Thénardiers and their son Gavroche, the families simply didn’t want them. There, in the streets, these children learned to survive—or they died. If they survived, they lived lives that were amazingly free, to barely paraphrase Kris Kristofferson’s famous song. So Hugo’s gamin becomes an archetype of the underclass, free to express oneself as one chooses, to live as one chooses, but in poverty.

Once again Hugo follows with a study in contrasts. In a subsequent chapter, we learn in detail of the family and lifestyle of Monsieur Gillenormand, an old man who had been a carefree rake in his youth. The Revolution had left his understanding of French society stranded in another century; hence he was a Royalist. To add to his angst, his daughter had married a soldier of Napoleon’s Republican army. And who was this soldier? Baron Pontmercy, who had died at Waterloo and who Thénardier claims to have saved.

Now Hugo introduces us to Gillenormand’s grandson, Marius. The old man would have loved to have made of his grandson an extension of his own ego, but as we in modern times know, this sort of aspiration for our descendants rarely works out. Marius has grown up as a rather serious, austere young man; he takes life seriously, intends his life to be meaningful. Quite the opposite of the formerly philandering old man.
Marius’ father is an unknown in the boy’s life until an accidental comment or two by M. Mabeuf, the churchwarden, informs him that Marius is the son of Baron Pontmercy. And Marius soon discovers that the Baron believed a soldier named Thénardier saved his life.
This mesmerizes Marius. He begins to visit his father’s grave— secretly, of course—and searches for Thénardier.
As Marius fumbles his way through this segment of his life, he makes the acquaintance of other young men destined to be revolutionary street fighters: Enjolras, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Prouvaire, Bahorel, and others. Marius, who is hardly one to strike a political pose, slowly comes under these young men’s influence. Liberty, particularly of the social kind, has been an undercurrent in France since the Revolution, and that seems to be what these men are after. From them, Marius comes to understand that while such freedom can be an indulgence, it can also hold more substance than the sort of nationalistic “freedom” Napoleon was famous for. He begins to carve out his own version of freedom, becoming a lawyer, but choosing to life in virtual poverty and making his living from translating books—his newly discovered passion.

His passion, that is, until he sees a fetching young lady on the mean streets where he lives. Of course, it’s Cosette, accompanied by M. Fauchelevent, our Valjean.
While Marius falls in love with Cosette from afar, other characters lurk these streets, these destined to cause trouble for Marius, Cosette, and Valjean: four men with alias names, Babet, Claquesous, Montparnasse, and Gueulemer. He also encounters Éponine, a daughter of the Jondrette family (this is our Thénardier family again), who is also destined to meddle in the story's affairs.
As the meddling begins, Javert returns to add his own to the mix. He recruits Marius to spy on the Thénardiers. Watching through a peephole, Marius is aghast to discover that the four above-named villains are set to accost Cosette’s father, to rob and possibly kill him, that the Jondrette man is Thénardier, Marius’ father's supposed savior. (Oh, and by the way, Valjean escapes both Javert and Thénardier.)

And so Marius is quickly torn between the father of Cosette and the man for whom he has been searching, Thénardier.

This Part ends with the Thénardier son, Gavroche, discovering that his mother and father have been taken to prison by Javert. Not so oddly, it turns out, Gavroche doesn’t mind.

What’s Hugo up to in this Part Three? Two things come to mind:

· In a broad-brush manner, Hugo wants us to see that personal freedom can be a chaotic albatross on society if handled immaturely, but that, handled in a constructive manner, it can also be a saving grace to the well-off, who are cramped by social position. It can also be a godsend to the poor, who find their only liberation within an oppressive social structure in such individuated liberty.

· In a personal context, as in Hugo’s depiction of characters as divergent as Gavroche and Marius, this part of the novel demonstrates that personal freedoms of the sort that had yet to permeate French society could actually add new structure to social life, and in a more meaningful and benevolent way.

Next post will take us to the most exciting and cinematic section of Hugo’s book, events leading to and including the April Revolution of 1832.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part Two: Cosette

Just when you think Hugo will smother you with the domestic and social travails of post-revolutionary France, he surprises. In this opening to Part Two, he gives us a military historian’s depiction of the Battle of Waterloo. Julie Rose’s copious notes tell us that Hugo visited the site of the battle in 1861, some forty-six years after one of Europe’s most pivotal war episodes. In fact, the first page or two of Part Two have Hugo as a character visiting the battle site. It’s fascinating to read his narration of the battle’s carnage, alongside his description of the battlefield more than four decades later. Perhaps the most poignant tale (and I won’t dwell on the battle’s details – it’s too good a read for me to paraphrase) is one of a drinking well poisoned by dead bodies thrown into it, still unusable in Hugo’s time.
But what’s Hugo’s reason for this digression? Partly to depict the aftershocks of the French Revolution on both rich and poor. But his primary strategy here is to introduce to us an ongoing lie in the story: Thénardier saving the life of Baron Pontmercy, the grandfather of Marius, the last major character to be introduced.

Then Hugo gives us more backstory on Valjean – his capture after his prison ship escape and his sentence to more years on the slave galley, Orion.
Following this, we return to M. Madeline and his promise to Fantine to look after her daughter, Cosette. This too is a promise Madeline aka Valjean takes to heart.

Hugo next allows us to peer at length into the family life of the Thénardiers, the sly way Thénardier manipulated people and events, the sullen rapacity of his wife, their bratty kids and, finally, Cosette’s sad state in her role as a child kept for money. The device Hugo sets between Cosette and the Thénardier girls is a ragged doll. Cosette yearns for the doll, but she’s forbidden to even touch it.
Valjean is on the lam again, and he visits the Thénardier inn anonymously. Noting Cosette’s attraction to the girls’ ragged doll, he buys her an expensive new one, then walks off with Cosette. Thénardier, of course, doesn’t want to lose the cash cow that Cosette represents to the inn, and he pursues the old man and young girl, but Valjean threatens him and he slinks back home.
The two take refuge in a Paris slum at the Old Gorbeau House, but even this place threatens our pair – now Javert is nosing about.

Hugo next treats us to another digression, one with ample application to the story: the streets of Paris. His intent here is to show us that the Paris of 1927 is a surprisingly intimate place, that one could always be found there, that on the streets where Valjean encounters Javert, there’s little hope of a wanted man escaping.
But now Valjean becomes superhero, using his formidable strength to scale a wall with Cosette under his arm, both dropping to safety inside a convent.
The convent is run by the Bernadine nuns of the Perpetual Adoration. Once again a digression, this one perhaps overlong and even unnecessary: on life in the monastic orders. Life in this convent is in Hugo’s depiction debasing, hypocritical, reactionary. Hugo’s publisher asked him to delete this section of the book, but he refused. Predictably, it scandalized France with its acerbic and negative views of monastic life. But I don’t think Hugo was simply being stubborn in insisting that this section remain. He wanted it there, I think, for one simple reason. In gaining refuge here from Javert – a place even the police weren’t allowed to enter, Valjean gained another asset - the name of the convent’s gardener Fauchelevent. The gardener becomes a friend to both Valjean and Cosette, and Fauchelevent risks his own well-being in smuggling the pair out of the convent when the proper time comes.

By this stage of the novel, Hugo has pulled us deep into his well-crafted plot. Virtually all his significant characters have been introduced, we know the good ones from the bad, and we have a sense of where the story is going.

The genius of Hugo’s panorama remains, despite such crafty plotting. He continues to give us a detailed view of France, Paris, and life during an era of European turmoil.

I hope it hasn’t escaped your attention that Valjean’s identity is murky at best. Not that he’s having some sort of identity meltdown, you understand. His identity problem seems to come from at least three different but necessary frames of reference:

• He’s a European peasant at a time in which names meant something only with regard to the rich, the famous, or the otherwise notable. Even Hugo had trouble making this character’s name relevant. (He variously chose Jean Tréjean, Jean Veryjean, etc.) Apparently he toyed with these several names, lighting on Valjean simply (a la translator Julie Rose) as a bastardization of voilà Jean, something like Behold Jean, or perhaps Behold the man.

• When Valjean takes his first alias, Madeleine, there are intimations that the man is meant to take a new temper as a doer of good deeds, a well-off but kind, benevolent man.

• Under the name Fauchelevent, which we’ll note later, Valjean assumed the role of a humble but proper old man, a man who wished to become unnoticed, despite his continuing penchant for giving to the poor.

While this no doubt made perfect sense to the French of Hugo’s time, it takes on another texture of us moderns and post-moderns. We see here a personality continually in flux - due to external conditions affecting his life, with names to match. We’ll also see this trend with some of Paris’ underclass in chapters to come. Does this make Hugo the first post-modern writer? You decide.

In Part Three, we turn our attention again to the poor, underworld life of Paris. And we'll finally meet Marius.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Part One: Fantine

Those who have only a peripheral acquaintance with Les Misérables will find it surprising that its Book One opens, not with Jean Valjean, but with one Charles Myriel, the Bishop of Digne. Myriel has descended from a well-to-do French family, but his devotion to God has caused him to shun all wealth, even the somewhat affluent trappings of his office. To the people of his bishopric, he’s a saint.

One day, a scruffy, beggarly man passes by: this time it’s Jean Valjean, just released after nineteen years on a slave galley. Earlier, he’d tried unsuccessfully to steal bread to feed his sister and her children, and was sentenced to fourteen years on the galley. Then five more years were added due to escape attempts. Even though now released, his passport marks him as a former convict, a man not to be trusted. Still, the bishop insists that Valjean board overnight in his home. But succumbing to his unfounded reputation, Valjean steals a set of silver candleholders from the bishop’s house. Naturally, Valjean is caught again. But the bishop insists to police officers that he’s given Valjean the candleholders. In fact, after the police leave, he allows the convict to keep the candleholders, with a proviso: he’s to use them to become an honest man.

As we’ll see at other times with other characters, such kindness sets Valjean into a spiritual and psychological turmoil; he doesn’t know how to react – except to thank God.

In order to escape his past, and to avoid the supremely focused policeman Javert, Valjean becomes Monsieur Madeline - an enterprising businessman, a philanthropist, and eventually mayor of the town of Montreuil-sur-mer.

In Book Three, Hugo finally introduces us to Fantine. She’s a working class girl – one of four - who has her eye on a well-off playboy type, Tholomyès. He and three of his male friends toy with the four girls, treat them cavalierly, and Fantine ends up pregnant with Tholomyès child, Cosette.
Fantine has a hard time supporting herself and Cosette, and bargains to leave the child with the Thénardier family, who are destined to be the villains of Hugo’s piece. They treat Cosette cruelly and continually increase their price of keeping the child. Fantine becomes distraught and penniless because of this – and she’s threatened with prison, only to be saved by M. Madeline.
Javert begins to meddle in the affair. He informs Madeline that someone has been arrested for stealing apples; the supposed perp is thought to be the ex-convict Valjean. Madeline deliberates, trying to decide if he should sit tight and let this man, Champmathieu, be sent to the galleys as Valjean. But he can’t do this; he travels to the trial in the town of Arras and proclaims himself to be Valjean. Champmathieu is acquitted and Madeline returns home, where Fantine is dying. Following her death, Madeline tacitly assumes responsibility for Cosette. But Javert has come to take Madeline to prison. Of course, the town of Montreuil-sur-mer is set on its ear by the news, and Madeline becomes universally shunned.

Here, Hugo is giving us a micro-view of French society. The rich have no use for the poor, as personified by Fantine’s treatment by Tholomyès, and his friends. Yet the poor have little use for one another (example: the Thénardiers) due to the brutal conditions of the underclass.

But why has Hugo introduced Myriel at the book’s beginning? Clearly, to depict two things: first, society doesn’t have to operate in the above manner. Myriel is of rich origins, and he’d consummately compassionate. Also, Hugo seems to want to set Myriel apart as an instrument of God, believing that only by such divine intervention can French society be set to rights.
As he says of Myriel: “What was this surplus of love? It was a serene benevolence, flowing over all people…”

But Hugo also wishes to note that same divine spark in the secular world as well, even in society’s dregs. He allows Cosette to become known as The Lark, a delicate, beautiful being among these damaged dregs. But he wants us to be aware that this spark is fragile, that the brutality and harshness of French underclass life can snuff out even this whisper of the divine.

Javert, then, is the implement of enforcing the status quo on these poor, with no consideration for or conception of kindness and compassion.

And what of M. Madeline? He’s Hugo’s vehicle of passage (at this point) through French society. He’s a convict on the lam, an exemplar of France’s growing middle class, who has made himself wealthy and has brought up with him those who work in his factory. As well, he champions the all-too-poor whom he continually helps, despite their minimal “value” to local society. He has indeed taken Myriel’s admonishment to heart.
What’s relevant here to us of the twenty-first century is that M. Madeline is an example of what can be done by one person in upholding human dignity and protecting it from threat by selfish callousness.

On the next post, we’ll move on to Part Two and one of Hugo’s grander digressions – the Battle of Waterloo.

Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – An Overview

For the past three summers, I’ve picked some rather voluminous reads to get me through the hots and humids of North Carolina. Two years ago, it was War and Peace. Last year, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. This year, I decided to take on Hugo’s fabled tome, Les Misérables. Of the three, I have fewer quibbles with Les Misérables. While it’s overlong by today’s standards and, as Tolstoy’s W&P did, it digresses often. However, Hugo’s digressions seem more connected to his story than Tolstoy’s. (A caveat: in both, one gets a sense of the nation’s sensibilities at the time of writing, wrapped in an ample dose of eighteenth century European history.) Based on my read, Hugo was no doubt the preeminent master of creative writing in his day. His characters are vivid, believable, and consistently drawn throughout this long text. There are few “dead spots” here; his story is well paced and it’s easy to follow, despite the length.

If you writers out there have taken years, even a decade, to finish a manuscript, take heart. Some seventeen years elapsed from the time Hugo began to write Les Miz until the book was published, in 1862. It’s organized into five parts; the first part, “Fantine,” was published separately, possibly as a trial balloon. I suspect the book was written to be published in its five parts, as sequels, although this apparently didn’t happen. Why do iI think so? Hugo’s narrator often repeats things at strategic places in the story, reminding the reader of previously introduced characters and events.

Les Miz is reputed to have been the most hyped book of its day, and Hugo’s thinly veiled impersonations of real-life people – the way Hugo depicted them - scandalized certain upper-crust segments of the French populace.

But what can be said of Hugo and his story in an overarching way? My first impression was that, at a time when European literature seemed to dwell on the well-to-do (much as popular American writing does today), Hugo reached into the dregs of society for literary inspiration. He didn’t blink at the tawdry side of French life, nor at the way the lower classes were treated by both the law and by society in general. In fact, this is perhaps the grandest irony in western literature: his view of post-1879-1799, revolutionary France seems all too much like the France of Louis Quatorze and Marie Antoinette. He orchestrates his characters’ actions within the plot to show how they become criminal-like under the duress of acute poverty and oppression. But he also shows that the dimmest lights of compassion among these poor, or by someone outside that poor state, can resurrect the human’s soul’s best qualities.

Secondly, Les Miz is perhaps the most socially subversive novel I’ve ever read. Hugo describes the psychology of the French urge to revolt, this time after the Napoleonic era. He depicts how to hold the troops of his day at bay, how revolutionaries could continually elude capture during and after street fighting. If one were to study how to manage the day-to-day operations of a civil revolt, he/she would do well to use Les Miz as a primer.

Besides these socio-political nuances, Hugo dwells in his asides on the history and geography of France, Paris in particular – even on the engineering marvel that is the sewer system of Paris. This last is perhaps a clearly intended, extended metaphor for the people who lived at the lower reaches of French society.

But a final irony regarding Hugo: the European Enlightenment is in full swing at this time, with secular values surmounting a class structure based on rule by royalty and a religious hierarchy. The French Revolution is all about abolishing this structure and supplanting it with mass rule and non-religious values. Clearly, Hugo is a part of this evolving ethos. But time and again he finds his own examples of Divine intervention in the doings of his characters – and by implication in the evolution of the French Republic.

It struck me that Les Miz has been the godparent to European Modernist literature. This text involved probably the first literary evidence of European anomie, the sociological and psychological unease that seemed to undermine the European urge to rational perspectives and reason prior to World War I. His protagonist, Jean Valjean is both heroic and antiheroic – a vulnerable, deeply troubled man who managed to do good things. Hugo also makes the reader work hard to divine meaning in his story – intending, I’m sure, to say life is that way. Clearly, there’s little in the complexities of Hugo’s characters and the events of their lives to suggest an overt sense of meaning to life in post-revolution France.

An aside: I have nothing but good things to say about Julie Rose’s translation and scrupulous body of underlying notes. She traffics not only in making Hugo’s text work in English, but in taking idioms of that day and transforming them into the feel of modern vernacular.

Over the next five posts, I plan to synopsize the five sections of Les Misérables and, hopefully to use examples to justify the above overview. It’ll be fun for me – hope you enjoy it as much as I will.