The Poor and the Wicked

[mtvessel]

Jul-Sep 2020
The Wretched - Victor Hugo, tr. Christine Donougher – Penguin Classics, 2013
* *
This book is more commonly known by its French title of Les Misérables, and even more commonly through the musical which is based on it. I chose it because I wanted to read its famous depiction of the 1832 June Rebellion. What I hadn't spotted was that it is enormously long - just over 1300 pages in this edition, which makes it shorter than War and Peace, but not by much - and that the reason for this is the lengthy opinion pieces in which the author engages. Some critics love Hugo's discursive approach to novel writing, but I found it infuriating, for much the same reasons as I dislike post-modern writers like Milan Kundera.

To give you some idea of what it is like, the first 80 pages are given over to a character sketch of an implausibly saintly bishop. We learn all about him - his religious views, history, daily life, and so on. But all of this is completely pointless, for his sole purpose in the story is a scene where he shows charity to recently released convict Jean Valjean, who steals a pair of candlesticks from him. After that he dies and is hardly mentioned again. His effect lingers because Jean Valjean becomes a sickeningly moral do-gooder, providing employment by creating a (relatively enlightened) factory making fake black jet, becoming mayor of a small town, and, most significantly, offering to help a dying fallen woman called Fantine see her daughter Cosette whom she had sold to the wicked pub owner Thenardier and his wife.

If all this was happening at a reasonable pace it would be fine, but the plot advances only in brief installments between long spells of pontification by the author on French politics, the Catholic church, the Battle of Waterloo, the Paris sewer system and other subjects. These essay-like sections - not exactly digressions, because each relates in some way to the scene that follows it - are quite interesting as snapshots of early nineteenth century French life, but mean that the reader is kept constantly aware of the author rather than his characters, which fail to engage as a result. There is no point in trying to enter imaginatively into the world of, say, Cosette's young lover Marius, when you know that the story is about to be paused for some twenty or thirty pages of authorial discourse on a subject which has nothing to do with his current state of mind.

Despite its length, some fairly fundamental questions that the reader may have about the characters don't get answered. We are given a detailed pen portrait of Enjolras, the leader of the "Friends of the ABC" (a pun on abaissé) who build the barricade, but Hugo focuses on his angelic appearance and stern demeanour rather than the reasons why he is prepared to lead a group of people into armed insurrection and probable death. To be fair, there may be a cultural barrier here - like most British people, I don't get why abstract terms such as "liberty" or the "spirit of '89" are so politically galvanising to our friends on the continent (ironically, Brexiter arguments about sovereignty hinge on a similar abstraction, and I don't understand those either) - but even so, Hugo's overwhelming authorial voice stifles the development of his characters, leaving them lacking depth. This is sadly apparent in the only female characters of any note: Cosette, the sweet, innocent doormat; Mme Thenardier, a forceful presence in her first few scenes who is ignominiously shuffled offstage to prevent her upstaging her husband; and Fantine, whose one memorable characteristic is her hopeless love for Marius.

One possible cause of Enjolras' fervour might be concern for the poor and downtrodden (not that we are told this), but Hugo's treatment of them is oddly dismissive given the title of the book. Other than the sickly sentimental Gavroche, the only representatives of the poor are Thenardier and his wife, who are decidedly evil. Hugo's attitude seems to be that the masses are either poor or wicked depending on who is leading them, which is why his narrative mostly revolves around lower and upper middle-class characters.

In terms of the development of novelistic form, there is some merit to Hugo's social documentation. There is a clear through-line from this book to Emile Zola's naturalism, which has far more interesting things to say about the lives of poor people and does so without losing focus on story and character. Nonetheless, I was disappointed by how uncompelling this supposedly great literary work turned out to be.