Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables (tr. Christine Donougher)

I began reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables at the very start of 2023. I can date this relatively precisely because I’d signed up for a newsletter that sent out one chapter per day, starting January 1—there being 365 chapters of The Brick, as it is known to fans. I don’t know if I immediately started reading on New Year’s Day, but I had caught up by January 4, which is when I started posting to Tumblr about it (here’s all my non-reblog posts).

I kept up with it for a little bit, but rapidly discovered that it worked better if I read in large chunks. [*] So I read Part One in February, Part Two in April … and then Part Three in December, when I barely remembered anything that had happened previously. (I had tried it in the summer, but with no success.) I got through Part Four also in December, with some hopes of finishing the book on the original schedule, that is, within the calendar year. When that didn’t happen—I finished the sewer digression on December 31—I ultimately decided to reread the whole thing from the start before pushing through to the end.

[*] Having spent my formative years reading one or more complete books per day, I have yet to figure out how to read something new-to-me slowly over long periods of time. This is one reason why my novel reading has dropped so precipitously.

This turned out to be a very good call, because wow, it was though I’d never actually read Part Three, the way it seemed completely new on reread. Also, I’d switched to the Christine Donougher translation after my friend ellen_fremedon said that it rendered Hugo’s arguments "remarkably transparent." And I definitely understood what he was getting at much better this time around, though it’s also possible that I’d finally internalized the various relevant points of French history. (It is truly embarrassing how often I stopped in my first reading and said, wait, what does Hugo think of, e.g., Napoleon?)

So I spent a very intense *mumble* days doing almost nothing but (re)reading Les Mis, finishing earlier this week. It’s such a relief to be done! 2023 was the year I had giant novels hovering over me: nominally, I was reading this; rereading Moby-Dick (which I’d read in December 2022) along with Whale Weekly; and rereading Heaven Official’s Blessing on Mastodon (though that only started in the summer). [**] The key word there is of course "nominally," though I have hopes of going back to Whale Weekly now.

[**] Heaven Official’s Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu or TGCF) is an enormously long Chinese webnovel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu that I’d read, twice, in 2021; the eight-volume official English translation has recently completed. It has eaten my brain as much as The Locked Tomb series has, not that you’d know either of those things from this booklog because I haven’t been updating consistently. I do hope to write up both eventually.

As for the reading experience, I should say first that I was in the somewhat-rare position of being basically unspoiled for the story. Somehow my knowledge amounted to: (1) there was a group of young revolutionaries on a barricade: two of them were consistently paired by the fandom, and I was pretty sure they all died?; (2) someone stole a loaf of bread; and (3) Russell Crowe was a cop who couldn’t sing. Seriously, that was it.

Fittingly, that was a lot of preface. What did I think of the book?

I have mixed feelings. Hugo is trying to do at least two things: tell a deeply dramatic and sentimental story about Jean Valjean (the aforementioned bread-stealer) and a relatively small group of people who keep crossing his path; and convince the French people to overthrow Napoleon III so that he, Hugo, can return from political exile. And the latter is not always of particular interest to me.

It’s not that I object, as a general matter, to the digressions that are the most obvious manifestation of the political purpose. I absolutely adore Moby-Dick, after all. (It is truly wild reading these two books in proximity, by the way; they are both long, digressive, heavily symbolic mid-19th c. novels with strongly-present narrators and clear political messages, but they could not feel more different to me.) And I think there ended up being only one digression in Les Mis that I could not understand the purpose of, the rant about monasteries. I don’t think the rest are skippable: for instance, we need to spend the first fourteen chapters with the Bishop of Digne so that we believe his interactions with Jean Valjean thereafter. (Even though Hugo says—in the very second paragraph of the book!—that a particular fact "in no way impinges on the basic substance of what we are about to relate," which is a truly bold way to start your honking enormous novel.) And I was delighted by the infamous sewer digression—Hugo just has so many feelings about it!

But seeing what role a digression is playing doesn’t equate to enjoying its presence. For instance, the Waterloo section may be even more infamous than the sewer one. I admit, it does start out by very effectively conveying the horror of the battle. But it then devolves into propaganda: and while I can intellectually appreciate Hugo’s attempt to turn Waterloo into a victory for France, I’m simply not the audience for it—or for extensive panegyrics to France’s greatness, or very long navel-gazing on the difference between riot and insurrection, or minutely-detailed odes to a Paris that is no more.

Talking about the digressions may give the wrong impression: the Jean Valjean drama and the revolutionary exhortations can’t be separated from each other. The plot is also in service to the political message. Which means that through the whole book, I wanted to tell Hugo, "I see what you’re doing there." It’s all very constructed. A lot of the time this works! Once, a character feels a time-sensitive obligation that they desperately do not want to fulfill, and Hugo just keeps piling on obstacle and reprieve, obstacle and reprieve, over and over again in this amazing extended sequence. Is it remotely plausible? Probably not. However, I don’t care because it fits with the character and makes for highly compelling reading.

But sometimes the constructed nature doesn’t work. For instance, there was one sequence at the barricade that was supposed to be very tense and moving, but instead it felt like an idiot plot, so I got annoyed at the failed emotional manipulation. And more generally, if I’m always seeing what the author is doing, then I’m failing to be immersed in the story. Sometimes what the author was doing were surprisingly telling bits of characterization, or tense scenes of suspense, or quite funny jokes, or movingly sad parts. But the feeling of edifice was inescapable.

The other reason I have mixed feelings is that Hugo is absolutely awful when it comes to women in this book. He consistently and vociferously argues that their highest happiness consists of entirely subordinating themselves to the man in their life. I very nearly threw my ereader at the wall when I got to this paragraph about a man being "contentedly blind" in the care of his sister:

Quote hidden for length and revolting sexism; click to show or hide

Incidentally, let us say that on this earth where nothing is perfect, to be blind and to be loved is in fact one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have continually at your side a wife, a daughter, a sister, a delightful human being who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you, to know you are indispensable to a person who is necessary to you, to be able constantly to measure her affection by how much of her presence she grants you and to say to yourself, ‘Since she devotes all of her time to me, I must have all of her love’; to see the mind though you cannot see the face, to be able to count on the loyalty of one person when the world is eclipsed; to perceive in the rustle of a gown the fluttering of wings, to hear her to-ing and fro-ing, going out, coming home, talking, singing, and to think that you are at the centre of these footsteps, of this talking and singing; to demonstrate at every moment your own magnetic power, to feel all the more powerful the more infirm you are, to become in the darkness and by means of the darkness the star round which this angel gravitates — few joys equal this….

He also spends so much time talking about virginity, virtue, and beauty as interchangeable—while leering at the beautiful virtuous virgins and talking about their irresistible wiles. It truly made my skin crawl. When these particular obsessions haven’t been tripped, he’s capable of characterizing the female characters just as well as the male; but unfortunately they get tripped regularly, and indeed key bits of the plot depend on it. So it, too, is inescapable.

To sum up: I’m glad I read it, and I enjoyed parts of it. I’m looking forward to seeing the musical in a couple months, because I find adaptations interesting, and I’ll keep an eye on the fandom. But I can’t say that I liked it, and I have no desire to read more Hugo.

A spoiler post follows.