This is the spoiler post for Les Misérables, in which I talk about the ending, the characters, and whatever else comes to mind as I browse my ebook notes. Here’s the non-spoiler post if you haven’t read the book and/or would like something marginally more coherent.
(Citations are in the traditional form of Part.Book.Chapter.)
I guess I’ll start with the ending since that’s the freshest. As I emailed some exceptionally patient and stone-faced friends: "I can’t tell which would be sappier, Jean Valjean living happily ever after in the bedroom next door to Cosette and Marius, or what we actually got."
When I called Jean Valjean’s story "deeply dramatic and sentimental" in the main post, this was one of the things I was thinking of. And this is also one of the ways the plot relies on Hugo’s extremely horrible view of women, because if Cosette had not "yielded to the undefined but clear pressure of [Marius’s] unspoken intentions, and obeyed blindly" by not caring about her father (5.9.1), then the whole thing would never have progressed so far as the deathbed reconciliation. (Which, by the way, is the occasion of one of the five perfect single tears that I counted, all from men of course (see: thingswithwings’ manpain vid). The other four are the member of the Convention (1.1.10); Marius’s father’s dead body (3.3.4); Enjolras killing the artilleryman (5.1.8); and Jean Valjean walking toward Marius and Cosette’s house (5.8.4).)
(The other main way that the plot relies on Hugo’s horrible view of women is Fantine/Tholomyès, because the text makes zero effort to justify her love of him. Nothing about his badly preserved buffoonish irony seems like it should be attractive to dreamy serious Fantine, and their sole textual interaction (1.3.7) is him telling her that he’s an illusion, when she’s not even listening, and then kissing the wrong girl!)
I honestly don’t know what to think about Jean Valjean’s death. Is it a sop to the reader who still reflexively thinks that convicts don’t deserve a happy life? Is it to complete the incredibly unsubtle Christ parallels—although he was already "like one crucified," on Cosette’s wedding night (5.6.4)? Is it some political parallel or message? Or is it just, let me drag as many tears out of the reader as I can?
I can’t even be mad at Marius and Jean Valjean about it, because they’re so transparently the victims of their author and his incredibly shitty views, though I fully support those who are. (I will give Hugo credit for not making Marius jealous over his cousin, however. That was nice.)
I was surprised that Javert killed himself; when I paused in my reading after the sewer digression, I vaguely speculated that maybe Jean Valjean and Javert would both die as part of Jean Valjean saving Marius. I was especially surprised that Javert killed himself so early in Part Five: where, I kept wondering as I read onward, is the plot? Javert was gone, and Jean Valjean made Cosette good fake papers, so Thénardier didn’t seem like a credible threat (as indeed he ended up not being, in a quite funny way honestly—"Thénardier went away understanding nothing, astounded and delighted by this gentle battering with sacks of gold and this storm of banknotes breaking over him" (5.9.4)).
(It is, of course, not funny that "With Marius’s money Thénardier established himself as a slave-trader" (5.9.4). Well done, Hugo. Did he know of the existence of the Confederate edition, by the way?)
I don’t give a shit about Javert, but I did see a little toward the end where the old-man slashers (who I am advised exist, though I have not run across them organically) could be coming from, book-wise. (Normally I do like "the one who is so good/the one who gets dragged into being good against their will by sheer proximity," but, ugh. Javert.)
Of the other two main ships in the book, I was pleasantly surprised by aspects of both of them. Cosette/Marius is of course difficult because it involves a woman written by Hugo, but at the start, when they were staring at each other, I liked that Cosette was in the verge of forgetting about him after not seeing him for a while, and of course Marius wearing his good clothes every day and sniffing Jean Valjean’s handkerchief is excellent comedy. And Hugo does concede that Cosette "spoke with remarkable insight and at times said all kinds of true and discerning things" (4.8.1), so I will hope that they have a happy and intellectually-fulfilling life together.
(Pour one out for Éponine, who was great and absolutely deserved better.)
As for Enjolras/Grantaire, I knew the pairing existed because I’d read contextless modern AUs back when the movie came out, but I did not expect how canon Grantaire’s feelings were? "Grantaire admired, loved and revered Enjolras. … Always snubbed by Enjolras, spurned, rebuffed and back again for more, he said of Enjolras, ‘What marmoreal magnificence!’" (3.4.1.) And then, of course, they die hand-in-hand. (The fics I read did not, by the way, do justice to the complexity of that whole thing.)
Speaking of the barricades and dying, the sequence that I mentioned in the non-spoiler post, the one that felt like an idiot plot, was Gavroche’s death. In general the barricades failed to bring tears to my eyes, because again of the distancing effect of the "I see what you’re doing there." Perhaps I’m heartless, but I simply cannot take seriously any scene that includes this (5.1.23):
A National Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras lowered his gun, saying, ‘I feel as if I’m going to be shooting a flower.’
Sorry, fans of Les Amis!
I did like Gavroche generally, though, and in particular, the interlude with the elephant and his unknown brothers was excellent. One could criticize the novel for everyone being either Jean Valjean in disguise or a Thénardier ditto, but not me; I rather liked that the core cast was kept small to counterbalance the wild sprawl of everything else.
Hmmm, what else? I already wrote at Tumblr about Hugo’s odd choices regarding narrative verisimilitude, and Jean Valjean choosing to turn himself in when he was mayor, so I won’t repeat that here.
Going through my notes:
-
Valjean is "a nickname, probably, and a contraction of ‘Voilà Jean’." (1.2.6.)
-
And why is he so consistently "Jean Valjean" to the narrative? Is it ducking the question of whether he should be "Monsieur"? (And of the Friends, why does only Jean Prouvaire get a full name?)
-
I know everyone already quotes this, but it’s for a reason: "It is our firm belief that if souls were visible to the eye we should clearly see that strange thing whereby every single member of the human species corresponds to some species of the animal world." (1.5.5.)
-
I very, very badly want an AU in which Cosette and Éponine are werewolves. No, hear me out! When Cosette is going to get water (2.3.5), "she did come across one woman, who seeing her pass by turned round and stood there muttering to herself, ‘Now where on earth can that child be going? Is it a werewolf child?’ Then the woman recognized Cosette." And when Éponine is facing down the gang outside Jean Valjean and Cosette’s house (4.8.4), she says, "I can’t be the daughter of a dog seeing as I’m the daughter of a wolf!" See? Werewolves!
-
(I would grudgingly concede to an all-fantasy AU in which Javert had psychic powers, based on him telling Thénardier not to shoot from three paces away, because he’d miss, and then Thénardier in fact missing (3.8.21).)
-
"The day before, Jean Valjean had handed over to Marius, in the presence of Monsieur Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs. Since the terms of the marriage were to establish joint ownership of the whole estate, the settlement documents were straightforward." (5.6.1, my emphasis.) Was a wife having an ownership interest in marital property usual at this time?
That’s enough for now. Please feel free to gossip about your favorite or least favorite character, moment, flight of rhetoric, etc., especially if I left it out!
My take on the ending was that I wanted it redone as a gothic novel with a less passive Cosette as protagonist.
I’m mainly fond of Javert for the scene before his suicide where he goes back to the station and writes up a long memo about what the police should be doing better — it’s so on-brand!
(Also my opinion on the book’s version of Waterloo is still “don’t be silly, Victor Hugo, that was all Jonathan Strange’s doing”! — I think I mentioned this when you blogged JS&MN.)
Gothic novel would be a great idea! That fits so well.
The memo is very good, I admit.
I loved that book in spite of the plot. It was Paris that delighted me–the nuns’ private language centered around bells, the thieves’ cant, and especially the elephant, because it was a real thing, forgotten after the failed “Supreme Being” invented religion flopped. And there it showed up in this novel! The sewers, also cool.
there’s unquestionably a whole lot of love for Paris in the book!
Oh, man, the ending of this book is such a tangle–Marius and Valjean make terrible decisions that Hugo knows are terrible, and also terrible decisions that he thinks are fine; Cosette’s actions are consistently the well-observed behavior of a psychologically real person with her trauma history, but they crash right into the narrator’s blanket statements about How Women Are; and Hugo’s own history constantly distorts where his sympathy lies.
Taking those points in reverse order: Hugo’s own father died when Hugo was in his late teens, after a long estrangement and a very brief and tentative reconciliation; and Hugo’s eldest and favorite daughter Leopoldine, whose shadow hangs over the whole book, drowned at 19, with her new husband, on a pleasure cruise. At some very basic level Hugo just doesn’t believe that fathers and adult children are able to have relationships without one of them dying, and it makes it hard to tell how much of the ending of this book is on purpose.
I also do not believe the narrator that Cosette ever stopped caring about her father. What we *see* is Cosette telling her father straight out that she wants him in her life; that she’s confused and distressed by the ways he’s withdrawing from her, and acting exaggeratedly childlike because that’s what has worked before–we’ve seen in other places, such as the opening of the chapter with the chain gang, that Valjean is comforted by thinking of Cosette as a young child and threatened by thinking of her as an adult who doesn’t need him anymore. And when that doesn’t work–when pleading, and reminding him of their shared history, and stating her emotional needs directly, all just lead to her father gaslighting her and withdrawing from her life… she’s got nothing else. Of course she lets herself be distracted–the two most important men in her life are joining forces to make it very plain to her that if she doesn’t go along with the distraction, if she keeps asking questions, she’s not going to get anywhere.
And then there’s Marius. I am indebted to PilferingApples for pointing out that the book basically ends with Marius’s Petit-Gervais moment–with him realizing that he’s crossed the one line he didn’t think he was able to cross: he’s permanently separated a loving father from his child, ostensibly in the child’s interest, exactly the thing that his grandfather did to him. It happens partly because Jean Valjean manipulates him into it, and partly because he’s fetched up right back in his abusive grandfather’s house, and falling back into his old patterns–he hasn’t actually interrogated the ideas he was raised in; he’s just substituted one set of received notions for another, first idolizing his father and becoming a Bonapartist, and now post-barricades idolizing the Montagnards in the same way, but not actually understanding well enough to question the carceral framework he has for justice.
That’s very sad about Hugo’s family, which I don’t think I knew. And I confess that it never occurred to me to think of Hugo being an unreliable narrator in this particular way, and I’m not sure my reading of the book ultimately fits with that. But I do see the justice in what you say about Cosette–who I do not blame in the least, in any way.
That’s such a good and terrible point about what Marius has done. It makes the sentimentality of the deathbed reconciliation an even more false note.