Ideas and the Novel (4 page)

It is surprising to notice how rarely Hugo allows us to enter the mind of Jean Valjean, even for the sake of glimpsing his state of feeling at a given moment. The emotions there are inferred for us by Victor Hugo and reported in summary form. This applies to the whole cast of characters. For instance, rather early in the book there is an examination of capital punishment and the feelings it produces in the spectator. Bishop Myriel, we are told, has been obliged in his younger days to witness an execution, and it has brought about a great change in his outlook. Another author would have shown us that reaction and those reflections through the old Bishop’s consciousness as it remembers, but Hugo describes the whole experience in his own terms, reconstructing it like an archaeologist’s sketch from fragments he feels must be buried in Myriel’s memory. He summarizes
on behalf of
the Bishop. In fact he almost never claims to enter the consciousness of any of his creatures. He speculates on what may be there and has recourse to metaphor and analogy to convey it, as in the entire short chapter in which Jean Valjean’s state of mind is evoked by the image of a drowning man abandoned by the ship of civilization. Similarly with the Bishop’s faith, an important force in the book; we see it at work, like the effect of wind on grass, but we do not penetrate into its inner make-up or constitution, any more than one would try to get inside a wind. It is no different with the bad people in the book. He guesses what must be passing through the mind of Javert in the scene with Fantine in the police-station, just as he guesses at the reasons for Jean Valjean’s growing love for the little orphaned Cosette: wasn’t it, perhaps, that the convict’s soul was in need of revictualing in order to persevere in the good?

Some of this, of course, is simply a device—an old novelist’s trick—to make us accept the pretense that the story is real, that it has an existence independent of its author, who is as much in the dark as the rest of us as to what is going on inside these people. But something more than make-believe is involved here for Victor Hugo. There is a delicacy of feeling in the decision to stay
outside.
It is as though the mind of another—even a fictional other—were a private room, whose threshold ought not to be crossed by anyone but the occupant. A mind, no matter whose, is a
hortus conclusus,
like the immaculate maiden’s chamber with potted lily and prayer books which only the Angel Gabriel is allowed to invade. Hugo is a chaste novelist, respecting the chastity of his characters. The inside of the dread Javert, as much as that of the saintly Bishop, remained
virgo intacta.

The exceptions to the rule are significant. Twice in
Les Misérables
he lets us see a process of reasoning that is going on in Jean Valjean’s head. On the first occasion he is struggling within himself as to whether he shall give up his new respectable identity—which shelters a new self—to save a man falsely accused of being the escaped convict Jean Valjean. It is a struggle between two kinds of duty: duty to his new, actively virtuous and altruistic self, which he fears he will lose by avowing who he is, and duty to a single other person. The inner argument is long; there are equally convincing, equally high-minded arguments in favor of either course. In the end, as you know, he appears dramatically in the courtroom and declares who he is.

The second time, hundreds of pages later, that we are allowed access to his soul or brain, he is once more locked in a struggle. It is after Cosette’s marriage, and the question facing him in his long-maintained third identity as Monsieur Fauchelevent is whether he shall share the happiness of the young couple, as they wish him to do, “bring his dark destiny into their bright foyer” or quietly go away. As he says, sharing their happiness will require his perpetual silence about the grim facts of his history, his continuing to live a lie, which has been justified by the necessity of being a father to Cosette but is so no longer. Again the inner argument is long, many valid points are to be made on both sides, and again it ends in a decision to avow who he is, this time to Marius, Cosette’s husband. It is clear, I think, why in these two, special cases, Victor Hugo lets us hear what is going on in Jean Valjean’s
for intérieur,
that is, his conscience, or inner tribunal. What we are overhearing in both cases is a
dialogue.
There are always two voices in a conscience, both usually claiming to be the voice of duty, and Jean Valjean is reasoning with himself, almost as if he were speaking aloud.

In these two interior dialogues lies the heart of the book, which is a story of pursuit. Jean Valjean’s bodily pursuer is Inspector Javert, who can be evaded and finally done away with; his moral pursuer is the truth, which hunts him down in his last retreat, his conscience, where after many vicissitudes he had good reason to believe himself safe.

That is the Idea of the novel. As Hugo himself formulates it in a characteristic passage, “A man’s conscience is that bit of infinity he harbors in himself and against which he measures the volitions of his brain and the acts of his life.” I say “characteristic” because there we find Hugo performing the big task he imposed on himself of giving a wider view than his
misérables
are capable of having, placed where they are, near the bottom of society. The Idea of the story has been lived by Jean Valjean; he has wrestled with it and borne it on his strong shoulders like the weight of Marius that he carried through the sewers of Paris. But he would be unable to express it.

From time to time, Hugo evidently felt the need to state magisterially how the book should be understood. For example, toward the beginning of the second volume, “This book is a drama whose chief character is the infinite. Man is the second.” At the beginning of Volume Three, he tells us that the novelist is “the historian of morals and ideas,” which implies a rather different stance, one of non-involvement. And it is true that in this volume, which deals with the 1839 events, he reports on the one hand the ideas of Marius, originally conservative, and on the other those of the embattled young men of the secret societies who will lead the May rising and man the barricades. In the manner of Caesar, he even gives us their pre-battle harangues. It is plain, moreover, that their ideas are being recorded by the author as historian, that they are not his own. Though he shows sympathy for the ardor and courage of an Enjolras, he himself was a believer in Progress. That in fact is the final explanation he offers of the underlying meaning of his novel (Volume Three, page 269): “The real title of this drama is: Progress.”

Actually this assertion is far from borne out by the novel itself, whose real title is its real title:
les Misérables.
The pursuit theme, illustrated in the smallest cruel particulars of keyhole spying and motiveless delation, points to the hopelessness of trying to throw off the dead hand of the past. However much we reform our ways, grow a new self, we
are
our past; it lurks behind us, follows us, denounces us, tracks us down. The novel ends with the utter isolation of Jean Valjean. You could say that social advance, an enlightened rehabilitation program for convicted offenders, would have remedied that. But that is not what the story says. By an immense solitary effort Jean Valjean had been able to change. He
is
a new man, but the new man, at the moment of promised happiness, only encounters a new pursuer, sterner than Javert: “To be happy we must never understand what duty is; once we understand it, it is implacable.” None of this resembles progressive doctrine.

Still, it must have been Hugo’s asserted faith in the deity of Progress—always written with a capital, like God’s name—that let him record without palliation the unhappiness, the mass misery, of the nation. And it was the wretched not of the earth but of France that weighed so heavy on him. How would he have been able to write of their suffering unless at the same time he had been able to offer the reader—and perhaps, above all, himself—the consolation of belief in a gradual improvement through the movement of History? His belief in historical progress was inseparable from his belief in France as the appointed successor to Greece and Rome in the sacred role of leader of nations.
“La révolution française est un geste de Dieu,”
he shouts in fierce italics, as if defying any contradiction. The manifest destiny of France to lead and inspire was identified by Hugo with his own mission to the nation as seer and epic novelist.

Hence the hymns to Progress issuing as if from the choir loft to temper the lesson of barbarity, greed, and fatuous ignorance being read and absorbed below. Hence also that passion for instruction, for the imparting of factual knowledge that impels him, for instance, to write twenty-two pages on
argot,
the pretext being the introduction of the street
môme,
Gavroche. The descent of Jean Valjean into the Parisian sewer system excuses a four-page essay called “The Intestine of Leviathan,” which is full of information and meritorious ideas, for example on the advantages for the municipality of using human excrement as fertilizer—an anticipation of today’s ecological thinking that unfortunately still remains “only” an idea. Hugo was an extremely intelligent and far-sighted man, and to know this of himself was to feel the duty of sharing. He has an obligation, fired by public spirit, to tell us the history of the Bernardine Order of nuns (Cosette is being harbored in the convent), to explain which Parisian cemeteries are disaffected and which are still in use (Jean Valjean, alias Monsieur Fauchelevent, is about to be buried alive), even to leap ahead to analyze the revolution of 1848, which took place nine years
after
the events we are reading about.

His ambition to get everything in, to make this book
the
Book, reflected a kind of evangelical zeal which he had in common with most of the serious novelists of his century. One thinks of Balzac’s excursus on the paper industry
(Les illusions perdues),
of Tolstoy on Pierre’s Freemasonry, of Dostoievsky on the Russian monk, of Manzoni on St. Charles Borromeo and on the daily mortality figures of the great plague of 1630 in Milan. Melville on whaling or George Eliot on the discoveries of Bichat in the field of medical pathology. For our own century, we may think of Proust on Venice, on Vermeer, on the newly introduced telephone system, but more emphatically, perhaps, of Joyce in
Finnegans Wake,
which he, too, aspired to make
the
Book embracing the whole of human history and its tongues in a perfect spiralling form. Though public spirit as an animating force was no longer evident (in fact the reverse) in either Joyce or Proust, the ambition to produce a single compendious sacred writing survived, and we may even find it today in an author like Pynchon
(Gravity’s Rainbow)
.

Of course not all novels were so informative; one reminds oneself of Jane Austen, who is to the novel as Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads
were to
The Prelude.
One must remember, too, that the novel of travel and exploration was a popular species by itself catering to a growing thirst for information: Marryat, Melville, Pierre Loti, Conrad were sailor novelists—a new literary type. Some of these tended toward the encyclopedic
(Moby Dick),
while the fictions of Conrad, on the other hand, went so far in the direction of brevity and concentration that they were closer to the tale than to the novel. Yet the element of vouched-for authenticity that seemed to be demanded of the sea story (no doubt because of the marvels of the deep it reported, like the Ancient Mariner, to those who stayed home) brought it close to the memoir, to such a piece of autobiography as Richard Henry Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast.
Typically, the line between Melville’s
Typee
(fact) and his
Omoo
(fiction) is hard to perceive. With scientific advances, the factual and the fabulous seemed to draw together and each to guarantee the other—stranger than fiction.
The Voyage of the Beagle
was a kind of adventure story. Waterways and landways “opened up” fresh territory, and geography, more and more, as with Huck Finn’s raft and Kurtz’s up-river station, was understood as a metaphor for the dark continent of the human heart. At the same time, like the
National Geographic,
this literature was
educational. Kim,
a bestseller, was boy’s book, romance,
Bildungsroman,
and dry-as-dust dispenser of ethnographical lore.

In other words, fictions, including the novel, were meeting a new need created by the fact that the horizon had vastly extended while the means of conveying information had not developed to keep pace. The newspapers were unequipped for the job of reporting on distant events and discoveries—the telegraph was just being invented. Photography was still in its early days, which made the “word pictures” of the novelist—themselves a rather recent invention—an enormous public service. In the absence of radio, films, television, news magazines, the novel kept the public in touch with what was happening in science, manufacturing, agriculture, and so on. Indeed it sometimes seemed to accept the functions of a mail-order catalogue or a farmer’s almanac, as in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
when the bright-blue new turnip-slicing machine and the still newer bright-red thresher are introduced to the farm laborers. The novel was not only a conveyor of factual information. It filled the place of today’s round tables and seminars that people watch on television or listen to on the radio and that is the commonest source of their general ideas.

In any case, the immense fullness of Victor Hugo (which leads many to fear, mistakenly, that he is unreadable) was not a peculiar deformity, not a species of giantism resulting from a swollen ego. In France, you have it in Balzac, whose title
The Human Comedy
declares the resolve to encompass the entire species. And Balzac, like Hugo, remained his own spokesman, undisputed lord of his creation. But there is a marked difference in manner and tone. Hugo’s assumption of the mantle of advocate for his
misérables
rested on compassion. His determination to widen the view, to soar above his narrative, implied no detachment of feeling. But Balzac was detached, to the point of being unsympathetic, often, with his principal figures, most noticeably in that strange masterpiece
Les illusions perdues.
Lucien de Rubempré (whose real name is Chardon like the lowly thistle) is a pathetic example of
l’esprit du siècle.
That is, he is an
arriviste,
endowed with two gifts—beauty and literary talent—on which he intends to capitalize. We are never allowed to know how much talent he really has—no samples are given of his historical novel,
The Archer of Charles IX
—but his worldly career is an abject fizzle. He lays siege to Paris, scales its heights briefly, is repulsed with humiliating rapidity, driven back to his province, where he has brought ruin not only on himself but also on his devoted sister and brother-in-law, who have “believed” in him. What they have believed in is not the frail creature they knew too well but the idea of “genius” incarnate in him like a promise that cannot be broken.