Les Miserables: Some Thoughts

I finished reading Les Miserables this past week. I had previously watched the movie, and was pleasantly rewarded with a book that far excelled the movie. Although, I have previously written that it would be impermissible to critique a book after only one reading, I want to note a few things.

It would be obvious the details of a human story could be great through 1200 pages. Hugo largely delivers, and the story is well worth reading. However, the book struggles to justify its length. It seems in one sense too big and in another too small. The main current and heart of the story is Jean Valjean. This is the story of one man, his fall into the depths of sin, his redemption, his continual fights with “darkness,” and his eventual victory. Alongside this portrait Hugo attempts to paint on a grand scale the whole French spirit of the time. The problem is that the two stories don’t mesh and run together as well as could be hoped. The grand painting seems to get in the way of the personal story. It just doesn’t run together. Not that Hugo attempts the impossible. War and Peace paints this kind of grand picture of Russia, and to a much higher degree succeeds. Les Miserables seems to have trouble uniting the whole and the part.

Along the same kind of lines, Hugo’s philosophy doesn’t seem to fit with his story. I have read two long and very philosophical novels that work very well. In both War and Peace and The Karamazov Brothers personal narrative and philosophy combine to make wonderful novels. Dostoevsky does this through presenting philosophy through its main characters, and making it part of their search for identity. Tolstoy uses such a broad canvas in every possible way that his speculative philosophy somehow fits. In Les Miserables not only is it wrong to include philosophy, but it is the wrong kind of philosophy. The story of Jean Valjean is about sin, penance, mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. These things all demand a personal God invested in Salvation. Hugo, whether intentionally or not, wrote a Christian story in the character of Jean Valjean. However, in his philosophical asides, Hugo labors to preach enlightenment philosophy. During the first part of the novel (Fantine) it sounds like one is reading a Christian novel. When one reaches the second part (Cosette) and the book “Waterloo” one realizes all that Hugo means by “God” is “progress,” or “the way things are.” The long, necessary, and inevitable progression of nature toward perfection: that is Hugo’s god. Hugo breaks from the narrative throughout the rest of the book to sell his enlightenment vision. This just does not fit; it makes no sense that all Jean Valjean is praying to is an inanimate sense of progress. The only place it does fit is with the revolutionaries and the barricade scene. The rebels, however, function as foils; they do not complement Jean Valjean. So the main reason I believe the two parts of Les Miserables (Jean Valjean and the larger picture) do not mix is because the visions of God in each part do not mix.

I learned more about French and enlightenment philosophy than I knew before in the process of reading one of the better stories I have ever read. However, I am unsure that I would want to wade through the first again to get the second. Time will tell.