Victor Hugo (1802-1885): among the great ones
Though I am not much of a movie-goer, over the last few
months, I have actually
seen several of Hollywood’s more recent and talked about efforts, including Argo, Lincoln, and Anna Karenina. Just before we went up to New York to
see the New Year in with a group of old friends, we went down to Princeton’s
sole and seedy cinema house and took in Les
Misérables. I am very glad we
did, as the experience has helped me clarify in my mind an incipient field
theory of modern fiction.
There
are whole continents of popular culture of which I am shamefully ignorant. We don’t go to Broadway shows, as I am
unprepared to take out the second mortgage the habit would demand. I am therefore one of what are probably
comparatively few suburbanites who over the last couple of decades have not
shelled out a hundred and fifty bucks to watch a stage full of urchins in rags
cavort their way through the fantastically successful show called “Les Miz.” This is relevant because the current
film Les Misérables is a version not
of Victor Hugo’s masterwork Les
Misérables but of the Broadway musical “Les Miz”. That is, instead of talking the characters mainly sing to each other. Sort of.
Artistic
“adaptation” has a long and noble history, but its parasitism must be frankly
acknowledged right up front. As
the great classicist Richard Bentley said of Pope’s version of the Iliad, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope,
but you must not call it Homer.”
So let us agree not to call this thing Hugo; call it Les Miz.02 or some
such, and you will enjoy it greatly.
The stage sets, the costumes, the architectural detail—all that is
fabulous. Much of the acting is
very fine. Although there are
notable exceptions, for the most part the singing ranges from the mediocre to
the misérable; but this somehow often seems appropriate to the material. Russell Crowe once made a film on the
Princeton campus (“A Beautiful Mind”).
His public deportment on that occasion suggests that his role as the
horrible Inspector Javert was an instance of casting by type.
Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert: cool hat
This
leads me toward my field theory. I
long ago concluded that what is so thin about modern fiction is the absence of
God. I do not refer to God as a
literary character with a speaking part.
Once you get past Milton’s Paradise
Lost God doesn’t get all that many speaking roles. I refer to the moral gravity that
becomes available to a work of fiction when it engages with the great question
of a Providential Order, the question that animates the fiction of Rabelais,
Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, Tolstoy—not to mention Les Misérables of Victor Hugo.
I
do hope this film will stimulate a certain number of its viewers to read Hugo’s
novel. Hope is of course a
different thing than expectation. Les Misérables is half a million words long,
within spitting distance of War and Peace. It is a skein of multiple plots, and
its characters are sufficiently numerous to fill a small town’s phone
book. Like much of the great
fiction of the nineteenth century it is awash in sentimentality and coincidence. But, boy, is it ever “on message”!
Years
ago a student said something very surprising to me. He was comparing two fine novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Henry James. Both, he agreed, were
very great writers; but he was forced to grant the priority to Hawthorne. This was to me a rather surprising
judgment, and he expressed it in an unforgettable way. “You see,” he said, “Hawthorne has more
of the old eternal verities going for him.” It was easier to chuckle at the form in which the judgment
was phrased than to contest the judgment itself.
Although
there is a great deal in Hugo’s Les
Misérables that is not in the film of Les Miz.02, I detected very little in
Les Miz.02 that is not in Les Misérables. There is so much of Hugo, indeed, that
it can hardly escape being an impressive work of art. I think it would be impossible to see this film without
realizing that it is pregnant with the old eternal verities: sin and
redemption, the vivacity of the spirit and the deadness of the letter, the
debility of law and the power of grace, the vivid possibility, never entirely
effaced even by the cruelest of material realities, of genuine moral change.
Les Misérables is a great work of
Christian literature. This is not
because Victor Hugo was particularly pious. Far from it. He
was a free-thinking political radical who scorned the comfortable and often
hypocritical Catholicism of the re-established ruling classes of
post-Revolutionary France. All
this is clear in Les Misérables, and
quite explicit in some of his other works. Like his contemporary Karl Marx, he nurtured a passion for
social justice—a fact obvious even from the very title of his book. Unlike Marx, he was not a
materialist. There was an ideal
moral order to be searched for beyond the random play of the molecules. His hero Jean Valjean searched for it
and found it, and neither Broadway nor Hollywood could conceal it.
