Ideas and the Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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