Hugo the endless blabberer

Hugo's two greatest novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables, needed editorial restraint at least as much as the second volume of War and Peace, but the author was too powerful to be bossed around.

Many years ago, editors of these works did for the reading public what those editors had been unable to do, cutting the blathering and publishing abridged editions.

That seems to have gone out of fashion.

But I suppose it doesn't matter, since most readers seem to have given up on literature and now prefer genre fiction.

Correction. B&N has an abridged edition of Les Mis that's merely 896 pages long.

Victor Hugo's Notre Dame novel tops bestseller list after fire

And, no, the unabridged first French edition did not run to eleven volumes, but only two.

The most absurd recognition scene in all literature?

In the chapter, The Little Shoe, Gudule (Paquette, Chantefleurie, the recluse of the Rat-Hole, Sachette whose infant girl was stolen by Gipsies who left Quasimodo in her place) and Esmeralda realize they are mother and daughter and fall on each other in tears of joy and love.

The Hunchback.

Update, I had forgotten how complete and devastating is the catastrophe of this novel.

And how suddenly comes the end.

Philosophers are the true flaneurs

"Anaxagoras used to say that he came into the world to admire the sun," explains the Skeptic Gringoire to Frollo, when the latter urges that he get himself hanged in Esmeralda's place - his latest plot to carry her off, though all unwilling, for himself.

Gringoire - Edmund O'Brien in the 1939 film - refuses, saying "I don't see why I should be hanged in another person's stead," and Frollo protests, "What makes you so fond of life?"

"Oh, a thousand things," answers Gringoire, in the manner of a man who has and needs nothing to live for, no "reason to live", no "cause greater than himself".

At the end of a list of examples including the air, the sky, and moonlight, and the reference to Anaxagoras, he says, "And besides, I have the pleasure of spending all my days, from morning till night, with a man of genius, to wit, myself, and that is a mighty agreeable thing."

And as to fate, an episode of Supernatural on Netflix has the Archangel Michael telling Dean he and Sam cannot avoid their destiny, "all roads lead to the same place."

That is one of at least three different ideas of fate, another being that you must do what is fated (or what is fated must befall), and the last merely that you will do it (or what is fated will befall).

The last is a consequence of logical determinism, the doctrine that all contingents, including future contingents, are true or else false.

Many philosophers consider it - but not the other two - a conception of fatalism compatible with human freedom of choice, though not all would say the same for causal determinism.

Reading The Hunchback.

God and fate

The following view would, I think, be acceptable to most, though not all, Western theists.

God exists necessarily and is necessarily whatever he is, including omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, perfectly just and moral and righteous.

But then how do things stand regarding God, so understood, and fate, whose other names are contingency and sometimes chance?

In the metaphysical sense, God could have created any possible world and, as modal metaphysicians might put it, in each possible world God creates exactly that world.

So God is, like everyone and everything else, the captive of contingency.

What he actually does, including which world he creates - it being understood that in each world God creates only its creatures, whatever is contingent within it - , depends upon which world is actual.

And not the other way around.

It is Whirl that rules, fate or chance, pure, baseless contingency.

It is fate that rules God, and not the other way around.

And the point is not altered if the set of worlds God could create, consistent with all aspects of his nature, is a proper subset of the set of all metaphysically possible worlds.

Not even if it's a unit set.

Or if it's not.

Though this is not how believing theists familiar with these and related issues in the philosophy of religion see things.

Too, these remarks are not without bearing on the free will defense, where both God and humans, for theist libertarians, escape fate and contingency by a free choice that, not determined by which world is actual, determines which is the actual world - God, by his nature, choosing the best he can and humans, by their nature, choosing not that.

A senseless though popular view among Christian theists, though of doubtful consistency with the at least equally popular argument a contigentia mundi, many of whom take it to be a successful refutation of the anti-theist argument from evil.

Reflections provoked by The Hunchback.

And Hugo's view?

Or Claude Frollo's?

Hugo in his preface says the entire work is based on the idea of fate.

Fate

Neither Frollo nor Hugo is pagan enough to attribute his, Esmeralda's, and the book's debacle to fate, alone.

That he was a priest not made for celibacy, that she is a Gipsy, that she loves Phoebus, he repeatedly attributes all to fate, but also to the will of God.

Never a hint how the two might be related.

Reading The Hunchback.

Horrifying

Esmeralda's trial, the torture scene, the visit of the archdeacon in her cell.

What is Hugo saying?

The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The people as mob in literature

Shakespeare's drama apart, does it appear anywhere else than in Hugo?

The canaille are much encouraged to hatred and violence when Sachette denounces Esmeralda.

It will later be revealed by cornball Hugo that, unbeknownst to the principals, Sachette is Esmeralda's mother.

The criminal rabble of the Court of Miracles who toy with the life of Gringoire are, in his (the translator's) words, merely the lowest stratum of the people, while the latter are presented by our author as scarcely less cruel and brutish than those lumpenproles.

As we see in their hate-fest of enjoyment of the wholly undeserved flogging of Quasimodo in the Place de Grève.

One can't help think of John Gay or Daniel Defoe.

Or Bertolt Brecht.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hugo indulges a bit of the delusional fantasy seen at greater length in Les Miserables than here in his presentation of the lives of street children in Paris - gamins, as he calls them - , never considering for a moment in either novel whether the fate of actual street children, mostly, is to be victims of sexual predation.

Update 09072019.

The novels of Dickens, some of them at least, depict the mob.

Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities.

But by no means only these.

Boredom

The most boring and pompous discussion of love in all of literature.

And tens of useless pages on argot - criminal slang.

Les Miserables.

A transvaluation of values

Again, she said to him, "Father, why do you eat miserable bread like that?"

"Because, my daughter."

"Well, if you eat it, I'll eat it."

Then, so that Cosette would not eat whole wheat bread, Jean Valjean ate white bread.

What do you think?

Did he cut off the crusts?

Throw away the heels?

Les Miserables.

Meanwhile, I have only recently discovered the virtues and wonderful flavors of whole wheat bread, pita, and English muffins.

I have never cut off the crusts or thrown away the heels.

Louis-Philippe

Hugo really likes him.

40 pages of blowhard, tendentious history through the June rebellion of 1832.

Literally, God is on the side of democracy, republicanism, and progress.

Revolution and progress are God's providential will controlling history.

After this 40 page digression, Hugo picks up the story where he dropped it, from the moment when Javert's raid has just missed capturing Valjean.

Les Miserables.

Update,  9/29/16.

Turns out Javert did not know the ambush victim was Valjean, but found it highly suspicious that he had slipped away.

More coincidence

Marius overhears Jondrette/Thenardier planning a gang ambush on Valjean at 6 in the evening, when Valjean is to visit to give Jondrette 60 francs with which to pay a year's back rent.

Valjean now uses the name Urbain Fabre.

They plan to kill him unless he hands over a very great amount of money.

The true rent is 40 a year, and anyway Jondrette owes no more than a few months, if that much, as Marius had earlier paid his arrears.

Marius goes to the police, who plan to ambush the ambushers.

They are, of course, led by Javert.

The double ambush plays out.

No one is hurt, the criminals are arrested, and Valjean escapes out a window.

Javert, disappointed, seems to have known it was he being ambushed.

Les Miserables.

Envy and hate

Thenardier tells his wife, the ogress, that the beautiful young lady is Cosette, who was Cinderella to her and her pampered daughters when her husband was an innkeeper.

She is filled with envy, rage, and hate.

Les Miserables.

Coincidence rules Hugo's world

It is about 1832.

Marius pities a family of begging con artists, the Jondrettes, to whom he gives money.

Of course, so does Valjean.

Through them, Marius finds by chance Cosette, whom he loves but has never met and whose name he knows not, and her supposed father, Valjean.

He had fallen in love from seeing her and her supposed father sitting and chatting at the Luxembourg.

Valjean, noticing Marius following them, had moved house and stopped going there, and thus escaped him, to the despair of the young man.

Months later, at their first meeting in the beggars' wretched flat, secretly observed by Marius, Jondrette, who is Thenardier, recognizes Valjean, though it had been 8 years.

He keeps it to himself, even as Marius, astonished, recognizes the girl of the Luxembourg and her supposed father.

Valjean suspects nothing.

Hugo's portrait of Jondrette and of more dangerous criminals recalls Dostoevsky.

Or the other way around.

The Thenardiers were repulsive long before they were poor.

Poverty has not ennobled them, but it has not made them worse.

There is something to the idea that society has made them poor.

But it did not make them bad.

It did not have to.

Les Miserables.

Complete, bombastic nullity

Hugo's liberalism.

No, Hugo's thought, entirely.

The Lowest Depths in Les Miserables.

Sweet fifteen

Marius sees Cosette sitting and chatting with Valjean on a bench on a street in Paris.

He is a handsome young man of 20 or so, and Hugo describes her as "sweet fifteen."

There is a moment when girls bloom in a twinkling, and become roses all at once.

Yesterday we left them children, today we find them disturbing."

A glimmer of Nabokov, perhaps.

Though at fifteen she is a shade too old to qualify as one of Humbert Humbert's nymphettes.

Marius falls in love with her, just from seeing her.

Reading Les Miserables.

The surprising churchwarden

Mabeuf knows stories about the Buddha.

Really?

Les Miserables.

No, thank you

Upon receipt of the first payment of his allowance from his aunt, Marius returns it with a note not to send more.

She does not tell Gillenormand.

She continues to send, and Marius continues to return, the allowance.

Reading Les Miserables.

It is a religion, thinks Hugo

But he has no idea that means it is driveling nonsense.

Marius, shaken by his republican friends, is close to abandoning Bonaparte.

The Friends of the A B C

Abaisee means the abased, the downtrodden.

They were the people, says Hugo.

It's a pun.

Anyway, Hugo's liberalism is not ours.

One of his heroic young men, Feuilly, a poor fan-maker, within himself "nurtured, with the deep instinct of the man of the people, what we now call the idea of nationality."

Hugo damns utterly the Partitions of Poland that, in 1795, caused Poland to disappear completely from the map of Europe for 130 years, in the name of that idea.

A convinced idealist, he mocks and denigrates the only skeptic among the Friends of the A B C, Grantaire.

The others are great fans of the Revolution.

Of Napoleon, not so much.

Marius is befriended by them.

One of the group, Legle de Meaux, is nicknamed Bossuet, after the famous bishop of that town.

Not that he is a devout Catholic, a clergyman, or an ardent believer in divine right absolute monarchy.

It's another pun.

L'Aigle (the Eagle) for Legle.

So, the Eagle of Meaux, Bossuet.

Les Miserables.

Bonaparte

It is now 1827, and the dead Louis XVIII has been succeeded by the reactionary "ultra," Charles X.

Marius is about 18.

Marius secretly comes to admire both his dead father, whose grave he regularly visits, and Bonaparte, with Hugo's approval.

He shouts out a window, "Vive l'empereur!"

He orders a hundred cards bearing the name "Baron Marius Pontmercy."

He travels to Montfermeil to visit Thenardier, but the innkeeper has failed, the inn is closed, and the man has gone off no one knows where.

His grandfather, M. Gillenormand, the Voltairian bourgeois and royalist supporter of the Bourbon Restoration, discovers the cards.

There is a scene, the old man shouts, "You are no more a baron than my slipper!"

And he throws Marius out of the house.

He orders his daughter, an old maid who lives with him, to send the lad 60 pistoles every six months.

That's 600 francs, in gold.

Les Miserables.