Saturday, February 16, 2013

Les Miserables: The First Great Crisis of Conscience

As I have said before, to me Les Miserables revolves around the three great crises of conscience Jean Valjean experiences.  No doubt Victor Hugo intended them as escalating crises, each worse than the last.  But to me they are exactly the opposite -- descending crises, from the first, a great moral dilemma that should be the great turning point of the book, to the second which is merely a temptation, not a moral dilemma to the third, which I believe Valjean decided wrongly.  In this post, I want to focus on the first and greatest moral crisis.

As we have seen, Jean Valjean jumps probation and robs a chimney sweep and is now facing a life sentence if caught.  He then has his great conversion and becomes a saint. He goes to work at a factory making glass jewelry and develops a process using cheaper raw materials and a simpler method of making clasps.  The town prospers as a result.  He offers work to anyone who needs it.  He uses his new-found fortune to endow hospitals, schools, pharmacies and retirement funds.  Furthermore, he freely dispenses money to the poor, breaks into houses to leave a gold coin, goes to funerals to comfort mourners, pulls carts out of the mud, shows peasants secrets to farming, and teaches children how to make ingenious toys.  As mayor, he prevents lawsuits and reconciles enemies.  In short, he makes the world (or at least his small corner of it) a better place.  All is well -- until he learns that an innocent man has mistakenly been arrested as Jean Valjean and is facing life imprisonment.

Let no one say that saints are uninteresting characters!  Truly, this is a dilemma fit to vex even a saint.  On the one side is all the prosperity he has built for his town and everything he has done to make his little corner of the world better.  On the other is knowledge that if he does not act, it will be built on the sacrifice of an innocent man.  His agony of indecision is entirely understandable, and we share it with him.

This is the great fork in the novel.  Once Valjean makes his decision, the rest of the novel should describe the consequences of his living with it.  If it had been written by Dostoevsky, let us say, or by Nathaniel Hawthorne, we can imagine the outcome.  After much internal agonizing, Valjean would reach the conclusion that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few -- or the one.  He would therefore stay and continue the good work he started and let an innocent man face life imprisonment in his place.  Of course the decision would haunt him.  The guilt would torment him.  He would have no peace, considering what he had done.  He would make every effort to atone for his sin by doing ever greater and more noble deeds.  Each noble deed would raise public acclaim for him and convince people all the more that he was a saint.  But public acclaim would simply serve to inflame his guilt as he knew that it was all built on the blood of an innocent man -- so he would seek to assuage his guilt by even greater noble deeds, raising public acclaim even more, and so the seemingly virtuous cycle would slowly eat away at him.  In the end, of course, he would be able to bear it no longer and finally turn himself in.

By contrast, if the novel had been by Tolstoy, let us say, or by Stowe, after much internal agonizing, Valjean would recognize that his accomplishments mean nothing if they are paid for by the suffering of an innocent man, and would turn himself in.  At first, of course, he would curse the fate that brought him down, but over time he would spiritually grow and develop and become a minister to his fellow inmates in their spiritual need.  Eventually, his spiritual grandeur would become known to the authorities and he would be offered a pardon, but refuse it, saying that he understands now it was all part of God's plan, and where is he more needed than here, among the very lowest of the low.  Or perhaps he would accept it and go on to become a prison chaplain.

Either version would work.  Either version would make a well-constructed, internally coherent novel.  But to all appearances, Victor Hugo is aiming for something much closer to the second alternative.  And it makes sense.  Recall that, although Valjean becomes a saint, he can never forgive himself for having once been brutalized by the system.  Or, as he humbly puts it, "I was saved by indulgence and kindness, as I had been lost by severity."  But how can we know he is truly a changed man and not merely the beneficiary of a better environment?  There can be only one way -- send him back to the environment that once brutalized him and see if he can resist being brutalized all over.  Admittedly, Hugo is at a disadvantage here.  When Dostoevsky, (to say nothing of Solzhenytsin) writes about the utter brutality and degradation of the chain gang, along with the flashes of nobility one nonetheless sees there, he wrote from personal experience.  Hugo apparently consulted with a former convict in writing Les Miserables, but nothing can match the intensity of a first-hand account.  Still, he addresses the subject indirect when Jean Valjean , on the run, he takes refuge in a convent as the gardener.  He compares the physical hardships endured by convicts to those endured by nuns and finds them similar.*  And yet, "What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth, hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a sarcasm against heaven.  What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love."  Clearly, then, what brutalizes convicts is more than mere physical hardship.  Hugo never answers what it is that brutalizes convicts.  To find the answer would be to find the key to how Valjean could return to the old environment and not be brutalized by it.

So, if that is the potential of this agonizing dilemma, how does Hugo, in fact, treat it?  First of all, as if the dilemma by itself is not enough, he attempts to heighten it by having it occur just as Valjean is about to bring back Fantine's daughter from the evil innkeepers who are using her to extort from her dying mother.  Furthermore, although Fantine is dying, we are given hope that she may yet recover if she sees her daughter. The trouble is that this sets up a false choice.  Fantine has dictated a letter commanding the innkeepers to turn her daughter over to the bearer and be paid for any remaining debts.  Valjean is, after all, a factor owner and mayor of a town.  As such, he must have learned to delegate.  Are we seriously to believe that he cannot delegate to someone else the job of retrieving Fantine's daughter?  Granted, when he finally does show up (after escaping), the innkeeper attempts extortion and Valjean has to act forcefully.  In this, he beautifully demonstrates that being a saint is not the same as being a pushover and makes us like him.  One might almost believe that he has to go himself because his agent might not be forceful enough.  Except that he brings the need to be forceful on himself by showing up in rags and not presenting the letter until the end.  A well-dressed agent, presenting the letter at once would not appear vulnerable to extortion and therefore would not need to be forceful.

In any event, this attempt to heighten the dilemma, besides being artificial, is unnecessary.  Weighing the prosperity of the town, the schools, the hospital, the pharmacy, and everything else against an innocent man going to prison for life is dilemma enough.  After a night of torment, Valjean does, indeed, decide in favor of the innocent man facing life imprisonment, and rightly so.  If his legacy cannot carry on without him, then ultimately Valjean has failed.**  After all, in the words of France's greatest statesman of the 20th Century, the graveyards are full of indispensable men.  Valjean steps up in court and reveals himself as the escaped convict Jean Valjean.  The innocent man is freed.  How does Valjean cope with the brutality of a convict's life?  We never learn.  One thing we do see, however, is that he gives himself up in July and has not been brutalized by October.  In October, a sailor is dangling from a rope, unable to climb back up, and certain to fall and die when Valjean bursts his chains with one blow and rescues him.  While all assembled call for him to be pardoned, Valjean appears to fall (but actually jumps) overboard and escapes.  He goes to rescue Fantine's daughter Cosette, takes refuge in a convent and lives there several years, and then emerges to use the fortune he accumulated as factory owner to live a respectable life.  But his vision has shrunk.  Although he is a good father to Cosette and gives generously to the poor, he no longer seeks to make the world better.  It is a reasonable decision for a convict on the run to make.  But once again, Hugo seeks to heighten the tension by making things needlessly difficult for his hero.  If Valjean had only stuck around long enough to be pardoned, he might have been spared all the difficulties of a convict on the run.  The novel would be less intense, but more sensible.


I will next touch briefly on his second crisis of conscience, before getting to the final one and deciding why I think Valjean decided wrong.

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*Aside from the obvious fact that nuns do not do the backbreaking labor of convicts and are not in chains.  Although Hugo would presumably say that nuns are in chains -- spiritual chains of their own making.  
**And, indeed, his legacy fails without him.

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