The Legacy of ‘Les Misérables’: Charting the Life of a Classic

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/books/review/novel-of-the-century-les-miserables-david-bellos.html

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THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURYThe Extraordinary Adventure of “Les Misérables” By David Bellos 307 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

A good book could be written about the bastardization of great novels, and Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” would make a fine Exhibit A. Rarely has any work of literature received such a pummeling at the hands of a succession of publishers, translators, filmmakers and musical impresarios, as David Bellos demonstrates in “The Novel of the Century,” his intriguing new history of Hugo’s 1,500-page masterpiece.

“Les Misérables” was published in France in 1862. An English-language version appeared in New York that same year, thanks to a justly hailed translation that the American Egyptologist Charles Wilbour completed in only six months. But right away there were signs the novel would take on a life of its own: A pirated version of Wilbour’s translation was soon released in Richmond, Va., where the Union’s copyright laws did not apply. All of Hugo’s references to the evils of slavery were struck out. (“The absence of a few antislavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers,” the preface proposed.) Hugo’s doctored novel went on to become such an emphatic hit in the South that the downbeaten soldiers of Robert E. Lee took to calling themselves “Lee’s miserables.”

There was distortion of another sort in the first British translation, by Sir Charles Lascelles Wraxall, also published in 1862. According to Bellos, Wraxall, a historian who fancied himself an expert on Waterloo, did not hesitate to alter the meaning of Hugo’s novel whenever he disagreed with passages pertaining to Napoleon Bonaparte’s downfall.

Bellos also relates how filmmakers from around the world have betrayed the original by putting “back in what Hugo so pointedly omits” — namely, organized religion. Though Hugo professed to believe in God, he did not subscribe to any one faith and was determined, Bellos says, not to let the Catholic Church “think it has a role in the ‘indefinite but unshakable’ religious slant of ‘Les Misérables.’ ” Tom Hooper’s unfortunate decision to shoot some scenes of his 2012 musical adaptation in Winchester Cathedral ran contrary to the novel, which never once enters a church.

Perhaps the most damaging deformation belongs to the all-conquering stage musical “Les Miz,” which turns Monsieur and Madame Thénardier — the novel’s most egregious characters — into bathetic comic relief. The lawless innkeeping couple who set out to blackmail the remorseful hero, Jean Valjean, are treated by Hugo with the utmost seriousness. “The figure of Thénardier is a warning that Satan may make his own use of the legitimate grievances of the poor,” Bellos counsels.

Impeccably researched and pithily written, Bellos’s book provides an important corrective to these kinds of distortions. And it is easy to see why a writer as drunk on language as Bellos would grow so fond of “Les Misérables.” For the English-born translator of such knotty authors as Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare, whose previous books include a deep-dive cultural history of translation (“Is That a Fish in Your Ear?”), “Les Misérables” represents the motherlode of French literature.

“There are around 20,000 different words in the 630,000 words of the text,” Bellos explains admiringly, “maybe as many as in all of Shakespeare, in fact, who was working in a language with a much larger vocabulary.” Yet Bellos, who is 71, did not get around to reading “Les Misérables” until relatively recently, when he took a copy along on an aborted camping trip in the Alps. Confined to a hotel room by a cold, he “stayed ill rather longer than necessary,” he writes in the introduction, “in order to follow this moving, challenging and immensely engaging tale to the end.”

It’s a shame there are not more personal anecdotes of this nature. It could have been jolly, for instance, if Bellos had done a bit of shoe-leather reporting and, say, infiltrated La Société des Amis de Victor Hugo, France’s leading association for all things pertaining to the author of “Les Misérables.” What are the burning points of contention among Misérablists? Is there anyone out there who thinks Valjean’s nemesis, the blinkered Javert, has been given a raw deal by literary historians? In fact there was rather more of this kind of anecdotal reportage in Mario Vargas Llosa’s book “The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and ‘Les Misérables’ ” (2007), which is notably name-checked in Bellos’s bibliography but not mentioned in his text.

However, the notion posited by Bellos’s title that “Les Misérables” is the novel of the (19th) century is given a thoroughly good airing. Not least because it proved to have such a considerable impact on French society: Bellos underscores four policy prescriptions the book proposes that have since been adopted by French governments of all political persuasions over the last 150 years. These include allowing convicts to re-enter society without a perpetual black mark against their names (or in the case of Valjean, abolishing the “yellow passport” that makes it difficult for him to find food, lodging and work); amending the penal code to recognize crimes of necessity, so that (for instance) poor people who steal bread to feed their starving children won’t be sentenced to hard labor; creating more employment for the uneducated; and building schools for the poor while making elementary education “universal and obligatory.”

Bellos’s book also doubles as a fascinating partial biography of Hugo’s life. Here we have a writer who had the courage of his convictions. He began writing “Les Misérables” in 1845 at the age of 43, the same year he was granted the ultimate honor of becoming a peer of the French realm by King Louis-Philippe. After giving his book the provisional title “Les Misères” and working on it sporadically between November 1845 and February 1848, he set it aside when street protests in Paris precipitated the chaos of a mini-revolution.

Indeed, it was miraculous that “Les Misérables” survived at all, as during that same month of February a rioting mob broke into Hugo’s Parisian home while he was out. “Angry men were on the brink of ransacking it when one of them noticed a petition lying on top of a paper pile,” Bellos writes. “It was a call for clemency for mutineers in the fleet at Le Havre. . . . The paper pile beneath the petition was the whole of ‘Les Misères.’ ”

Hugo did not pick up “Les Misérables” again until some 13 years later, by which point he was living in Guernsey, a British crown dependency, after being banished from France by Napoleon III (whom he had accused of taking power illegitimately). His famous quip — “Because we had Napoléon le Grand, do we have to have Napoléon le Petit?” — became a rallying point for all those disenchanted by Napoleon III’s autocratic regime. Hugo did not return to France until 1870, when Napoleon’s reign came to an end. By then, his book was well on its way to outlasting them all.