Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [19]
As this discussion of the symbolism of color versus black and white just above suggests, Hugo often implies themes rather than stating them, by relating two passages of which the second nevertheless invites a new interpretation of the pair through its manifest contrasts with the first: he achieves a dialectical movement of thesis—antithesis—synthesis. In this way he particularly exploits the archetype of Inversion, and pairs of digressions. Inversion refers to a transvaluation of values, whereby that which had seemed bad proves good, or vice versa. Hugo invokes negative inversion to characterize the police agent Javert when the latter learns that M. Madeleine, who had humiliated him earlier, is really the convict Jean Valjean: “A monstrous Saint Michael,” Javert seems both imposing and hideous. “The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves an indescribably mournful radiance.... Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call all the evil of good” (p. 194). The sinister, deformed grandeur of Thénardier’s visionary engraving of Napoléon may also exemplify this archetype, like a spider’s ambition to rival the sun (p. 437; compare the poem in Les Contemplations, “Puissance égale bonté”). Thénardier, by trying to capture the emperor’s image, seems to aspire to appropriate for himself the soul of N apoléon’s genius.
The positive form of Inversion reveals that what seemed bad, proves good. Outstanding examples are the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:2—12), and the Passion and Resurrection (Matthew 27—28, Mark 15—16, Luke 23—24, John 19—20). Appropriately expressing his tidy sense of structure, Hugo frames his epic novel with nesting layers of inversions. At the beginning and the end, we learn that humility can exalt the soul (in Bishop Myriel, whose last name is a near-anagram of “lumière” or light, and in Jean Valjean). In the middle, Javert’s bad excess of goodness yields to his shocked awareness of the possible goodness of badness, as he learns of Jean Valjean’s moral sublimity.
Near the end, Jean Valjean thematizes Inversion as he wins his final spiritual battle by confessing his past to Marius. Speaking for the author, who unlike all his contemporaries accepted two decades of exile rather than make any compromise with Napoleon III, he explains, “In order that I may respect myself, I must be despised. Then I hold myself erect. I am a galley slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that is improbable [ressemblant]. But what would you have me do? it is so” (p. 779). The word ressemblant echoes Hugo’s pirouette at the beginning of the novel, as he concludes his idealized moral portrait of Bishop Myriel—“We do not claim that the portrait which we present here is plausible [ressemblant]; we say only that it resembles him” (p. 15). This subtle, nearly subliminal association of the two men reminds us of Myriel’s enduring moral influence on Valjean. Switching from the narrator’s voice to the hero’s voice in the second of these mirroring scenes makes the novel’s moral impact more immediate at the climax.
Hugo’s historical and cultural digressions set the stage for the characters, explain the limits of their possibilities, and often hint at, foreshadow, or symbolize what he sees as an overarching spiritual odyssey of Fall and Redemption. Unless we sin in thought or deed, we cannot benefit from grace and ascend nearer God. William Blake’s scandalous slogan “Damn braces; bless relaxes,” like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of Faustian striving with its inevitable errors