I am posting here a really fun conversation via email between a friend, Mary Anne O’Neil, and me. At least it was fun for the two of us. Perhaps it will be for others looking in from the outside; I hope so. It concerns Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which I took a few months to read (in English translation) late this past spring and through the summer. Mary Anne is a scholar of French lit, especially poetry, retired now from Whitman College here in Walla Walla, having been an important member of its French department for years. One of the not-infrequent topics of discussion between us has been her Catholicism versus my atheism. When she discovered my enthusiasm for Hugo’s novel, she mentioned an article about it she’d once published (Pascalian Reflections in “Les Misérables,” Philological Quarterly, volume 78, Issue 3, 1999), her interest at the time having been prompted by a student’s essay. She was able to find a copy of the article for me, which, as you will see, I found much too laden with pro-Christian interpretation than I could bear. Posting the article itself here is impractical, but I think my commentary and Mary Anne’s reply will supply some of its most important features.

Mary Anne, I have read your piece on Hugo, Pascal, and Les Misérables. I’m going to begin with a conclusion, then add some commentary. My conclusion is this: I cannot imagine two admirers of the novel who differ more than you and I do in how we read and understand this thing we both admire. You quite obviously are vested in what you take to be verities unique to conventional Catholicism. I believe in no such verities belonging uniquely to Catholicism, Christianity more generally, or any nameable religious tradition. I do believe that religion(s) provide a fountain of metaphor useful for communicating beautiful, enigmatic truths that cannot be encompassed within the languages of problem-solving—i.e., science and logic. So, perhaps the one point of your essay in which we are most surely on the same page is this one. “Hugo obviously fears the influence of both contemporary philosophers and political thinkers… whose enthusiasm for science results in unadulterated materialism,” although I don’t find the verb “fears” quite suits me; “combats” would work, though.

   I will say little about Pascal, as he’s not a thinker who has interested me overmuch. So far as I’m concerned the one contribution for which he’s remembered is his famous wager, which I valued in late adolescence when I first encountered it for the inscrutability I ascribed to it—does the author believe this (reason may substitute for faith) or does he not? In my later age,  “inscrutability” I’ve replaced with “enigma” (in this case, faith is not a problem to be solved, it’s a mystery to be contemplated).

   Now, what within Christian dogma does Hugo “need” for this great novel?  Is it true, as you state it is, that he fears those who’d “eliminate the notion of a supreme being from metaphysics.” I’m doubtful. I don’t sense fear. Fear of such a thing is as beneath him as it is for his two great religious heroes, Monseigneur “Bienvenu” and Jean Valjean; neither of whom could be bothered—amused maybe, but not bothered otherwise—by someone brandishing a metaphysical axe, on the lookout for supreme beings to use it on. (Neither would fear me, for example.) Does Hugo, their author, or the heroes he’s authored need a supreme being? Not exactly. Why not exactly? Because they are its, the supreme being’s, author, each of them is. Authoring, even if it’s wholly unconscious, frees you of “need.” Every confident religious person is fearless—that’s the point in the Psalms, and in Ecclesiastes. Hugo makes a huge point of the Monseigneur’s fearlessness. I sensed then I was in the presence of a great artist; an artist who knew, who just knew, the magnitude of his undertaking: co-authoring God. Will he make use over and over of bits and pieces of Christian dogma? Yes, as metaphor. My favorite moment, one bringing me to tears, was this one. (The “he” in the quotation is Jean Valjean, now beginning his final hour on this earth.) “’It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.’ Suddenly he arose. These returns of strength are sometimes a sign of the death-struggle. He walked with a firm step to the wall, put aside Marius and the physician, who offered to assist him, took down from the wall the little copper crucifix which hung there, came back, and sat down with all the freedom of motion of perfect health, and said in a loud voice, laying the crucifix on the table. ‘Behold the great martyr.’ Then his breast sank in, his head wavered, as if the dizziness of the tomb seized him… .” The life well led—well, as well as he, as he was in any particular moment, had been capable—the goodman. The passage is an echo of the book’s beginning, when the emperor, Napoleon, turns to face the gaze of a curious priest (who will become, owing to his performance in this very encounter, the highly placed priest-hero Monseigneur Bienvenu) and asks, “Who is this goodman who looks on me?” And the Monseigneur-to-be answers. “Sire, you behold a good man, and I a great one. Each of us may profit by it.”

   My view (interpretive bias) is this. What Hugo needs is a lingo, one that can be understood by his readers, with which he can portray his greatest faith: creation (we might say “cosmos” these days) is a whole—contents and container, all that’s large, tiny, and in-between, all that’s good (e.g., his heroes, the innocent Cosette and Marius, the innocent poor), and all that’s bad (thugs like Thénardier and his spouse; things like inadequate sewers)—a whole, which by some mysterious means is a unity, made coherent. Expressions for this ineffable, ordered wholeness pop out, now here, now there, across cultural and religious traditions over many centuries. The lingo Hugo chooses is drawn up from Christian dogma: it’s what he knows, and almost every French person does, too. How is this whole made coherent? Hugo chooses, hardly a surprise, the word God. It works, but it needn’t be taken literally. See the work of the modern philosopher, Thomas Nagel. Hugo’s goal is to create a literary work that through its story and its story-telling evokes this sense of ineffable wholeness—that’s why he goes on and on about so many things. He’s an artist: his job is to evoke, not to declare. Now if some declaration helps to evoke from time to time, he’s hardly shy about it; it’s as much a matter of evocative style, however, as it is the content of what’s declared. It’s his detachment, in fact, from Christian dogma that permits him to create (author) his two heroes, Monseigneur B and Jean V—each decidedly creative, independent, and confident, to admire Napoleon, to praise (over and over) the revolution of 1789, to side with the insurrectionists, to see a necessary role for the state and society if the terrible poverty he so abhors is ever to be overcome; I could go on.

   I cannot be satisfied with your encouragement to see Jean Valjean’s story as “this hero’s progress from crime to sanctity as a nineteenth-century version of Pascal’s wager.” Quite the contrary, to my mind. Jean Valjean is created as an exemplar of the remarkable maturation within who we are that can take place when love and plain old luck come onto our side—if such happens before we’re too, too far gone, so to speak. The same had been true for the Monseigneur who inspired him, is true for Cosette, for Marius, for Marius’s grandfather, for the two Thénardeir children who come into grown-up, even heroic selfhoods, for the insurrectionists who grow into who they are right now at the barricades. And it’s true even for Javert—the compulsive rule-bound Enforcer—who in the end has so come to love and admire the man he’s pursued for so long that he, Javert, breaks a rule! His mind is stunned by contradiction of such degree about himself; in despair to learn that such moral ambivalence just must be borne, he suicides. Here Hugo makes a very clever moment. He has Jean Valjean, who has borne moral ambivalence of such extreme himself, simply, on learning of Javert’s suicide, casually declare him mad. Jean is unable to get too, too close to the inner fire of such ambivalence once again by giving Javert’s case of it much thought: he’s been there; it’s scary; he’ll leave Javert to his fate and move on. In every one of these examples, none but Jean’s and the Monseigneur’s is particularly religious, and the latter’s is as much to the credit of Napoleon as to God! This is all the working out of psychological exploration decades in advance of its time. It doesn’t need religion, but it can not only make use of it, it can author it.

   I put myself for proof that your comment “… an urgency to prove the value of religion suffuses the novel” must be mistaken. Had I sensed that was so, I would have put it down for good early on, saved myself a months-long investment. And a corollary, seemingly impossible, cannot be granted (can it?). Readers who do not feel such an urgency pressed upon them expose Hugo as a failed author!

   And it cannot be, from my viewpoint, that “the long exposition of the Battle of Waterloo insists upon the deity’s supervision of history.” This novel out-Dickens Dickens in evoking abhorrence for the intolerable and odious misery inflicted on millions of the poor and the stigmatized. That therefore no deity supervising history can be worth a shit cannot have escaped this author. It’s a fucking mystery! That’s Hugo’s point. God is a mystery, in fact a metaphor for mystery. And so is his/her/their relationship to the world we live in; and that world includes things and events so tragic as great battles lost by the flimsiest of margins and for the flimsiest of reasons. His view owes as much to ancient Greece as it does to Christianity. When Jean says “Behold the great martyr” while looking on the crucifix it’s out of grief! Grief’s always tragic dimension—sublime sadness. Christianity itself is a Greek takeoff on Judaism: the tragic and the causal, merged; that’s why it’s so beautiful.

   “… the curious digression after the introduction of the Petit Picpus convent entitled ‘Parenthese’ pleads for the necessity of religious faith.” Yes, well here, taking your comment quite literally, we can agree, and most emphatically. But why is it “curious”? Because it’s a sentimental glitch; he knows it and we do, too: he has stopped authoring for the sake of a nostalgic fart. I forgave him as a reader, and I forgive him as a critic. It’s a long, long work; stuff happens. The hero of his authorship, Jean, had no delusions about the convent; he knew there was something a bit crazy about the women there; when time and chance permitted him to liberate Cosette and himself from it, he did.

   I have many other conflicts and quibbles with your view within the essay and the expressions it inspires, but I’ll confine myself. Thénardier is not a “materialist,” he’s a thug, and along with his spouse and other colleagues-in-crime a necessity for the overall reality-principle embedded within the novel, an artist’s device, not a philosopher’s. Hugo does not demand asceticism of his heroes. He gives it to them provisionally and in the degree needed. Jean, for example, though ascetic himself, wants none of it for Cosette nor for Marius. His own dose is not part of some global moralism, it feels right for his self-image, which is not one he’d inflict on others. Though not so clear-cut, I think the same is true of Monseigneur Bienvenu, who wants to inspire, beyond theology, simply this: charity toward the poor. You have confused, according to my bias, artistry with theology.

   Well, there you go. The theist and the atheist meet as critics of the same great novel. Surprise! They more than differ; they cannot—more, they will not—see it the same way. History must decide. Each believes …

Dear Bob,

 Thanks so much for your detailed reading of my article.  I should tell you, to begin, that when I wrote it in 1998, I was a confirmed atheist and would have vigorously denied that I was trying to defend the Catholic Church.  I was inspired to investigate this subject when I received a short student paper comparing Pascal and Hugo.  The more I researched the subject, the more obvious it seemed to me that Hugo had either consciously drawn from Pascal or, more plausibly, just found a kindred spirit. I would never argue that Hugo was a Catholic, because he wasn’t.  There are Catholics he admired, but he also admired Buddhists and even atheists who believed in a higher purpose for humanity.  He certainly couldn’t have admired Napoleon, who imprisoned the pope, if he were advocating Catholicism. As far as materialism goes, I’m referring to specific, 19th-century materialists, such as Feuerbach, Claude Bernard, and Auguste Comte.  While Hugo admired Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, he greatly feared –like Voltaire–what would happen to a society unleashed from the concept of God.  Otherwise, Hugo’s view of a world moving toward perfection is not incompatible with atheistic versions of history, such as that of Comte or the father of sociology, Emile Durkheim, and certainly Marx’s idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

   My only real purpose in the article was to follow through with a comparison of Pascal and Hugo.  Like all interpretations, mine is just that—another way of looking at the novel.  My interpretation doesn’t exclude other interpretations, such as yours.  I found some of your interpretations of episodes absolutely compatible with my view of the book, such as your view of Monseigneur Myriel.  I find other interpretations really interesting, such as your view of Javert’s suicide.  You’ve got me thinking that ,while Hugo was not a big reader (except of his own work), he was also influenced by early 19th-century popular literature of the different social “types” living in Paris.  Anne’s[1] done a lot of work on these literary caricatures.  Hugo’s genius is to turn social types into living, complicated characters that live with us forever.  I know we can agree on that!

  Thanks again, from your fellow admirer of Hugo, Mary Anne

Dear Mary Anne,

Yes, we can agree on that! And all that you say before that I find fascinating. I am so glad we engaged in this exchange: for me, the pleasure of a great work of art has been magnified and I have learned a lot I would not have gleaned from the work itself. Thanks so much, Bob

Dear Bob,

And thank you for your reading!

[1] Anne O’Neil-Henry is Mary Anne’s daughter, a member of the faculty for French studies at Georgetown University.