Review of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

I have my reservations about jumping into nineteenth century literature. I only have so much endurance for coal-filth and candles, gout and apoplexy, and meandering prose, and most of these books can just go on forever. But I was specifically looking for something down on love (completing the theme), and M. Hugo has been waiting patiently on the shelf for years now. Notre-Dame de Paris is a historical novel, which decently swaps out some of the usual period props, but it's still told in the style of the times, which the authorial voice periodically cheeps in to remind us faithful readers. And not unlike I feared: Hugo almost immediately drifts away from the opening scene to tour-guide our way through the Palace of Justice and a couple hundred years of its history, which is less effective getting me into 1482 than letting the characters open their mouths. Three chapters in, and Hugo drops another anchor, describing--no, delineating--the layout of medieval Paris over the course of 30 or 40 pages. It's not that he's boring when he talks about architecture, but these opening devices don't exactly kickstart his classic plot, they dismissed the characters just as they were getting interesting. And over these last few weeks I haven't had the luxury of time to just sink in and bask in a big heap of prose. And to be fair, even if I mildly object to info-dumping it, one of the writer's purposes was to evoke the character of the city in its time.

Hugo finds momentum well enough when he's not feeling up the masonry. Our opening scene is a mystery performed by the aspiring philosopher Pierre Gringnoire, mercilessly and hilariously cut down by attending students, and ignored by the crowd. Paunchy bishops and dignified statesman filter in and out to create a bigger scene, but much like the stage drama, they're an unloved spectacle, and it takes low humor to get the rabble really aroused. Hugo, to my pleasure and surprise, is really good at humor, and I love how he eyed up the intelligent and powerless (that is, the students) as the eagle-eyed observers of the human condition, and gave them all of the good lines. (As they deserve: I have an affection for the disenfranchised wiseasses of the world.) Unappreciated (and unpaid), Gringnoire wanders dissolute through the Paris streets, delivered into the court of the vagabonds and their sham Justice, and played out for laughs and the uncomfortable bite of satire. Official death loomed over the heads of the poor in Gringnoire's time, and hadn't exactly disappeared by the time Hugo was writing. The characters support the development of the story's tragedies or (as Mark Twain would say it) its sarcsasms, but my favorites were the latter. Our poet is an ineffectual blatherer, charming as a parody of a (real historical) writer, the king of the vagabonds is a debauched and lethal mockery of the Law, and young student Jehan Frollo (brother of Claude) steals every scene he's in, whether throwing about grandiloquent insults, or guilelessly conniving his way to his next bottle.

Even at his most discursive, Victor Hugo clearly takes great joy in the language, on which note, in a case like this, I usually start bitching about translations. The fact that my edition is rendered to The Hunchback of Notre-Dame instead of Hugo's more appropriate original title is a bad sign, as is the failure to credit the translator. How much better did the French flow along? How much more playful, how much more moving was the original? One `particular annoyance: French makes use of a formal second person, but the resulting English thees and thous read terribly. That forced archaism always come off as a cheesy anachronism for anything less than 350 years old.

The obvious liberty with the title is unappreciated because our well-known bell-ringer is only one of a cast of fully conceived players, and not even the best one. Hugo trots him out as not only physically hideous (and deaf), but also a mental defective, amoral, unable to perceive very well the antics of the crowd, nor the whims of Justice. Much later, when he gets speaking lines, he expresses himself differently than he was originally described. He's capable of metaphor, uttering sentences that require the self-awareness he was denied in his introduction. There's clearly an incomplete inner transformation that's intended here, which is similar to the way most of the major characters are developed: whether quintessentially noble, wise, beautiful or brave, Hugo drips with pleasure as he skewers their outward characters with reality, but the author's conflation of physical, mental, and moral deformity are confusing. They violate my admittedly modern understanding of their relationship beyond what I'm willing to give to artistic license.

As a love story, I couldn't be more pleased to read Victor Hugo's side by side with Graham Greene's. Hugo lets his play out with nearly as much cynicism: the hunchback's great love is a beauty; the repressed scholar's great love is a free-spirited ingenue; the sweetheart's is a handsome cad, who, at the moment of seduction, can't even remember her name. The love stories aren't weighted equally--those that contain a particle of actual compassion are allowed the heft of tragedy--but every one of them is ultimately a comedy of objectification that can only end badly, and does every time.

Marriage is painted as a farce too, but as a legal distinction, that's perhaps as much about Hugo's disgust with civic power, which is a much deeper condemnationthan his mockery of romance. Justice is doomed to end badly for its subjects, and the exclusive purpose of its proceedings is to deliver state violence, regardless of cause or merit. The comical vagabond court, we find, is the most pure authority, and the least corrupt. While it feels at times that Hugo is picking on the medievals, and if he taunts the king that his day is coming (that experience was brutal too), mostly he presents the Law as a timeless sort of evil. He's got a good trick where he reveals the mechanics of mysterious events off-handedly, and lets the process play out deaf and thoughtless of the minor truth. Hugo's Justice grinds on with tremendous inertia, abetted by the ecclesiastical powers and the expectations of the people. It exists to drink blood, and no one but a half-mad bell-ringer even thinks to stand against it, wrongly and badly. Notre-Dameis an artful blend of place and character, of comedy and tragedy. You'll laugh until you cry.

Hunching Back: A Couple of Tangents

An online Spanish/English arts and literature magazine called Yareah--a myth-and-legend, cultural-roots sort of thing--is evidently hungry enough for material to Google certain occasional book reviewers and solicit them for contributions. They've asked to reprint my review of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in an upcoming issue (April 1). Their theme will be ugliness in literature, and after all, who's uglier than that deformed little sprout, Quasimodo? I did take the trouble to modify the review a little for their theme, but they're still getting what they paid for it.

Looking back to Hunchback, I was struck again by a couple of thoughts, stuff that didn't get expressed very thoroughly in either the new or old version...

1. The tranlation of Notre-Dame that I read I had really annoyed me with its persistent use of the archaic English "you," filling up the book with thees and thous, which to my jaded ear, reads either like a half-assed effort to recreate the speech of the middle ages, or else a clumsy attempt to recreate the original French word flow. Since I was now submitting my crappy review to a bilingual magazine, I thought I might find something clever to say about the absence of a formal second person in English, which I've never decided is a blessing (given all the people I half-know, I'd hate to wrestle with vous or tu in every single greeting--it's bad enough figuring out who to grandma-hug among the people I know intimately) or a flaw (because after all, it does take away nuance). It's my understanding that the formal second person has been falling out of favor in the Romantic languages too for some years, to the irritation of traditionalists, something on par with how no one in America (not in the decadent North anyway) addresses anyone as sir, and everyone lets kids call adults by their first names. I'd always assumed that the "thee" cognates were the dropped formal forms, abandoned on Albion a few centuries before the continent got around to ditching them. This, it turns out, is flat wrong.

The T-V distinction in English (Wikipedia tells me) originated as a singular/plural distinction, and the weight of formality that it later grew stemmed from the early French habit of turning the king into a pluralized synecdoche for authority. In other words, the respectful use of vous comes from the French royal we,* and the old English plural "ye" took on the same pattern following the Norman injection of 1066. "Thee" is the old singular form, and it came into use as the informal second person for the next 600 years. Cast thee back, varlet!

So in English, the informal/singular form is the one that eventually disappeared. The whole thing is complicated by holding on just barely long enough for Shakespeare to intermittently use it, by later bad authors of archaism, and by persistent religious use (from bible translations which adhered strictly to the singular/plural distinction, and not the informal/formal one--it's interesting that the "thee" got that dignified sense round about the time of the Reformation, reducing God to an informal invisible Buddy maybe, or alternatively enhancing the status of the singular pronoun because, hey, you don't sing how great Thou art to just anyone) which lent the singular a new assumed solemnity. In any case, Victor Hugo's speakers were using their pronouns correctly in the 1482 French sense, and I have to conclude that the nameless translator did a fine job after all.

2. There's a lot of madness lurking around within nineteenth century writing. Mental illness wasn't particularly well understood in those days, but writers tend to be good observers, and a lot of those plausible conditions of human nature can be represented without understanding the mechanics of it very much. Those Dickensian crazies really told us more about the problems of the relatively sane anyway, and what shape sanity took in a heartbreaking time that was filthy with disease, religious injunction, poverty, and death looming around every corner, but still cursed with a modicum of badly enlightened hope. I'm not 100% content with modern descriptions of brain malfunction, either. Diagnosing depression or PTSD or ADD is useful, but absent any real neurochemical understanding, the expertise is less perfect than the guys in the white coats would have you believe. Worse, those sorts of behavioral pathologies seem to get around talking to the basic horrors and absurd beauties of our existence, which, for all their faults, those Romantic-era writers had down in spades.

Putting madness on the same spectrum as physical deformity and moral ugliness fits the Romantic ideas pretty well (and I'll review Frankenstein really soon now, I promise). I'm not sure that it helped their development that these ideas were tied into (if you'll forgive my philosophical naivete) the ideas of innocence and morality that had been recently getting hashed out by the likes of Rousseau and Hobbes, whose philosophies were slowly filtering down to practice for some captive subjects in the middle of the century. Quasimodo is given to us as developmentally disabled (I should stop joking with the word "retarded," but then it's the same thing that happened to "idiot" decades ago), and inhibited cognitively by his physical handicap, which is not a bad portrayal given what limited technical understanding Hugo would have had at his fingertips. The problem is that Hugo was playing with--mostly satirizing--themes of redemption, and even giving Quasimodo a partial transformation through beauty and love seemed a little too credulous to me.

Victor Hugo wrote Notre-Dame at an interesting time in the west's understanding of mental disability. Victor, the famous wild boy of Aveyron, was discovered near Hugo's boyhood home, but the idea that he was a template for Quasimodo is evidently apocryphal. Victor (whether he was really wild or not) was taken as a case study in the Enlightenment notions of mankind's natural state, and it's not surprising that Hugo would entertain similar ideas that his own unsocialized character could graduate to the more touted human qualities through some kind of personal moral Renaissance.

In the mid-1800s, the field of mental health was growing up a little too. The idea that a scientific basis for behavior could be sought led to a greater desire to understand the nature of the handicapped. Previously, and at various times, retarded people had been taken care of in the church, as Quasimodo was, or in the community, or by the public. The thought that idiocy could be understood, categorized, or even cured in some cases, led to a spate of study in Hugo's time, and France, though home of one of the more notorious asylums, was progressive about it in those days. The inmates of Bicêtre were unchained around 1900, and Édouard Séguin, who classified idiocy into four categories based on capability,** was advocating more humane treatment for these people while Victor Hugo was still writing.

Regrettably, early brain science wasn't much up to its hoped-for task, and Séguin's humanitarian notions gave way to awful pseudosciences like phrenology and eugenics, and eventually to a return to mere custodial care for "moral degenerates", giving the science a bad name for the better part of the following century. I wonder if the still considerably qualitative nature of some kinds of brain science slows down the more substantive research, or if it damages public perception, as it did in the later nineteenth century. (Not that I'm so very on top of the state of the art. Where the hell is TenaciousK when I need him?)

(Some google finds that informed this: 1, 2, 3)

UPDATE! Study questions for non-idiots.
1. Was Charles Dickens a Romantic-era writer?
[Well, if you concentrate on "era," then I suppose he was writing at the same time as the Romantics. If you stress the "Romantic," I think he may have shared some of the sensibilities, but was not in quite the same mold. I should be more careful.]

2. For that matter, were all those Gothic horror elements (which was closer to my actual train of thought) part of of the Romantic movement?
[I'd argue yes, although maybe it's an argument that needs acknowledging, since I don't really know how serious literature people tend to view the distinction. These handful of writers I've been reading lately were all about (violation of) beauty and nature, and had all of the melodrama. And even their ugly was beautiful, really.]

3. Did Romantic writers find life's beauty an absurd, unlikely sort of beauty?
[Probably not in the way I do, although it's fair to say they were also struggling to incorporate, or just struggling against, a growing scientific understanding of nature. Bad wording, though.]

4. Didn't a revolution in psychoanalysis occur around 1900, which is, in fact, "well into the next century" after ~1850?
[Well, my criticism of psychoanlysis even now is that it's still pretty qualitative, and in the early days, basically unprovable and possibly even in pathological science territory. But there's a lot of prejudice in that statement, and I don't really have the first clue how the Freud boys dealt with the more obviously physiology-based cognitive problems.

I don't feel too bad about more modern classification of behavior patterns based on observation, and I think categorization of them is more or less useful, although it still loosk pretty qualitative. What little I read now of cutting-edge brain science seems like a different world than these earlier twentieth-century views, even from only a couple decades ago, and also a lot more like actual science than all those behaviorist experiments I remember reading about in that one psychology class.]



* I really should have titled that post "The Royal Wii." Dammit.
** Not those four, Dave.

Review: The War of the End of the World, by Mario Vargas Llosa

[This review contains spoilers. Cleaned up a little too.]

To recap from previous comments, when Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel literature prize last year, the choice was lauded from many quarters, a sometimes political novelist (and a sometimes politician novelist) who found supporters from many surprising quarters. When pressed the crack team of commenters over at alicublog recommended The War of the End of the World as particularly impressive, and that was a good enough excuse for me to pick it up.

The story involves a relatively large cast of players and several significant intertwining threads, moving along approximately linearly, which keep up tension despite a few gigantic giveaways, despite this being a story whose outcome is already known anyway. It's a fictionalized account of the "War of Canudos" that took place in Brazil in 1897, a stunningly tragic affair in which the government, at great cost to its own military, mercilessly eradicated some twenty thousand souls that had founded a religious colony in the dusty backlands of the state of Bahia. The villagers, composed of fanatics, pilgrims, and former bandits, turned back three invasions before being overwhelmed and butchered by an ovewhelming final force. The conflict was by various respects an extension of the struggle between the country's contemporary republican and conservative political factions, an assertion of state authority over independent homegrown autonomous movements, or even an understandable attempt (gone horribly awry) to curtail extortion of the neighboring localities by the upstart community. Modern American parallels might include the massacres at Waco or Jonestown, although those were at not nearly the scale.

The Canudos war was chronicled by a Brazilian war correspondent named Euclides da Cunha, who published Os Sertões (the title is usually translated, apparently not well, as Rebellion in the Backlands) in 1902 after his experinces there. Now, Os Sertões is highly acclaimed in its own right, thought by some to rival Tolstoy, a comparison which, when it comes to scope and its morally tinged realism, is easy to draw for The War of the End of the World as well. (Or if not War and Peace, then at least War.) Although he remains unnamed in the novel, da Cunha is one of Llosa's primary characters, and the author does not present him very favorably. His physical deficiencies are used instead of his name (he is "the nearsighted journalist"), and no mention passes without a reference to his irritating voice, his ungainliness, his social awkwardness, his crippling myopia, his insufferable allergies. (I would add cowardice to the list, but I don't think Llosa condemns cowardice so much, and it may even be a byproduct of relative sanity.) He is moreover offered as a shallow hipster sort, possessed of a tiny, spent cachet of coolness among the other journalists, which only makes him more of a misfit among the serious people and ascetics. The actual journalist's Wikipedia entry has a photo of a handsome man, however, and while I don't want to add much approving weight to ideologies in this review, he seems to have been motivated by a reasonably decent naturalist one. And of course there's that great book he wrote. As one of a handful of survivors, Llosa's journalist is also one of the two people to experience a positive character evolution from the conflict, and may be the only one gifted with both intelligence and, at the end, something like maturity. I wish I had read Os Sertões too, wish I knew what comment Llosa was making on it and why he felt one was needed. Is he looking to remove that early 19th century gloss? To call out its simple ideologies? Possibly The War of the End of the World is ultimately a novel of becoming Euclides da Cunha.

I have the characters in War divided loosely among three types: the mad idealists; the pragmatists; and lastly, the group that includes the journalist, the dependents at the mercy of the rest. The first are the most striking, and include the inscrutable Counselor (Antônio Conselheiro) who founded the place, Colonel Moreira César who led the second expidition against the rebels at Canudos, the peasant guide Ruffino, and the itinerant revolutionary Galileo Gall. As a group they favor extreme views of their individual philosophies (the Counselor's Catholic-derived teachings; Moreira César's Republicanism; Ruffino's code of personal honor; and Gall's anarchism) and they have considerable overlap in terms of personality and even the structure of their ideas, but the intensity of conviction makes them utterly incompatible with one another, to the point of death for each one of them.

The pragmatists temper their belief with necessity, and great examples of this are Antônio Vilanova and Abbot (a.k.a. Satan) João who lead Canudos' surprisingly effective administration and military staff. They are motivated by idealism, but it's tempered enough to make them useful people. This category could also include the baron de Canabrava (monarchist and the nominal landowner of Canudos, gradually losing his grip to the republicans) and his opponent Epanimondas Gonçalves (the schemer of the other political faction). These people tend to survive, or at least die less fantastically, in the novel. They're shown capable of change, but don't necissarily manifest any worthwhile personal growth. The baron shrinks in moral stature; Vilanova's left to re-start his life yet again; and Epanimondas continues to shift around like a perpetual Reynard. Further down the spectrum, other dependant types include Ruffino's wife Jurema, a circus dwarf (doesn't every epic novel have to have a traveling circus?), and the deformed, lenonine scribe of Canudos. These people are given to fear, doubt, and childish displays of need. You might call them the victims, the real people (although these are all of them novel-style people) least infected with zealotry, and in the absence of spiritual salvation or other true belief, they're the ones who at least have a chance of a hward-won literary redemption.

[In addition to the journalist, known historical figures include the Counselor and Colonel Moreira César. My guess about Epanimondas Gonçalves is that his name is meant to suggest a political provocateur that history forgot, but I had similar and stronger suspicions about a militant little shit named César, and I was wrong about that one. Presumably there was a real Baron de Canabrava at this time; hopefully history did not give us a Galileo Gall.]

Now this can clearly lead to a lot of smaller personal conflicts and all kinds of compare-and-contrast kinds of exercises, and that's the meat that Llosa fills his book up with. (The skeleton is a story of sad deaths and unlikely survivals, and a hate-to-admit-it gripping military tale of plucky underdogs versus the hostile empire.) Although I had early difficulties with some aspects of the book, I really loved the way he could jump gears to weave in a background story or a subplot into the body of the text. There is no loss for words or ideas here. The story of Canudos is, as the journalist describes it late in the novel, in reality a tree of stories, with expansive roots, and branching everywhere.

I want to put the uniting theme of the book as a failure of idealism, but there's the troubling fact that Canudos, as Llosa presents it, basically works as an idealist society before it's squashed. Is it a story specifying the conditions for ideology's success then? Well, the town works nearly in spite of the loopy counselor and his inner core of whackos; and the various other modes of belief presented in it could have similar interpretations. There's a more-or-less effective Brazilian state or of a more-or-less successful mutualism going on in town.(It happens that the faithful follower of Proudhon has no hope of understanding it, but he is also sort of right about it.) Is it about the correctness of that faith, of that brand of libertarianism? No, the counselor's specific objections to the Republic are basically silly (at best a well-motivated misunderstanding), and Gall is a philosphically ineffectual but personally monstrous buffoon (his ideas are cast off as naive and he unrepentently fails to practice them when it comes to individual people--he's a real Alden Pyle type). Is it a contrast between European (Gall's) vs. Brazilian ideas of liberty? Not really--it'd take some familiarity with European history to use "Jacobin" as an epithet for the political ascendents. Speaking of the rapist Gall, is the message to put the abuse of women and the poor in the inevitable denominator of society? Well not even that: a woman is the other character lucky enough to catch an epiphany through all that; the poor rebels were happy as well as oppressed; and the rich had their successes and failures too. It's maybe all of those things. Or maybe it's just given as a bunch of stuff that happened, with a healthy nod to how things relate to ideologies, but aren't really.

I'll have you know that it's a bitch to type out all of those special characters, and I found the early abundance tilded, carated, and accent-marked proper nouns (the first 50 Brazilians that you meet are all named either Antônio or João) for which I had little feeling of a correct pronunciation to be an extra difficulty. Add to this that I didn't have a good intuition for the geography, and was learning fast to loathe this redheaded Scottish asshole featured so prominently at the front end of the book, and the first 75 pages was actually a bit of a slog. After that, however, (and maybe because I was home and had time to read) I caught the groove of it, and the book suddenly flew. I enjoyed the rest of the novel enough to go back and reread the first parts, which no longer seemed so slow.

The geography issue wasn't the backlands of Bahia, which are presented in great fine detail. As I mentioned yesterday, I got a distinct Victor Hugo vibe from their description, as Llosa lovingly and condescendingly re-introduces to the reader these superstitious country folks that modern society has stopped thinking about. He gets across that we're in an arid climate of scrub forest and Andean pampas in this part of the country. No, what I really missed here was any useful contrast between that and the coastal parts of Bahia. I didn't get a good picture of Salvador as an urbane, cosmopolitan place, and it took a while to figure out that Queimadas was the railway terminus, the cutoff point between civilization and the rest of the state. I mean, Llosa is writing to a South American audience which has some of the requisite cultural baggage, and that's all fine, but I kept thinking that if this was straight fiction instead of the historical variety, I'd have been content to have it spelled a little clearer. In a great departure from the inability of the characters of the novel to communicate with each other and the difficulty they had in traveling out there, I scouted out Canudos and environs with Google Maps, and it helped a lot.