Book Review: The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs is a good story poorly executed. Set in England c. 1700, the story revolves around the fortunes of a young man, Gwynplaine, who was surgically disfigured in infancy so that he appears always to be hideously laughing. Abandoned as a child by the Comprachicos (child-buyers) who mutilated him, Gwynplaine is wandering through the snow when he finds a baby in the arms of her dead mother. He rescues the baby, and the two of them are ultimately taken in by a kindly if verbose mountebank, Ursus, and his tame wolf, Homo. The baby, Dea, blind as a result of nearly freezing to death, grows up to love Gwynplaine and he her, and all goes reasonably well for this band of traveling performers until a long-buried secret transforms Gwynplaine’s fortunes in unexpected ways.

As we expect from Hugo, the novel is replete with biting social commentary. In this case, the focus is the nobility’s blindness to the misery it causes the poor, with particular reference to the whimsical injustice of late-17th century British law.

The idea of the story is excellent. The conceit of the man who must grin irrespective of his true feelings is not only engagingly grisly and pathetic on a literal level but is also a fine metaphor for the disconnection between the reality of social injustice and the semblance of beneficent order the aristocracy pretends to. The four performers make a quirky and memorable family. The sexual tension between Gwynplaine and the thrill-seeking duchess, Josiana, who, at one point, tries to seduce him, is plausible and compelling in a dysfunctional way. The way Gwynplaine’s laughing face sabotages his attempts to promote social reform through inspired rhetorical address is plausible, moving, and powerfully symbolic.

Despite these strengths, however, most of this long book suffers from poor craftsmanship. Of course, allowances must be made for the conventions of the 19th-century novel. So let’s take it as read that the heroine (Dea) is going to be helpless and almost completely devoid of personality. Let’s anticipate that the story will take two or three times as many pages to narrate as the same story would in the 20th century. Let’s forgive grand generalizations about Man, Woman, Gypsy, the Nature of Love, etc. and apostrophes of the “Oh, such angelic innocence!” variety. Let’s prepare for lots of exposition “telling” us about characters and situations at the expense of scenes that would actually “show” these things.

These allowances having been made, the book is still poorly crafted. Here’s an example: near the end of the saga, Gwynplaine makes an impassioned speech to the House of Lords in which he observes that he has seen the suffering of the common people of which they know nothing. This could be a moment of powerful payoff if we had seen him see it. But we haven’t. Yes, he stumbled through the snow fifteen years before as a child and saw a hanged man and was hungry and near death, and it was well written too. But since then, Hugo has done almost nothing but emphasize how happy Gwynplaine’s social circle is, how successful they are in making a decent living as mountebanks. We haven’t seen Gwynplaine suffer from poverty or show any significant awareness of others’ suffering either (he says a sympathetic word or two once in a great while), and thus, his words before the Peers ring hollow.

Likewise, after several chapters advertising that Gwynplaine and Josiana will momentously cross paths at some point, their actual meeting is short and anticlimactic: she attempts to seduce him but then goes off him when she receives a letter stating that Queen Anne wants her to marry him (he is only interesting when forbidden). This basic irony is all well and good, but it’s delivered so briefly after such voluminous foreshadowing that I, for one, feel jipped.

And even in a 19th-century novel, it’s hard to care about a love story in which the two principals, Gwynplaine and Dea, never have a single real conversation. Though we get several expository reiterations of how lucky it is that Dea is blind because she won’t judge Gwynplaine by his appearance and how conflicted Gwynplaine is between idolizing Dea yet loving her sexually, the sum total of their actual discourse is a handful of very short, very stereotyped conversations with no content: pretty literally “sweet nothings.”

Overall, the book indulges in exposition to the detriment of story. Anyone who’s read Les Misérables knows that Hugo inserts massive essays on everything under the sun into his novels. But in Les Misérables--and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, for that matter--these essays exist alongside the actual story, which is complete with conversations, actions, descriptions: characters doing things. In The Man Who Laughs, however, actual scenes of storytelling are significantly outstripped by long, repetitive discourses on privileges of the British aristocracy, different types of ships, the Nature of Woman, and so on. One wants to read the story, but there isn’t much story to read.

I also have one criticism of content rather than execution. This novel expresses a level of misogyny I didn’t think Victor Hugo was capable of. Yes, it’s a 19th-century novel, and allowances must be made. But his reduction of women to petty and helpless symbols of different facets of sexuality is persistent and unrelieved. He repeatedly categorizes women as virgin, mother, or seductress: Dea is virgin and potential mother, Josiana seductress. Dea is also an unwitting seductress--apparently all women are, for Hugo tells us, Eve seduced Satan. Now, he clearly didn’t mean this literally, but even a piece of metaphorical hyperbole, it is a statement unworthy of a social reformer, yes, even in the 19th century, as it does nothing but reinforce the age-old practice of blaming women for the existence of evil (and by extension, for men’s negative actions, particularly towards women).

And finally, if Dea is meant to be our paragon of female virtue, how should we read the implication that if she had not been blind she would not have been able to love Gwynplaine? Ursus is not blind, and he loves Gwynplaine, a fact which is apparently so unremarkable it’s scarcely even commented upon. Does this mean that the most virtuous woman imaginable is shallower than a rough, rather cynical man is simply assumed to be by default?

These criticisms notwithstanding, the story does have some strong moments: Gwynplaine’s initial abandonment and trek through the snow; the foundering of the ship that abandons him, in which Hugo pulls off the rare feat of profoundly interesting me in the fates of a bunch of random characters with no personalities; and Gwynplaine’s diatribe before the House of Lords are all powerful sections. If the whole book had been written to that caliber, it would have been a classic at least as renown as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. As it is, it is a powerful idea in a poorly designed package.

Worth reading (or skimming) if you have patience and are a fan of Victor Hugo.

Worth seeing is the 1928 silent movie adaptation of the novel, impressive for its time and remembered today for creating the visual character concept that inspired the Joker in Batman.