"The Man Who Laughs" by Victor Hugo

[Betty]

My first impression of this 1869 novel, seemingly starting in the previous century, may not be for the faint of heart. We have come a long way, however seemingly doubtful at times, from cruel and unusual punishments and no socioeconomic safety nets. One episode that struck me as unreal (although we are speaking of fiction) is the eponymous youngster of the title trudging in a fifteen-degree, heavy snowstorm with bare feet unscathed by frostbite and a thin shirt, a climatic event said to have sunk a ship at sea, and another being Ursus's so-called domesticated wolf. It is, so far, more violent than "Les Miserables," but at the same time, it is similar in the rare example of human empathy and kindness of some characters.

[James]

L'Homme qui rit is a Romantic historical novel set in England during the reigns of James II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne. Written about seven years after the publication of Les Miserables (although that was written over a period of about seventeen years), this was much less successful both artistically and financially. Partly this may be because Hugo was better able to write about France in approximately his own time than about late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England, and certainly in part because it was a novel with all the faults of Romanticism to excess published at a time when the literary fashion was turning to Realism, but, although it may seem like sacrilege to say this about a classic by a great author, if this had been a contemporary novel I would have said it badly needed a good editor. At nearly seven hundred pages of very small print in the edition I read (it would probably be well over a thousand pages of today's normal type size) there is far more explanatory material and authorial commentary than actual plot and character development.

The novel begins with two introductory parts in which nothing happens; the first introduces us to one character, just by description and not by him doing anything, and goes on to a long list of dozens of English Lords with descriptions of their lands, houses and so forth which is supposedly written on his wall, and the second describes organized child-trafficking in late Stuart England (contrary to some conspiracy theorists, this is not a new thing created by the liberal conspiracy to destroy America.) How accurate any of this is I have no idea. Then, after about a hundred pages in my edition, he begins the actual plot — for a while.

Apart from the introductory sections, the novel is divided into two unequal parts. The first part takes place in a single night early in the reign of William and Mary, and consists of alternating parallel descriptions of the same snow storm, which were very exciting — except that the descriptions, initially very striking, went on and on and on repeating the same things in different words. They were also introduced by a long digression about how snowstorms are caused by the Earth's magnetic field, which as far as I know was not a mainstream scientific theory even at the time he was writing. There were also other obvious blunders, such as the idea that Basque and Irish Gaelic are so closely related that the Irish and Basque characters can understand each other's language (in fact Basque is not even remotely related to any other existing language.) We are introduced to the protagonist of the novel, Gwynplaine.

After this short stretch of actual plot, the second and longer part begins again with more background, giving us a brief (and not particularly accurate) history of Cromwell and the Restoration under Charles II, passes quickly over James II, and introduces other major and minor characters with brief histories and less brief descriptions of what they were like at the time of William and Mary. He then gives a bizzare description of the activities of the nobility at the time, which I would like to know the sources of (if it isn't simply his own invention.) He then introduces more characters, and brings the descriptions up to the times of Queen Anne, with more authorial commentary about psychology in general, none of which rings true to me. The actual plot then resumes after nearly another hundred pages or about halfway through the novel, with the protagonist now twenty-four years old.

The second half of the novel is much better, more focused on events, although there is still way too much unintegrated historical background explanation and verbose authorial comment. One major problem with the novel is that it presents itself both as a historical novel demonstrating the power and nature of the English aristocracy, and as a satire of the same, so that we can never be sure what is supposed to be actual fact and what is supposed to be exaggerated as satire. The other main problem is that it is full of rhetoric, both in the narrative voice and in the characters. Everything is a speech. Hugo seems to be so caught up in his indignation against the rich and powerful that he forgets he is writing a novel. Whenever someone writes a novel on a political theme, there is a delicate balance between the requirements of the politics and the aesthetic requirements of the work as art; he found the balance more or less in Les Miserables but not in L'Homme qui rit.