Miserable musical interludes

Every once in a while a student wants to know what's the point of reading a big fat novel when we can get the information from a movie "more efficiently," and I usually respond by reminding the student that if literature were primarily designed to convey information efficiently, no one would write a novel requiring more than 140 characters.

But I sympathized with that student recently when I viewed Les Miserables (the movie) and read Les Miserables (the book). The musical drastically condenses Victor Hugo's prose, which is a good thing because no one wants to watch a 20-hour musical. Some of the cuts lead to more efficient storytelling; for instance, in the film Marius  and Cosette follow the musical convention by falling in love at first sight, while the book follows Marius's lengthy journey from apathy to obsession to disappointment to love. Similarly, Eponine is an only child in the movie but has four siblings in the novel, most of whom barely impinge upon the plot.

And then there is the plot itself. The film focuses like a laser on the suffering and redemption of Jean Valjean, but the novel loses sight of that plot for long stretches, suggesting that Hugo was trying to dramatize the suffering and redemption of an entire people, which may explain why it seems at times as if he's intent upon providing a full character sketch of every single person living in France in the early nineteenth century.

And the man could pontificate. At length. About anything. It's tempting to call these long plotless chapters digressions, but if the goal is to thoroughly dramatize a particular cultural moment, then everything is relevant. (In this way, Hugo was an important precursor to Proust, who similarly strove to tell us everything about everything.)

Good thing Hugo's prose is so compelling or the novel would be simply unbearable. In fact, I found some of those long plotless passages so quirky and charming that I wish they'd been included in the musical as big, colorful production numbers. For instance:

1. Dance of the Nuns: Six chapters describe the convent on the Rue Petit-Picpus (its layout, character sketches of notable personages who play absolutely no part in the plot, details of its rules and relationships to other religious communities) and eight chapters explore the history of the monastic impulse and its possible future relevance. I can't imagine why none of this made it into the musical. I envision a Busby Berkeley-style production number filmed from above, with masses of bewimpled nuns forming flower-like patterns while singing passionately about the theological and practical distinctions between Benedictine and Bernardine rule.   

2. Wails from Waterloo. Hugo's compelling description of the decisive battle unfolds at a leisurely pace over 19 chapters, ending with an incident of pilferage tenuously linking this large digression with the Jean Valjean plot--but the battle is central to Hugo's larger concerns. Let's see the battle and its aftermath condensed into a five-minute medley involving martial drumbeats, a wailing bagpipe suddenly wiped out, and the Song of the Moonlight Pickpocket.   
 
3. Song of the Slangsters: Hugo devotes four long chapters to defending his decision to put street argot in the mouths of his thieves, which was apparently a controversial move at the time. Even while defending his use of slang, he personifies "that pustulous vocabulary" as a "frightful, living, and bristling thicket" in which "[o]ne word resembles a claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye." Later he claims that the specialized slang of street thieves resembles the jargon used in other venues, including "the painter who says: 'My grinder,' the notary who says: 'My Skip-the-Gutter,' the hairdresser who says: 'My mealyback,' the cobbler who says 'My cub,'" and so on for several pages. Imagine all those slangsters slinging their specialized argot in song!

I could go on. Or I could just let Victor Hugo go on. For 900 pages, more or less. I would gladly see the movie again, but the book? I'm singing the "Glad-I-Read-it-But-Don't-Ever-Expect-Me-to-Read-it-Again" blues.