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内容简介

　　(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is "Les Miserables "(1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre. "Les Miserables "is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama--highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications--of the redemption of one human being.

作者简介

　　Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26February 1802 at Besancon, where his father, an officer underNapoleon, was stationed. After his parents separated in 1812, Hugolived in Paris with his mother and brothers. At twenty he marriedAdele Foucher and published his first poetry collection. Hugo waselected to the Academie Francaise in 1841. The accidental death twoyears later of his eldest daughter and her husband devastated himand marked the end of his first literary period. By then politicshad become central to his life. Though he was a Royalist in hisyouth, his views became increasingly liberal after the Julyrevolution of 1830. He initially supported Louis Napoleon, butturned against him after being denied a role in governmentfollowing the coup d'etat of 1851 and was forced into exile inBrussels and Jersey. After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870,Hugo returned to France and was re-elected to the NationalAssembly, and then to the Senate. Hugo is celebrated as apolitician, a social campaigner, a poet and a novelist. His mostfamous works include Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Miserables(1862). Victor Hugo died on 22 May 1885 and his state funeral wasattended by thousands of mourners. Julie Rose lives in Sydney andis the highly regarded translator of more than a dozen works,including an acclaimed version of Racine's Phedre as well as worksby Paul Virilio, Jacques Ranciere, Chantal Thomas, and manyothers.

Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26
February 1802 at Besancon, where his father, an officer under
Napoleon, was stationed. After his parents separated in 1812, Hugo
lived in Paris with his mother and brothers. At twenty he married
Adele Foucher and published his first poetry collection. Hugo was
elected to the Academie Francaise in 1841. The accidental death two
years later of his eldest daughter and her husband devastated him
and marked the end of his first literary period. By then politics
had become central to his life. Though he was a Royalist in his
youth, his views became increasingly liberal after the July
revolution of 1830. He initially supported Louis Napoleon, but
turned against him after being denied a role in government
following the coup d'etat of 1851 and was forced into exile in
Brussels and Jersey. After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870,
Hugo returned to France and was re-elected to the National
Assembly, and then to the Senate. Hugo is celebrated as a
politician, a social campaigner, a poet and a novelist. His most
famous works include Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Miserables
(1862). Victor Hugo died on 22 May 1885 and his state funeral was
attended by thousands of mourners. Julie Rose lives in Sydney and
is the highly regarded translator of more than a dozen works,
including an acclaimed version of Racine's Phedre as well as works
by Paul Virilio, Jacques Ranciere, Chantal Thomas, and many
others.

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　　From Laurence Porter's Introduction to Les Miserables
　　The Great French Novel
　　Why do we still read Les Misérables? Not too many years ago, itwas added to the required reading list for the agrégation in Frenchliterature, the competitive state examination that qualifiesteachers at advanced levels. Its moral, social, and politicalmessages remain pertinent to many of the situations we confront.But above all, Les Misérables is the unrecognized “Great FrenchNovel,” analogous to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, AlessandroManzoni’s The Betrothed, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or ThomasMann’s The Magic Mountain. I do not mean that it is necessarily thegreatest French novel: one might prefer Proust’s ? la recherche dutemps perdu, just as in the literature of other languages, onemight prefer Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, James Joyce’sUlysses, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s TheTrial, or Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum. The social, moral, andintellectual range of Hugo’s characters far exceeds what we find inall these other great authors, whose social density is nonethelessnoteworthy. Beyond that impressive achievement, Les Misérables inmany respects conforms to an ideal type, an influential theoreticalentity whose traits are realized only in part by any concreteexample.

From Laurence Porter's Introduction to Les Miserables 
　　The Great French Novel 
　　Why do we still read Les Misérables? Not too many years ago, it
was added to the required reading list for the agrégation in French
literature, the competitive state examination that qualifies
teachers at advanced levels. Its moral, social, and political
messages remain pertinent to many of the situations we confront.
But above all, Les Misérables is the unrecognized “Great French
Novel,” analogous to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Alessandro
Manzoni’s The Betrothed, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Thomas
Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I do not mean that it is necessarily the
greatest French novel: one might prefer Proust’s ? la recherche du
temps perdu, just as in the literature of other languages, one
might prefer Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, James Joyce’s
Ulysses, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s The
Trial, or Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum. The social, moral, and
intellectual range of Hugo’s characters far exceeds what we find in
all these other great authors, whose social density is nonetheless
noteworthy. Beyond that impressive achievement, Les Misérables in
many respects conforms to an ideal type, an influential theoretical
entity whose traits are realized only in part by any concrete
example. 
　　The Great National Novel is capacious: it covers substantial
amounts of time and space. It contains many vivid characters
belonging to varied social conditions: it is not intimist in its
setting, not a drawing-room adventure limited to family, friends,
and courtship. It tells its sprawling story in a traditional mode,
dominated by the controlling perspective of an omniscient author
who, despite flashbacks and digressions, generally proceeds
steadily forward, following the protagonists as they age. It
usually deploys la grande histoire (“big” history, revolutions and
wars) in the background, although the main characters, affected as
they are by political dramas, usually are not leading players in
them. It implies some connection between individual and national
destinies. By the time he wrote Les Misérables, Hugo had had more
direct political experience at the highest levels of government
than had many other writers of his time. Very often the Great
National Novel suggests the looming presence of the supernatural,
hidden but at times glimpsed behind the scenes, or during “second
states” of consciousness such as dreams, drug experiences, visions,
hallucinations, illness, passion, or prayer. Hugo began writing Les
Misérables shortly after spending several years of evenings at
mystical séances, and after elaborating the religious system, based
on punitive and redemptive reincarnation, that he finally made
explicit in his visionary poem La Fin de Satan. The Great National
Novel usually relegates artistic self-consciousness to the
background: it does not become a Künstlerroman—the portrait of the
artist as a young man—nor does it foreground the cleverness of the
writer’s craft by radical experiments in point of view, plot
structure, stylistic innovations, or characterization. Instead, the
Great National Novel quietly insinuates the mature author’s
hard-won wisdom through a series of aphorisms, or pithy,
penetrating generalizations about human nature. These maxims
demonstrate the author’s ability to synthesize many experiences.
The digressions are miniature essays on varied subjects—authors of
the Great National Novel are born essayists and amateur
philosophers—that aim to instruct the audience. In contrast to the
Self-Conscious Novel (Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot), digressions do
not serve to tease the expectant reader by delaying the forward
progress of the story, but to establish the writer’s authority as a
portraitist of a wide world by giving glimpses into his or her
encyclopedic knowledge. 
　　The Influence of Les Misérables 
　　In the late nineteenth century, Les Misérables anticipated both
the naturalistic movement and its opposite pole, the Catholic
Renaissance. Whereas the realistic novel typically deals with the
middle class, Naturalism deals with the working class and with the
underworld. Repetitious, menial labor is difficult to dramatize in
a novel; but Hugo devotes ample space to describing members of the
working class at play (Fantine and her friends), and the criminal
class at work or trying to escape from the police. In the Paris
scenes, he depicts the grisettes (young proletarian women who wore
gray smocks at their jobs, and who were stereotypically easy
targets for seduction). Notably in the chapter “L’Année 1817,” he
emphasizes the inequities of their sexual exploitation by
middle-class men in a direct way that Zola, with his sexual
insecurities, could not (compare Zola’s Nana, 1880, depicting
female sexuality as a monstrous source of social corruption). Hugo
has not yet received due credit for anticipating the naturalist
movement in the chapters devoted to Fantine’s life both in Paris
and in her hometown. 
　　The Catholic Renaissance, which deplored Hugo’s bombastic,
prophetic rhetoric and his pretensions to revealing a new religion,
also derived considerable indirect inspiration from Hugo. Like
Claudel, who detested him and made a point of saying so, like
Mauriac, or like Bernanos, from thirty to ninety years after him,
Hugo in 1862 dramatizes his heroes’ relentless pursuit by
conscience, meaning our instinctive awareness of God. 
　　Hugo’s appeal to posterity depends not only on the awe-inspiring
range and depth of his masterpiece, Les Misérables, not only on his
inspiring, idealistic visions of political and social progress, but
also on the acute visual sense that put him well ahead of his time,
but that can be captured and reinforced by modern media such as
film and television. His extraordinary visual imagination is both
impressionistic—sensitive to colors, including colored shadows, and
to changes in light—and cinematic, aware of varying angles of
vision and shifting vantage points. It involves an exceptional
responsiveness to both light and motion. One can find striking
proof of this in Hugo’s correspondence. He does not write
interesting letters; he wrote letters while resting from his
continuous periods of creative work on most days, on his feet in
front of his writing stand from 5 a.m. to noon, with a cup of hot
chocolate nearby. In letters, he cares more about making contact
with others than about thinking of precisely what he has to say.
But the one interesting letter in the first volume of his
correspondence describes his first ride on a train, and his
fascination with how the landscape blurs and flickers as he passes
it at speeds far greater than he had ever experienced before.
Compare the description of what Jean Valjean sees on his carriage
ride to denounce himself at the court in Arras. Notre-Dame de Paris
provides even better examples. Hugo anticipates Claude Monet’s
famous series of paintings of the same subject when he evokes the
changing light on the fa?ade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Following this passage, he executes the verbal equivalent of a
zoom-in shot to approach a balcony on which an engagement party has
gathered. Earlier, the description circling Paris from the top of
the cathedral towers (“A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris”) anticipates the
cinematic technique of the traveling shot. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, polls rated Hugo as the greatest
nineteenth-century French poet, but his gifts as a storyteller in
his plays and novels were fully acknowledged on an international
scale only when Les Misérables was produced as the first
full-length feature film in France in 1909; within a few years
Albert Capellani of Pathé and André Antoine of Le Thé?tre-Libre
produced a noteworthy series of silent films of Hugo’s works: Les
Misérables (1912), the play Marie Tudor (1912), and the novels
Quatrevingt-treize (1914) and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918).
Lon Chaney’s celebrated performance as Quasimodo in W. Worsley’s
film The Hunchback of Notre-Dame de Paris (1924) consolidated these
triumphs. More recently, television versions of the plays Les
Burgraves (1968) and Torquemada (1976) were triumphs. Today
(November 2002), Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg’s stage
version of Les Misérables (1980), inspired by the rock opera
Jesus-Christ Superstar, is still running in New York and on tour in
the United States. It eclipsed the record number of international
productions of a musical, previously held by Cats (see Porter,
Victor Hugo, pp. 152–156).

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