Les Mis�rables

I was drawn to Les Mis�rables mainly because it is one of the omissions of my high-school reading list. I realize that it is regarded as a classic novel of the Western canon of fiction and that my literary knowledge base is incomplete without it. It is not written in a modern style, but I appreciate the benefit of seeing how modern literature has evolved, and I hope to get a sense of why modern writers and readers regard the novel so highly. That is so even though--in the age of page-turning thrillers--there is a certain mystery to the enduring appeal of more than 1,200 pages of narrative. The narrative itself is quite clear in one way--the conflict of the man unjustly condemned by the state who is the unknown hero of many people. The specific issues are somewhat obscure, since the setting is France, and there is a decorously "antique" quality to language and story--no vulgarisms, no nude scenes. Thus the reader is obliged to yield to the literary conventions of an earlier configuration of Western culture. However, it is striking how many actual issues Hugo deals with--harsh prisons, brutal bureaucrats, homelessness, vast differences between rich and poor--are every bit as current in the 21st century as they were in the 19th. It resonates in ways that neither Hugo nor his modern reader might have imagined.

Les Mis�rables embodies or generates creativity in part because, as a text that became a classic, it actually seems to have helped define the evolution of completely selfl

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icalized because of his observation of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 in France; Les Mis�rables, a mature work that took him 14 years to write, appeared in 1862. However, even without that background--which makes perfect sense in explaining a novel of criticism--Les Mis�rables is very obviously a critique of unfair social power arrangements. The content of those arrangements in the story communicates strongly. The chapter titles are one "technology" for conveying the message that Les Mis�rables is a "message" text. They are helpful to any reader who may be daunted by the prospect of having to wade through so much text in order to get the story completely worked out. These titles "position" the text for the reader, supplying an alert to the status of the narrative at a given point. That is helpful because the text is quite dense and decidedly not written in the style of a contemporary whodunit. However, as Lehtonen observes: "The organizing of the world of meanings construes the daily life of entire communities and their concept of their own identities in an important way" (2000, p. 12). The slow and deliberate pace of the text, which includes the comments of the author, sometimes ironically, on characters' thoughts and motives

Category: Literature - L