Live Arts Theatre’s Jigsaw Jones interviews Marva about Les Misérables for their winter 2014 production, which Marva saw with the students in her course Les Misérables: From Page to Stage to Screen.
Les Misérables is now the longest-running musical in the world, having been seen in over 40 countries over the past 25 years. But there’s still a lot to learn about this beloved, monumental story. We talked to Marva Barnett to get some insight.
LIVE ARTS: Firstly, thank you for taking the time to talk with us! Please introduce yourself and let us know a little about your history with the works of Victor Hugo.
MARVA BARNETT: Thanks for your interest in Les Misérables, and thanks to Live Arts for bringing Boublil & Schönberg’s musical to us. I have been fascinated by Victor Hugo’s work since I first read Notre-Dame de Paris (in English) as a young teenager. In grad school, I explored more, ending up writing my master’s thesis on the theme of love in Hugo’s works. I tried to read Les Misérables on my own, in French, but I met my Waterloo with the “Waterloo” chapter, letting the book (all three volumes) languish on the shelf.
Years later, as I looked for a new UVA French course to teach, I rediscovered Hugo’s genius. In that course, we read Les Misérables in an abridged version appropriate for American students learning French. But, just like a three-hour musical, an abridged version leaves out important information. Why did Valjean turn himself in when he could so easily have gone free? Why on earth did Javert commit suicide? I had to read the original novel, and this time I flew through it. And I found so compelling the whole story, the philosophy, the history, the social commentary that I began teaching in English so that students could read the entire novel. Discussing Les Misérables with them even led me to see why Hugo spends so many pages on Waterloo.
Seeing the musical, recognizing how well it captures the heart of Hugo’s novel, and finding so many people moved by the story sent me on a journey exploring why this particular story is so timeless and compelling. For that book project, I’m looking into Hugo’s life and ideas and talking with the artists who created the original musical and the 2012 musical film. Their insights have enriched the musical theater experience for me and for the 100+ students who have joined me on this journey. I hope my eventual book will bring as much pleasure and insights to other lovers of Les Mis!
LA: Les Misérables was first published in 1862, in the middle of what appears to be a revolution-free period of French history. Can you give us an idea of the context of that time in France and how it relates to the novel’s setting a few decades earlier?
MB: This is a big question! Like much of Europe, France was reeling a bit, looking for the best form of government, with camps on all sides. The haggling over which form of government is best, which future the country will have—and the difficulties and despair experienced by those who have not—repeats itself in all cultures and all times. Our time and our place are not exempt. All times and cultures need their Victor Hugo.
The first principle of history, since day two of humankind, is that no day is unprecedently and entirely new. Thus what becomes most instructive is to look for repeating patterns— and they always manage to repeat. In the period from 1789 to 1832, roughly two generations, when we consider the amount of change that the French populace had faced in its governance, it’s hard to see a lot of repetition. There was the bloody overthrow of monarchy (the 1789 French Revolution) succeeded by a period of violent imperial expansionism (Napoleonic Empire) followed by a supposed restoration of monarchy (the Bourbon kings) succeeded by the July Revolution of 1830 that brought in the constitutional monarchy of “citizen-king” Louis-Philippe.
LA: How has your experience with the musical informed later readings of the novel?
MB: When I read the novel now that I know the musical so well and admire it so much, I see many moments in the novel that lie behind important moments in the musical. Several lines from “Stars,” for example, were clearly inspired by Hugo’s thrilling description of Javert when he captures Valjean in the guise of M. Madeleine. To quote just a few words: “He, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth, in their celestial functions as destroyers of evil” (Part I, Book 8, Chapter 3, “Javert Satisfied”).
We can see much more of the novel in Tom Hooper’s 2012 movie version of the Les Mis musical. As many people know, Tom encouraged his actors and crew to read Les Misérables before making the film, and many did. My students and I, especially, enjoy finding the dozens of subtle ways in which they incorporated details from the novel—in ways that work on film but would be difficult or impossible on stage.
LA: Victor Hugo said of his novel, “I don’t know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone.” Do you think he would have been pleased with the global success of the musical? Or would he wish more people picked up the book?
MB: That’s a hard question, especially as Hugo strongly believed (and accurately) that his entire body of writing was an integrated work. I suspect that, like me, he would want people to experience the truly big ideas in the novel. But he may well have liked the musical and the way it has spread his story in new ways to a new audience. He did, after all, write the lyrics for an opera based on his Notre-Dame de Paris, working with family friend Louise Bertin, who composed the music in the 1830s. And he applauded his son Charles’ success in adapting Les Misérables to the stage in the 1860s.
LA: On a heavier note, do you have any tips for picking up the book? Are there special exercises you can recommend to help lift it?
MB: When you’ve gotten far enough into the novel, it lifts itself—and you with it. Seriously, read through the first 100 pages before giving up. Meet the bishop and see what an amazing person he is. Agonize with Jean Valjean over his lost 19 years and experience with him the turmoil the bishop’s gift provokes. Then skip any parts that seem boring to you. Don’t get stuck, as I did the first time I picked up the book. As timeless as the novel is, Hugo was writing to his nineteenth-century French peers, and they knew the history of King Louis-Philippe’s reign and the Napoleonic Empire, for instance, in ways that only fans of French history come close to knowing today. Follow the stories of the characters you love, and you might find at the end that you want to go back later and figure out what those “digressions” say to you. “I think I’m going to miss Jean Valjean,” one student wrote me at the end of the semester, “is that weird?” No. He’s someone many of us like to spend time with, and he’s always there inside the book’s covers.
LA: If someone seeing the show is inspired to look more deeply into the works of Victor Hugo, where do you suggest they start?
MB: I recommend “the brick,” the Signet paperback translation by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee. It’s modern in the way Hugo’s French remains and nearly always accurate. Just as important, their translation is based on Charles Wilbour’s original 1862 translation, which is the most faithful to Hugo’s French. But any translation that you find readable you will find pleasurable. Reading the same pages from different editions online will likely tell you which one is the one for you.
LA: Throughout all these changes, the newly risen middle class, the bourgeoisie, remained relatively comfortable. By the time of the 1832 barricades, an insurrection or attempted revolution, the bourgeoisie had generally enjoyed plentiful opportunity. But the lower classes were very poor and increasingly repressed.
Victor Hugo—who grew up with a monarchist mother (who had, too, the free-thinking leanings of Voltaire) and a father who was a Napoleonic general—surely had some insights into top-down social arrangements. By the time he began Les Misérables in 1845, he had become concerned about the direction of French society. Whether you call the person at the top of the pyramid “king” or “emperor” is not so germane as the fact that the privilege and power all live there and exert themselves downward. This concerned Hugo greatly. As governments gained power, they policed the French citizenry more and increasingly suppressed dissent, which alone might explain the relative lack of revolutionary ferment in the 1860s. But Napoléon III also made sure that domestic discontents were muted by France’s involvement in a variety of what might be called small foreign wars.
In December 1851 Hugo was forced to flee into exile when President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte took over the government and soon assumed the role of emperor, calling himself Napoléon III. Hugo had been forcibly separated from France and living mostly in the Channel Islands for nearly a decade when he had the chance to resume writing Les Misérables in 1860. It is possible that he felt a freedom and a necessity to speak for that large part of the French public which did not have a political voice.
LA: Though this might be the first time Hugo’s novel was set to an orchestral score, Boublil & Schönberg were not the first to attempt to bring the story to a greater audience. There have been numerous film, television, and radio adaptations stretching back to the beginning of mass media. Yet it is this musical that seems to be the most widely known adaptation. Is that just because it’s a musical, or does this adaptation capture something fundamental to the original book that resonates?
MB: Yes, over 50 films from countries as diverse as India and Poland, with even a Japanese anime version. Although the 1934 and 1954 movie versions are perhaps best known and loved in France, the musical is, as you say, probably the most widely known version throughout the world. I believe its success is due to the creative genius of the artists who created it: Claude-Michel Schönberg’s remarkable, opera-like music and his goal of writing music that tells the story without words; Claude-Michel and Alain Boublil’s insights into Hugo’s novel that they brought to their moving original musical book; James Fenton’s and Herbert Kretzmer’s stunning lyrics; the theatrical genius of producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh. They captured, I think, Hugo’s passion in support of the outcasts, the downtrodden, the hardworking regular folks who can hardly get a break. And they show us through memorable music and lyrics Hugo’s picture of the power of love for bettering oneself and society.
LA: What is it about this story that has us all retelling it?
MB: Ah, you ask the question the more or less prompted my book project. In a nutshell, I believe that the story of Jean Valjean’s multiple moral challenges and triumphs touch something deeply human inside many of us, prompting us to be better people, “to be a better man every day,” as Hugh Jackman emailed me about the impact of playing Valjean in the 2012 movie musical. At the same time, the big sweep of the novel, so many realistic, touching characters, and the social justice issues raised makes us believe, for a while at least, that the world can truly be a better place. Hugo hoped that his novel would transform society, as he wrote to his editor and as he claimed at the end of his preface (often quoted at the beginning of French versions of Les Misérables): “as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like this one cannot be useless.”
LA: Apart from having more songs and way fewer digressions, how does the musical differ from the novel? How closely to the text does the play adhere?
MB: Of course, the musical must simplify the complexities of human nature and the epic social struggles that Hugo portrays. But, beyond that obvious difference, my students and I spend a semester answering this question. I’ll touch on just a few points relevant to main characters that I find key. I could go on and on!
The bishop’s spirituality is broader than the Christian framework we usually see in the musical. Jean Valjean is just as larger than life as he is in the musical, but the novel gives us a stronger, clearer understanding of how incredibly human he is. Hugh Jackman told me when we talked about the film that Tom Hooper noted how important it was to “play the long game” with Valjean. Valjean struggles with his darker side, his weaker side, all the way through the novel.
Inspector Javert is a much, much more complex character in the novel—he’s not the villain that many spectators find him to be. And Hugo’s Gavroche is so delightful and heartwarming that it’s almost worth reading those 1,400 pages just to spend time with him. The musical captures Gavroche’s spirit but doesn’t have time to show us who he really is. And, of course, the novel’s huge themes are deepened and enriched by what appear to be digressions.
LA: On the topic of Hugo’s many digressions, what purpose do the serve? What have we lost by not including some of that authorial voice in the stage adaptation (aside from an additional few hours of running time)?
MB: Waterloo, life in convents, the criminals’ slang, and the Paris sewer system are certainly digressions in one sense. But when we read the novel thoughtfully, we see how much they have to tell us about social ills and the potential for progress. As Hugo recounts the Battle of Waterloo and its surprising turns of fate, he is prompting us to wonder: are these random accidents or God’s providential hand? That question about fate, destiny, providence, and chance flows through all the characters’ lives (not to mention our own), and “Waterloo” gives us another way in which to grapple with it. The history and description of the sewers are a marvelous metaphor for the way in which society often wastes human potential.
This interview was published in the Live Arts newsletter:
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A QUARTERLY EFFORT DECEMBER 2014 THROUGH FEBRUARY 2015