Les Misérables: Justice and Mercy

Les Misérables has long been one of my favourite musicals. When I was a child, the dance class I was in used some of the songs as part of a sequence at a show, so I feel like I have known some of the songs forever. I think it was when I was 14 that my mum took me to London to see the show and I loved it. Since that first time seeing it at the West End, I’ve seen it once more there with my brother (who I went to the cinema with last night), and once in an amateur school production with my friend Lucy as Éponine – a very talented cast. I have also actually read the 1300 page book. I was 13 at the time, and skipped over the 50 page description of the Battle of Waterloo and Thénardier’s involvement in it, but recently began to re-read it, and have been much more engrossed this time around. I will always remember the pastor of the church I was in growing up telling me that when he first saw it, it made him want to preach a sermon at the end. After seeing the film last night, I feel the same way.

The music of the film is wonderful – stirring and haunting (and the whole film is sung – for those of you who don’t know!!), and the acting and singing was fabulous. I especially loved the performances by Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman and Eddie Redmayne (he made me like Marius, which I had never done before!!) – and the production was terrific. Bringing the musical to film made it much more intimate, and much more detailed (great examples, I think, are Jean Valjean’s ‘Soliloquy’, the detail in ‘Master of the House’ and of course Valjean dragging Marius through the sewers!).

But really what gripped me once more, and moved me to tears on several occasions, is the story. I love the story of Les Mis, and I love the character of Jean Valjean – he is possibly my favourite character from anything I have ever read. It’s a story of freedom, love, mercy – and redemption. The story is explicit in its belief in the power of grace to transform people, and as a Christian this is something I firmly believe in – and it is beautifully displayed in the character of Valjean. Victor Hugo’s own position towards the Catholic church was constantly in flux, but he did seem to have few issues with the central positions of the faith.

Hugo spends at least 50 pages in the opening of his novel describing the Bishop who so dramatically alters Valjean’s life, carefully showing us a picture of his selfless, merciful and loving life, which I think can be summed up in this beautiful statement: ‘As we see, he had a strange and peculiar way of judging things. I suspect that he acquired it from the Gospel.’ Previously, Valjean has been subject to a strict and pure Justice, which punishes him with imprisonment for the desperate theft of bread, and then for attempted escape. In showing Mercy to Valjean when the law was ready to execute Justice on him, as it had so many times before, the Bishop enacts a process of redemption:

‘ “Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!” ’

In the novel, Valjean exhibits a final act of selfishness in stealing a small sum of money from a boy he meets on his travels, and this last minor incident culminates in a life-changing realisation what the bishop has done for him:

‘He beheld himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time ... he saw ... a sort of light which he took at first to be a torch ... he recognise that it had a human form, and that this torch was the bishop.

‘His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it, the bishop and Jean Valjean... as his reverie continued, the bishop grew grander and more resplendent in his eyes; Jean Valjean shrank and faded away. At one moment he was but a shadow. Suddenly he disappeared. The bishop alone remained.

‘He filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.’

The bishop has literally bought this desperate man. After having set the bishop up as a Christ figure, I think part of what Valjean is meant to represent in the story is a similar thing. The bishop has shown Valjean divine love – and this spark is fanned into a flame in him too. Throughout the rest of the novel, Valjean makes mistakes and errors of judgement (he is still human!), but instead of being compelled by hate and fear he is now compelled by mercy and love. Even his desperation to conceal himself in Paris is mainly for Cosette’s sake, as he remembers the promise he made Fantine to care for her. We constantly see him seeking to do the loving thing, even when it is not necessarily the right thing... and this extends to Javert.

Valjean, the man redeemed through Mercy, against Javert, the man ruled by Justice.

Christians often talk about the Mercy and Justice of God, and how these are seemingly opposing forces. God is just – therefore according to His laws He must punish sin. Yet He is merciful – and provides a Redeemer to allow us to know His love. Jean Valjean is like many people – he is familiar with the Justice of God, but until meeting the bishop, not His Mercy. Javert has never encountered Mercy, and he is so entrenched in his law-keeping belief that he can please God and man through Justice, that when Mercy is extended to him, he is unable to comprehend or accept it. It seems so unbearably UNjust to him to have Mercy shown to him, that he takes Justice into his own hands and metes out punishment on himself. When Mercy is extended to us, what is our response? Are we Javert, or are we Valjean?

A little light reading

Silence on this blog does not equal no reading, just that I enjoy reading more than I enjoy writing about reading. During my PGCE, most of my reading was about spiritual matters, as I undertook a discipleship and church planting school at my church. Among other things we read Celebration of Discipline (Richard Foster) - beautifully written book about spiritual disciplines; The Church Can Change the World (Jimmy Seibert) - an exciting adventure about the birth of the movement of churches we are part of; and Spiritual Authority (Watchman Nee) - a hard-hitting and thought-provoking classic. It was fantastic, but I am enjoying being able to read for pleasure again!

And for whatever reason, for light reading I have been drawn more and more to the 1920s-1950s, and to three writers in particular: P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Stella Gibbons. Let me tell you why...

I discovered P.G. Wodehouse as an undergraduate, having heard of Jeeves and Wooster and deciding I ought to see if it was any good. It was. However I actually prefer the one-off stories, mainly involving bumbling but well-meaning toffs in monetary and amorous scrapes. One of my favourites has been Laughing Gas (1936), where a young English earl visiting California switches bodies with a twelve-year-old boy movie star. Wodehouse's wit and humour is delightful, and I often find myself re-reading a passage or line that seems particularly appropriate or amusing. The dedication to The Indiscretions of Archie particularly struck me as a good example:

"The fact is, I have become rather suspicious about dedications. No sooner do you label a book with the legend:-
To my best friend X
than X cuts you in Piccadilly, or you bring a lawsuit against him. There is a fatality about it. However, I can't imagine anyone quarrelling with you, and I am getting more attractive all the time, so let's take a chance."

Simon Callow has recorded a lot of Wodehouse books for audio book, and compares reading his prose to singing Mozart, and I can see the similarity - frivolous but elaborate and careful craftsmanship. Try him!!

I had only heard of Dorothy L. Sayers from Suzanne, who lectures in British Christian writers between the world wars at l'Universite Catholique de Lille, and as a first year I proofread a series of radio lectures she had discovered in an archive of an American university, which was published as The Christ of the Creeds (2008). I was very impressed by the clarity of Sayers' writing, but only read one of her detective novels, featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, whom she is most famous for creating, last year - The Nine Tailors (1934). Although it took me a while to 'get into', I am now hooked and am slowly reading my way through all of these books. Having grown up on Agatha Christie it was a shock at first - Sayers' books are more detailed, longer, with more precise characterisation - but I now think Lord Peter a wonderful character, and particularly enjoy the constant literary quotations and references throughout the books (those which I am able to pick up, anyway!). I'm surprised these books aren't better known and appreciated, and that no one has decided to re-make them for television (the last production was about 30 years ago, and I don't think all of them have ever been done). I still love some Agatha Christie but am definitely enjoying Dorothy L. Sayers too!

I've blogged on Stella Gibbons before - particularly on Cold Comfort Farm. I think for a long time that's all I imagined she'd written. No! I'd heard a radio adaptation of Westwood a couple of times and decided it was time to read more of her work, so I got hold of Westwood (1946) and Nightingale Wood (1938) and read them both recently. They make an interesting comparison. Nightingale Wood is very light - a reworking of Cinderella - very frivolous, and Westwood doesn't allow for a fully satisfying happy ending in the same way. It is fascinating because it was written so soon after the end of the war - and indeed the novel is set in the war so you really see what it was like for ordinary people in London while it was still fresh in the memory. Perhaps this proximity to the war is what prompts Gibbons to refuse us the 'happily ever after' ending we feel we deserve. Gibbons' characterisation is biting - and at times borders on the cruel - in all of her books I have read so far, but her characters are human - the bad with some good, and the good with some bad, as in real life.


I'm starting to love this period, and these writers, and others. They are the perfect light reading for me - I feel embarrassed both borrowing or buying and reading most 'chick-lit' which I'm supposed to find escapist, and books from this era allow me a window into the past. Additionally, they are much less explicit in terms of bad language etc, which I appreciate. I recommend all of these writers, and welcome suggestions for others! (Please... not D.H. Lawrence... I've read a few and find him depressing and far, far too serious. Besides, who can take Lawrence seriously after they have read Cold Comfort Farm?!).


Of course, I've also been reading The Hunger Games - who hasn't?! But maybe that's a future blog post...

"Learning never ends"

As of this Wednesday, I am officially a graduate from the University of Sheffield with a 2.1 in English and French. It's taken me 5 years from finishing A levels, which I could never have anticipated, but I got there! It's been an unexpected 4 years in many ways (who knew I would end up doing half my degree in French?!) but also incredibly rewarding.

And I've come out the other side still loving literature. The day of my last English literature exam (Modern literature, on which I got a first - another surprise!) the first thing I did was to go to Sheffield City Library and get out a pile of books, and since the end of exams I've pretty much been reading between 3 and 5 books per week. Now's the time to make the most of it, since come September I'll be starting my PGCE (teacher training) to become a secondary school French teacher (who also now has roughly GCSE-level German!).

Why not English? Practical reasons: most of my experience so far has been in language teaching, there is a greater need for language teachers, I get a bursary for it (!). Also I imagine I will end up teaching English some time anyway. Part of me is a little worried at teaching English, that I wouldn't be able to get across my enthusiasm for the subject to teenagers. Also I feel like teaching languages is a more practical skill.

Still, if I ever take the step to do a Masters, I like to think it would be in English. I genuinely love the academic side of the subject, whereas with French I was only ever interested in upping my language skills. Although my favourite historical period in literature is probably now the Renaissance (the Victorian literature module somewhat ruined the period for me... apparently it's all about Darwin; who knew?!) my highest marks were in the 'Enlightenment Britain' and 'Modern literature' modules, which I enjoyed more than I ever expected to.

I suppose what's really fascinating about literature is the way it interracts with culture, history, society and everything else in the world yet creates something new in it and, in some cases, affects those things itself. We had a set of very confusing 'Modern literature' lectures about Modernist art (never Modernist music, oddly) which compared Gertrude Stein to art of the time by comparing syntax to subject and grammar to form (if I remember correctly), so that Modernists are obsessed by form. I still love the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, and finally have lost some of my T.S.Eliot hangups. No-one really understands the guy's poetry, it's all just posturing.

As our Pro-Vice-Chancellor ("tips hat") said on Wednesday, "Learning never ends." I've learnt lots about developing critical skills and analysis at university, but about enjoying literature for its own sake - well, I learned that years ago anyway.

The Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all people. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
- John 1:1-5

I'd never thought much about God as Word before. But it's vital. Words create. We do it all the time - billions of words creating novels, poetry, plays. Words directing destinies, as James says, for good or ill.

How much more the words of God? As our words create an imaginary reality, His words create in our reality, as if we were characters in His cosmic novel.

I'm convinced God loves language - etymology, neologisms, especially word play.

Poetry

So I just found this blog post that I wrote way back in July and never published on here, so here we go...

We’re back on poetry again. It’s been a while.

In my recent selection from Sheffield city centre library (which was incredibly Lit-geeky and which I’ve already blogged on two texts from – Planet Narnia and O Pioneers! ) I took a random book about poetry: The Strength of Poetry by James Fenton (2001). The contents page promised writing about Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath amongst others so I thought, let’s give it a go. The first chapter talks about Michelangelo and other Italian Renaissance artists; the way they learned from, or were secretive towards, each other. By the end of the first page we feel that Fenton definitely has a unique way of looking at things. His writing can be by turns beautiful and amusing, and he’s always brutally honest. He picks up on usual things about poets – Owen’s juvenilia (hilariously pompous), the way Larkin is credited with expounding things everyone thinks but no one says but how ridiculous that actually is when you think about what he is saying, Auden’s dual influences of William Blake and Henry James. Seamus Heaney’s Irishness is discussed, the influence of life on poetry in Plath and, running through all, what it means to be a ‘poetess’. Fenton points out that feminising nouns like this can completely change their meaning: a ‘priestess’ is not at all the same thing as a ‘priest’ as it has much more pagan connotations. Similarly a ‘poetess’ is not the same thing as a ‘poet’. He charts the struggles and differences of opinion amongst several women poets as to what it means to be a woman and a poet, quoting Germaine Greer: ‘The more women adored poetry, the less able they were to write it... It is less crucial for women to work out how men did this to women than it is to assess the extent to which women did this to themselves.’

All in all, it is at once varied and coherent as a selection of thoughts on modern poetry. It is also amusing, clear and – wonder of wonders for a book on poetry! – interesting. It also made me want to read more Larkin, Plath and Heaney and to discover new writers (for me) such as Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.

While on the subject of poetry, let’s talk Donne (again). In the same lit haul I picked up John Stubbs’ biography Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006), which I’ve been after for a while. ... My main gripe with it is that Stubbs uses Donne’s poetry to prove things about his life. I can understand this in that it is difficult to write a biography about a man who’s been dead for nearly 400 years and who lived in an age where documentation was not seen as especially important (hence why we have so little information about Shakespeare). However we are always being told not to confuse the poet and the voice in the poem, and although it seems reasonable that Donne drew from his own experience and potentially parts of his own personality in his poems – which are known for their startling voices – to use lyric poetry as proof of some particular personal opinion on Donne’s part seems to me a fallacy. Poets don’t always say what they mean in their poems and are notoriously unreliable; we never know when they are using their own opinions or assuming someone else’s and unless we have other biographical evidence to prove our point I feel we would be better off leaving our insights of a poet drawn from his craft out of it.

Planet Narnia

Back from university some time in 2009, my dad told me about a programme he had recorded from the television called ‘The Narnia Code’ (BBC, April 2009), where an academic had come up with a theory explaining the coherence of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. We watched it together and I thought the premise intriguing. Michael Ward, a Lewis scholar, was reading Lewis’s poem ‘The Planets’ as part of his research when he was struck by the line in reference to Jupiter: ‘winter passed/And guilt forgiven’. He realised this was the premise of the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and began linking the rest of the books in the series to planets in the pre-Copernican constellation: Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus and Saturn.

I was interested by this theory and emailed a Lewis specialist friend from my time in Lille, France, who sent me a review she had done of his book Planet Narnia (2008). The main argument against it was, she said, that even academics who are familiar with the medieval view of the planets had difficulty connecting them to the books in the way that Ward does.

Summer 2009. I am at Greenbelt festival (see this post) and notice that Michael Ward is going to do a talk about Planet Narnia. Interested, I decide to go along. Unfortunately in 50-odd minutes there’s not much he can say that I haven’t already heard in the BBC documentary, although he does go into a little more ‘academic’ detail than would presumably have been appropriate for television. The bookshop stock the book but at its hardback price I decide against it.

A few weeks ago I was in Sheffield city centre library in the literature section and wondered whether I would stumble across Planet Narnia; it had been in the back of my mind to read for a few months. There it was, and five minutes later I was reading it on the train home for a day. I spent most of that weekend reading when I could, and some evenings while doing a placement in a Sheffield secondary school. It definitely makes interesting reading, if you are at all familiar with Lewis. For me the main problem was the frequent references made to Lewis’s ‘Ransom’ trilogy (another for the ‘to read’ list), but I could follow the main point of what is being said. It did feel as though more time was given to this series than to the Narnia books themselves at times. Ward’s thesis goes further than just linking the books to planets, however; he is trying to prove that Lewis was attempting to make his readers Enjoy the planets rather than Contemplating them. (The difference between Enjoy and Contemplate is the difference between the French connaître and savoir – the first is knowledge gained by experiencing it rather than observing and knowing in the mind) He calls this ‘donegality’; the process of understanding the characters of the planets through reading books which are written in the ‘spirit’ of that planet. I’ve explained that badly.

In conclusion, if you are a Narnia enthusiast and have a bit of concentration (although it’s not written in the highest scholarly style there are some presumptions made about the level of academic knowledge of the reader) it’s well worth a read. Then it’s up to you as to whether you are convinced by Ward’s thesis; personally I’m still on the fence.

Exploring the Wild West... through books

It seems I’ve always been interested in the American West. As a child of about nine I bought a very tattered copy of Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder, 1935) and was instantly intrigued by the life of making do in difficult situations, the resilience of those who pioneered the West, and their attachment to the land. Funnily enough I was never interested in America as an actual place to visit until recent years, during which I have met many Americans from California to New Jersey, Texas to Illinois. I suppose to me the West as a literary concept wasn’t a real country I was interested in visiting; it existed in my imagination and that was enough. It seems a fair conclusion considering the West of my imagination, of the late 19^th century, probably no longer exists, but I do wonder whether this separation of ‘the country in my head’ and ‘the country as it is’ goes further than this, as I’ve read many books centring around India (The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy; A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth) without actually wanting to travel there. I now have been there, however, and can feel the life and colour of India through writing about it much more effectively. What I’m really saying, I suppose, is that to enjoy books about different places, times, cultures, you do not actually have to have been there.

I enjoyed the Little House books for many years – and probably would still do so now if they weren’t in a box somewhere in the attic with many of my other favourites from childhood (Enid Blyton, What Katy Did etc). While at secondary school I found a book in the library: These Is My Words (Nancy Turner, 1999) which I read several times. It is now one of my favourite books and, I feel, shockingly overlooked. I now have my own copy, and I have lent it to perhaps six or seven different people, all of whom were completely captured by the spirit and passion of the story. It is the diary of a young girl – Sarah Agnes Prine – whose family have been living in the West since she can remember. Her father decides to move back East but on the way misfortune strikes. To say much more would to be giving away the story, but I think what makes it for me are the two main characters – Sarah and the man who appears in her life over and over again, Captain Jack. Sarah is an incredibly resilient, strong and humorous woman and I think there is something about her that I want to be. Captain Jack is one of the most compelling male characters I’ve ever read; discussing the book with a friend we decided a film should be made of this book starring Hugh Jackman as the Captain! Apparently there are sequels to this book, although I am still trying to get hold of copies.

The latest of my adventures in the West has been quite different. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913) is the second book she wrote, and the first where she felt ‘This was the first time I walked off on my own feet – everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired.’ It is the first book by her which I have read, and despite my initial uncertainty it completely drew me in. It centres around a Swedish family living in the West and struggling to make the land pay. As the story opens we are shown Alexandra, the eldest of four, being left the responsibility of the farm by her dying father who has ‘spent his first five years on the Divide getting into debt, and the last six getting out’. The novel makes several skips of time, focussing eventually on a time twenty years later when Alexandra has made the farm prosperous and her youngest brother, Emil, is deciding how to make his way in the world. Alexandra, like Sarah Prine, is resilient and strong, but she does not have Sarah’s spark of brilliance and fire. This does not make her any less likeable; her deep attachment to the land and the steadiness of her character and opinions also make us sympathetic. Like many stories centring around life in the West, the book is marked with tragedy but also with hope. The prose itself is sparkling and expressive; Cather is definitely on my ‘to read more of’ list.