Hence the hymns to Progress issuing as if from the choir loft to temper the lesson of barbarity, greed, and fatuous ignorance being read and absorbed below. Hence also that passion for instruction, for the imparting of factual knowledge that impels him, for instance, to write twenty-two pages on argot, the pretext being the introduction of the street m?me, Gavroche. The descent of Jean Valjean into the Parisian sewer system excuses a four-page essay called “The Intestine of Leviathan,” which is full of information and meritorious ideas, for example on the advantages for the municipality of using human excrement as fertilizer—an anticipation of today’s ecological thinking that unfortunately still remains “only” an idea. Hugo was an extremely intelligent and far-sighted man, and to know this of himself was to feel the duty of sharing. He has an obligation, fired by public spirit, to tell us the history of the Bernardine Order of nuns (Cosette is being harbored in the convent), to explain which Parisian cemeteries are disaffected and which are still in use (Jean Valjean, alias Monsieur Fauchelevent, is about to be buried alive), even to leap ahead to analyze the revolution of 1848, which took place nine years after the events we are reading about.
His ambition to get everything in, to make this book the Book, reflected a kind of evangelical zeal which he had in common with most of the serious novelists of his century. One thinks of Balzac’s excursus on the paper industry (Les illusions perdues), of Tolstoy on Pierre’s Freemasonry, of Dostoievsky on the Russian monk, of Manzoni on St. Charles Borromeo and on the daily mortality figures of the great plague of 1630 in Milan. Melville on whaling or George Eliot on the discoveries of Bichat in the field of medical pathology. For our own century, we may think of Proust on Venice, on Vermeer, on the newly introduced telephone system, but more emphatically, perhaps, of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, which he, too, aspired to make the Book embracing the whole of human history and its tongues in a perfect spiralling form. Though public spirit as an animating force was no longer evident (in fact the reverse) in either Joyce or Proust, the ambition to produce a single compendious sacred writing survived, and we may even find it today in an author like Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow).
Of course not all novels were so informative; one reminds oneself of Jane Austen, who is to the novel as Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were to The Prelude. One must remember, too, that the novel of travel and exploration was a popular species by itself catering to a growing thirst for information: Marryat, Melville, Pierre Loti, Conrad were sailor novelists—a new literary type. Some of these tended toward the encyclopedic (Moby Dick), while the fictions of Conrad, on the other hand, went so far in the direction of brevity and concentration that they were closer to the tale than to the novel. Yet the element of vouched-for authenticity that seemed to be demanded of the sea story (no doubt because of the marvels of the deep it reported, like the Ancient Mariner, to those who stayed home) brought it close to the memoir, to such a piece of autobiography as Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. Typically, the line between Melville’s Typee (fact) and his Omoo (fiction) is hard to perceive. With scientific advances, the factual and the fabulous seemed to draw together and each to guarantee the other—stranger than fiction. The Voyage of the Beagle was a kind of adventure story. Waterways and landways “opened up” fresh territory, and geography, more and more, as with Huck Finn’s raft and Kurtz’s up-river station, was understood as a metaphor for the dark continent of the human heart. At the same time, like the National Geographic, this literature was educational. Kim, a bestseller, was boy’s book, romance, Bildungsroman, and dry-as-dust dispenser of ethnographical lore.