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Thursday, September 14, 2006
The Count of Monte Cristo
Daddy Dumas’s enormous novel is not at all what you think it is. You have not read it. You have, perhaps, seen the movie adaptations, the TV serials, maybe the comic book version. You have a sense of the story from hearsay or reputation. These, believe me, do nothing to capture the range, scale, detail, specificity and above all the sheer, brute, glorious interminability of the actual novel.
It is, you see, very long. Serialised first between August 1844 and January 1846 in the Journal des Débats it was then issued in an eighteen-volume edition. It’s available in two very-fat, close-printed Livre de Poche volumes, or in one large format, tiny print 1276-page Penguin translation. The story fills these pages by a combination of monstrous deferral of the expected revenges, and a variety of digressions; but fill it, it does.
This is the bit you’ve heard of: Edmond Dantés, a virtuous sailor, gets betrayed by three acquaintances when he docks at Marseilles. One of the subordinate officers on the ship, called Danglars, is merely jealous of Dantés’ preferment at the hands of the ship’s owner, Morel. A Catalan called Fernand loves Dantés’ fiancée, the beautiful Mercedes, and wants Edmond out of the way in order to be able to press his own suit. A third individual, Caderousse, has less concrete reasons for wishing Dantés harm, but he gets drunk and goes along with the others. Their plan is simple: they write a letter to the local Crown Prosecutor denouncing Dantés as a Bonapartist (this, in January 1815, is a state crime). The local Prosecutor, Villefort, in order to protect his father – who really is a Bonapartist – goes along with this charge, though he knows it baseless, and commits innocent Dantés to the terrible Chateau D’If. There Dantés rots in a dark cell for fourteen years. During his incarceration Dantés swears a great oath of revenge on those whom have betrayed him.
In prison he befriends the occupant of the adjacent cell, an Abbé who happens to know the location of an enormous treasure, and who has dug a tunnel between the two cells as part of a long-drawn-out escape attempt. But the Abbé is an old man, and he dies. Dantés waits until the corpse has been tied into a sack prior to burial, creeps into the cell and substitutes himself for the old man’s corpse. The sack is thrown into the sea, but Dantés gets free, swims to a nearby island, is taken on as a crewman by a smugglers’ craft, locates the treasure on the uninhabited island of Monte Cristo and becomes impossibly wealthy.
Believe me, the story has barely begun by this point (we’re about 250 pages into the Penguin edition: the best part of a thousand pages still to go). Most of that textual bulk narrates events in Paris. Now going under the assumed name of the Count of Monte Cristo (and sometimes under other aliases, including ‘Sinbad the Sailor’, ‘Abbé Busoni’ and ‘Lord Wilmore’) he seeks out his accusers. Although one of them, Caderousse, is still bumbling along in the humble station in which all the main characters began the novel, the others, rather improbably, have climbed the ladder of social station. Danglars has become one of the wealthiest speculators and bankers in Paris. Fernand, who now calls himself ‘Morcerf’, has married Mercedes and somehow become one of the wealthiest and most powerful politicians in France. Villefort has become the leading Parisian Crown Prosector.
They all surely deserve the revenge Dantés is plotting. But despite the fact that Dumas, having established various opportunities, and having stressed the Count’s almost supernatural abilities of disguise and manipulation, could bring about that consummation as soon as he likes, he delays the process. Delay is the narrative watchword. Monte Cristo goes to amazing lengths not to avenge himself directly, by (for instance) killing his betrayers with his own hands: instead he arranges situations, via complex machination, in which his betrayers become hoist, as the cliché has it, on their own evil petards. If you can have an evil petard. Which, now that I come to think of it, I doubt.
Monte Cristo: Christ Mountain. Dantés takes his title derives from the Mediterranean island (an actual place) on which his treasure had been hidden; but the nobs of Parisian high-society don’t know this. ‘Perhaps he comes from the Holy Land,’ one high-born Parisian speculates: ‘one of his ancestors might have owned Calvary, just as the Montemarts did the Dead Sea’ [The Count of Monte Cristo, 451]. Calvary figures on the Count’s concocted Coat of Arms: ‘une montagne d’or posant sur une mer d’azur, avec une croix de gueules au chef, ce que pouvait aussi bien être une allusion à son nom rappelant le Calvaire, que la passion de Notre-Seigneur a fait une montagne plus précieuse que l’or’ [Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, II: 352]. The Count himself, as his messianic fantasies of God-directed revenge swell larger and larger, does not shy away from identifying himself with Christ: ‘moi, trahi, assassiné, jeté aussi dans une tombe, je suis sorti de cette tombe par la grace de Dieu, je dois à Dieu de me venger’ (I have also been betrayed, assassinated, thrown into a tomb, I have escaped this tomb by the grace of God and I owe it to God to revenge myself!’) [Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, II:400]. Dumas underlines the almost blasphemous nature of this frame of mind on several occasions.
I think the references to Calvary are a red-herring. I think the novel works symbolically around another Christ-mountain, and the name of that mountain is Purgatory. There’s a good reason, I think, why Dantés is called Dantés. The mountain that the novel climbs (the mountain, in fact, that the novel constitutes) is not the road to death, but the road after death. After his prison experience Dantés is unrecognisable to everybody who knew him before; a man of skeletal gauntness (a gauntness exacerbated by a pretty unrestrained opium habit) and severity. He strikes those he meets as undead, cursed (‘“he is a vampire!” “Laugh if you wish. That was precisely the opinion of Countess G—.”’ 453); he is ‘some kind of Byronic figure, branded by fate’s dread seal’ [478]. The many high society occasions, dinners, balls and other brouhahas through which he travels becoming illuminated by his presence as barren and void.
Indeed the book as a whole tropes the world and especially polite Parisian society as death – as the underworld. This explains, I think, a number of curious features in the novel, and I’ll give you a for-example. During his time in Paris Dantés refuses to eat anything in anybody’s house, declining all hospitality, even so much as (as Mercedes, ventriloquising Persephone, observes) ‘a pomegranate seed’ [p.768]. At one point we’re offered the explanation that he doesn’t wish to compromise his revenge by becoming obliged to anybody [‘Monsieur de Monte Cristo is almost a man of the East and an Oriental; in order not to interfere with his freedom to take revenge he never eats or drinks in his enemy’s house’, 972]; but this doesn’t ring entirely true. Or rather, there is a deeper sense in which this explanation is true; that the whole of our world is a ‘house’ in which the Count does not wish to sup. He is travelling through. This is an epic novel that has been taken over by (as The Waste Land is an epic poem taken over by) the visit to Hades. The subject keeps reasserting itself in the novel. It’s one of the text’s unavoidables (‘“Again this idea of death, Madame!” said Villefort; p.780).
The novel balances a logic of equivalences, in part because it is in the nature of revenge to require such equivalences. In the sequence ‘You wrong me, I revenge myself upon you’ there is an inescapable need for the latter quantity needs to balance-out the former. That, in a sense, is what revenge means. At one point Monte Cristo has the following conversation with Mercedes:
’Yes, Madame, I have suffered a great deal,’ he said.
‘But are you happy now?’
‘Yes, of course,’ the Count replied. ‘Nobody hears me complain.’
‘And does your present happiness calm your soul?’
‘My present happiness equals my past misery,’ said the Count. [p.771]
The odd precision of this last statement expresses the restrictiveness of the logic of revenge, which must perforce parse unlikenesses (lets say: misery, happiness) into an equivalence. In a way this captures the symbolic or thematic economy at the heart of the novel, except to say that all these equivalences are subordinated to a prior one: crime and death. ’There is no crime in my house,’ Villefort frantically declares, trying (against all the facts) to assure himself of this innocence.
Do you hear me: I do not want there to be a crime in my house because when crime enters somewhere, it is like death, it does not come alone. [p.894]
But there is crime in his house, of course; his whole house is founded upon his crime, and atonement – death – is inevitable. Crime equals death in the symbolic logic of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo. But of the four wrongdoers who so blighted Dantés’ life, only one, the ruffian Caderousse, dies a shameful death, and then only because he compounds his guilt with a number of other terrible crimes. All the other guilty parties, whether they die at the end of the novel or not, are offered some form of redemption. Even Cristo himself, at the very end of the novel, feels the curse of his own deadness rise from him. ‘God who roused me against my enemies and gave me victory, God, I can see, does not wish my victory to end with that regret. I wished to punish myself. But God wants to pardon me’ [1241].
This post-mortem narrative, in other words, spirals painfully and slowly upwards. The very last sentence in the novel articulates resignation to Divine in a way that also expresses the principle behind the ‘make-em-wait’ deferral-as-plot logic of so many nineteenth-century novels: ‘“My dearest,” said Valentine, “has the Count not just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words – ‘wait’ and ‘hope’?”’ [1243].
The book enacts what it describes, and what it describes is just how long-drawn-out and effortful the journey must be from peripeteia to resolution: from setback to triumph. A great many things must be gone through, a whole lot of educative suffering. The Bildung that turns naivety to the ripest form of experience cannot be accomplished overnight. There is a reason why Mt Purgatory is not a hillock; and it’s the same reason why Le Comte de Monte-Cristo is so very lengthy.
Now, to call the novel a fictive Purgatory sounds merely insulting, I know: as if it is an onerous duty that must be strenuously worked through before greater pleasures can be enjoyed. But I don’t mean the phrase in this sense. Indeed, part of the point of the book, and one of the ways it remains true to Dante’s poem, is that working one’s way up Purgatory is not seen as a strenuous or pointless task, not merely filling time until eventually one can run gasping into Paradise. On the contrary, working away at whatever Purgatorial task one has been allotted is a joyful business for Dante Aligheri’s souls; it is embodying and aligning oneself with God’s will. Similarly there is something joyful in the seeming-interminability of the textual mountain that Dumas Père built. Working your way up the slopes of the novel, though not a rapid or necessarily easy progress, is an intensely satisfying, and even a purging journey.
Comments
Thanks for this, Adam. Not many people argue for Dumas nowadays, and it’s good to know that little Stephen might’ve stayed true to the “figure of that dark avenger” after all.