“His name was Javert and he was a policeman”

Though I have the privilege of an academic background, I found many of the texts that were read in this course to be intimidating. Many discussed issues in a language that I found inaccessible, or made references to theories that I had never heard of. As I continued in the course, this feeling never really subsided; I must have read the word “hegemony” a hundred times, and each time, I needed to google it.

This was a shame, because I could tell that I was missing something in the readings: that the assigned writers were tackling important, relevant issues. I desperately wanted to understand. I began to wonder if there was another way of framing this information. It was when reading Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended” lecture on biopower that the seed of this project germinated. I kept wondering how Victor Hugo, who was infamously preoccupied with the Parisian sewer system, would have reacted to these ideas. The more I thought about biopower in the context of Les Misérables’ depiction of the sewer system, the more it stuck, and the more confident about the assigned reading I felt.

Victor Hugo was an intensely political writer; at its publication Les Misérables “set the parliamentary agenda for 1862”, (Robb 381). I began to wonder if I could somehow use the text as a teaching tool, if I could produce something that might model how people might use a work of fiction to teach. I have had the ambition for some time to translate the novel, and I wondered if I could create a teaching text through translation, by annotating specific passages with information. Ideally, the text would illuminate the concept and vice versa. The information would “be disguised as fiction” which would be less intimidating to people without academic training.

I decided that, though Hugo’s text was undoubtably relevant to discussions of biopower, it had even greater resonances with current discussion on the role of the police in society. As Graham Robb says:

If a single idea can be extracted from the whole [of Les Misérables], it is that persistent criminals are a product of the criminal justice system, a human and therefore monstrous creation; that the burden of guilt lies with society and that the rational reform of institutions should take precedence over the punishment of individuals. (381)

The character that most embodies the arguments made by Hugo about the limits of policing is Javert, so I chose to translate the chapter in which he was introduced (Volume One, Book 5, Chapter 5 “Faint Lightning on the Horizon”).

Originally, this project’s annotations focused more directly on aspects and processes of translation (and some of these do still remain). However, I was unsatisfied with this direction: it seemed to me that it was veering too far into literary studies. I wanted to keep it relevant to real world problems in the same way that the course readings we had read were relevant to real world problems. I restructured my annotations so that they worked thematically, focusing less on how the text had been created and more on the issues that certain passages brought to mind. As a result, the process of translation is less foregrounded in the end result then it was in my project proposal.

As I worked, I realized that this project had an overlap with another of the options for our final project. It occurred to me that, as each of the “major annotations” was themed around an issue relating to policing or crime, I could easily create an informal syllabus by simply including reading recommendations. I also decided to incorporate key terms that people could use as a starting point to guide their own research and questions to prompt reflection. I decided to keep these questions generic; you will likewise doubtlessly notice that most of the annotations are relatively simple introductions to the topics contained within them. I also decided to adopt a less formal, academic tone as I wrote.

I made these choices for two reasons: first, I wanted to keep this project “friendly” to people of all knowledge ranges, especially to the target audience of people who had never considered or heard of these issues before. If people read the blurb and decided that they were interested in more detailed information, they could access one of the other resources highlighted in the annotation. Secondly, though each blurb is relatively short, the cumulative effect of the blurbs is long, and I didn’t want people to be overwhelmed with information. Unlike a traditional syllabus, where information is spread out over weeks, a chapter of fiction is consumed relatively quickly, and it was important to me that the framing device not be lost, as I consider it one of the key pedagogical benefits of the project. The project is intended as an introduction to the issue, not as a “deep dive”, though the potential to learn more is always there. It is my hope that this project is an inspiration for how topics in Cultural Studies may be introduced accessibly, and how we might use fiction in service of our pedagogical goals.

Read the Translation →