By having the ideal, that is God, as the generator instead of the idea, we can see that it fulfils the same function as nature. The idea engenders the characters, the characters produce the drama, and this is, in effect, the law of art. The preface would have begun like this: 'This book has been composed from the inside out. When the book was finished, Hugo tried - and failed - to write a preface. 'There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell - not even on the background.' Les Misérables begins with a digression from a digression (thus resembling Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which a few years earlier had begun with a digression, too.) Here, at the start, Hugo was trying to set up a narrative convention, derived from the novel's deep theory. The beginning, it turns out, is not a beginning at all. And this is visible immediately: it's visible, to the perturbed reader, in the second of this novel's many sentences. The size was the centre of Hugo's discovery in the art of the novel.

To describe his work in progress, he jotted down a list of hyperbolic adjectives: 'Astounding, extraordinary, surprising, superhuman, supernatural, unheard of, savage, sinister, formidable, gigantic, savage, colossal, monstrous, deformed, disturbed, electrifying, lugubrious, funereal, hideous, terrifying, shadowy, mysterious, fantastic, nocturnal, crepuscular.' This megalomania was a conscious choice on Hugo's part. And the most obvious transformation Victor Hugo effects in the novel's form is sheer gargantuan size.

Victor hugo's miserables