Just Get to the Story ... Skip the Forward and Introduction

Remember in public speaking, the instructor chanted "first you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, then you remind them what you told them." Maybe that is just fine in oral instructions, but it is tedious and falsely page-filling in a novella. Victor Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man was published in 1832, with memories still fresh from the French Revolution and the guillotine used much more broadly. Hugo could picket in front of state capitals or on the eve of executions today. He believed (1) society made the criminal what he is and could not blame anything else for his falling into a life of crime when all other opportunities were cut off and (2) more than the criminal suffered by his death, namely his family. Hence, there was no moral authority for capital punishment by the state.

If his wasn't so blatantly stated in both the interpretive foreword and by Hugo himself in his introduction, TLDOACM seems more neutral -- depicting the depravity of the inmates, the intentional distancing of surviving family members of the convicted. Because he never divulges the crime, Hugo leaves open to interpretation whether this incarceration and verdict was a political travesty/vendetta or just punishment for a violation of the sacred norms of society. Had it been disclosed, a lot of Hugo's argument would have been weakened. He argues against all facts, a charge he levels against his perceived biases in those who favor capital punishment.

All in all, an A.

Keeping in my French lit vein, I watched an "art house" movie last night, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Set in China during the worst of the reign of Chairman Mao, it is a Jules and Jim kind of story of two young men, sent to remote mountains to be reeducated from their bourgeois ways. Instead they influence the village with their violin music, knowledge of dentistry and love of French literature. They take on the education of a teenage girl, the granddaughter of the local tailor. All in French and Chinese, the scenery is beautiful, the dialogue succinct and the tension precisely toned. A wonderful movie about a horrible time in a nation I still find without allure.