 |
| The Count of Monte Cristo |
Alexandre Dumas understood something that separates great popular fiction from competent popular fiction: the reader's desire for justice is not the same as the reader's desire for virtue, and the most satisfying stories are the ones that know the difference. The Count of Monte Cristo is, among many other things, the great novel of righteous rage — the fantasy of the wrongfully punished man who returns, at last, with infinite patience and infinite resources.
Edmond Dantès is young, gifted, about to be happily married, and entirely blind to the envy accumulating around him. Three men, each with their own mean motive, conspire to have him imprisoned in the Château d'If, a fortress from which no one emerges. He enters the darkness as a man. What eventually leaves it is something more terrible.
The years in the Château are not wasted. Abbé Faria, a fellow prisoner who tunnels into Dantès's cell by accident, becomes teacher, father figure, and ultimately the means of his escape. Through Faria, Dantès acquires not only knowledge of a buried treasure but a different way of seeing the world — longer-sighted, more patient, more capable of design. When he finally breaks free, he has seventeen years of grievance and the resources to address every one of them.
The Count of Monte Cristo — the identity Dantès constructs for himself — is one of fiction's great reinventions. He moves through Parisian society as an alien intelligence: impossibly wealthy, seemingly omniscient, capable of deploying money, information, and social connection with a precision that suggests he has been planning for everything, which he has. Watching the destruction of Fernand de Morcerf, Danglars, and Villefort unfold — each one undone by his own history, each one believing until nearly the end that he has merely been unlucky — is one of the great pleasures of nineteenth-century fiction.
What elevates the novel beyond pure revenge fantasy is Dantès's growing unease with his own operation. He has appointed himself an instrument of Providence, but as the plan advances, the collateral damage becomes harder to ignore. Innocents are caught in trajectories he set in motion. The question of whether his justice is actually justice, or whether it is merely his pain given elaborate expression, surfaces with genuine moral weight.
Dumas wrote fast, published in serial installments, and is sometimes accused of excess for it. The excess, in this particular case, is the point. Monte Cristo is not a restrained novel because Dantès is not a restrained man. Everything is proportional to the injury, which was enormous, and the response, which is magnificent.
Post a Comment