Part I, Book 2, Chapter 8
The Deep and the Dark
It’s here! Our first true digression chapter! Chapter 8, “The Deep and the Dark,” features no introduced characters and has no bearing on the plot, but it does continue Hugo’s theme of casting light on those most forgotten by society.
The chapter depicts an unnamed prisoner—presumably one of Valjean’s comrades—who falls overboard into the sea and drowns—both his fall and his death go completely unnoticed by his captors and by the rest of the world. His pleas (to his fellow men aboard the ship, to nature, to God) go unheard.
“The sea is the inexorable social darkness into which the penal system casts its damned,” Hugo writes; it’s gutting to be shown that the most vulnerable people, used for their labor, are considered anonymous and disposable—essentially subhuman. It is easy to think that we have evolved since Hugo wrote this, but just last year my state, one of the most liberal in the country, failed to ban forced prison labor, thus continuing the long history of penal labor in the US alone.
The line I quoted above also reminded me of the countless victims of the Middle Passage in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade (and of Killmonger’s line in Black Panther, “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors“)—a sober reminder that we have no record of all the lives in history cast into wretchedness and lost in the ocean. I also thought about the many laborers treated essentially as slaves in the modern-day unregulated fishing industry who are abused and often cast aboard at sea.
So for all the specificity of this chapter, Hugo’s writing feels horribly universal; his depiction of an unknown soul cast overboard and drowned in the cold depths of the ocean could apply to essentially any era of human history, including today.
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