In Victor Hugo’s short novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man, black humor, namely humor about serious, unpleasant, or painful situations, appears frequently on the day before execution. With its satirical nature, black humor highlights the gravity within absurdity, such as the speaker’s apathy towards the serious topic of his or her joke. Hence, black humor serves to evince an apathetic attitude, which, if uttered in any other form of discourse, would lead to a contradiction between form and content. Besides, since most cases of black humor in this novel are words that belittle or ignore death, black humor draws attention to the gravity of death and the death penalty, which is too grand to be entirely depicted by simple emphasis. By exposing social indifference towards the two issues, death and the death penalty, and revealing the attention these two issues deserve, black humor proves the irrationality of the death penalty and corroborates Hugo’s plea to abolish capital punishment. Ultimately, black humor becomes more than a risible form of disclosure but a literary device that proves otherwise unverifiable attitudes and reveals immeasurable significance.
Essentially, black humor is the only feasible form of discourse for Hugo to reveal the 18th century French society’s indifference to death and death penalty in this novel.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “indifference” means lack of interest, concern or sympathy. Thus, being indifferent to an issue usually means not talking about, thinking of, or recreating to the issue. How, then, can one substantiate a character’s indifference without recourse to his or her words, thoughts, or behavior? Nonetheless, if an issue is simply omitted from the novel, it is improbable that the readers will notice the conspicuous absence of attention to this issue. Even worse, in the case where almost all characters are apathetic to the same issue, it is unworkable to reflect the indifference of some characters by having others repetitively mentioning that issue. Hugo purposely inserts black humor into his characters’ language so as to slow down the reading speed with such a cause of laughter, draw the readers’ attention with its absurdity, and push them to reflect on the pieces of black humor. Spending more time reflecting on the black humor, readers will then notice the whole society’s indifference to death and the author’s implicit accusation against capital punishment. In such a way, black humor implicitly proves a proposition which would be led to deadlock by any other type of discourse. Through the condemned man’s interpretation of a surveyor’s unwitting gesture, Hugo first indicates that the general public is uncaring about the convicts and unaware of their physical or mental agony of imprisonment and awaiting decapitation. According to the narrator, the surveyor signals, “You will not enjoy it [the improved prison]; what a pity!” (Hugo 59). Ludicrously, the surveyor’s pity comes from the condemned man’s inability to enjoy the renewed prison rather than from the impending penalty, and he does not realize that, regardless of the renovation, staying in a prison could never be enjoyable to anyone.The fact that even the individuals who have the chance to meet and talk to the prisoners in person, such as the surveyor, are uncaring suggests that other people, who don’t even have the chance to know the prisoners, are ignorant about the condition of prisoners, and are thus thoughtless of the implications of capital punishment. Therefore, the people who propose capital punishment, whether acquainted with prisoners or not, would not be conscious of the excruciation of imprisonment and execution, and thus are unwarranted to claim the necessity or even the benevolence of such punishment whose effects are unknown to them.
If the society is indifferent to death and death penalty, then how can this penalty that makes no difference to the public produce any of the edifying effects it claims to have? Some eerie words of a gendarme suggest that capital punishment not only produces no edifying effect but even demoralizes people by deadening their feelings and compassion. The gendarme who habitually buys lottery tickets states, “You must be dead for my numbers to be lucky” when the narrator attempts to escape (Hugo 62). Rather than acting in the interest of justice, the gendarme wishes the criminal death for the sake of his own fortune. Since the gendarme shows no sense of justice, he either has already lost this admirable quality, or has never attained it. In either case, capital punishment, an institution with which the gendarme is closely involved, has not produced the educational effect it asserts, since it can’t even instill a sense of justice, which is the essence of the whole judicial system; worse still, the gendarme may even have been demoralized, in the sense that he may have once had a sense of justice but now lost it. Besides, the gendarme expects to benefit from the beheading of the condemned man, who is almost a stranger to him.Such a will on the part of the gendarme disrespects another human’s life and death, and the manifestation of this will thus hints at the absence of humaneness. Therefore, the gendarme’s indifference to the condemned man’s life and death and disregard for the penalty, demonstrated by his black humor, prove capital punishment to be merely a ruthless act with no edifying effect.
Moreover, in the odd dialogue between the bailiff and the condemned man, Hugo implies that indifference can even lead to injustice in the justice system:
“Am I not unfortunate? All my tobacco is lost!”
“I am losing more than you,” I replied, smiling.
[…]
“More than I! That is easy to
say! But no tobacco all the way to Paris! It’s dreadful!” (Hugo 46).
It is bizarre that the bailiff who encounters nothing but a mishap is crying whereas the doomed man whose execution is just around the corner is smiling and calmly using commas in his statement, as if stating an irrelevant matter of fact. The exclamation marks and the question mark not only express the bailiff’s distress but also indicate that the bailiff is immersed in his own affairs. In other words, though his duty demands him to be particularly attentive to the condemned man, the bailiff still cares more about himself and does not reflect on the condemned man’s words. The bailiff’s uncaring attitude toward the condemned man thus involves not only indifference but also dereliction of duty.If we accept Plato’s definition of justice, mentioned in Book IV of Republic, which claims that “justice is doing one’s own job,” then the bailiff, a clerk of the justice system, is injustice. In that case, the decisions made by clerks of the justice system,such as death sentences, may also be unjust.
While all the cases of black humor mentioned above implicitly prove people’s indifference to death and death penalty, there is still a point when Hugo uses black humor to somehow explicitly criticize capital punishment for its prevalence. After the visit of the surveyor, the condemned man writes “I thought he was going to tease me, as one might tease a young bride on her wedding-night” (Hugo 59). It seems bizarre at first that the hapless condemned man relates himself to a mirthful young bride. When in fact, by comparing himself to a young bride and comparing his execution later that day to a wedding-night, the condemned man lampoons that capital punishment is so commonly practiced in the 18th century that it has become a convention just like the medieval tradition of teasing the bride on the wedding night. This derisive analogy further proves that the wrongful death penalty is not an insignificant rare case but an epidemic.
Regardless of the society’s indifference to death, dominant in the novel, Hugo utilizes black humor to reveal that death actually deserves the omitted attention. Though it is widely accepted that death is important to everyone’s life, it is still hard to scale the importance. Even if we use all our words to emphasize the magnitude of death, we can only achieve pompous talk rather than a convincing proof. However, black humor, with its absurdity, can serve as a foil to the significance of death.For example,some characters compare death to trivial things, such as loss of tobacco and winning lottery numbers, and then exaggerate the trifles. Such comparisons between death and trifles are considered to be cases of black humor because they express ridiculous viewpoints opposed to the serious social ethics that claim death to be non-trivial. As a result, these cases of black humor evoke objections to these preposterous views in the reader, and satirically lead the readers to perceive the ineffable significance of death and thus the severity of death penalty.
Interestingly, black humor draws the readers’attention and prevents them from neglecting or being indifferent to death and capital punishment by revealing the 18th century French people’s indifference to the same issues. When the condemned man rambles on about the possible manners in which he might be executed, he suddenly exclaims,“Ah! my hair will turn white before my head falls!” (Hugo 55). By saying “my head falls”instead of “I die,” the condemned man refers to his head as if it is an unrelated object whose falling leaves nothing else than a point on the timeline.However, the falling of his head actually mark the termination of the condemned man’s own life. The condemned man’s apparently uncaring attitude towards his death and worry about his aging appearance seems ridiculous and contrary to social ethics since life and death are usually considered the first priority. This form of gallows humor, once noticed by the readers, would force the readers to ponder over the contradiction and then compare their values and ethics with the condemned man’s, leading the readers to conclude that death shall be way more important than any other thing in life and thus shall be always on one’s mind.
Through the fiction The Last Day of a Condemned Man, black humor proves capital punishment to be an unwarranted, unedifying, even unjust, yet prevalent act so as to support Hugo’s plea to abrogate death penalty. Additionally, black humor achieves the goal of revealing an almost unspeakable social indifference towards death, and the goal of proving that death has such an indescribable significance that it deserves everyone’s consideration. Hence, black humor can be developed into a versatile literary technique that can produce hardly achievable effects in literary works.
Works Cited
Hugo, Victor.The Last Day of a Condemned Man. Arabella Ward. David Dow. Dover Publications, 2009. Print.
