The Count of Monte Cristo revisited

I read the Count of Monte Cristo on the plane ride over--I found out the version I first read and loved years ago was the abridged version, and, well, abridged just ain't how I roll.

Besides, I wanted to bring only a single book that would last my whole vacation, and a 1,500 page book seemed to fit the bill.

Only just barely, though--Dumas's classic just might be the only 1,500-page page-turner in the history of humanity. When I was battling insomnia on the 8-odd-hour flight over the Atlantic (after another 4-hour flight over the US), it wasn't the crappy selection of in-flight movies that kept me sane, but the first third of the Count of Monte Cristo. I finished the tome entire just 3 days after I got back.

Of course, there were differences between this reading and the last one--and not just the addition of another 700 pages. I only had a H.S. diploma the first time; now I have a graduate degree, and I can clearly see that this book has more than enough Orientalism to make Edward Sa'id uncomfortable. The East in this novel is constantly exotic, abnormal, feminized, and othered (as represented by the Greek princess-turned-bondwoman Haydee), something that can only be properly cared for and handled by the masculine, Western Frenchman Edmond Dantes. The novel's constant references to The Arabian Nights likewise keeps the Orientalism thoroughly centered in the novel's action.

But then, the novel is not just Arabian Nights-esque in content, but also in structure--there are stories within stories within stories, intertwining and threading together like an Arabain prayer rug, forming a single glorious tapestry as multiple different genres are brought into conversation. This is Mikael Bakhtin's "diologic imagination" in play, wherein, according to Bakhtin, a novel's entire function is to bring multiple genres, alien utterances, and foreign languages into a dialogue--not subordinating them into a single discourse as in poetry (according to Bakhtin), but rather allowing them all to remain outside.

The Count of Monte Cristo, I'm willing to argue, performs this novelistic dialogic admirably, and may in fact be its exemplar par excellence--Edmond's quest for vengeance, after all, does not seek to reify the dominant power structure, but to destabilize it. The Count is an agent of chaos wherever he enters, lulling people into a sense of false security as to his manners and intentions, even as he turns them all inside-out. Even Haydee's mission is to bring down and wreck vengeance on a noble-man, not restore him.

For that matter, Bakhtin's "Carnivalesque" is likewise at play in this novel--the Carnival in Rome plays a central role in the novel's plot, after all, and like Dante's own quest for revenge, the role of Bakhtin's "Carnivalesque" is to subvert the dominant hierarchy, to make high things low and low things high through mockery, degradation, blood-letting, humbling, and humiliation. All of these goals Dantes likewise pursues--and like the Carnival, the point of this degradation is not to destroy, but to allow life to return to the soil to renew itself. Likweise, Dante's quest ultimately becomes not just vindictive, but redemptive, and hence rejuvenating, not just for his antagonists, or even the bystanders, but also for himself.

Which brings me to the novel's last line: "has not the count just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words--'Wait and hope'?" When I first read that ending years ago, I just thought it was a clever line, as good as any with which to finish a story. But now I've had just enough life experience, and I'm just old enough, to wonder if perhaps "Wait and hope" isn't in fact the sum of human wisdom in truth.