Brickclub 2.1.5 âThe quid obscurum of battlesâ
Itâs hard to talk clearly about a chapter about muddle.
- The descriptions of the uniforms remind me of The Year 1817 in terms of being a solid block of text throwing a lot of images at us of past things that were in living memory at the time this was written and are impossibly distant now. Itâs effective in the same way: as an overwhelmingly complicated image that comes at you all at once.
- Hugoâs musings on the variations in types of mud reminds me of the sewer digression, which feels very present here. His mention of how slight differences in the way soil reacts to water cause more troops to be needed and the way blood flows illogically is yet more Chaos Theory. Valjean will fall afoul of this mud much more viscerally laterâwhich brings up the visual metaphor raised last chapter of an army as a strong manâs body.
- I love the point that the middle of battle has no narrative. Writers and historians will later use the beginning and end form it into narrative, but that narrative will always be somewhat false. It could really have gone the other way, and there is at least as much truth in that shifting uncertainty as there is in the narrative that cements around explaining whatever the ending was. Itâs part of the conversation of Providence vs. Fatality, which @fremedonâ points out is intrinsic to how Hugo talks about destiny as described in the preface: everything is the push and pull between the two, and either one can always rule the day.
This brings up a lot about the structure of stories for me, and of this story in particular. Les Mis does in fact have a long and chaotic middle, and youâd be very excused for not having any idea where it was going while you were reading it. And more importantly, it has a very strange ending.
That the chaos of the middle is important in itself, and the ending doesnât impose meaning on that chaos, perhaps expresses some of the paradox of this text. Les Mis has the wrong ending: the heroes were heroic (and necessarily brutal, but not less heroic) and then they were massacred, the protagonist got confused and let a saint die whom he might have saved, the tide of bourgeois conservatism covered over everything again, and if any lessons were learned, we sure didnât see much about it.
And you can go back over the text, as the musical does at least a little, as many people do, as I used to do before I understood the text better, and believe that the ending of the story expresses its theme: that Revolution was maybe a step too far, that Marius and Cosette lived happily ever after, that Hugoâs ultimate proposal for humanityâs betterment is some middle road.
And itâs not. Its Revolution, as he says both explicitly and symbolically many times over.
But if you tend to believe the endings of things over their middles, you might miss that. The narrative you get if you draw a smooth line from the gentle priest at the beginning to the bourgeois happy ending is a lie. Much of the truth of the book is found in the obscurity of the middle.
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