Brick!club 12/19/13 12/20/13 Les Miserables 4.10.1, 4.10.2
Also, Hugo's snittiness about the bourgeoisie always cracks me up. They're not even a class! they're a kind of furniture! OPINIONATED FURNITURE!
(and thus, one might suggest, perfect material for barricades. But I'm pretty sure Hugo's not going that direction, even though the inclusion of the middle classes is really essential and now I'M digressing, and I have SO MANY CHAPTERS TO GO.)
4.10.2- The Essential Question
I'm mostly not going to grapple with the litany of historical incidents here, except to point out that it's a PERFECT example of why Hugo's historical/literary parallels have to be taken with a BIG grain of salt regarding his actual intentions-- he clearly has some Very Different Ideas about SOME people than a modern reader might (Colombus? WHAT COLOMBUS DID FOR AMERICA?!? Turn it into a genocidal slavescape?!? THAT makes revolt against him wrong ? I know I know it's the 19th century, teachings on the subject were...different, but ..?? This is sounding an awful lot like the whole ' slaves got exposed to Christianity so they should be THANKFUL' stance and I. No. No that is not how it works, okay.
Given the other names I DO recognize here I'm gonna guess that Hugo and I would have A FEW more disagreements on the subject of Legitimate Authority and Legitimate Protests in the specific. But as for the basic idea that a mass revolt is not ALWAYS in the right I
see that point?? Certainly there's plenty of mob action against minorities (meaning just numerically here, but also yes, against culturally determined Official Minorities) that is purely vile; the group against the individual is VERY OFTEN wrong, but mass revolt against authority-- even 'legitimate' authority-- well,I can't get past the fact that this is NOT a thing people do for shitsn'giggles. (well, okay. Maybe SOME people. but not enough to make a real riot of it.) It is a dangerous, desperate thing, and even if people involved in the moment forget that, they're only able to reach that point of Upset because of WAY backlog of injustice. Insurrections don't come out of nowhere. And if a governing power has fouled up enough to GET a revolt-- not an externally-induced coup but a straight up revolt-- well maybe it needs to PAY ATTENTION NEXT TIME. I'm not saying violence on a personal scale is necessarily a right answer to violence on a systematic scale (also not saying it ISN'T, because hey, options), but if the sides are People With Rocks against People With Cannons I am always going to want to know WHAT DID THE PEOPLE WITH CANNONS DO TO MAKE THE PEOPLE WITH ROCKS THINK THIS WAS WORTH IT.
Ehem. Anyway. More book-specificallyish, here we are back in 1817, focusing on the minutiae of history and the things forgotten--only this time the minutiae and the forgotten are people we've spent a lot of time getting to know, lives and places that have weight and feel like a world now, and help I'm getting Waterloo-level emotions because this is the thing, what half this book is ABOUT, that these little lives that don't even count as newspaper minutiae are everything, the notes on the back of bathroom doors and the jokes people note in their journals mean more than the grand battlefields because it's these little moments that REALLY make history. Cambronne cursing on the battlefield counts, a peasant shaking his head counts, these things turn the wheel as much as weather and cannon (and of course weather and cannon are going to matter here soon too).
But unlike 1817, which was a rush of detail with a promise that no, this really matters, unlike Waterloo, which was a breakdown of history everyone at the time was assumed to know a LITTLE and presented as a post-mortem, this collection of details is very obviously relevant to people-- living people, people with lives, people NOT Historic, yet or ever--that carry a LOT of emotional weight, and gad, I wish I was good with words, because-
because it seems like the point here isn't that history is made of small details but that History isn't even REAL, that is, the faceless march of grand events so often presented as History doesn't even count. What makes it real, whether it's the history of long ago or the present moment about to become history, is the the tiny details, the small lives that get described as 'caught up' in it when really they're the current carrying history along. I AM NOT SAYING THIS AT ALL RIGHT, but...The Year 1817 bored me. It was newspaper clippings. The year 1832? I CAN'T KNOW ENOUGH, I want every newspaper clipping and mention of fads and detail of the streets, because people I love are walking here, people I'll never know except through knowing these details, and THEY ARE WHAT MATTER, they're the reason the history matters, the reason the past has anything to say to the future, because technology changes the world, government shifts, statistics wave across in graphs, but people learn from OTHER PEOPLE and to do that we have to talk to each other and that is what history is FOR, to expand the range of our community. This is 'the real countenance of that fearful public tragedy'-- not 'merely words', not statistics and numbers and money but these lives, in all their color and force. These people on every side and angle of the barricades are what ultimately made it happen and they're who we have to talk to if we want it to not happen again and I AM BAD AT BEING BRIEF.
But uh, yeah. For all I want to argue politics in this section, I'm too busy being awesomed by the sheer humanity going on. I--I'll try to get more properly political when I reblog more competent posts??