Brick Club 4.3.3
The best translation for this chapter title I could scrounge up without reading first century Roman poetry is “Leaves and Overshadowing Foliage.”
In the midst of the city lies a wild heart. “This garden was no longer a garden; it was…something which was impenetrable as a forest, populous as a city, tremulous as a nest, dark as a cathedral, odorous as a bouquet, solitary as a tomb, full of life as a multitude.” Held back by bars, it’s hard to tell if the garden is content to run wild in its own space or if it longs to break free and overrun the entire city.
I found some actual real, dedicated academic analysis of this chapter and its myriad of symbolism that is way more detailed than anything I have the effort to do so I will be following that in an attempt to sort out what’s going on here. I’m drawing from Les Miserables and Its Afterlives: Between Page, Stage, and Screen edited by Kathryn Grossman and Bradley Stephens, specifically Chapter 2, “’Foliis ac frondibus’: Les Miserables and the Ecogarden” by Karen Quandt. Quandt first notes that the chapter title is taken from a first century didactic poem by Lucretius, De rerum natura, which was written as a primer on Epicureanism. I don’t know that Epicureanism is really congruent with standard Hugonian philosophy, particularly what he espouses in this chapter, but I’ll leave that determination to actual philosophers. Quandt’s thesis is the garden, as described by Hugo, is meant to represent the ideal, dare I say, utopian society. Gardens reflect their gardener and the gardener reflects their society. She also includes the idea of the ideal society being “green” in a sense of both symbolically and literally embracing nature back into civilized society, becoming one with nature and all that, which I think connects to Hugo’s idea that “Nothing is really small…All works for all” which is exemplified in this garden.
Having introduced the garden, we must examine the gardener. “Jean Valjean—who above and beyond all other characters illustrates an unrelenting capacity for transformation and adaptation—is on equal terms with nature and its creatures. He thus abandons his role as a cultivator and gardener and allows nature to run wild at his new house.” Quandt claims this represents a “utopian eco-ideal,” but I would observe that this wild garden is still trapped behind the bars of the gate. This is an evolution in Valjean’s practice with ‘gardening,’ from the concerted cultivation as the Mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer to his more natural growth style with Cosette (any class or educational sociologists holler if you recognize those), but it feels like a simplification to say it’s necessarily a blanket positive change. Valjean’s instincts re: Cosette are varyingly hands off yet restrictive. He’s paranoid about her safety, yet wants her to be free. Cosette has free rein of the house and the garden, but Valjean moves their little family around abruptly, is anxious out in public, and doesn’t know how to provide for Cosette’s social needs. Sometimes Valjean is less gardener than bystander, whether through anxiety or ignorance. Sometimes this is helpful and good but sometimes a garden needs a guiding hand. The utopian eco-ideal seems okay if you subscribe to the Lockean definition of the state of nature, but (breaking) Locke is wrong about the state of nature (because of western colonialist white man reasons) and society has always been comprised of actors pruning the weeds.
Building on the utopian eco-ideal, the garden is not just an emblem of utopia on a metaphorical level, but on a metaphysical level. Quandt says “In this second half of ‘Foliis ac frondibus,’ added in exile and thus at the height of Hugo’s development of a visionary aesthetic, the atom of the natural world interacts with an infinitely generative moral philosophy” and “represents humanity’s obligation to love and to be united as fraternal citizens.” This is definitely directly supported: “Nothing in this garden opposed the sacred effort of things towards life…vegetation, in a close and strong embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there…the sacred mystery of its fraternity, symbol of human fraternity.” Again, though, the garden is barred, it is literally not public. I think a better way to think of the garden is as having potential to be the utopia Hugo and Quandt want it to be. It’s both the society that is and the society that can be. And since we can’t talk about the bright future without talking about Cosette, the garden also represents her potential. The garden both needs to be freed and guided, just like Cosette needs freedom and direction. Maybe for now she needs more freedom, just like society needs violent overthrow, coming off the misery of the preceding era, but as she grows it’s important that she have a level of concerted cultivation.
Aaaand final disclaimer, everything above assumes a starting point of society as is, not as we might like it to be. It sucks but context is king democratically elected representative.
