#abridgements

[aphraseremains]

Today I discovered at my university library, among their many scholarly and aged (practically falling apart in some cases) copies of Hugo’s works and scholarship on that work, the Dover Classics abridgement of Les Miserables: translated by Charles E. Wilbour, abridged by James K. Robinson, and totally incoherent to anyone who hasn’t already read it unabridged.

It unsurprisingly cuts all the digressions, as well as the initial sixty pages on the Bishop of Digne (it begins with Valjean showing up in Digne), “The Year 1817”, and, uh,  everything between Fantine getting work at the factory (“the problem was solved; she was earning her living”) and Javert asking Madeleine to fire him. I’m pretty sure this Fantine never becomes a prostitute or gets arrested. On one page Fantine is happy and getting work and on literally the next page Madeleine “could not but think of poor Fantine”. But with no explanation offered for why. We only even find out that Fantine is sick after Valjean returns from Champmathieu’s trial.

We get “The Ship Orion”, but all of Valjean finding Cosette is cut down to half a page from “Number 9430 Comes Up Again, and Cosette Draws It”.

“Cemetaries Take What Is Given To Them” becomes a nonsense title, as it consists of Fauchelevent and Valjean wondering briefly how Valjean can stay at the convent, and then Fauchelevent just taking Valjean and Cosette to the prioress the next day, with no troubles about explaining how they got in there or any graveyard shenanigans.

Everything about the revolutionaries prior to the barricades is cut. Marius leaves home, wondering what he will do; next page, Marius is figuring out poverty, and Courfeyrac has appeared with no explanation to give him an old coat in exchange for some previous favours. Courfeyrac continues to be there where you would expect him to be as Marius falls in love, except whenever it would require any of the rest of the Amis to show up, in which case those parts are cut completely. Just for example, we cut directly from “he was desperately in love” to “it was serious, indeed”, without the scene where Jean Prouvaire says that it’s serious, which that line of the narrator’s is responding to.

They also cut Marius going to ask Gillenormand for permission to marry, but still leave in the lines “Marius left M. Gillenormand’s desolate. He had entered with a very small hope; he came out with an immense despair”. There is no mention made of what his hopes were or how they have been crushed.

The first scene at (or relating to) the barricades is “The Man Recruited in the Rue des Billettes”, which is not only the first time we see Enjolras, but may well be Gavroche’s first scene as well. “The Flag: the First Act” happens, but not “The Flag: the Second Act” (Mabeuf is entirely absent from this abridgement after he tells Marius his father loved him). Jean Prouvaire does not die (or, indeed, exist). Where “The End of the Verses of Jean Prouvaire” ought to go is an extremely brief chapter titled “You Are The Chief”, which consists entirely of Courfeyrac hugging Marius, Enjolras telling Marius he’s the chief, and everything appearing to Marius “a monstrous nightmare” (Combeferre and Bossuet's lines are naturally cut, because it wouldn't do to acknowledge the existence of too many characters). (Does the Wilbour translation actually describe Eponine’s pants as “velvet pantaloons”?)

Enjolras doesn’t die in this abridgment either. We get: “When there were none of the chiefs alive save Enjolras and Marius, who were at the extremities of the barricade, the center, which Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly, and Combeferre had so long sustained, gave way.” And then the last we see of Enjolras is: “The whirlwind of the attack at that instant concentrated so fiercely upon Enjolras and the door of the wine-shop, that nobody saw Jean Valjean cross the unpaved field of the barricade, holding the senseless Marius in his arms, and disappear behind the corner of the house of Corinth.” (It will surprise no one that Grantaire also does not exist in this abridgement.)

(We do however get several chapters of the journey through the sewers.)

“Javert off the Track” is compressed into two pages, but at least it happens. The formatting gets really weird, like they were leaving spaces between paragraphs to indicate missing material, despite doing that nowhere else in the book.

The final chapter is still “Grass Hides and Rain Blots Out”, but there is nothing written on the gravestone to be washed away by the rain, rendering it nonsensical.

[killforacig]

"The Traveling Mariachi Band or Not Being Literally Fucked Makes You Figuratively Fucked"

He'd always told his friends that he'd one day love to hire a mariachi band to follow him around and play songs as pertaining to his ever shifting moods. After his pregnant girlfriend left him for the big empty that is to his mind not being with him, he decided that there was no better time to stay true to that threat than the present (which is now the past). He did his research. He had his friends with uncles and fathers and even an aunt or two. The most important thing he learned was not to ask them if they could play Cielito Lindo; of course they could! Some of them could even play Hava Nagila. They were musicians (!); the love of music and the alternating celebrations and sadnesses of life compelled them. He pictured himself strolling down the summer pavement of the street that reminded him most of her, the mariachi band in tow, playing something like: "Ay, mi amor perdido" or something like that. Yeah, he did his research alright. Because was that even a song? Was it in a song? He didn't know and he didn't care. It was less about the sounds than it was about the imagery that was representative of his thoughts and feelings. For example: he'd think about his unborn child and become fraught with the conflicting emotions that that particular dilemma entails (dilemma, perhaps, being the wrong word): the fear, the anxiety and the variegations of shimmering energy and lowering lethargy thereof, the lump-in-the-throat wistfulness that one almost feels ashamed of because then there's the guilt of self-pity, which is then translated to selfishness and now it is all about oneself, is it not? All of this weighed on him at once like he was in the middle of some nightmare intervention in which all of his loved ones encircled him and browbeat him into a fetal position assuming the meekest of submission to the accusations and congratulations and that faint-fucking-praise that may as well have been a singular remonstration with all of that which is the very essence of who he is. He imagined a banda mariachi confundida in his shadow, melting under the smile of the mid-day sun playing songs no one has even heard because it's more of a medley of conflicted thoughts, feelings; nothing concrete; everything abstracted and melded together like some freak-of-nature (loved and respected nonetheless) and on-the-move; bi-polar, even-- was that his problem? Sometimes he felt so angry and resentful AND WHAT WOULD THEY PLAY THEN?