#retrobricking

[pilferingapples]

LM 1.2.8 (retrobricking)

[ID:  black and white photo of Victor Hugo, in his older bearded years, doing the Hugo Head Lean. text on image reads “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards” in Caslon Antique typeface) 

[fremedon]

Brickclub 3.5.5, “Poverty A Friend of Misery” and 3.5.6, “The Substitute”

I’ve fallen behind again and I am once again going to be lazy and mostly say what Bird said about 3.5.5, with a couple of addenda:

1.) Once again, Grantaire is coming off much better than Marius--Marius he had finally come hardly to look at anything but the sky, the only thing that truth can see from the bottom of her well.” Grantaire is the toad who looks up and sees the eagle in flight. Marius is only seeing the sky--not actually truth, just what truth sees. He’s being exposed to things he could put together into some sort of truth, but he’s not doing the math.

2.) Hugo introduced the July Revolution for the first time in the last chapter, in the context of its effect on M. Mabeuf’s book sales. He mentions it again here, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aside. He’s eventually going to backtrack and give us a whole book-length digression as the opening to Tome IV--A Few Pages of History, the equivalent of Paris Atomized and Waterloo. But right now, we get

All passions except those of the heart subside in idle musing. Marius’s political fanaticisms were dispelled in this way. By satisfying and calming him, the 1830 Revolution had helped in this. He remained the same, without the anger. He still had the same opinions; only, they had mellowed. Strictly speaking, he no longer had opinions--he had sympathies.

While we’ve been watching Marius look at lettuces, there has been an entire revolution, and Marius didn’t bat an eye and neither did the narrator. 

I’m not sure if that’s more damning of Marius or of Louis-Philippe, but. It’s pretty bad.

I have very little to say about 3.5.6, where Aunt G tries to replace Marius with Theodule and the graft doesn’t take. Gillenormand wants a fight, and Theodule amiably gray-rocks his way through a three-page rant and refuses to give him one.

I am really appreciating Theodule’s ability to visit his elderly relatives and make pleasant conversation without getting even a little bit drawn into their shit-stirring drama. Seriously, well done Theodule.

[synteis-bookclub]

2.1.13 - La catastrophe

After the "glory" of the suicide of the imperial guard, what is left is disorder and disaster. Now we've gone from "Vive l'empreur!" to "Sauve-qui-peut!" all the way to "Trahison!" We also get the mentions of "Vive le maréchal Ney" even as we know that he longed for a glorious death the previous chapter.

Here is a difference between Waterloo and the barricades. Because Enjolras is a far better man than Napoleon or Ney, he leads from the front with his men. They don't descend into this chaos and he doesn't yearn for death ahead of them because of the shame of failure. Perhaps this is why the barricades are sublime while Waterloo has moments but is not so in a general way.

Everything has fallen apart and there's now nothing that Napoleon can do even as he tries.

But there are others on the French side who are stil carrying on with courage in spite of their leadership. We get what Lobau tries to do at Genappe where they make barricades and recruit 300 men. The earlier French policies lead to even more terrible policies from the Anglo-Prussians including Blücher.

Ce vertige, cette terreur, cette chute en ruine de la plus haute bravoure qui ait jamais étonné l'histoire, est-ce que cela est sans cause? Non. L'ombre d'une droite énorme se projette sur Waterloo. C'est la journée du destin. La force au-dessus de l'homme a donné ce jour-là. [...] Waterloo, c'est le gond du dix-neuvième siècle. La disparition du grand homme était nécessaire à l'avènement du grand siècle. Quelqu'un à qui on ne réplique pas s'en est chargé. La panique des héros s'explique. Dans la bataille de Waterloo, il y a plus du nuage, il y a du météore. Dieu a passé.

At its heart, all this death is the work of the higher power who is Hugo's God. Napoleon didn’t stand a change even though Hugo’s spent the past ten chapters telling us about all of them. For him to fall so too did all those underneath him, good ones and bad.

[kingedmundsroyalmurder]

Retrobrick: 2.5.10

I am a billion years late, so here's how this is going to work. I'm gonna jump straight to the current chapter and pick up from there so that I can stay caught up, but the convent is also tied as my second favorite digression, so I'm also going to retrobrick that.

However, I didn't quite make it to the end of 2.5 before being consumed by the Finals Beast, so we pick up first with Javert!

Rereading this chapter, after all of Andrew Davies'... Opinions about Javert is, honestly, really refreshing. Javert, for all his (numerous) flaws, does his due diligence and isn't about to jump the gun by arresting the wrong person. He is unreasonably harsh on the guilty – and his definition of “the guilty” is broader than most of us, including Hugo, are comfortable with – but he is steadfast in his determination to only punish those who are guilty. Javert is Lawful Neutral to his core.

And this is not, inherently, bad. Hugo even says that Javert achieved a certain level of honor in performing his duties in Paris. Hugo, like many of us, seems conflicted about whether such a thing is possible but, if it is, then Javert is the one to do it.

So, when presented with the chance of a lifetime, Javert takes his time. He checks his sources. He follows up with the Thenardiers and does his own legwork. He makes sure. And it's here, once he's almost-but-not-quite positive, that we see the other part of him, the part that Davies has latched onto, the part that counterbalances the careful, diligent part of Javert's nature: Javert's stunningly well developed sense of narrative.

We've seen it before, of course, but it's always kind of a shock when it comes back into focus because it's so unexpected for the kind of character he is. It's like Javert knows he's in a novel, and also believes, as fervently as he believes that he is right, that he is the hero of that novel. Why doesn't he immediately arrest Jean Valjean? Diligence, yes, but also Drama. Javert doesn't want to ruin the moment. He wants to savor the chase and revel in his own success and cleverness. He wants to play cat and mouse and look Jean Valjean in the eye as he realizes that he has been outmatched.

But even in the midst of this resurgence of narrative, we're reminded of the pragmatism. Drama, yes, but also Diligence. He cannot afford to be wrong. And so both sides of Javert's nature work together to caution him to wait, to be careful, to make sure.

Only this time, both the Drama and the Diligence worked against him – he was too careful, too aware of narrative potential, and he gave Jean Valjean the chance to escape. And yes, what Jean Valjean did should not have been possible, and yes, Javert was not wrong to think him completely cornered, but escape he did, despite it all. And had Javert not taken his time relishing his victory, he might have actually been able to achieve it.

Of course, Jean Valjean is also the hero of his own story, and his narrative is the more potent of the two, but Javert doesn't know that.

And Hugo's talk of Javert the great strategist making a fatal mistake is so reminiscent of the way Hugo talked about Napoleon. Napoleon was a Great Man in a time that had moved beyond a need for Great Men. Javert is a Just Man in a time that requires something other than Justice. Napoleon is opposed by Revolution, Javert is opposed by Love. Both cannot help but fail in the face of such odds.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 2.3.5, “The Little Girl All Alone”

This is the chapter where Cosette is a werewolf; I liked @everyonewasabird‘s take on that.

Also, she sees ghosts. Literally: “She looked hard and heard the beasts moving in the grass and she distinctly saw the ghosts stirring in the trees.” I guess this is how she knows what kind of hats ghosts wear? I like that she’s matter-of-fact about them--there are ghosts, they’re terrifying, they are definitely there and just as real as the animals and the wind.

Cosette’s tininess against the darkness reminds me of the incredible description of the ship of the line a couple chapters back: “On the one hand utter darkness, on the other an atom.” The gamins in the next book will also be atoms--in both cases, the word is used of children to emphasize their smallness, but also that they are part of something. Cosette is not actually all alone, though she doesn’t know it yet.

I love the way Hugo writes about literal light and shadow. It’s always lush and evocative--but also, I love that he grounds his metaphors about light and darkness in passages of literal darkness. When Hugo talks about darkness of the soul--this is what he’s comparing it to, this utterly terrifying, real experience of a dark wood on a winter night.

As terrifying as it is, Cosette is more scared of going back empty-handed to Mme. Thenardier than of going on. As always in this book, nature might be dangerous, but its dangers are innocent. The worst threats all come from humanity.

“So violent was [Cosette’s] state of turmoil that her strength was three times normal.” Shades of Valjean lifting the cart, as if to remind us of him, just before he makes his entrance and lifts the bucket out of her hand.

[fremedon]

Brickclub I.6.2, “How Jean May Become Champ”

--Ecce Homo alert: “The same age, fifty-four, same height, same manner, in short the same man, it’s him.”

--Hat-tip to @meta-squash for pointing out another runaway cart--this time, one that narrowly misses running down a woman and child. Madeleine’s hands are still on the reins of the town; the cart is careening, but it’s avoiding disaster and the near-misses are being dealt with. But it’s a reminder that the minute Madeleine leaves, the cart is going to come crashing to a halt. And we’ll see that literalized on the road to Arras.

--It is kind of hilarious watching Javert go on about what a cool and cunning character Jean Valjean is while Jean Valjean is just nodding and going “Uh-huh.”

--

Beyond that--oof. Where to even begin with this one. This is the chapter where Javert is at his most admirable--for those of us with a long-standing fascination with the character, this is where it starts. Everything Javert believes is terrible, and also wrong. But he believes it completely, and he’s not only willing but absolutely insistent on being judged by the same cruel and absurd standards he uses for anyone else. 

And his mixture of pride--both pomposity and a justified pride in meeting his own standards--and absolute abasement and self-abnegation remains one of the kinkiest things in literature (and, for those of us with a long-standing Valvert OTP, this is also where it starts).

But this time through--I’m writing this three days after the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by a MAGA lynch mob--the thing that’s really jumping out is Javert’s metatext. Javert proceeds from a rather more honest answer to the same question that produced Ainsley Hayes on The West Wing: WHAT IF a conservative authoritarian, except that they actually believe their bullshit.

Because that is why Javert is SO weird--so unique that he seems a lot more admirable than he is. Because people who believe what Javert believes never, in real life, swallow their own stories to that extent. People who believe in hierarchy as a positive moral good always, always, have some reason why they and those closest to them should be spared the consequences they’re happy to dish out to others.

There are no Javerts in real life, and here we begin to see why--because you can’t live that way. It will destroy you. Massive hypocrisy and sanctimony isn’t good, but it is psychologically sustainable. Javert’s deal is not, and we see here all of the fault lines on which he’s eventually going to crack.

Many of Javert’s other character traits--his repression of imagination, the way he can talk himself out of noticing things contrary to his worldview--are keenly observed and they are the ways that people with his values avoid noticing the things that would cause a cognitive dissonance spiral. But his insistence on submitting himself to his own harsh judgement is pure thought experiment. Just as, in his professional behavior, the book is asking whether a cop who is the best, most honest, most incorruptible cop ever could do good (answer: Nope), in his personal philosophy, it is asking whether a belief in Authority, if pursued with perfect sincerity and integrity, could ever be good. And the Nope is resounding.

The sincerity and the integrity are still oddly impressive, though.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 2.3.1, “The Problem of Water at Montfermeil.”

I have fallen so far behind but I am catching up!

Fortunately, these chapters mark a return to the plot--characters are doing things in real time, and a lot of this section can really just be read at face value. I always forget how quickly can move his story along when he wants to, but 2.3, “A Deathbed Promise is Fulfilled,” gives us a couple of short chapters of scene-setting and then plunges right in. So--with a couple exceptions, because nothing is ever entirely just what is says on the tin in this book--I’m just going to note random observations as I go, rather than try to prise out larger thematic stuff.

The water-carrier makes about 8 sous/day at a quarter-sou per bucket--so, about 32 buckets a day.

“Now, this was the terror of that poor creature the reader may not yet have forgotten, little Cosette.”  I am coming to realize that anything Hugo says about his reader’s expectations is litotes at best, if not outright trolling. The reader has been saying “Yes, but WHAT ABOUT COSETTE” through the entirety of Waterloo.

The vulture with the tricolor cockade attracts Bonapartist veterans to the mountebanks’ stall--trading on the name and the trappings of Napoleon, as Thenardier also does, is the province of mountebanks.

I’m going to pull out one passage to quote at length:

"Or a miller was shouting, ‘Are we responsible for what’s in the sacks? We find countless small seeds in them that we can’t afford to spend time picking out and that just have to be left to go through the mill. There’s darnel, yellow vetchling, corncockle, vetch, hempseed, couch grass, meadow foxtail and a host of other tares, not to mention the quantity of grit in certain types of grain, particularly Breton grain. I don’t like milling Breton wheat any more than pit sawyers like to saw beams with nails in them. Imagine all the unwholesome dust that adds to the yield. And then people complain about the flour. They shouldn’t. The flour’s no fault of ours.’”

1.) I love this list of weeds.

2. ) In the next chapter, Cosette’s abuse by Mme. Thenardier is described as like being crushed by a mill--and in his first long POV section back in book 1, we were told that Valjean’s thoughts were those of a millet seed below a millstone. Between that and Valjean’s nettles speech, where weeds are people society has failed to cultivate and given up on, I smell a metaphor here. Everyone is responsible for what’s in the sacks, and no one is stepping up to keep the fields from going to weeds or the weeds from getting into the crop--just like no one is stepping up to take care of Cosette.

And then the reaper’s speech comes next: “In any case grass like that, your grass, it’s still young and very hard to cut. Being as it’s so tender, you see, it flattens before the blade.” And then in the next paragraph, we meet Cosette, so tiny she’s sitting on the crossbar of the table. Despite her rags and bare feet--and the ominous leather strap on the wall--Cosette is still young enough to bend under the sickle. She’s going to be surprisingly resilient. (Oh--and the first of the three snatches of conversation we get, which didn’t initially seem to fit, is about grapes that can’t be harvested ripe. Is this Eponine, old before her time?)

[fremedon]

Brickclub 2.3.2, “Two Finished Portraits,” 2.3.3, “Men Must Have Wine and Horses Must Have Water,” and 2.3.4, “A Doll Makes Its Appearance”

2.3.2

The passage about Thenardier’s aggrieved grudge against the world is such a good description of such a specific and familiar type of spite.

Other than that, two things really jumped out at me about the descriptions of the Thenardiers and Cosette in this chapter:

1.) Thenardier owes 1500 francs to creditors.

In spring of 1818 when Fantine leaves Cosette--and when the inn has been there for less than three year--her money settles a debt of 110 francs that was about to come due.

HOWMST. Has he run up more than ten times that debt in five years?! What is he spending money on? They don’t even keep a servant except Cosette. (Because Thenardier sexually harasses adult--or, I imagine, teenaged--servants, so Mme. Thenardier just doesn’t hire them.)

Hugo straight up calls Cosette’s situation in the household “a paradigm of oppression,” compares the house to a spider’s web and says Cosette is like a fly being the servant of spiders.

So, a.) Spiders = fatalité, and b.) what does that make Cosette, preying on flies herself with her little lead sword?

2.) We get a lot of small images or lines that call out parallels to other characters. Thenardier is a crack shot and a poacher, like Valjean. Cosette is being crushed in a mill, also like Valjean.

For Mme. Thenardier, the first description of her unthinking acceptance of her husband’s authority, and her obedience to it, brought to mind Javert.

And then we get this:

“This bustling mountain of flesh moved under the little finger of the frail despot. It was, viewed from its dwarfed and grotesque side, the great universal fact: the homage of matter to spirit; for some deformities have their origin in the very depths of eternal beauty.”

Which feels like the dark mirror of the toad loving to watch the eagle soar. And like a weird prefigurement of the parallels we’re about to start getting between young Cosette and Grantaire.

(I know. Bear with me.)

2.3.3

Cosette’s first words in the book are a bold and obvious lie. When this doesn’t work, her next action is to pause in the doorway of the inn: “She seemed to be waiting for someone to come to her rescue.” Cosette has learned the habits that work for her—and I’m sure dawdling and hoping that a more pressing task often does work for her. This time, nothing intervenes immediately—but someone is, even now, coming to her rescue.

Fursona watch: Mme. Thenardier calls Cosette a dog and a toad, both very resonant images in this moment. The toad, of course, is the only (I think?) animal comparison Grantaire gets. And dogs are always significant.

2.3.4

The juxtaposition between the lit candles glowing magically around the doll and the starless sky recalls Grantaire’s “Who’s been unhooking the stars…” in “Preliminary Gaieties.” And, as @everyonewasabird points out here, Cosette’s veneration of Catherine, and her painful awareness of the gulf between them, really does call to mind Grantaire’s veneration of Enjolras.

It also calls to mind, even more strongly, Valjean’s watching the townspeople of Digne through the windows of the inn and the peasant’s hut--and watching Cosette’s wedding through the windows, after he slips out.

Cosette gets Catherine. She gets to come inside. Valjean brings her there, but can’t or won’t follow.

And I really am thinking now about the Thenardiers as upside-down mirrors of other relationships in the book. @secretmellowblog made a good case on discord for their being pre-Seine Valvert. I feel like there’s also an inversion of E/R there--opposites attracting, but making something worse than the sum of their parts; not the grotesque joining the ideal to make a sublime, but joining a more abstract grotesque to make--well. A paradigm of oppression. Fatalité incarnate.