#sewer digression

[pilferingapples]

The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and formidable thing. It has been a sepulchre

Well what the hell isn't , Vic

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

Live footage of me suspending my disbelief and trying to figure out what symbolism Vicky is aiming for while he talks about using human feces to fertilize fields:

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

[dolphin1812]

“a man disappeared suddenly”

The sewers are terrifying! 

Disease is not a new metaphor for social problems in general or within the context of this novel, nor are elements of horror. But I do feel like the sewers are particularly well-suited to this, partly because they are literally so closely tied to disease (especially cholera) and because they’re suspenseful in a different way? Hugo’s playing on the unknown aspect, of course, but I do think the un-thought-of dangers of the sewers - like fungi, falling in, and other problems - are especially scary.

Social commentary is also present: it’s no surprise that the sewer is tied to prison, given all that we’ve learned about the horrors of French prison. The animal also gives a sense that the sewer is for the “lost,” literally in this case, but also metaphorically for those cast out from society.

I don’t know a lot about Marat, but I would love any additions!

I think it’s important to note that these explorations were firmly Napoleonic. They were centralized, reflecting the expansion of the state’s power, but they also touched on something that affected ordinary people, highlighting the aftereffects of the French Revolution. The Napoleonic structure couldn’t have reformed this system, but it was a start, just as Hugo doesn’t want to completely abandon what he respects about the Napoleonic era even if he doesn’t want a Napoleon.

Spoilers below:

I’d be remiss not to point out that explaining Bruneseau’s tactics to explore the sewers will help us understand Jean Valjean’s later on. As funny as digressions are, this one not only serves a thematic purpose, but a plot one. Knowing the structures of the sewers and the challenges in moving through them just a few decades earlier gives us a good sense of what Valjean is facing.

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

I just think that if I ended my twenty-page essay with

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cloaca has been the disease of Paris. The sewer is the taint the city has in her blood. The popular instinct is never mistaken. The trade of sewerman was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repulsive to the people, as the trade of slaughterer, so long held in horror and left to the executioner. It took high wages to persuade a mason to disappear in that fetid ooze; the well-digger's ladder hesitated to plunge into it; it was said proverbially, "to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave"; and all manner of hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal drain with terror; awful sink, bearing the traces of the revolutions of men, and in which we find vestiges of all the cataclysms from the shellfish of the deluge down to Marat's rag.

I might have a "SEE ME" underlined somewhere underneath.

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

I get that the word for an animal "cloaca" comes from the original sewer "cloaca." I still really wish he'd stop calling it that.

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

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