#hugolian magic system

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 1.8.2 ‘Fantine happy’

Fuck this chapter. Fuck that physician.

He tells Fantine her daughter is here, but that she can’t see her until she’s better. Fantine reverts immediately to her good-little-child mode, trying to convince them to let her see Cosette by any means necessary.

It’s horrible.

And okay, fine, this book likes lying more than I do. But that particular lie trapped them into a cul-de-sac of bullshit and gaslighting instantly, because Fantine knows the best thing for her is to see Cosette, and we know she’s right because that was the doctor’s opinion before Madeleine left for Arras. And she likely knows she doesn’t have much time.

If Cosette were here, of course they’d bring her in. The fact that they don’t and then lie about it means Fantine can feel something is wrong but can’t tell what. She knows she can’t trust any of these people to give her straight answers or allow her any autonomy or decision-making. Hugo says her childlike state is the result of illness, but it’s so obviously the result of utter powerlessness and being lied to, the same way it’s going to be for her daughter at the end of the book. Fantine tries every trick she has to get a glimpse of her daughter or a scrap of information about her. I hate this.

Valjean’s “Cosette is beautiful” breaks my heart a little. Not for Fantine this time so much as how strange it is to hear him talk about Cosette when she’s still a stranger to him. He talks like he cares, he talks like Cosette is beautiful--and he’s going to care, and Cosette is going to be beautiful. She’s going to matter so much, and he has no idea.

Fantine had visions of Valjean’s journey last night, but they’re all wrong. She may or may not be calling on some of the book’s second sight in terms of the halo of glory and the celestial forms she saw hovering around him, but she certainly wasn’t able to see where he went or what he was doing.

Why not? Why wasn’t she?

It’s not as if this book isn’t full of people capable of semi-preternatural vision of far-off events. She’s the double of Enjolras, who certainly is more than capable of it. Compounded horrors only seem to make him more visionary and more able to discern the future.

So why is Fantine different?

#brickclub #lm 1.8.2 #seriously fuck that doctor #i don't care how pro-lying we are that wasn't better #hugolian magic system

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 1.2.12 ‘The bishop at work’

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an adaptation capture the fact that Myriel’s core personality is “trickster.”

And that’s never truer than here.

We start, because of course we do, with a perfect setup for Myriel’s witticisms. To abridge slightly:

“Does your greatness know where the silver basket is?”

“Yes.”

“God be praised! I did not know what had become of it.”

“There it is.”

“Yes, but there is nothing in it. The silver?”

“Ah, it is the silver then that troubles you. I do not know where that is.”

This is a comedy skit of an old kind, still familiar. It’s also recognizable as Myriel’s signature gentle wit. It’s among the best of his jokes, and it feels familiar and reassuring by now. From the desperation of the previous chapters, we’ve crossed back into Myriel’s softer world. Jean Valjean’s betrayal hasn’t destroyed his equilibrium--far from it--though we do see him “sad” as he examines the broken flowers.

I suspect he’s not only sad about the flowers.

Jean Valjean is dragged back, he’s shocked to learn Myriel is a bishop, and Myriel preempts everybody else’s narratives by asking why Valjean didn’t take the candlesticks too.

He also tells Valjean to come by the gate next time instead of over the wall, and he says it in front of the gendarmes--odd, because it undercuts his story that nothing criminal happened. My best guess is that this is to defang the evidence: If the gendarmes ask around for witnesses who saw a man fleeing, or if they look at the broken wall, they could bring those facts back to Myriel or track down Valjean for further questioning. But if Myriel acknowledges it now, there’s nothing for them to find.

And then he buys Jean Valjean’s soul.

It’s kind--incredibly kind--but I can’t help being struck by the brutality of it. He doesn’t offer Valjean agency. He says, “Remember, you have already promised.” Valjean is too baffled to argue, and so the deal is done.

There’s a retribution in this moment that didn’t have to be there. There was a gentle version of this story: if Valjean hadn’t stolen the silver, he could have entered a good life of his own free will. Valjean stole, though, so now they’re doing it the hard way. There is no signing over his soul on the dotted line, because he already forfeited it in the theft.

Myriel reminds me of some kind of fairy or minor local god in the powers he takes on here. Betrayal itself gives him power over the one who crossed him. There is Deep Magic going on.

In The Discovery of France, Graham Robb talks about how the religion of rural France was heavily tied up in shrines and offerings to statues of saints and local sites of holy apparitions and tangible miracles. It considered itself Christian, but it wasn’t what educated urban Christians thought of as Christianity. Myriel feels far more of that world than he does of the Catholicism handed down from Rome.

There was a fully dark path for Valjean, and we saw it last chapter with the miner’s drill upraised over the sleeping bishop. There was a fully light path, where he didn’t betray Myriel at all, and who knows what would have happened then. But instead, he took a middle road: no violence, but a theft.

Valjean won’t stay in something that feels like the “middle.” He’ll become something like a saint, something like Myriel himself.

But the fact that Myriel took his soul because it was already forfeit, that Valjean never signed it over of his own free will--or kept it himself, for that matter--is going to darken his path for the rest of his life.

There’s a doubt that stays with him, about whether he is worthy, about never being good enough. I think the seed of that poison is here, in the choice he knows he couldn’t have made on his own.

#brickclub #lm 1.2.12 #hugolian magic system

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 1.1.10 “The bishop in the presence of an unknown light”

 “Dying is simple.”

Oh no, we’re going to hear that idea again in the last lines of the book, and I’m sad.

It feels like one more key to the text--Dying is simple, but living is complicated. There are many, many ways to arrive at death, and the differences between them are important.

G’s line “Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left,” echoes the "But who attains his ideal?” said about Mlle Baptistine’s sofa. The irony of both is in being a grandiose and melancholy statement said about a very small thing--except G is aware of the irony and choosing to use it.

...You’re all with me in this feeling that I’m watching the alternate-universe death of Enjolras or Combeferre, right?

To the point about child guides in earlier chapters, G is the first person we see take care of a shepherd boy in a way that acknowledges he’s a child.

There’s been a slight cloud over these last chapters, and mostly it’s been a subtle one: little moments where I can’t quit read the mood of the narrator, or times when Myriel’s perfectly set up one-liners get old. Then G starts talking and it’s just... oh. Here’s the true voice of the book repeating the concerns of the Preface and putting the French Revolution into its rightful context. The narrator and the bishop are both generally benevolent, but G is right.

“You condemn the thunderbolt” is such a beautiful critique of of the criticisms of revolution.

I love this chapter. I don’t know how to go into all the ways I love this chapter.

I’ve talked before about how the description of G’s “dying because he wished to die” is a motif that comes up again. I don’t know how to defend this point, but I feel like there’s a level of wisdom and connection to the infinite you can attain that, according to the rules of the magic in this book, you can’t be harmed until you choose to die. (There also seems to be a few scary and slightly off versions of that state, like Javert’s unwise and unmagical choice to die, or Eponine becoming invulnerable by being a kind of undead wraith.)

On this readthrough I was especially struck by how much was lost because of Myriel’s prejudice. G was here in the woods for years, a sad life, though he seems to have made the best of it. But when he talks about the bishop’s finery, maybe the one actually mistaken thing he says, and the bishop allows him to remain wrong about it--it’s just, like.... in a better world, they could have been friends. They would both have gained so much from it.

When G addresses the ideal in answer to Myriel’s complaints about atheists, it seems to confirms the reading I had a few days ago: that anyone who believes in one of the names of God the bishop listed (Compassion, Justice, etc.) believes in God enough for this book’s purposes. We’ve moved from puncturing straw atheist idiots to asking for benediction from people who view the cosmos and the sublime from a wise framework that isn’t an explicitly religious one.

And the chapter ends with Myriel making his peace with the revolution via a pun, which is the most Les Mis thing of all possible Les Mis things.

#brickclub #lm 1.1.10 #hugolian magic system

[everyonewasabird]

I would love to see your Thoughts on the Hugolian Internal Magic System sometime:D It's something I like talking about but def. some Deep Nerding that is not an overcommon discussion!

Ah!! Thank you!! I’ve been wanting to talk about this!

But also, it’s so Big? So instead of overwhelming myself trying to cover it coherently, I’m going to get the ball rolling by scattering undeveloped ideas everywhere.

To start, my feeling is that the brick operates on something that isn’t real-world logic but a coherent system of magic logic, heavily symbolic, and with power over the events in the story. It’s not fantasy-world magic--it’s closer to magical realism, though it never quite reaches what I’d consider that.

There are a lot of magical elements in the brick. Some I want to acknowledge but have little to say about:

The animal thing. The dog-man versus lion-man, mice and cats and all that. The visual use of it in Arai’s manga was how the penny first dropped for me about the brick having magic. Many other people have more coherent thoughts about this than I do.

The fatefulness of spiders and the doom that hangs over anything connected to the numbers four or eight.

Enjolras and Grantaire in OFPD as the apotheosis of the ideal and the grotesque uniting in the sublime--I’ve read meta from you and others about this! It’s fascinating, and I feel like I only half understand it! I have nothing to add to it but it’s wonderful.

A whole lot of characters symbolize different things, and the way that functions has a magic logic to it, and Oh God This Topic Is So Big, I Can’t.

Related to the symbolism, there’s the, um--economy of casting? There’s a coherent logic behind a lot of the coincidences: If someone goes for a police officer, they’re probably going to find one--where brick logic differs from real world logic is, that policeman will always be Javert. All the misfortunes of poor and friendless young women befall Fantine. All people at the cusp between abject poverty and marginal respectability live in the Gorbeau house. I’m not sure I’d quite call this magic, but it’s related.

The place where I first really noticed the magic system myself was with the four-and-a-half characters who have power of will over when they die.

The first is the Conventionist, G——, and it’s with him we get a description of the trait I’m talking about:

Though so near to his end, he preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken the door. G—— seemed to be dying because he willed it so.

This isn’t a magic that can be used for arbitrary purposes--you can’t game the system with will-powered immortality. I think it’s more that the characters who have this are so in tune with the magic they become immune to petty injury until they reach the moment of their death--which will be an appropriately symbolic one.

The second of the four is the Bishop, though his death is a little different: instead of culminating in a moment of transcendent will, he’s granted Hugo’s ideal of the perfect death. (Now--I have Massive issues with what Hugo thinks the perfect death is: blind, and beloved woman is taking care of you. It’s gross, sexist, ableist bullshit with wild disregard for boundaries, and Hugo is being The Worst. But anyway.)

In the text it’s the ideal death, and Myriel is granted it. This feels to me like not an exception to the system but its culmination--the other four are granted sublime and transcendent suffering, and Myriel was granted something past that: transcendence without the suffering.

Following the Bishop and the Conventionist are their direct successors, slightly more tarnished, but only slightly: Jean Valjean and Enjolras.

Like the Conventionist, neither can be killed until they choose to die. Until that time, bullets don’t touch them. Both deaths are sublime and transcendent, but Enjolras seems to come closer to perfection--there’s something strangely self-defeating in Valjean that doesn’t exist for the other three. Nevertheless, both of them clearly have near-superhuman power of will over their deaths.

Discussions of what Enjolras would have done if he’d survived after condemning himself for Le Cabuc feel slightly misaimed to me because of this--my feeling is that once he condemned himself, there was no other ending. He belonged to the magic, and he had willed it so--he Knew.

(And... okay, side note, I personally am writing an AU where he lived. But I had to fracture some of the magic system to do it. It felt right to me that in a story about Combeferre the magic would be fractured--I don’t know, I feel like that’s a thing.)

Aside from those four, many characters have different magic at different times.  Eponine gains a preternatural ability to get things done, Gavroche is made of magic and Paris, there’s a lot of magic in Cosette, and so on. The Amis are also magic, and a few of  them seem remarkably able to perceive it--Combeferre understood Valjean at a glance and described Fantine exactly. (Side note: my  favorite headcanon about Combeferre is that he has a nearly unparalleled  ability to perceive the magic system but is too at odds with himself to use it.)

But I feel like there’s a character with a half-realized version of the transcendent will like the other four above, and it’s Javert.

There’s something really interesting going on with Javert and magic.

Like Valjean and Enjolras, he’s immune to bullets, (”You’ll misfire”/The pistol misfired.) And Valjean almost gave to Javert the transformation Myriel had granted him, but something went wrong. Instead of becoming the fifth of these supernormal characters, Javert reaches half a revelation and backs away. He wills his own death, but prosaically and with despair, in a bastardized version of what the others achieve.

I can’t prove this, but I put real significance in that moment when Javert’s tied-up body makes a cross with Mabeuf’s body laid out, and instead of bearing his suffering he asks Enjolras to re-tie him lying down. Javert does a LOT of things wrong morally, but magically and symbolically that might be where he got off the path of the Absolute. (Does it matter symbolically that there end up being four of them (a fateful number) rather than five? Does the feeling of transcendence in Enjolras’s death and incompleteness in Valjean’s have anything to do with the fact that Enjolras convinced Grantaire, but Valjean did not convince Javert? ...I’m not convinced of any of that, but it occurs to me.)

--

And the barricade.

The barricade is made of magic and fate and the Absolute. It magically draws everyone to it and intensifies the magic potential in anyone near it. Enjolras and Jean Valjean become godlike, and everyone else becomes more transcendent as they get nearer.

I swear I can hear the first sparks of the magic of the barricade forming in Grantaire’s dialogue in the Corinth. He’s in the middle of a misogynistic and racist harangue and then he bursts out with:

“And it appears that they are going to fight, all these idiots, to get their  heads broken, to massacre one another, in midsummer, in the month of  June, when they might go off with some creature under their arm, to scent in the fields the huge cup of tea of the new mown hay!”

(Wilbour. Hapgood massacres this line.)

...then he goes back to rambling, until he wanders into an entirely perceptive (if wryly mocking) description of Marius’s love for Cosette and his own for Enjolras: “They must make a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They are souls possessed of senses. They lie among the stars.”

Which, for once, is exactly correct.

And I think these sparks happen because the barricade is beginning, and the barricade is magic, and it’s what finally pulls from Grantaire what he was capable of.

There is SO MUCH MORE I’m sure, but this post is becoming novel-length, so I’ll stop for now. Anyone who wants, please argue or expand!

#long post #the longest post #hugolian magic system #meta #long meta #asks #javert #enjolras #jean valjean #the conventionist #myriel #pilferingapples

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 1.8.4 ‘Authority resumes its sway’

We’re here. I don’t know what to say. It’s horrible.

The second meeting of the text’s great Karpman Drama Triangle happens. Javert commits his life-defining crime, our protagonist becomes Jean Valjean at last and for good (or until the very end, I suppose), and Fantine dies grotesquely, terrified and realizing she’s been lied to, with no idea whether Cosette is safe or even alive.

It’s an echo of the last time these three met, where Javert was frozen, bowled over, and unable to fathom what was happening. For Javert, the world turned upside-down then: the people society was built to crush were on top, and he felt the wrongness of that viscerally. He had been feeling all along that there was a wolf in his master’s clothing, and at that moment the wolf started raising up all the other wolves. Rebellion was made manifest.

For Javert, this chapter fixes the outrage. He sees himself bringing the social order back into balance, and the chapter title makes it clear that he’s 100% right. This is what the social order is. If you like the social order, congratulations on how much you’re winning right now.

If you don’t... stay tuned for the rest of the book.

There’s something I always wonder about Javert's worldview, that somebody more versed in law or philosophy could probably probably articulate better. But when he says “authority can do no wrong,” I always wonder if it means he thinks people in positions of power *don’t* commit crimes--as in, they nobly refrain from it--or because at a certain level of authority “crime” is not defined, and anything a magistrate does--even if it would be a crime for a lesser person--is done rightly.

Either way, the problem with Jean Valjean is that he’s *not* an authority figure in Javert’s worldview, he’s a misérable posing as one. Because the law, as personified in Javert, isn’t actually about what people do, it’s about what people are. ..And it’s possible that answers my question.

Valjean also transforms here. There’s a feeling about him that he was holding on to the last tattered vestiges of the Madeleine costume, even though it was shredded and falling off him. He put the name Madeleine back on when he arrived back in Montreuil, but only for convenience, to be kind to Fantine and to others whom he didn’t want to unduly startle. Underneath, he had already become something else.

When she dies, the costume falls away and he’s just Jean Valjean, and the narrator will no longer pretend he’s anything else. He can open Javert’s fist like a child’s hand, he can tear iron bars off beds, and he can whisper words that will comfort the dead. Authority holds sway externally, but internally now, for the first time, something else also does.

We don’t know what he whispers to Fantine, but I can guess. As Pilf pointed out, she really did see him go for Cosette--she just didn’t know she was seeing nine months into the future. This is where Valjean takes up the task that will define the rest of his life, and where he becomes the person capable of doing so.

Ten years later, with Cosette married, he very jarringly folds up all of this and puts it away, as if he only took it on for her.

We talked on discord about how maybe the thing that gives someone preternatural power in this book is living in the shadow of their deferred death. Maybe that’s what happens here: he defers his death until Cosette doesn’t need him anymore. He gives up any pretense of belonging to the world, and for it he is granted near superhuman powers and Fantine is granted peace.

#brickclub #lm 1.8.4 #hugolian magic system