#LM 1.5.11

[the-wraxall-illustrations]

#my posts #les mis #les miserables #victor hugo #lascelles wraxall #wraxall translation #lynd ward #lm 1.5.11

[cliozaur]

It’s a gut-wrenching chapter, in which Hugo argues that misery, hunger, destitution and like drive women to become societal slaves (sex workers). However, later in the book, when it’s not just misery but someone else (Thenardier) exploiting his daughters, Hugo only slightly alludes to this situation (which is in fact much worse) without delving into it.

“It weighs upon the woman, that is to say, upon grace, weakness, beauty, maternity. This is not one of the least of man’s disgraces.” Is Hugo perhaps referencing his own experience with "society's slaves"? I’m not sure, but he could.

Ah, the parallel between Fantine and Enjolras in this chapter! Both turning into marble towards the end. The entire subsequent paragraph is hauntingly beautiful. Sometimes, death seems a preferable option to such an existence. Hugo appears to have given up on society's capacity to solve these problems, turning to God as the sole source of hope and solution.  From this we can conclude that Fantine is doomed.

#les mis letters #lm 1.5.11 #les miserables #fantine #thenardier #enjolras

[pureanonofficial]

LES MIS LETTERS IN ADAPTATION - Christus No Liberavit, LM 1.5.11 (Les Miserables Broadway, 2007)

At the point in this melancholy drama which we have now reached, nothing is left to Fantine of that which she had formerly been.

She has become marble in becoming mire. Whoever touches her feels cold. She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and dishonored figure. Life and the social order have said their last word for her. All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep. She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that is soaked.

At least, she believes it to be so; but it is an error to imagine that fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything whatever.

#Les Mis #Les Miserables #Fantine #Lea Salonga #Les Mis Letters #LM 1.5.11 #Les Mis Letters in Adaptation #lesmisedit #lesmiserablesedit #musicaledit #theateredit #pureanonedits #broadwayedit #I was stuck for this chapter and then once again the musical pulled through and I was struck by how much these lyrics parallel this chapter!

[dolphin1812]

I’m particularly interested in this passage from today’s chapter:

“She [Fantine] has become marble in becoming mire. Whoever touches her feels cold. She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and dishonored figure. Life and the social order have said their last word for her. All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep. She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that is soaked.”

For all that “marble” is used to describe Fantine’s coldness/hardened exterior, it’s actually considered a fairly sensitive stone (mainly to acids). While it seems very sturdy, then, the “clouds falling upon” it and “the ocean sweep[ing] over” it would eventually cause harm, just as Fantine herself is not actually immune to all of her suffering. She’s just too worn down to show it. Her “resignation” is even paralleled with death through the structure of the sentence: “that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep.”

Marble as a material is also associated with ancient Greek works, particularly in sculpture and in architecture. In this sense, it works well with Fantine’s prior tie to classical imagery. Whereas before she seemed to be an ancient divinity, now she is a monument, a remnant of the past. Of course, these monuments were (and are) highly valued. The sheer number of classical references in Hugo’s writing highlights his own connection to 19th-century Europe’s fascination with ancient Greece. However, these monuments were also considered “ruins,” suggesting that the use of “marble” links Fantine to some form of destruction and/or decay as well. Society is what made this happen to her rather than time, but she has similarly been eroded away.

This also isn’t the first time marble has been used to describe a character. While most references to marble so far have been literal marble (the tablet in the bishop’s original residence, for instance), marble has been used more metaphorically for two other characters: the Conventionist and Javert. In the case of the Conventionist, marble was used to describe the immobility of his lower body: “[he]  resembled the king in the Oriental legend, flesh above and marble below.” In this case, the comparison is indirect and is strictly about his appearance, so it’s not the best link to Fantine, who is like “marble” character-wise. Javert, on the other hand, is “a marble-hearted spy.” The stone is used to convey his coldness, strictness, and harshness, just like it’s used to illustrate Fantine’s reduced sensitivity. In some ways, they are made “marble” by similar forces, as Javert has also “hardened his heart” because of his experiences as a social outcast. Still, their “marble” natures are opposed (Javert is on the side of the law and Fantine is very vulnerable to that now that she’s on the outskirts of society), so it’s interesting that this connection between them exists.

Spoilers below:

The allusion to marble mainly makes me think of Enjolras, especially since there are already so many similarities in how he and Fantine as described. In his case, though, I think marble mostly links him visually to either a “hero of classical antiquity” or more recent works in that style, while also conveying his supposedly cold attitude. If Fantine is marble in the moment of her ruin, then Enjolras is the reappropriation of that marble image as an idealized symbol of the future.

#les mis letters #lm 1.5.11 #fantine #the conventionist #javert #hugo's love of classical references #this chapter was so sad that I didn't want to write too much about what happens #even though it's super short #some of Hugo's language was once again uncomfortable #but I mostly just feel bad for Fantine :(

[elinordash]

Alas! What are all these fates, driven on pell-mell? Whither are they going? Why are they thus? He who knows that sees the whole of the shadow. He is alone. His name is God*.

*or in this case, Victor Hugo

#les mis letters #les mis #les mis quotes #lm 1.5.11 #my text

[pilferingapples]

LM 1.5.11 (retrobrick)

One of those chapters where I have too many feelings to say much; that's gonna be a real Theme in these last Fantine posts, I think ><

" ..the whole ocean sweeps over her! What does it matter? the sponge is already saturated." 

 I *think* the last real heavy Ocean Mention we got was back in Man Overboard.  That chapter is tied to Valjean, though not exclusively about him 

The man overboard there screams and thrashes and cries and prays, until " he yields to despair; worn out, he seeks death, he no longer resists, gives up, lets go, tumbles into the mournful depths of the abyss forever."  

There, the sea is explicitly linked to the penal code--but here, it's shown to be (as seas generally are) far larger and deeper than that. Fantine is underwater too. 

But:  she hasn't accepted defeat. Her own death? sure.  The end of all her happiness? Absolutely .  But she's not  a corpse drifting to the bottom; she's " become marble in becoming mud" . 

The obvious other reference for a Les Mis character becoming marble in accepting self-sacrifice is Enjolras--so much so that it's what finally brainslapped me into realizing their parallel --and I'm sure I'll talk about it more. But the contrast between Fantine and Valjean here is really interesting. Because they're both cast aside by society, sunk under that ocean.

But Valjean  never becomes marble.  He stopped crying, he" died", spiritually, in that ocean,  became the corpse (the better to be resurrected by a miracle, of course); and the effects of that in a practical sense are in his ever-present  self-loathing, his anger that lasts even when he wants to set it aside.   But he doesn't get the Marble metaphor--at least not so far (it's a big book, Valjean does a lot , maybe it shows up later?) . 

The Conventionist becomes marble as he dies; Fantine becomes marble in accepting her social damnation;  Enjolras is way ahead of the Final Form game from the time we meet him.  Becoming Marble is not Super Great for the characters it happens to--it's linked to acceptance of ultimate sacrifice , not a fun way to spend an afternoon- but it's distinct from Valjean's prison-trauma and death-metaphors.  And I think it plays out differently; or anyway, I'm going to be keeping an eye on this now to see if that's right. 

Other Notes: 

whoo boy. I don't even know where to start with Hugo's assertion that the only slavery left in European society, in 1862  (let alone 182x) , is prostitution (and that's saying nothing of his apparent assertion that prostitution employs only women).    This is one of those " a dissertation or nothing" kind of subjects and I am not at all up to the dissertation but. At best that's wildly overoptimistic as an assessment (slavery is still all over the place now, even where it's illegal) ; more likely, of course, it's willful obfuscation to make a point, and I *get* it, but..this feels like writing off a lot of pain and injustice to make that point. 

#Marble and shipwreck #LM 1.5.11 #Fantine talk #Valjean talk #slavery ment. #Brickclub

[meta-squash]

Brick Club 1.5.11 “Christus Nos Liberavit”

The Latin of the title translates to “Christ Liberates.” Most of this book talks about god in a much more abstract sense, and god in general is invoked more than Christ is, at least in narration rather than dialogue terms. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Christ is being invoked when Hugo is criticizing the fact that society ignores the true tenets of its largest religion.

“The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not yet permeate it.” Christianity is supposed to be the main religion but those with the power to act as “good christians” interpret the phrase how they like, in ways that do not line up with the actions of good will and mutual aid and empathy that are actually in the bible. This is another one of those ‘Why’s Hugo gotta be so relevant in the 21st century’ type lines. Even now I live in a country that’s supposed to have separation of church and state but it really doesn’t, and the christianity that the state follows is christianity appropriated and twisted by those in power, by politicians and capitalists and bigots. The people who claim christianity now are the people Jesus would have chased out of the temple. The fights with cops over the right of Black people or homeless people or trans people to live, the lack of welfare for all the people suffering from unemployment due to the pandemic, the utter disregard of large churches to be safe in said pandemic, hell, all the people who refuse to mask up and quarantine, the fact that gatherings for two Eids and Rosh Hashanah were cancelled due to pandemic but the US won’t be shutting things down for Christmas and didn’t make an effort to prevent Thanksgiving gatherings either, the consistent abuse and torture of immigrants deemed “illegal” and placed in camps, the abandonment of people who are ill or disabled without health insurance or adequate care. It all just feels like it can be summed up with this line. We say we’re a christian country, that we are religious, but the laws of Jesus Christ that should govern our civilization aren’t the ones that have permeated it. People have appropriated the words of christianity for their own use and abandoned those that are truly important. It was relevant in 1823, and in 1862 when Les Mis was published, and it’s still highly relevant in the dumpster fire of 2020.

Hugo is so pissed off in this chapter. There’s just so much anger and just a sense of, like, “it’s all so awfully overwhelming, and nobody’s doing anything to change it, because they don’t see what needs changing.” That’s the problem here. People are turning a blind eye on problems because they think that because some other major problem (slavery) has been solved, that means there’s no other major problems.

“They say slavery has disappeared from European civilization. That is incorrect. It still exists, but now it weighs only on women, and it is called prostitution.” France abolished slavery in 1848, and I think Hugo is talking like France is all of Europe, because I’m pretty sure a number of European nations didn’t abolish slavery until at least a dozen or so years later?

“It weighs on women, that is to say, on grace, frailty, beauty, motherhood.” Hugo is listing off all these aspects that Fantine no longer has access to. She no longer has virtue, at least in the eyes of society, now that she has become a sex worker. She no longer has frailty, because she has hardened and become marble. She no longer has beauty, because she has lost her hair and her teeth and her nice clothes. She no longer has motherhood, because she has lost Cosette. This slavery weighs on women until they have none of these characteristics left to them.

First switch to present tense! Well, first switch to present tense while talking about a main character, and talking in a non-abstract sense. Present tense when talking about actual plot action (as opposed to poetic or historical ramblings) is Hugo telling us to pay attention! Aside from Waterloo (which is in the historical present tense), there are only a handful of times that he switches to present tense. Present tense is Hugo telling us to wake up and pay attention because what he’s talking about is important for the upcoming chapters. And often he only hangs on to Important Present Tense for about a paragraph. Here, it’s 13 lines.

In this case, the present tense details just how horribly traumatic the situation has been for Fantine. She has basically shut down, become almost a shell of a person, become resigned to her fate. Nothing can touch her; she ignores and endures all. This emphasis on how indifferent she has become is important, because that endurance breaks down in the next chapter with Bamatabois’ treatment of her.

“All that can happen to her has happened. She has endured all, borne all, experienced all, suffered all, lost all, wept for all.” Fantine really and truly becomes a Universal Symbol here. She is All Women here, and is experiencing the pain and suffering and burden of every poor woman.

“She is resigned, with that resignation resembling indifference as death resembles sleep. She fears nothing now. Every cloud falls on her, and the whole ocean sweeps over her! What does it matter to her? The sponge is already saturated.” This feels like a parallel to 1.2.8. Again, society is an ocean. Again, it overwhelms, drenches, drags down. In 1.2.8, we get a poetic, abstract image of the way the poor struggle to keep their heads above water, to survive the crushing weight of society and poverty, and in the end we watch them give up the struggle, exhausted, and sink. The last thirteen or so chapters have chronicled Fantine’s struggle, her fight against each crashing wave, her determination. She’s still swimming here, but she’s beginning to go numb and cold, her hands are starting to grasp at nothing the way the cast off man in 1.2.8 did, she’s starting to become worn out, and the inexorable night of poverty, the measureless misery of societal abandonment, is starting to take its toll.

#les miserables #les miserables meta #brickclub #lm 1.5.11 #les mis #les mis meta #i'm very much not religious but my best friend was a religion major and we've had lots of conversations about this type of stuff

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 1.5.11 ‘Christus nos liberavit’

Random collection of thoughts for this one, and I think other people have said all of them before.

..The end of this chapter is really beautiful.

Rose’s note on the title:

“Christus nos liberavit: “Christ has made us free.” Hugo used this phrase from Paul’s letter to the Galatians (5:1) as the epigraph to his royalist ode À la liberté.”

It sounds like there’s a self-reference in that. I haven’t dug that poem up, but it’s possible it would illuminate something here.

So. I know I’m coming from a really, Really different context in terms of how we think about sex work. Sex workers being sympathetic and their problems being the result of systemic injustices that should be fixed was a big deal when this was written! And being pro-woman in this era involved a lot more Separate Sphere nonsense! Fine.

But, like. They say when Hugo died, all the prostitutes in Paris wore black to mourn the death of their favorite customer. This “Woman’s Fall Is Man’s Sin” narrative is part of a deep personal inconsistency, and I feel like everything would be better if Hugo could just.. not. When he frames it as man’s sin, the only solution is for man to stop sinning, which is an unworkable dead end, and Hugo has personal knowledge of this fact. The sex work conversation becomes so much more productive when it’s about labor and working conditions and systemic factors (which he has! He knows about those!) rather than Sin Against Innocents.

Yeah, yeah, like I said, there’s been a real social context shift. Moving on.

I guess I’m a little surprised by the use of “slavery” here as specific to women and prostitution rather than part of a more general observation. It moves away from the ways I was linking Fantine with Valjean and their similar exploitation. And Cosette also, which...

....Holy fuck, I just realized how good it is that Valjean got her out of there while she was still a little kid. God, poor Eponine and Azelma, who were still around when Thenardier figured out that forcing girls into sex work was profitable. Fuck.

Fantine turning to marble as she becomes corrupted is a remarkable image. The connotation of marble is about purity, and Hugo is deliberately contrasting that with the reader’s (and his own) feelings about prostitution.

And, with the link between Enjolras and Fantine, all of this is also about Enjolras becoming more marble and more corrupt at the end of the barricade as he becomes harsher with Javert and turns from grand and noble war to the kind of desperate war that means fighting with bottles of nitric acid.

And “All the ocean sweeps over her.”

We’re back at the man overboard chapter, only Fantine has progressed so far into drowning that she's stopped struggling and is already underwater--or she thinks she is.

I love the use of the present tense to emphasize her feeling that time has stopped and she has reached the end.

#brickclub #catching up #i feel like i didn't have much to add with this one #lm 1.5.11

[fremedon]

Brickclub I.5.11, “Christus Nos Liberavit”

“At the point we have now reached in this painful tragedy, there is nothing left of the Fantine she once was. Sinking into the mire, she has hardened into stone.”

The governing image for our martyr characters, marble, meets the governing image of the whole novel, with a tense change just to make sure we notice--as @meta-squash points out, it’s the first time in this book Hugo has used the present tense for a passage of narrative within the story’s timeframe, not just for an apostrophe to the reader.

And what a passage. It goes on:

“Anyone who touches her feels cold. She passes by, enduring you, ignoring you. She is the stern figure of disgrace. Life and the social order have said all they have to say to her. Everything that will happen to her has happened. She has been through everything, borne everything, sustained everything, suffered everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned with a resignation that resembles indifference as death resembles sleep. There is nothing more she shrinks from, nothing more she fears. Let the whole rain-cloud come down on her and the entire ocean sweep over her! What does she care? She is a saturated sponge.

This at least is what she believes, but it is a mistake to imagine that fate has no more in store and that there is a limit to everything.”

She has made herself marble, and it’s not enough to keep her from being hurt. She is the man overboard, but she’s not finished drowning.

The previous chapters were Fantine’s barricade; this one is what follows the barricade: her sewer, where she throws herself into degradation and horror, in order to keep it from engulfing her child.

The association of prostitution with the sewers was a pretty common metaphor in canon era: they were both seen as a sort of public infrastructure, a necessary, if disgusting, convenience for keeping the public’s...effluvia, shall we say...from backing up into public view. Parent-Duchâtelet, who conducted the landmark public health study of Paris’s prostitutes, applied for the job on the basis of having already conducted the landmark public health study of the sewers of Paris, and he drew that connection explicitly.

And since this is such a short chapter, I’m going to go off on a little bit of a tangent. Fantine is still associated with Enjolras here through the marble imagery, but now she’s prefiguring Valjean’s descent into the mire.

On Discord, we’ve been talking about the images and concepts that recur and develop enough to almost be characters in their own right--the sewers, the barricade, Waterloo, Providence, etc., and that discussion has turned a couple of times to Tarot. I think it’s a productive way at looking at and distinguishing the types of mirroring and doubling Hugo uses. Not--let me be very clear--that I think he was deliberately building on Tarot imagery in any systematic way. He clearly knew of it, and of some medieval card imagery that didn’t make the standard decks, but he doesn’t draw on it as a system.

As a shorthand for Hugo’s homegrown system of references, though, I keep coming back to it. There’s a difference between the sort of mirroring where he puts characters through the same scenario or into the same tableau--or back into the same tableau in a new role--and the sort where he associates them with the same archetype, or with a reversed/mirrored form of the same archetype. I’m starting to think of the first kind as Hugo’s minor arcana and the second as the major arcana.

So Fantine's descent enacts the same minor arcana scenario with Cosette that Valjean will later enact with Marius. Fantine and Enjolras, who are associated with each other through repeated imagery and description, are two aspects of the same major arcana figure--let’s call it the Martyr. They each sacrifice everything for Future, another figure of the major arcana and possibly the most powerful, after Providence--in the abstract, that’s the republic or Progress; as a person, Cosette; as something in between, Patria or France.  

You could also call this one Hope: the thing that, when you have lost it, you die of despair.

Cosette’s zero-sum game with Éponine, who can only be strong when she is weak and vice versa, represents a reversal of that figure, the inverse of Hope. And I think in this book that’s not actually despair; despair is the absence of hope, not its dark mirror. The reversal is Fatalité. I’m going to come back to that over the next few chapters as we meet Javert again, because I think, as much as Javert represents the abstraction of the Law, the Law in this book represents one facet of fatalité, and Javert and Éponine’s doubling is meant to underline that. 

#brickclub #lm 1.5.11 #tarot #brick arcana

[greenleaf-starbright]

Brickclub 1.5.11

I love it when the author is so good as to let you know what the message of the story is.

This chapter is brilliant, and I don’t think I have much to say about it.

Like a lot of people, I'm super familiar with the musical, so that's my reference point for the story. One thing I love, love, love about the book in contrast is how angry Hugo is. The rage roars right off the page, and I personally find it very healing. When this happens in the musical, and even in most adaptations, Fantine's story is very sad and very difficult to watch; but without the narrator's voice, that is all it is.

For reasons I cannot quite put my finger on, I feel like Hugo saying "...but it's never so bad as you think!" should feel twee - but it doesn't.

I think because rage is an active emotion, it drives us to DO SOMETHING and that fire of DO SOMETHING stands in contrast to the overwhelmingly sopping wet morass of despair that Fantine is trapped in. This is definitely a chapter about the roaring of the fire and light of the sun above the ice-cold, anonymising, diffuseness of the water and its dark, magnetic depths. But a few chapters ago, Fantine was the sun, and now she is everything the sun is not.

(I spend a lot of my time thinking about scuba divers drowning. Once you get beyond a certain depth, your body just begins to collapse - but the nitrogen bubbles through your brain and, in cold water, the narcosis can take on a dark, pulsating feeling, and the way that shipwrecks tend do call divers to come in and drown there. When I read the descriptions of those who have survived this, I hear a a dissociative loss of self, a sort of dissolving so that nothing of you is left - only the weight of the sea; and I also think about how in death and in the water one loses individuality, as in the phrase, "one of a sea of people", becoming part of a huge absence, and I think that also is a fit for Fantine - no longer really a person, but one of a mass - having lost the connection to herself and the strength that helped her stay centered)

God sees all - but I love the particular phrasing here, because it would be awful if Hugo suggested He saw the meaning or the plan or the reason for what happened to Fantine. But what God sees is the darkness of the whole. I don't know for sure what that means, but there's an unexpectedness about it that gives me pause and pleases me; and again, it suggests a light and fire imagery which definitely isn't in the text clearly, but feels obviously present.

#the les mis tag #lm 1.5.11 #brickclub