#lm 5.3.7

[secretmellowblog]

It’s fascinating how Jean Valjean is constantly associated with imagery of being buried alive.

His literal near-burial in the coffin outside Petit-Picpus is the most obvious example of that. But it’s in the sewers chapters as well— he has to face the horror of nearly drowning and being buried alive deep underground in the filth beneath the city.

And that imagery a running motif throughout his entire storyline. His imprisonment is constantly compared to as a burial, a living death; being in prison is like being trapped and drowned underneath an enormous weight, unable to move, unable to escape, with everyone around you refusing to acknowledge you are still a living human being.

In his dream before the Champmatheiu trial, Jean Valjean had a nightmare where he’s surrounded by a faceless crowd of indifferent people, who tell him:

‘Do you not know that you have been dead this long time?’

I opened my mouth to reply, and I perceived that there was no one near me.

The core horror of Jean Valjean’s plotline is the horror of being buried alive. It’s the horror of being constantly told that he is dead when he’s still living and suffering and desperately struggling to escape—- but suffering alone while he’s buried in a place so deep that no one can hear him.

[dolphin1812]

Valjean seeing light and feeling hope is so beautiful! 

That said, it’s a bit marred by this (even before be realizes that he can’t get out):

“The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel; a faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries, logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been corrected.”

He really can’t escape prison, even in a sewer. The use of the same structures is fascinating on an infrastructural level (why was the prison a model? How and why did prisons influence sewers?), but it tells us that Valjean’s still trapped even before we explicitly learn that. And he is, once again, locked in by a prison lock.

“He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison” is such a heartbreaking line. 

And it’s even more heartbreaking to know that he’s thinking only of Cosette.

[cliozaur]

The one in which the brightest of hopes is replaced with the darkest of despairs. Valjean saw a good light (good, as opposed to the light produced by the police’s torches) and forgot about his weariness and exhaustion. It’s amazing how many types of light Hugo distinguishes in his novel – I suspect that it is possible to write an essay on this subject.

Valjean’s hopes are shattered by the weighty grating blocking the exit from the sewer. It's so robust and heavy that even a strong man like Valjean cannot break it. It’s hard to fathom the horror of this situation. Hugo intensifies the scene by drawing parallels with prison—there could hardly be anything more terrifying for Valjean than a reminder of his prison days. What’s most agonizing is that freedom lies just beyond the grating; he can see the river, the quays, the city, but there's no way for him to reach it. I appreciate Hugo’s attention to detail, such as the flies freely passing in and out through the grating. However, Valjean is not a fly, and it seems that for him, everything is over. 'He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison'—what a terrible and heart-wrenching sentence! Somewhere in that darkness, 'the terrible spider is running along those black strands, quivering in the shadows.'

In this profound despair, Valjean finally thinks of Cosette. However, we will never know the exact nature of his thoughts about her.

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 5.3.7 “The Grandfather”

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[fremedon]

Brickclub 5.3.7, “Sometimes When You Think You Have Reached Your Destination, You Have Run Aground”

Valjean, having made it through the sinkhole and prayed--for the first time in the book, directly to God, instead of to an intermediary (Cosette, the nuns, the bishop, even Fantine)--hits a wall, literally.

The sewer gate, which narrows at its end, “a design fault copied from the entrances to prisons,” is locked “with one of those jail locks with which old Paris was so readily unsparing”--and, just in case the three direct prison comparisons in two pages haven’t made us think of Javert, “the teeth of a tiger are no more firmly set in their sockets” than the unmovable bars of the grate.

This place reminded Valjean of the convent--but now, in a retroactive judgment on it, the text confirms, he has “succeeded only in escaping into a prison.”

Donougher here makes what seems a wildly off the mark translation. The original text reads “C'était fini. Tout ce qu'avait fait Jean Valjean était inutile. L'épuisement aboutissait à l'avortement.” Donougher gives that last sentence, literally “Exhaustion ended in abortion,” as “God was against it,” which. Sure is a choice.

Because this is very explicitly the work of fatalité-- Valjean and Marius “were both caught in death’s huge sinister web, and Jean Valjean sensed the dreadful spider scuttling along those black threads quivering in the dark.”

This is such an awful moment--Valjean has realized, for possibly the first moment since entering the convent, that he’s in a tomb, and took the first steps toward life and escape, and prayed like that’s a thing he’s allowed to do instead of having to filter his approach to the absolute through someone he thinks is allowed to approach it. And it’s not enough--as far as he knows, he’s going to die in sight of daylight.

Or not--because in the next chapter, Thénardier--surely the least likely agent of Providence--will appear with the key. And Thénardier’s appearance will continue to be providential for Valjean--it’s his inept attempt to blackmail Marius at the end which will lead to their reconciliation, if too late to late to save Valjean.

But of course, ever since Waterloo, that’s been a theme of this book: That Providence does and will intervene, when it absolutely has to, and with whatever tools and methods are at hand--and they’re almost never the best or the kindest tools for the job.

But for the moment, Valjean sinks to his knees and thinks of Cosette--which, YES, FINALLY, THINK ABOUT WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOUR DAUGHTER WHEN YOU DON’T COME HOME.

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 5.3.7 “Sometimes we go aground when we expect to get ashore”

I do really love Hugo’s plotting. It’s so big, and he goes so hard. Through some combination of magic system and symbolism and realism, Jean Valjean has reached a place where something that feels like it might come to him in a specifically personal nightmare--he’s nearly escaped, only to find one more prison gate blocking his way!--is a realistic sequence of events. And Valjean has put in superhuman effort, and he’s superhumanly tired.

It’s Providence now, or nothing.

@fremedon complained about Donougher’s God-intruding translation of “L'épuisement aboutissait à l'avortement.”(“Exhaustion ended in abortion”), but FMA does essentially the same thing:

It was over. All that Jean Valjean had done was use­ less. God refused him.

In context it reads like more free indirect speech than like Word of God, but it’s still intruding an idea of God where Hugo didn’t--and/or indicating specific despair at God in the moment that Valjean is closest to God in the entire book. Which is a Choice.

Hugo is in fact VERY upfront here that the entity at work in this is the Fatality Spider.

They were both caught in the gloomy and immense web of death, and Jean Valjean could feel, running over those black threads trembling in the darkness, the appall­ing spider.

Which, actually, raises an interesting idea about the God-Fatality dichotomy, in that it feels like Valjean actually knows the deal. Even in his thoughts, he doesn’t blame God for this. He knows what’s at work here.

I’m interested in the way Providence uses Thenardier as the agent who can fix this. It feels like it has a lot to do with Thenardier’s myopic selfishness--he never sees the big picture, he never cares about the big picture, and that makes him a weird little oddly effective tool in the hands of Providence..... and an unthinkably devastating one in the hands of Fatality, who's going to have the last word there unfortunately.

And we end with Valjean thinking about Cosette. I think Hugo wants it to be a moment of pathos and Oh No, but I really, really want it to feel more like a reckoning. Valjean left her with no note, no provision for her future if he didn’t make it out, not even so much as a map to where the money was buried, and he walked in RIGHT AFTER Combeferre made a whole speech about what can go wrong when men go off and die without thinking about their families. And even so, it doesn’t feel like we’re necessarily supposed to be saying “YES. YOU IDIOT. WHAT ABOUT COSETTE??”

I’ve been rewatching Shoujo Cosette lately, and it’s such a breath of fresh air, how much that show bothers to think through what it would be like to Cosette experiencing all this.