Les Miserables: Book 5 ("Jean Valjean")
Jan. 23rd, 2013 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnThe last book! skygiants' post is here and is full of awesomeness, especially her thoughts about Valjean who is THE BEST, although I have more thoughts on Marius!
...I had no idea it was possible to say that many words about poop.
Valjean: Jean Valjean made me bawl like anything. Oh, Valjean. To have happiness so close, and then to renounce it at the end, and then to cling to it anyway and have it torn away from him little by little... AAAAAH. I just. I have no words. Valjean is awesomeness. Really weird and socially awkward and sometimes mistaken, but also awesomeness.
Cosette: Cosette is really sweet and I love her to bits, but... not... the brightest apple in the bucket? I mean, seriously, your husband is all "okay, so, we're not really that excited about your father anymore" and you're okay with that?
Javert: Javert has always been my favorite character by far, and he gets one chapter here that is all his own. And now I have a story to tell you. So even though I may have mentioned that the print copy I own is the first unabridged paperback translation, translated by Fahnestock and MacAfee, I've mostly been reading the Hapgood Gutenberg translation, because my Kindle is waaaay lighter than the book. And that worked really well for quite a lot of the book, and then I got to the Javert chapter, "Javert off the track," where Javert thinks about the fact that Valjean saved him and ends up committing suicide. (I realize he didn't do this so Valjean would appreciate it, but it's rather funny and a little bit sad to me that Valjean's reaction is, "Yeah, he must have been crazy.")
And I got really worked up because, you guys, apparently I read this particular chapter so many times as a kid that I remembered particular word choices and phrases -- I seem to have really embarrassingly large swaths of this chapter all but memorized -- and every time the Hapgood translation did something differently, I got this sense of "Nooooo that's not how it goes!" So, um, after about five kindle pages of this I had to switch to the paper copy. And then it turns out the F&M translation is in fact twice as readable as the Hapgood translation! I ended up reading it to the end. I really wish I had stuck to F&M the entire time, I probably would have found the digressions way more fascinating -- but at this point I am too lazy to reread it in the F&M translation. Maybe skygiants will read it again in ten years! I WILL SO BE THERE.
...So, Marius. Marius is awful in this book, really awful to Jean Valjean, breaking Valjean's heart and mine too. And -- and I was very angry with him, and then I kept reading, and then I read this:
And I came to a realization about him: We are Marius. Victor Hugo, I think, intended Marius to represent Society, to represent the audience, to represent the reader: to represent you and me. He has great compassion and sympathy for us, but at the same time pokes fun at our ridiculousness and our awkwardness -- and he doesn't pull punches at the consequences of our actions when we're thoughtless or selfish or don't have our philosophical ducks all in a row.
Marius is a nice kid. You want to pat him on the head. He's awkward, he's socially maladept, he's prickly, he's honest, he tries to live as best as he knows how. Like all of us. He's occasionally capable of self-sacrificing or heroic actions, like all of us. And he gets the girl in the end; he gets his grandfather back. But what happens when he doesn't think, when his actions don't reflect his best ideals? Eponine dies. One of his only friends, M. Mabeuf, basically commits suicide.
And in the end, when Valjean tells Marius he is a convict and Marius recoils in disgust and horror and shows him the door? When Marius rejects what, if only he had known everything, would have been his own best self, everything he yearns to venerate, everything he lacks in his life, everything he wants to be and to look up to? And loses that best self thereby? Jean Valjean, in a sense, had to die, so that Marius (so that we, as a people) could learn to grow beyond the self-obsessed twit he is (we are) now. And Hugo has hope for us! We can do this, he's saying. Marius is going to do this. We can too. He's saying, Marius is wrong, what he did was terrible. And what we do as a society is terrible, even if we want to be enlightened, even if we think we are -- every time we let the unthinking opinions of others sway our hearts, every time we don't allow for the possibility of redemption.
But it doesn't mean he can't learn. It doesn't mean we can't learn.
(But it still sucks for Jean Valjean. Dumb Marius. But also, dumb us.)
skygiants' post is here and is full of awesomeness, especially her thoughts about Valjean who is THE BEST, although I have more thoughts on Marius!...I had no idea it was possible to say that many words about poop.
Valjean: Jean Valjean made me bawl like anything. Oh, Valjean. To have happiness so close, and then to renounce it at the end, and then to cling to it anyway and have it torn away from him little by little... AAAAAH. I just. I have no words. Valjean is awesomeness. Really weird and socially awkward and sometimes mistaken, but also awesomeness.
Cosette: Cosette is really sweet and I love her to bits, but... not... the brightest apple in the bucket? I mean, seriously, your husband is all "okay, so, we're not really that excited about your father anymore" and you're okay with that?
Javert: Javert has always been my favorite character by far, and he gets one chapter here that is all his own. And now I have a story to tell you. So even though I may have mentioned that the print copy I own is the first unabridged paperback translation, translated by Fahnestock and MacAfee, I've mostly been reading the Hapgood Gutenberg translation, because my Kindle is waaaay lighter than the book. And that worked really well for quite a lot of the book, and then I got to the Javert chapter, "Javert off the track," where Javert thinks about the fact that Valjean saved him and ends up committing suicide. (I realize he didn't do this so Valjean would appreciate it, but it's rather funny and a little bit sad to me that Valjean's reaction is, "Yeah, he must have been crazy.")
And I got really worked up because, you guys, apparently I read this particular chapter so many times as a kid that I remembered particular word choices and phrases -- I seem to have really embarrassingly large swaths of this chapter all but memorized -- and every time the Hapgood translation did something differently, I got this sense of "Nooooo that's not how it goes!" So, um, after about five kindle pages of this I had to switch to the paper copy. And then it turns out the F&M translation is in fact twice as readable as the Hapgood translation! I ended up reading it to the end. I really wish I had stuck to F&M the entire time, I probably would have found the digressions way more fascinating -- but at this point I am too lazy to reread it in the F&M translation. Maybe skygiants will read it again in ten years! I WILL SO BE THERE.
...So, Marius. Marius is awful in this book, really awful to Jean Valjean, breaking Valjean's heart and mine too. And -- and I was very angry with him, and then I kept reading, and then I read this:
Although a democrat, Marius... had not yet come to distinguish between what is written by man and what is written by God, between law and right. He thought it natural that certain infractions of the written law should be followed by eternal penalties, and he accepted social damnnation as growing out of civilization. He was still at that point, though he was to advance infalliably with time, his nature being good, and basically composed entirely of latent progress.
And I came to a realization about him: We are Marius. Victor Hugo, I think, intended Marius to represent Society, to represent the audience, to represent the reader: to represent you and me. He has great compassion and sympathy for us, but at the same time pokes fun at our ridiculousness and our awkwardness -- and he doesn't pull punches at the consequences of our actions when we're thoughtless or selfish or don't have our philosophical ducks all in a row.
Marius is a nice kid. You want to pat him on the head. He's awkward, he's socially maladept, he's prickly, he's honest, he tries to live as best as he knows how. Like all of us. He's occasionally capable of self-sacrificing or heroic actions, like all of us. And he gets the girl in the end; he gets his grandfather back. But what happens when he doesn't think, when his actions don't reflect his best ideals? Eponine dies. One of his only friends, M. Mabeuf, basically commits suicide.
And in the end, when Valjean tells Marius he is a convict and Marius recoils in disgust and horror and shows him the door? When Marius rejects what, if only he had known everything, would have been his own best self, everything he yearns to venerate, everything he lacks in his life, everything he wants to be and to look up to? And loses that best self thereby? Jean Valjean, in a sense, had to die, so that Marius (so that we, as a people) could learn to grow beyond the self-obsessed twit he is (we are) now. And Hugo has hope for us! We can do this, he's saying. Marius is going to do this. We can too. He's saying, Marius is wrong, what he did was terrible. And what we do as a society is terrible, even if we want to be enlightened, even if we think we are -- every time we let the unthinking opinions of others sway our hearts, every time we don't allow for the possibility of redemption.
But it doesn't mean he can't learn. It doesn't mean we can't learn.
(But it still sucks for Jean Valjean. Dumb Marius. But also, dumb us.)
no subject
Date: 2013-01-24 08:27 pm (UTC)Although I will say I never got the impression that Marius was at all likely to go do anything particularly helpful or revolutionary in his future, now that he had everything he wanted, anything to help the people climbing towards the light, as it were; and I think Hugo would quite like us to go on and do so. But I hope I am wrong about Marius and he will in fact go on to spend lots of time on education reform!
(PS: Once every ten years seems about right as a reread ratio to me!)
no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 07:04 pm (UTC)Well, on one hand, he was clearly not doing anything at all helpful during most of the book (except almost accidentally, like threatening to blow up the barricade). On the other hand, I like to think that he felt super super guilty about Valjean's death and also maybe asked Cosette a little about her father (would this have killed him to do this before Valjean's death??) and I could see that spurring him to try to be a little more like Valjean -- come on, Marius, you can use those feelings of guilt for things other than dithering :) (Also, education reform! Hee!)
no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-25 09:10 pm (UTC)