#another chapter has gotten SADDER THAN WAS ADVERTISED

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 2.7.3 ‘Upon what conditions we can respect the past’

Hugo describes joining a convent as being buried alive, which Valjean will take literally a few chapters from now.

Valjean internalized the nature of this place really fast.

I was going to say that’s strange for a person his age--but no, it’s NOT. The convent is familiar to him because it’s so much like the bagne.

Oh god, this gets worse and worse. A couple of chapters ago I felt like I got a handle on how the convent doomed Valjean. Now I feel like I just understood why.

He spent 19 years training for this. It was really hard for him to adapt to being a member of a small town.

This place must be such a relief.

;_______;

I talked a little while back about how uses of the word “ingrate” in the text are overwhelmingly tied to Marius.

This chapter has one of our few non-Marius uses:

The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child’s garment which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which should return to embrace the living.

“Ingrates!” says the garment, “I protected you in inclement weather. Why will you have nothing to do with me?” “I have just come from the deep sea,” says the fish. “I have been a rose,” says the perfume. “I have loved you,” says the corpse. “I have civilized you,” says the convent.

To this there is but one reply: “In former days.”

So these objects talk just like Gillenormand? It’s exactly the same kind of guilt tripping.

And Hugo lays out the clear, firm, boundary-setting answer: The solution to Marius’s story is presented to us before we ever meet him.

But we never see Marius realize it.

;_______;

This chapter goes on to describe phantoms of the past that won’t die and which prey on the living:

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms, all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.

Hugo is speaking in a global sense, but it's just as true for the characters whose pasts the chapter invokes. Gillenormand is one of these phantoms for Marius. The bagne is one for Valjean.

And both Valjean and Marius lose this fight. There’s hope that Marius will eventually sort things out, but Valjean dies of it.

;_______;