Faut-il trouver bon Waterloo?
May. 20th, 2013 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melannen posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
les_miserablesI have just conquered Waterloo!
What Hugo seems to be trying to say in these chapters, as best I can tell (in that he says it outright over and over in slightly different words, although this being Hugo he also says many other things some of which are contradictory) is that the outcome of the battle was due, not to one general being better than another or one army being stronger, but due to the fact that Fate had turned against Napoleon (fate/destiny/luck/the will of God/natural law/the Force/narrative causality/the balance of the universe/whatever you want to call it.)
And ignoring if I can the question of actual reality - which apparently has only a loose relationship to Hugo's Waterloo anyway - I am fascinated by this argument, and especially the way we get it right after Valjean's desperate ride to Arras to confess. Because, while I don't think Hugo ever directly references it, both of those sections inevitably called to mind the old proverb about "for want of a horse-shoe nail, the battle was lost" (a reference that would almost certainly have been familiar to Hugo's original audience as well), but in entirely different ways.
Because the Waterloo section seems to say that this is true - that if any one of many small things that could not have been predicted had changed, if they hadn't all gone against Napoleon, than the outcome of the battle might have been entirely different.
But when we get to that in the book, we've just lived through Valjean's desperate ride, which calls to mind the proverb even more strongly: although I don't think his horse ever quite threw a shoe, everything else that could have gone unpredictably wrong did, and yet he made it there with his message in time anyway.
I guess one could argue that we're supposed to read by this that Valjean did have the will of God on his side, because he succeeded in the end when Napoleon didn't, but if God was smoothing his path, why have everything go wrong in the first place? When I read those chapters (and they resonated with me so hard, going toward one's doom and hoping and hoping that something will go wrong that stops you that isn't your fault, but having to push on anyway--) I thought that it was about how Valjean was doing what was right - that if you are doing something that you know is right, it doesn't matter what obstacles turn up in your way, as long as you keep going toward the right, you will get there.
(Or possibly it was just a cheap attempt to build suspense. :P)
But when you put that next to Waterloo - you take all the excuses he's laying out about why Napoleon could not win, and lay them out beside all the excuses Valjean could have used but didn't - well, then, what does that actually say about Napoleon?
Maybe the answer is the people he does credit with winning the battle: the peasant guides whose truth or lies changed the course of the battle: and maybe most of all Cambronne, the man he declares as the only true winner of the battle, the man who, like Valjean, carried on unflinching with what he knew was right even as he charged toward his own destruction.
So all of that sixty-page digression, then, has boiled down to an obscure young officer sublimely shouting "MERDE!" into the face of death. But then I guess that's what a good historical novel does: it takes the vast sweeping events of history and of great men and boils them down into the stories of individual, ordinary people making hard choices and shouting profanities on a battlefield.
(Although if that's the case this is all fascinating but did we really need fifty-six pages before we got back to an actual character from your novel, Hugo??)
(I suspect I will have more to say about all of this once I get to the other big battle scene in the book...)
Anyway! I have many thoughts on Waterloo! Does anyone have any thoughts on Waterloo to share?
(Also other people should post other stuff to this comm or else it'll just be me going on about Waterloo until I'm worse than Victor Hugo! I can post on Waterloo all week if you make me. I HAVE THE MATERIAL.)
What Hugo seems to be trying to say in these chapters, as best I can tell (in that he says it outright over and over in slightly different words, although this being Hugo he also says many other things some of which are contradictory) is that the outcome of the battle was due, not to one general being better than another or one army being stronger, but due to the fact that Fate had turned against Napoleon (fate/destiny/luck/the will of God/natural law/the Force/narrative causality/the balance of the universe/whatever you want to call it.)
And ignoring if I can the question of actual reality - which apparently has only a loose relationship to Hugo's Waterloo anyway - I am fascinated by this argument, and especially the way we get it right after Valjean's desperate ride to Arras to confess. Because, while I don't think Hugo ever directly references it, both of those sections inevitably called to mind the old proverb about "for want of a horse-shoe nail, the battle was lost" (a reference that would almost certainly have been familiar to Hugo's original audience as well), but in entirely different ways.
Because the Waterloo section seems to say that this is true - that if any one of many small things that could not have been predicted had changed, if they hadn't all gone against Napoleon, than the outcome of the battle might have been entirely different.
But when we get to that in the book, we've just lived through Valjean's desperate ride, which calls to mind the proverb even more strongly: although I don't think his horse ever quite threw a shoe, everything else that could have gone unpredictably wrong did, and yet he made it there with his message in time anyway.
I guess one could argue that we're supposed to read by this that Valjean did have the will of God on his side, because he succeeded in the end when Napoleon didn't, but if God was smoothing his path, why have everything go wrong in the first place? When I read those chapters (and they resonated with me so hard, going toward one's doom and hoping and hoping that something will go wrong that stops you that isn't your fault, but having to push on anyway--) I thought that it was about how Valjean was doing what was right - that if you are doing something that you know is right, it doesn't matter what obstacles turn up in your way, as long as you keep going toward the right, you will get there.
(Or possibly it was just a cheap attempt to build suspense. :P)
But when you put that next to Waterloo - you take all the excuses he's laying out about why Napoleon could not win, and lay them out beside all the excuses Valjean could have used but didn't - well, then, what does that actually say about Napoleon?
Maybe the answer is the people he does credit with winning the battle: the peasant guides whose truth or lies changed the course of the battle: and maybe most of all Cambronne, the man he declares as the only true winner of the battle, the man who, like Valjean, carried on unflinching with what he knew was right even as he charged toward his own destruction.
So all of that sixty-page digression, then, has boiled down to an obscure young officer sublimely shouting "MERDE!" into the face of death. But then I guess that's what a good historical novel does: it takes the vast sweeping events of history and of great men and boils them down into the stories of individual, ordinary people making hard choices and shouting profanities on a battlefield.
(Although if that's the case this is all fascinating but did we really need fifty-six pages before we got back to an actual character from your novel, Hugo??)
(I suspect I will have more to say about all of this once I get to the other big battle scene in the book...)
Anyway! I have many thoughts on Waterloo! Does anyone have any thoughts on Waterloo to share?
(Also other people should post other stuff to this comm or else it'll just be me going on about Waterloo until I'm worse than Victor Hugo! I can post on Waterloo all week if you make me. I HAVE THE MATERIAL.)
