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les_miserables2013-05-20 10:20 pm
melannen) wrote in les_miserables2013-05-20 10:20 pm
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Faut-il trouver bon Waterloo?
I 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.)
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I will try to have more thoughts that aren't just jumping up and down going YES THIS YES OTHER PEOPLE'S THINKY THOUGHTS at both of these posts later!
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I saw that meta awhile back and yeah, it does overlap with mine a lot! berryphase says it a lot better, but links it up to Les Amis instead of Valjean. :P Which is also very valid and yeah, I suspect once I get to the barricade I will be full of thinking about Enjolras and company in terms of this too. (And I wouldn't be surprised if reading her thoughts about the horse-shoe nail was part of what had it so present in my thoughts when I was reading about Valjean's wheel-spokes and whiffletrees, before I ever got to Waterloo.)
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My favorite thing about Waterloo, I think, is how many different opinions about Napoleon Hugo's got swirling around that section. Napoleon was great, but terrible, but destiny was on his side but then destiny turned against him -- and of course these are all things Hugo has thought about Napoleon at various different points in his life and is trying to reconcile, and in the end the only way to possibly reconcile it is to throw up your hands and say "WELL I GUESS GOD SORTED OUT WATERLOO THEN DIDN'T HE."
Whereas of course Valjean is Hugo's. Hugo knows exactly what he thinks about Valjean. So Valjean, as an individual, can overcome fate; there's a logic and a reason behind it. Individuals can overcome fate.
Napoleon's not an individual, by this point. He's a piece of French mythology; he's a historic force. And what this section always reminds me of, anachronistically, is the way time travel works in books like Connie Willis'; try whatever you want to change the past, the sweep of history will come pushing it back into place again. Connie Willis calls it the sweep of history, and Hugo calls it God, and thinks in terms of the eternal movement towards progress.
But, as you say, whatever the historical forces are, an individual's attempt to do what's right in the face of all obstacles still matters -- even if, in the end, Waterloo is still lost.
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I read this section bearing in mind the idea that Hugo considered it the most important section in the book but also that is was written last; he must have put it where he did - right after Valjean's ride - for a reason, but on the other hand I can't help but wonder if he really worked out all the echoes of it himself.
And yes about how Napoleon is no longer an individual at this point! Really he's no longer a person, in some ways, and I don't think Hugo ever really lets him be on. That almost becomes a commentary on monarchy in general, doesn't it - if only an individual can choose to do right, and a king or emperor isn't really an individual anymore...
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That's interesting! Denny assumes in the foreword to his translation that Hugo had written most of it before returning to finishing the novel. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't make me boggle that he considered it the most important section... but on the other hand, Les Misérables is a story of coincidences -- of things that would have gone very differently if circumstances had been only slightly altered -- and I assumed that was the function of the Waterloo chapter while reading it.
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...but I'm not sure about Waterloo as being about coincidences in general; in my experience, *most* novels in this period are about a string of unlikely coincidences, I don't think he'd've needed to hang a lantern on it....
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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.
Well said. I think you put your finger on it - it's all about the "MERDE!"
Plus, Jean Valjean's association with Napoleon: he falls when Napoleon rises (1796-1815), and Napoleon has to fall first in order for Jean Valjean to be transformed and rise into M. Madeleine. But Hugo had to be tricky and put that thematic beginning a long way into the novel. Well, to be fair putting it at the start would likely drive away even more people than those who are currently frightened off by the Bishop (me included).
(Also interesting that we got the whole 1817 chapter first - a close look at the cultural life of the early Restoration before the depiction of Napoleon's fall that had to precede it.)
Fun fact*: before the release of Les Miserables, Hugo advised his publisher to let Napoleon-friendly quotes from the "Waterloo" chapters reign over the Hugo skeptics of the Second Empire's literary scene - and the censors.He reasoned that they wouldn't dare object to passages of that nature, given how much Napoleon III supported the cult around his uncle.
* According to Graham Robb's Victor Hugo biography, anyway.)
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