1.2.4-Kingedmundsroyalmurder

ClubNinetyThree 1.2.4: Everything is metaphor
Also everything is contradictions.

So so far the book has been really focused on contrasts and on deceptions. We’ve talked a lot about them in club already, and boy does Hugo lay on the contrasts here. The cannon is machine and monster, is free and enslaved, is inanimate and angry, is heavy and moves lightly, is dead and living, is exterminator and toy, is savior and death-bringer. Furthermore, this is probably the most brutal section yet, in terms of what’s happening, but it’s described using the prettiest prose we’ve seen so far. The whole first part of this chapter is gorgeous, and not in the unsettling ‘birds sing over swinging bayonets’ kind of way. This chapter is take-your-breath-away pretty, prose-wise. (At least it was for me. As mentioned, I go weak-in-the-knees for Hugo’s writing when he’s trying.) And hidden in those words is this awful, awful thing going on. Hugo’s too deliberate a craftsman not to have done it this way to further his theme. It would have been very, very easy to go all ‘the orchard was terrible’ on us here, but he didn’t. There’s hardly a short sentence in the whole chapter, and almost all of the ones that are there are questions. He could choose to write in such a way that describes the chaos and terror of the moment, and lord knows he’s capable of that when he wants to, but he doesn’t.

I don’t think I am going to try to unravel the actual metaphor of the cannon. I have my thoughts about what it might be, but I a)don’t know my history enough to be sure and b)need to think about it more. I think it’s Actually War, but it might also be Actually Revolution or Actually The People or even Actually God and I need to think about it more and read more of the book to figure out which it is.

However, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about the cannon as Actually Metaphor in general. I’ll admit, I tend to just sit back and let the metaphors wash over me, and I definitely did that here. Mostly I just sighed enviously a lot about the prose. But one thing was abundantly clear even to me: the cannon is a force of nature in its own right and it can only be controlled by other forces of nature. The cannon is controlled by the ship, which is controlled by the sea, which is controlled by the wind. (Note that the wind is not controlled by God, which actually surprises me, coming from Hugo. It may be implied, given who he is and when he’s writing, but I am very intrigued by his choice of not making it explicit. I’m used to him explicitly placing responsibility in the hands of God/the Divine, but the cannon here is left in the hands of the wind as ultimate master.) The cannon is a man-made creation, but the instant it escapes man’s control it becomes instantly deadly. It cannot be restrained because, as Hugo says, “Comment arrêter ce qu’il faut éviter?” (How to stop what must be avoided?) Human intelligence made it and human error set it free but now that it is free only nature can command it. Which makes the earlier comparison to the slavery of the material even more pointed: the cannon must be confined because there is no other way to control it. However! This is only prevailing dogma, and the chapter ends with a man preparing to, apparently, do the impossible and reason/regain control of this objects which cannot be contained. I know I said I wouldn’t try and figure out the metaphor, but this is making a pretty strong case for the cannon as Actually The People, who are repressed and confined by a ruling class that thinks it owns them but doesn’t know how to work with them through any means other than complete control.

Furthermore, the cannon, having taken its freedom, is now made master of the ship. The cannon is unstoppable and terrifying. I cannot, however, help but notice the irony in the situation. The two men last chapter were talking casually about slaughtering people and praising men who did it without thinking too much about it. Here, a force is slaughtering their people and they are horrified. Certainly, I’m not saying they shouldn’t be horrified, because what is happening is horrific, but it’s still quite the contrast from how they were treating the hypothetical and historical death of their enemies not 1000 words ago. Like the soldiers in 1.1.1, who went against orders when faced with human suffering, these officers find themselves filled with fear and horror when faced with this bringer of death. Human emotions, it seems, often override orders or ideology.

Okay, switching tracks a bit, I want to go back and talk about the language. Because I mentioned that the language was beautiful, but I didn’t really talk about it much. So let me reiterate: this chapter is beautiful. It’s evocative and well constructed and rich and deeply terrible. I would point out bits that I found particularly pretty, but that would be about half the chapter. But have a few anyway:

C’est une machine qui se transforme en un monstre. (It is a machine transformed into a monster)

rien de plus inexorable que la colère de l’inanimé. (nothing more relentless than this wrath of the inanimate)

Ce bloc forcené a les sauts de la panthère, la lourdeur de l’éléphant, l’agilité de la souris, l’opiniâtreté de la cognée, l’inattendu de la houle, les coups de coude de l’éclair, la surdité du sépulcre. Il pèse dix mille, et il ricoche comme une balle d’enfant. (This enraged lump leaps like a panther, it has the clumsiness of an elephant, the nimbleness of a mouse, the obstinacy of an axe, the uncertainty of the billows, the zigzag of the lightning, the deafness of the grave. It weighs ten thousand pounds, and it rebounds like a child’s ball.)

Une tempête cesse, un cyclone passe, un vent tombe, un mât brisé se remplace, une voie d’eau se bouche, un incendie s’éteint: mais que devenir avec cette énorme brute de bronze? (A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?)

Le navire a, pour ainsi dire, dans le ventre la foudre prisonnière qui cherche à s’échapper; quelque chose comme un tonnerre roulant sur un tremblement de terre. (The ship has, so to speak, in its belly, an imprisoned thunderstorm, striving to escape; something like a thunderbolt rumbling above an earthquake.)

Also this sentence? This sentence is one of the most Hugo sentences I have ever read:

La caronade, lancée par le tangage, fit un trouée dans ce tas d’hommes et en écrasa quatre du premier coup, puis, reprise et décochée par le roulis, elle coupa en deux un cinquième misérable, et alla heurter à la muraille de bâbord une pièce de la batterie qu’elle démonta. The carronade, hurled forward by the pitching of the vessel, made a gap in this crowd of men and crushed four at the first blow; then sliding back and shot out again as the ship rolled, it cut in two a fifth unfortunate, and knocked a piece of the battery against the larboard side with such force as to unship it. (all trans. from wikisource)

Like damn. I think if I ever have to describe Hugo’s writing style in a sentence I will just offer up this one.

Commentary
Lifeisyetfair Ooh, could you expand on that last bit about “one of the most Hugo sentences I have ever read”? What specifically makes his style stand out? (I don’t really read French).

Kingedmundsroyalmurder (reply to Lifeisyetfair) The main things that really stood out for me were the list structure and the way death was integrated into the middle. Hugo is really into lists, and he does this thing where he varies the amount of detail he puts into each part of the list. This one’ s actually not quite as distinctive as some others (a really classic example of this structure is the infamous ‘killed four Amis in one single line’ sentence in Les Mis) but it still jumped out at me as a Hugolian list structure sentence. And the way the deaths were treated feels very Hugolian — he tends to put death starkly, just dropping it into the middle of the sentence and moving on (again, see That Sentence from Les Mis). Or, to pull another Les Mis example, have the penultimate sentence of chapter 2 of Waterloo:

Bauduin killed, Foy wounded, fire, massacre, carnage,a stream of English blood, French blood, German blood, mingled in fury; a well crammed with corpses, the Nassau regiment and the Brunswick regiment destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackman killed, the English Guards slaughtered, twenty French battalions out of the forty in Reille’s corps decimated; three thousand men in that single farmstead at Hougomont cut down, slashed to pieces, butchered, shot, burned. (Donougher translation)

That one’s a more elaborate list than the one we’re dealing with in this chapter and it’s heavier on the detail staggering, but it still drops death starkly in the middle without fanfare or elaboration like the one in today’s chapter does. Obviously Hugo isn’t the only one to do this, but he does it regularly enough that it’s a structure that pings me as decidedly Hugolian every time I see it. (I have Theories about why he chooses that structure, but I’ll spare you any further half-structured rambling.)