1.2.5-Shirley-keeldar

ClubNinetyThree: 1.2.5: Vis et Vir
Fun title note: ‘et vir’ is a term added in legal proceedings to the known name of a spouse to indicate a husband whose name is unknown. (‘Et uxor’ or just ‘et ux’ is the equivalent term for a wife.)

THE LIVING CHARIOT OF THE APOCALYPSE. I love this description so much, I think I’ll make it my blog title.

Matters quickly become gruesome beyond my endurance. Tamara noted that in yesterday’s chapter Hugo was holding back on the visceral awfulness of the violence, and here, to me, at any rate, it no longer feels that way, with the stark descriptions of the cannon rolling over and over the cadavers and tearing them into pieces. All the earlier wishes for fire and blood and destruction aside, I don’t actually like violence.

And I do like people. I like people a whole lot, and it gets to be a problem sometimes.

Case in point:

Boisberthelot said to La Vieuville: "Do you believe in God, chevalier?" La Vieuville answered: "Yes. No.  Sometimes." "During a tempest?" "Yes. And in moments like this one."

This is so inexpressibly endearing to me, and it is so Not Allowed. My impulse is always to love everyone in fiction, and I am so weak against my better nature that no amount to recalling my rage from last chapter is helping. Victor Hugo laughs at me across the centuries, he knows my pain, he intends my pain, Look, he says, people aren’t fundamentally good or evil, people are fundamentally people (no, wait, I think Adam Young says this, but anyway), I am so emotionally compromised by everything.

The Peasant gets in the heroic action I expected he would, though it’s odd how explicitly he’s disconnected from everyone else in this chapter, especially when he was so closely symbolically linked to the ship in previous chapters. Now that it’s being destroyed in front of his eyes, he’s down to a mere witness, even a “sinister witness”, and he’s so detached from the crew that he won’t even answer the gunner’s thanks at the end of the chapter. But still he comes out of his statuesque observation at the most opportune moment, stops the cannon and saves the gunner’s life, and I don’t know what to do with any of this.

Here’s what I do know — he may have saved the ship from total destruction, but with all that structural damage already done, it’s not seaworthy anymore, and it is a sitting duck for the revolutionary forces our spy alerted.

But, anyway, I don’t really care about The Peasant, he can go rot. (What was that you were saying about loving everyone, Alona? It’s an IMPULSE, I said, and I can fight off some impulses.)  I’m way more interested in the gunner, who doesn’t get a name, but who jumps in to take responsibility for his cannon, which has run free and is destroying the ship because of his neglect. He knows the cannon. It’s his own monster, and he tries sweet-talking it like it’s an enraged and frightened animal, but if it notices him at all it’s because it’s trying to kill him. “Perhaps he loved it.” I am beyond emotionally compromised.

All this was taking place in semi-darkness. It was like the shadowy vision of a miracle.



''Stormy Sea with Blazing Wreck, c. 1835-40

At this point I’m visualizing this scene like a later Turner painting, where there are hardly any definite forms, only color and movement, half dark, half lit by the lantern. It’s invigorating. Goddamn, this is some writing.

And I love how this starts out as a duel between matter and intelligence, between strength and soul, but moves gradually away from that, towards a vision of the cannon that personifies it, gives volition and craftiness and a soul. (It’s a soul of rage and hate, of course, but then, it’s been a slave.) By the end of the scene it’s no longer clear cut at all that it’s all that inanimate, it really is more like a battle of wills.

A battle of wills in which The Peasant gets involved, and that’s the point my interest drops to nil.

It felt neater to me, somehow, when the gunner was the one taking action — more fair, I think, though I’m not at all sure what’s leading me to feel this way.

Will there ever again be a chapter that doesn’t end in a cliffhanger of one kind or another?

Where am I on the Symbolic Importance of the Cannon question? I don’t really know. The two sides, cannon and crew, have come to a draw, leaving the cannon tied down again and the crew alive but in dire straits. It could mean anything and everything. It probably DOES mean anything and everything.

Commentary
Fizzygingr I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on why it feels neater when the gunner’s taking action. Because you’re right; it’s his mess, and it’s his job to clean it up, and in most stories he would be allowed to do that to achieve some kind of redemption (and, generally, die in the process). But sometimes people can’t complete a neat little redemption, because there’s no logical way, or because the victim is dead or won’t see them, or because the cannon knocked them over and someone else has to step in before it’s too late. And it’s worth thinking about why this completion is so important. The gunner didn’t complete his redemption, but he made an effort to. And if you ask me, the effort is the only thing that matters here. Nothing he does can really atone for what he’s done, can balance the scales. But if he tries to make reparations, that’s how he redeems himself.

That’s how I see it, at least. kingedmundsroyalmurder was talking about how there’s nothing he could have done to make up for it, because a good deed doesn’t cancel out a mistake. Which I feel is probably true for them. But then why not have the gunner succeed in his redemption and then shoot him anyway? What’s Hugo getting at with the lack of closure?

Shirley-keeldar (reply to Fizzygingr) In retrospect, I think it was my subconscious awareness of the Mounds and Mounds of Foreshadowing that was making me feel that way, but I still basically agree with it.

It’s that the cannon and the gunner feel like part of a unit, in a very organic way, so when the fight is between them it feels — real, and fair — and The Peasant stepping in, not when it would have been useful like at the beginning, but only at the most narratively ideal moment, feels — wrong, and false, and impersonal. Which is about right, because everything about him is false and impersonal and purposefully cruel, and I know that’s ''the point.

I can’t really take up the redemption theme, because I’m not really — feeling it. I mean, yes, he fucked up big time, but I don’t feel like negligence is the kind of thing you need redemption from. It’s not a moral failing; it’s a mistake. For what it’s worth, I think Hugo placed more importance on having the contrast between The Peasant saving the gunner’s life only to order him executed to prove his ruthlessness. I was going to say “only to turn around and order him executed,” but the thing is, there’s no turning around going on, it’s all part of The Peasant’s single setting, and that setting is Inexorable.

Pilferingapples * hugs* I have a lot of sympathies with the crew here, just in general, and for the gunner, who must have known that come what may he was in SO MUCH trouble, and was sincerely trying to fix his screw up out of loyalty and duty.

THE PEASANT, THOUGH. I need a name for this guy so I can stop hissing at him under the title of an entire class of people who I like a LOT more than I like anything about him. I really thought he was going to step up and Superman out here, and be the clear hero of the day, and that would be how he impressed our Skeevy Aristos, but TURNS OUT NOT SO MUCH, the actual saving of the day was a joint affair, which I’m fine with, and then the Moment of Impressing was

ugh

SOMETHING ELSE.

Thank you for the etymology info! That’s really interesting, and I am sure super symbolic, and I DON’T KNOW HOW, so I hope someone else in the club pieced it together!:P