1.2.6-Kingedmundsroyalmurder

ClubNinetyThree 1.2.6
So this was totally foreshadowed.

No, I mean it. The whole conversation we all got mad about back in 1.2.3? It was foreshadowing this chapter. I mean, it’s probably foreshadowing other things too, but the old man’s actions in this chapter are a direct response to the conversation in 1.2.3. This is the old man’s equivalent of setting his son on fire for siding with the enemy. This is him proving that he is worthy, that he is fierce, that he is a general and not a prince. This is exactly what the captain and his first mate were looking for. This is not the subtlest scene Hugo has ever written.

Let’s back up though and do this in order. So, as we all knew, the ship is by no means saved. It will not sink immediately, but the only thing that means is that it will sink slowly. The cannon gets one last animal comparison (seriously, has someone written up a list of all the animals the cannon gets to be?) as a way to describe the utter wreck it has made of this ship.

And outside the ship conditions have worsened and the ship has been blown off course. The wind and the sea are still ultimately in charge here, though the wit of man has triumphed over the brute force of machine. shirley-keeldar pointed out the way the sea is described as kissing and cradling the ship even as it pulls it further to its doom. It really brings home the old man’s later point about how the sea itself is an enemy.

So as efforts begin to salvage something and make it to shore, the old man goes up on deck and continues to watch impassively as around him other people do the work. Hugo is still pretty much exclusively calling him the old man, even as the captain and the crew begin calling him General. He can no longer even pretend to be a peasant, but Hugo is still not giving him his title in the narration. I also notice that, so far, precisely two characters regularly go by their names in narration, and those two are the least complex of all the characters we’ve met so far. There is a Thing About Names in this book so far and I really want to find out where it’s going.

I really do think that bringing the gunner to the old man was a test. We know that the captain and the first mate (whose names I can neither remember nor spell and don’t feel like copy-pasting every time, so I am just pulling a Hugo and not using them) were wary of the old man’s competence, and this feels very much like a chance to get him to prove himself. Which brings us back to the foreshadowing.

Honestly even without the foreshadowing the final verdict didn’t really come as a surprise. That is pretty much how this scene was always going to go, and while Hugo can be subtle when he wants to be, he made no efforts this time. Unless he was going for some kind of bait and switch, the gunner was always going to be executed. (Executed as his cannon executed the ship, perhaps?)

(Obligatory pronoun mention: the captain gets to be a vous while the gunner is a tu.)

So the old man goes out of his way to explicitly reject mercy as an option. This is the first time we have seen that rhetoric put into practice, and it’s by a man who has had a lot of his humanity deliberately removed (and who has perhaps deliberately stripped himself of that humanity). And, if you’ll excuse yet more Les Mis references, unlike when Enjolras refuses mercy and becomes stone, this man does not acknowledge the horror of the deed he is about to commit. He delivers his judgement without emotion, without hesitation, without compassion, without any indication that this is a terrible thing. The gunner is not the old man’s brother, and there is no one on board who will speak up and say otherwise.

Note also that the gunner does not protest. The gunner, I suspect, knew this was coming as much as I did.

And so he is killed offscreen. His heroic struggle happened in front of us, but both his mistake and his death are not shown. This death is as impersonal, as cold as the sentencing was, a marked contrast to the very emotional, very graphic, very present fight against the cannon. He is not even named in his death — it is not the gunner who falls into the sea, it is a body. And it’s not even the body itself that is described, it’s the noise that it makes.

And back on the ship, the old man has passed the test that I am quite convinced he knew he was taking. His ruthlessness has been confirmed and he has been deemed suitably inhuman for command.

Commentary
Shirley-keeldar Wait, hold up, belay that last reblog, jumped the gun a little, I just remembered something this entry shook out of my head and I’m going to throw it at you because I don’t know what to do with it. It’s interesting that you went for the National Guardsman, because my first association with this was to contrast it with Le Cabuc, like, The Peasant — I’m going to keep calling him this out of spite FOREVER, even if we do find out his name, though in this chapter he’s actually described as “the man in peasant’s clothing” at one point, very definitively point out his fakey fakeness, and then mostly “the passanger” and “the old man” — The Peasant, AS I WAS SAYING, orders an execution rather than carrying it out himself, and then, too, Le Cabuc was committing not just deliberate sabotage but also the same kind of excessive violence that we’re condemning in The Peasant, whereas the gunner, as far as we know, just made a mistake…

Like I said, I don’t know what to do with any of this, which is why it didn’t make it into my write-up, but I remembered it now, so, here it is.

Also, wow, yes. That foreshadowing sure was thick on the ground, and I wasn’t consciously aware of it until the thing with the medal happened, at which point I was like, “OH NO THE BAD THING IS COMING.” Because I can sure be willfully blind to the most obvious of foreshadowing when I want to be.

Kingedmundsroyalmurder (reply to Shirley-keeldar) I was thinking of both scenes, honestly. The first one that came to mind was the Caduc scene, in part because, as you say, there the person who ordered the execution carried it out and here the person giving the orders watches as other do his cruel deeds for them. (And, since robertawickham brought up Game of Thrones, I cannot help thinking of the, like, second scene or so in the series when Ned Stark executes the dude and says that it should always be the lord/leader who carries out justice.)

The National Guardsman scene came into things when I realized that one of the other main differences between this scene and the Les Mis comparison scenes is the lack of any kind of tempering influence or dissenting opinion. Republic this ship ain’t. I should definitely have made it clearer that I was referencing them both though, sorry about that.

(Also, where I think Hugo may be going with this is that there is a place for ruthlessness and that it is sometimes unavoidable in times of war but that it should never be undertaken lightly and never replace humanity. But I could be totally wrong, because I have not read this book and I cannot crib meta from people around me who have.)

Shirley-keeldar (reply to Kingedmundsroyalmurder's reply) Ah, no, don’t apologize, that wasn’t meant as a criticism of your analysis, I’m just very — excited? Worked up? — I’m having a lot of feelings about the whole group close-reading thing, it’s sort of robbed me of the capability for writing non-run-on sentences. And that’s a really good point about the lack of dissenting opinions! Especially since here the people whose opinions would count most are deliberately putting The Peasant up to it as, you and others have observed, a deliberate test of his ruthlessness.

IT IS SO NERVE-WRACKING not having any idea where the book is going, but also very exciting!

Primeideal This is your first readthrough, yeah? Because you’ve, uh, inadvertently hit on something that sounds pretty prescient (it’ll make more sense in a handful of chapters). Nice attention to detail with the Les Mis parallels, is all I’m saying. For now.

Kingedmundsroyalmurder (reply to Primeideal) This is indeed my first readthrough. And ooh, that’s exciting. I’ll keep an eye out for future developments then

Feuillyova Oh wow, just your post gave me chills. Obviously need to read this book

Pilferingapples "suitably inhuman for command"

WOW. Yes, that’s exactly it. And—everything else, too. I mean, of course the test was on purpose and understood, or else why the fuss about who should decide the gunner’s fate? Proof Was Being Demanded and Points Were Being Made.