#4.2.1

His attempted example of Escousse and Lebras becomes its own counterexample with little effort. Victor Escousse and Auguste Lebras were poets and playwrights who committed suicide together after their play, Raymond, was a failure, declared guilty of an “excess of reverie” by Hugo. Honoré de Balzac said, “Escousse and Lebras have died, like many young people, from the disenchantment of their time. They died because they found nothing to do in this world, in the midst of this society, as the last forty years have done to us.” Well, that’s kind of right but for all the wrong reasons. They didn’t have “nothing to do,” both writers were actively doing labor. They were barely twenty years old and had produced multiple works each. They both had invested their sense of self so deeply in their labor, that’s its failure became a failure of their very beings. This is doubly crushing in a (capitalist) system that primarily values you for your labor! I’d be fucking disenchanted. The problem is both Hugo and Balzac have the entirely wrong idea of what is the cause and what is the effect. Reverie and disenchantment aren’t affecting people’s labor, the system of labor is so alienating and exploitative that people are turning to suicide or crime as their only answer to society.

I emphasize the connection to labor because Hugo does so, but there’s a host of other social influences we could consider in interpreting this vague notion of reverie. Emilie Durkheim’s Suicide categorizes the motivations for suicide by degrees of social integration and moral regulation, and if I wanted to lean entirely into that, I could say revolutionary France is a petri dish of anomie, a societal state of low moral regulation, meaning society lacks a foundational set of norms, often due to rapid change on a societal level, good or bad. Anomic suicides are characterized by a sense of alienation and a lack of purpose and are common in the wake of significant social upheaval.

So...I said I was talking about mental illness and..I haven’t really. I mean, I have but I’ve mostly talked around it, alienation and anomie and bullshit. I’ve rewritten this section multiple times now, trying to find a way to ground this to Marius and to me, honestly. There’s a balance that needs to be struck between the social and the individual and mileage will vary. Hugo treats reverie like an actual drug, an external indulgence that you either partake in or not. It’s characterized too much as an individual weakness of character. Yet at the same time, Durkheim’s interpretation is too reliant on broader social explanations. Hugo is pretty dismissive of class, but we know now that mental illness disproportionately affects the working class. But it’s also a product of individual brain chemistry, my seratonin whatever doesn’t give a shit about about societal moral regulation. Ugh, I just don’t know what the right balance is and it’s impossible to filter that past my own experiences with mental illness. Maybe I’ve successfully presented some contextual space to move around in.

With all of this in mind, let’s look back to Marius without the easy excuses of voluntary reverie or even labor clouding our perspective. Marius is way ahead of us, having sampled and discarded meaningless labor entirely. “He had lost the capability of work, and of moving firmly toward a definite end, but he was more clear-sighted and correct than ever…His judgement, almost detached from hope, soared and floated aloft.” Marius isn’t high on the drug of reverie, he’s dissociating. The Romantic glorification of ecstasy and melancholy—“The soul which loves and which suffers is in the sublime state”—is disguising the fact that Marius is profoundly depressed (likely has been for awhile) and, having lost his few coping mechanisms, is spiraling. His father was wrong about Thenardier, Ursula The Lark may not be the innocent girl he thought she was, the facts of his carefully balanced world of possibilities have been overturned. If I were inhabiting Durkheim, I would peg Marius as the poster child of anomic suicide. The possibilities before him are so unbounded that they’re overwhelming and he’s lost every set of foundational values he’s ever held on to. Even the value of transcending values has turned on him, his decision to stay neutral in the Gorbeau raid weighing on him just as heavily as the prospect of having chosen a side.

The clearest indication of this is the very end of the chapter. Grasping for anything to hold on to, Marius comes across the Field of the Lark and, through the desperate logic of a depressed mind, decides this is Ursula’s field and substitutes his daily walks in the Luxembourg Garden with visits to this obscure field. “The whole mind condenses abruptly around one idea, and ceases to be capable of any other perception.” In this state, he clings to the unfixed ideal of The Lark even more than before, needing a touchstone that can neither be confirmed nor denied. Schrodinger’s coping mechanism.

He also doesn’t understand that he may be supporting a criminal in his activities? What is your moral code, Marius? He’s giving Thenardier money in prison, he’s involved in a transactional relationship with him, which is frustrating because Marius will do the same thing at the end of the book as well. He’s paying money to Thenardier each week, because of a perceived debt that his father owed but that debt wasn’t monetary in nature and so cannot really be paid with money, and Marius doesn’t really understand how to pay the debt. 

Also his father would not appreciate this, I’m sure. I think the bishop had somewhat of the right idea that it takes more than just giving money to change someone’s life, he was kind to Valjean as well when no one else had been and he kept being kind to him and giving him chances. Marius does not have that relationship with Thenardier to affect any change of that sort, he still won’t have that relationship at the end of the book, so it is really puzzling why he always decides to throw money at problems.

It is interesting that the narrative shrouds Marius in obscurity, uncertainty, darkness and having paths closed off to him, though he is still thinking more about the girl. He’s also only concerned about the girl and her father, because what he had assumed about them no longer holds true. Hugo also describes Marius’ daydreaming as something which has been taken to the extreme. A little daydreaming is good, but Marius has given up everything to daydream including work and has therefore become stagnant and stuck. It is interesting that without finding his love, Marius would be unable to come out of his stagnation and move towards progress, which is why it is not surprising that Marius did not notice or participate in the July Revolution, which Courfeyrac because of changing his house to come closer to the more political areas, almost certainly did. 

Hugo mentions that thought is useful, that has been a theme throughout, about contemplation being useful and compared to invisible work and also about the necessity for prayers. Marius has taken daydreaming about his love too far. She is compared to light and radiance for him, while he is currently in darkness and he is moving more and more towards dreams to the point of giving up everything else including work while moving back towards poverty. 

Marius is becoming more and more despondent about the girl and moving towards despair, resembling something of a depression, to the point of it being mentioned that ‘the day comes when you go out and drown yourself’, and also to mentions of two playwrights Escousse and Lebras who Donougher mentions made a suicide pact and killed themselves through suffocation. This seems to be a pretty heavy warning to Marius about his habits.

The field of lark is associated with pretty sinister happenings as well. Ulbach, a young man murdered a pretty young shepherdess because he was not able to marry her at the same exact spot Marius has chosen.