#5.3.6

The quicksand chapter is, to put it mildly, a microcosm of horror. It’s like how to cook a frog except for humans. This is the spiritual sister to that one chapter waaay long ago about the sailor who falls overboard into the merciless sea.

“If enlizement is terrible on the shore of the sea, what is it in the cloaca?” I really am cursed because my entire life has led to me reading these words thusly. Not only are you in slow, agonizing fear for your life, you’re also horribly embarrassed the whole time. What you should do in quicksand is 1) not thrash around and agitate everything and 2) try to lie on your back to spread your weight. Besides, Mythbusters did an episode proving that killer quicksand is a myth, humans are just too damn floaty to fully sink into dense sand. I’d now like a follow up episode that tests sewers and sewer waste.

I couldn’t find Blaise or Nicholas Poutrain and the only Vicomte D’Escoubleau that popped up in my search was decidedly not a young consanguineous rake, but notable Archbishop and French naval commander Henri de Sourdis, who died in Bordeaux and not in the Parisian sewers. Maybe it’s a less noted )or fictional) descendent. I suppose the apple can fall far from the tree…and roll down the street…and drop through a grate…into a sewer.

We’ve entered into a Dante’s circles of hell situation. Every turn of this place is more nightmarish and dangerous than the last. “It produced the effect upon him of the first step of a staircase reascending towards life….On coming out of the water, he struck against a stone, and fell upon his knees. This seemed to him fitting, and he remained thus for some time, his soul lost in unspoken prayer to God.” Is Valjean carrying Marius back to the light or delivering him further into the the grip of hell? Virgil he is not.

I think this technically makes Javert the ninth circle, if not Satan the fallen angel himself. That’s definitely an interesting interpretation I could run with. Lots of very rich discussions to be had here on the nature of good and evil, what it means to fall from grace, what it means to serve humanity versus to care for humanity.

It’s also compelling in an unexpected way to see Valjean fighting this hard for something. We’ve seen him struggle, sure, but usually from a more passive or at least societally driven standpoint. This odyssey feels almost entirely individual, it has very little to do with the outward pressures of society.

334 chapters read, 31 chapters left

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Valjean finds himself in a fontis, an eroded section of the sewer. The rain the previous day had made it worse. Valjean feels that he cannot go back. Marius is dying, and he is exhausted. Before long, the sludge is up to his calves and the water to his waist, and then he has to hold Marius--who may be dead already and whose added weight is causing him to sink faster--up out of the water. When he can only just barely hold his own face above water, he finds something solid beneath him once more. Eventually, he collapses onto the pavement, absorbed in prayer.

The rain at Waterloo changed the course of European history, but the rain on June 5, 1832 has seriously endangered two (2) protagonists as well as the whole B cast of books 3-5.

JVJ and Marius encounter a fontis--just as described last chapter, quite the surprise--and somehow don’t die. They are both submerged up to their faces in sewer water, though, which is 1) gross, 2) really scary in this dark uncertain space, and 3) CHOLERA, CHOLERA EVERYWHERE. And their open wounds...

[I would like to register a complaint about the irrelevant misogyny of the 5.3.5 chapter title. I will do this by dressing up as a siren and luring male authors into the Rhine.]

Hugo likes his drowning metaphors. It was the ocean in 1.2.8, just before JVJ started on his new Bishop-inspired life of goodness. Now, it's the sewer. I find it interesting that Hugo's choosing to repeat the motif here. On one level, JVJ is about to be in rather literal danger; on the other, this isn't a plot chapter: the quicksand of beach and of sewer and the hapless traveler struggling therein is here to make a point. 

One of which is drawing a parallel to the earlier chapter, where the hypothetical seaman is lost to his companions and consigned to the vast, impersonal ocean (right when we were being introduced to JVJ, who was crushed and swept away by the vast, impersonal penal system). JVJ is in this sewer becaue he decided to see and then to save Marius (cough BBC cough), which presents another parallel to how JVJ was almost lost before: extralegal zeal in helping others. Before, the drowning was metaphorical; now it's a metaphorical and literal danger, whether JVJ is caught by the police as an escaped convict absconding with a political fugitive or caught by the sewers as an entity denser than mud.

I read this section and the analogy as Hugo showing us how far JVJ has come on his journey to, well, love. This time he doesn't throw off his gentler impulses, become bitter, and adopt the role of criminal he' been forced into.  This time, he holds onto the burden that seems to be dragging him down; he uses his strength and his resourcefulness, and he perseveres through the danger and could (really, should) have trapped him.

The 'romance soured' suggestions in the last paragraph of 5.3.5 reinforce my opinion that sewer sequence here (digression and action) serves as a Romantic exploration of the grotesque: the gargoyles on the gothic edifice (see also Dante's 'gargoyle cantos' in the 8th circle of Inferno).