The Four/eight Thing - Tumblr Posts
I would love to see your Thoughts on the Hugolian Internal Magic System sometime:D It's something I like talking about but def. some Deep Nerding that is not an overcommon discussion!
Ah!! Thank you!! I’ve been wanting to talk about this!
But also, it’s so Big? So instead of overwhelming myself trying to cover it coherently, I’m going to get the ball rolling by scattering undeveloped ideas everywhere.
To start, my feeling is that the brick operates on something that isn’t real-world logic but a coherent system of magic logic, heavily symbolic, and with power over the events in the story. It’s not fantasy-world magic--it’s closer to magical realism, though it never quite reaches what I’d consider that.
There are a lot of magical elements in the brick. Some I want to acknowledge but have little to say about:
The animal thing. The dog-man versus lion-man, mice and cats and all that. The visual use of it in Arai’s manga was how the penny first dropped for me about the brick having magic. Many other people have more coherent thoughts about this than I do.
The fatefulness of spiders and the doom that hangs over anything connected to the numbers four or eight.
Enjolras and Grantaire in OFPD as the apotheosis of the ideal and the grotesque uniting in the sublime--I’ve read meta from you and others about this! It’s fascinating, and I feel like I only half understand it! I have nothing to add to it but it’s wonderful.
A whole lot of characters symbolize different things, and the way that functions has a magic logic to it, and Oh God This Topic Is So Big, I Can’t.
Related to the symbolism, there’s the, um--economy of casting? There’s a coherent logic behind a lot of the coincidences: If someone goes for a police officer, they’re probably going to find one--where brick logic differs from real world logic is, that policeman will always be Javert. All the misfortunes of poor and friendless young women befall Fantine. All people at the cusp between abject poverty and marginal respectability live in the Gorbeau house. I’m not sure I’d quite call this magic, but it’s related.
The place where I first really noticed the magic system myself was with the four-and-a-half characters who have power of will over when they die.
The first is the Conventionist, G——, and it’s with him we get a description of the trait I’m talking about:
Though so near to his end, he preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken the door. G—— seemed to be dying because he willed it so.
This isn’t a magic that can be used for arbitrary purposes--you can’t game the system with will-powered immortality. I think it’s more that the characters who have this are so in tune with the magic they become immune to petty injury until they reach the moment of their death--which will be an appropriately symbolic one.
The second of the four is the Bishop, though his death is a little different: instead of culminating in a moment of transcendent will, he’s granted Hugo’s ideal of the perfect death. (Now--I have Massive issues with what Hugo thinks the perfect death is. Spoilers: you’re blind, and beloved woman is taking care of you. It’s gross, sexist, ableist bullshit with wild disregard for boundaries, and Hugo is being The Worst. But anyway.)
In the text it’s the ideal death, and Myriel is granted it. This feels to me like not an exception to the system but its culmination--the other four are granted sublime and transcendent suffering, and Myriel was granted something past that: transcendence without the suffering.
Following the Bishop and the Conventionist are their direct successors, slightly more tarnished, but only slightly: Jean Valjean and Enjolras.
Like the Conventionist, neither can be killed until they choose to die. Until that time, bullets don’t touch them. Both deaths are sublime and transcendent, but Enjolras seems to come closer to perfection--there’s something strangely self-defeating in Valjean that doesn’t exist for the other three. Nevertheless, both of them clearly have near-superhuman power of will over their deaths.
Discussions of what Enjolras would have done if he’d survived after condemning himself for Le Cabuc feel slightly misaimed to me because of this--my feeling is that once he condemned himself, there was no other ending. He belonged to the magic, and he had willed it so--he Knew.
(And... okay, side note, I personally am writing an AU where he lived. But I had to fracture some of the magic system to do it. It felt right to me that in a story about Combeferre the magic would be fractured--I don’t know, I feel like that’s a thing.)
Aside from those four, many characters have different magic at different times. Eponine gains a preternatural ability to get things done, Gavroche is made of magic and Paris, there’s a lot of magic in Cosette, and so on. The Amis are also magic, and a few of them seem remarkably able to perceive it--Combeferre understood Valjean at a glance and described Fantine exactly. (Side note: my favorite headcanon about Combeferre is that he has a nearly unparalleled ability to perceive the magic system but is too at odds with himself to use it.)
But I feel like there’s a character with a half-realized version of the transcendent will like the other four above, and it’s Javert.
There’s something really interesting going on with Javert and magic.
Like Valjean and Enjolras, he’s immune to bullets, (”You’ll misfire”/The pistol misfired.) And Valjean almost gave to Javert the transformation Myriel had granted him, but something went wrong. Instead of becoming the fifth of these supernormal characters, Javert reaches half a revelation and backs away. He wills his own death, but prosaically and with despair, in a bastardized version of what the others achieve.
I can’t prove this, but I put real significance in that moment when Javert’s tied-up body makes a cross with Mabeuf’s body laid out, and instead of bearing his suffering he asks Enjolras to re-tie him lying down. Javert does a LOT of things wrong morally, but magically and symbolically that might be where he got off the path of the Absolute. (Does it matter symbolically that there end up being four of them (a fateful number) rather than five? Does the feeling of transcendence in Enjolras’s death and incompleteness in Valjean’s have anything to do with the fact that Enjolras convinced Grantaire, but Valjean did not convince Javert? ...I’m not convinced of any of that, but it occurs to me.)
--
And the barricade.
The barricade is made of magic and fate and the Absolute. It magically draws everyone to it and intensifies the magic potential in anyone near it. Enjolras and Jean Valjean become godlike, and everyone else becomes more transcendent as they get nearer.
I swear I can hear the first sparks of the magic of the barricade forming in Grantaire’s dialogue in the Corinth. He’s in the middle of a misogynistic and racist harangue and then he bursts out with:
“And it appears that they are going to fight, all these idiots, to get their heads broken, to massacre one another, in midsummer, in the month of June, when they might go off with some creature under their arm, to scent in the fields the huge cup of tea of the new mown hay!”
(Wilbour. Hapgood massacres this line.)
...then he goes back to rambling, until he wanders into an entirely perceptive (if wryly mocking) description of Marius’s love for Cosette and his own for Enjolras: “They must make a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in which they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They are souls possessed of senses. They lie among the stars.”
Which, for once, is exactly correct.
And I think these sparks happen because the barricade is beginning, and the barricade is magic, and it’s what finally pulls from Grantaire what he was capable of.
There is SO MUCH MORE I’m sure, but this post is becoming novel-length, so I’ll stop for now. Anyone who wants, please argue or expand!