more Les Mis spam

[elsane]

I'm reading Les Miserables (very slowly). I've read excerpts from it before, usually in watered-down French -- my high school French teacher was notable for migraines, scattershot lesson planning, and deep, disorganized passions for Hugo and Impressionists -- but I've never tackled the whole thing. It's great fun though I haven't hit the parts with Marius yet. I have the itch to live-blog every other page and argue back at Hugo, which I have been heroically repressing.

Here, have a fic rec: Dolce et decorum est, featuring Les Amis in Temeraire!verse. Enjolras is captain to the dragon Patria, deadly earnest human and draconine republicanism abounds, and so does gleeful gender confusion. Clever, cracky, and fun.

And another one: With Faith Unfearful, by carmarthen. It's not very easy to write believable ship fic for Enjolras and Grantaire and stay true to their canon dynamic, but this works beautifully well, partly by not being the sort of thing one would ordinarily call ship fic.

Something about Enjolras lends itself to genderfuck remarkably easily, and I think I know why. Enjolras is one of the Les Mis characters who's halfway to being a symbol, and symbolic embodiments of abstract virtues are female in Western thought. Think of Liberty, leading the people, and Marianne; the Virtues, the Graces. Enjolras is written to be the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit, and his appearance, his demeanor, all hark back to those feminine abstract archetypes. He was gender-bent from the beginning; no wonder he bends back so easily.

More links: today I was amused to note that as part of the New York Times' ongoing "Disunion" Civil War history project, posted today was an article about how Les Miserables, hot off the presses, was received in the US. Not much has changed: "The New York Times called the novel 'remarkable' and 'brilliant, but in the same notice labeled Hugo 'a prosy madman.'" It's fascinating to read reviews from the Southern side and see the doublethink involved, as Hugo and his messages were fairly obviously abolitionist; this is only briefly touched on in the article, and it would be interesting to read more.

So the thing about writing people who started out as Enjolras (this overly punctilious approach to naming brought to you by the fact that I know full well my people are mutating away from Hugo's bases), is that you realize they really aren't going to live very long, even when you try to give them a nice victory to start out with.

In other words, April 1960 is more like 1830, and 1832 is still coming.

But there gets to be some Orestes and Pylades first, and more than two years, so the story is that much different.

...in other news. Uh. So, does anyone want to watch Sandglass with me?

Comments

[elsane]

Spam and time, that's why! It would get boring very fast, as I have not the gift of unerring snark, and long careful arguments about moral atheism would keep me up half the night.

♥___♥ let us do this thing. only not right this moment because I am horridly busy and shouldn't be on the Internet as much as I am

[skygiants]

I mean, valid and fair but some of us are interested in long careful arguments about moral atheism . . .

YES LET'S DO THIS THING . . . . slowly. In between mountains of academic work. :D? *HIGH FIVES*

[elsane]

I can write bits of fiction or I can read books or I can liveblog Hugo and take a whole year to read the Brick. SAD BUT TRUE. I make myself feel better by pretending that after I get tenure I am going to write a big massive novel that is a post-colonialist, post-communist, atheist/Buddhist, feminist reply to Hugo. hahaHA. (edit: I feel obliged to say that I mostly want to write it because (1) CHARACTERS OMG and (2) REVOLUTION OMG.)

:D! It is a (hopefully soon not hypothetical) date! *HIGH FIVES*

[skygiants]

I mean, I can't argue with anything that will mean I might get the GREATEST POST-COLONIALIST POST-COMMUNIST ATHIEST/BUDDHIST FEMINIST REPLY TO HUGO EVER at the end of it! :D

[oyceter]

Ooooo I have been wanting to watch Sandglass for forever! I think I've seen the first episode three times or so. But um yes totally with you on the not quite right now kinda busy bit.

[elsane]

Oh, fantastic! This should be fun. when we're allowed to have fun again, ha ha ugh.

It will probably be hard to coordinate four+ busy people episode by episode, but it seems like we should have a good critical mass for discussion and or capslocking :)