Brick!Club 5.1.23: Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk
Septembrisuer wrote a fascinating post about why Grantaire and Javert both have to die at the moment of revolutionary enlightenment. So this started off as a reply to that, but I don’t think I ever addressed their arguments, so it should probably be its own post.
The question about why Grantaire dies got me thinking about similar thoughts I was having about Javert and Enjolras and why each had to die, a couple of books ago. The conclusion I reached was – to shamelessly quote myself:
Javert’s death is a reaction to his inability to cope with being an absolute in an imperfect world
and that Enjolras’ death, by comparison, is an imperfect world’s inability to cope with the absolute – a fault not with the absolute itself, as in Javert’s case, but with the world (and therefore a fault that can be fixed, leaving us with hope for the future.)
But where Enjolras and Javert both represent ideals and absolutes, Grantaire is the opposite – the anti-ideal. And yet the anti-ideal dies not when Grantaire is shot, but moments before:
“Vive la République! J’en suis.”
So to apply my previous hypothesis: does the anti-ideal, Grantaire-the-cynic die because he is to absolute in his cynicism (just as Enjolras is too absolute in his ideals) to cope with an inabsolute world? Or because an inabsolute world is not able to cope with his absolute nature? It seems apparent to me that for Grantaire-the-cynic it must be the former – his absolute cynicism is thwarted by the sight of Enjolras, dying for his country and his principals. And not, as Grantaire-the-cynic most likely believed, futilely. Because one needs only look at Enjolras’ death through the eyes of Hugo to see that is a transcendent experience.
The audacity of a fine death always affects men.
And therefore, it is apparent to Grantaire-the-cynic, the anti-ideal, that the world is not so hopeless as he expected. A futile death can still have a profound effect. And so Grantaire-the-cynic dies, and Grantaire-the-idealist, for a brief moment, is born.
But why must Grantaire-the-idealist die? My answer to that is that it is because he’s no longer the absolute cynic, but he has not attained the ideal. And so Grantaire, rather than being the foil to Enjolras, the cynic-beside-the-ideal, is simply a man. And die, in this horrible, brutal reality, is what men do.