Les Mis 365 – 3.4.1 -Grantaire (retroblog)
Oh Grantaire. Grantaire Grantaire Grantaire. What are we to do with you?
Alright, first thing to note is that Hugo sets Grantaire strongly apart from the rest of the group. He doesn’t just come last in the list – he comes last after Hugo has made closing summary remarks about the group as a whole. That’s a dramatic separation! The sense is that you have met the whole group – and then Grantaire arrives on the scene. Victor Hugo revisits this technique on the barricade; while Grantaire’s tardy inclusion here serves to set apart, his late entrance onto the scene in OFPD has the opposite effect.
The biggest theme of Grantaire’s introduction seems to me not to be his skepticism, but his love. In the absence of faith, Grantaire is moved by love alone. Love is what brings him into this circle, love is what keeps him there, love is what Grantaire does. But the skepticism is certainly important, mostly because of how it lets him function as Enjolras’ genuine obverse.
Back in the convent chapters, Hugo described faith and love as “the engines of progress,” and that’s stuck with me as a summary of Hugo’s outlook. And for Hugo, love and faith are clearly intertwined – it isn’t just that they’re two separate things that you need to have, it’s that they inspire and inform each other. (This is something that was a huge theme with Jean Valjean and the Bishop and Cosette.) In this chapter, Hugo sets up Enjolras as the apparent embodiment of faith without love (hence all the otherwise odd emphasis on Enjolras’ disinterest in romance), while Grantaire seems to be the representative of love without faith. And of course, for Hugo, either of these is a contradiction, just as he accuses Grantaire of being.
Both of these simplistic accounts get complicated later – Enjolras is not truly without love (very far from it!), and Grantaire is not truly without faith (as much as he’d like you to think he is). But Hugo is working hard in this chapter to create the appearance of that lopsided dichotomy, one with all the faith and the other with all the love. This is our starting point for them as characters and as narrative symbols. (And this is what we return to in OFPD of course.)
(I probably shouldn’t get into this now, but it occurs to me as I write that Grantaire’s narrative function as a figured moved only by love is probably why he is absent from all of the fighting and killing at the barricade. Love is to light as faith is to daring; love and light are forces of pure life in this novel. It’s only when you add in faith and daring that there can be necessary violence. Grantaire can’t kill anyone; the narrative symbolism is set up against it.)
There’s always so much to say about love in this novel, sometimes I don’t even know where to begin! First some verbs of love: “Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras.” (“Grantaire admirait, aimait et vénérait Enjolras”). Grantaire also gets an association with the word “friendship;” “His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship” (“Son esprit se passait de croyance et son cœur ne pouvait se passer d’amitié.”) (Sidenote: I’m not sure how I feel about “mind” as a translation of “espirit” here given the possible theological connotations of both “spirit” and “heart” and the fact that we just left behind “the grand bourgeois” Luc Esprit.) I know I keep threatening to write an essay just on Grantaire and the Symposium and Love, but I think it may have to wait until this reread is over. But as I keep saying without following it up with evidence, I think Grantaire is written almost as a personification of Platonic Love (not to be confused with platonic love, lower case), and this is why he must be ugly where Enjolras is beautiful and doubtful where Enjolras is certain. Platonic Love is defined by what it lacks; Love seeks out what it is missing, and loves what it itself is not. Grantaire clearly loves all of the Amis, but there are philosophical as well as narrative reasons to focus (as Hugo does) on Grantaire’s love for Enjolras. (Grantaire also has some very Socrates-like qualities – Socrates too was infamously ugly and loved to declare that he was completely ignorant and didn’t know anything.
And he had a smoking hot but very scary love interest I’M JUST SAYING.)A note on Grantaire’s skepticism: I’ve written before about the fact that Grantaire’s skepticism is of what I’d call a Pyrrhonian sort, which means that his ultimate goal is doubt. The Pyrrhonians suspend all judgments about truth claims, including whether one is more probably than the other. If a Pyrrhonian has done his work perfectly, he will be left in a state of perfect absence of belief. This is very different from the kind of skepticism I see Combeferre engaged in; I think Combeferre uses skepticism to get closer to the truths of the world (as the Academics do, and as Cartesian style skepticism does), while Grantaire uses it as a way to refuse to engage with truth and falsehood period. Maybe that’s a bit glib as a summary, but I think something of the sort is why Hugo sounds so much more positive when talking about Combeferre’s skeptical habits than Grantaire’s.
With Victor Hugo, a pun is never just a pun, especially in this chapter. The nickname R draws attention to the sound “grand” in Grantaire’s name. While the pun here is just on it being great in the sense of a capital letter, the great/good contrast has been heavy in book 3 already (see again: the grand bourgeois. I’m also convinced – though I can’t prove it – that the R is a reference to the Republic (the res publica – the public thing!). I know we all joke about how repeatable Grantaire is (I too have too many emotions and can’t get anything done!) but I think there is a real sense in which Grantaire is meant to represent the average citizen, the one who doesn’t want to hear any more about fighting for progress because he’s tired of all the fighting of the last half century and unimpressed by the results.
I’ve probably already talked the classical references to death, but if you want something to read here are links to my posts on Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Hephaestion, Pechmeja, and Orestes and Pylades. The specter of willing sacrifice for a beloved friend through death runs heavy through all of these, though Eudamidas and Pylades are slight outliers (Eudamidas dies, but his friend survives; Pylades and Orestes try to die for each other but both end up surviving). There’s also a fairly strong suggestion of homoromantic attachment in the choice of names here; not all of the men referenced have a well-known tradition of being written as lovers, but most of them do, and I know some of them were used as coded signals of homosexuality in the 19th century. I can’t say with absolute certainty that Hugo meant for his readers to assume that Grantaire’s love for Enjolras includes a romantic aspect – he could have chosen all of these names for their association with love and death – but it seems much more likely to me than not, especially after the extra research I did this time around.
I could keep going for ages here, but this post is nearly a month delayed and I’m going to let it go, imperfect and incomplete as it is. Hooray! Onwards!
Whaaat this is one of the most complete Grantaire Theory posts I’ve ever read?? I wish I had something to add, but I’m pretty much just applauding. Thanks for including the links to all your other wonderful reference posts here!