Crafting Readers

Items

• “A Mass of Lightning in One Clap of Thunder” / Les Misérables
  This craft object is an exploration of perspective and location in the fourth part of Les Misérables. In my reading of the novel, I focused on the impressive number of locative details that Hugo includes in each character’s exploration of Paris. I traced the details of an 1834 map of Paris onto fabric and then embroidered the paths of each character, with each colour representing a different perspective. Areas with dense embroidery are places that attract the most attention in this section.  My intention for this piece was for the line of perspective to be traceable from the beginning of the narrative to the end, but due to overlapping threads, that’s no longer possible. However, this piece still emphasizes which characters and locations are the most significant in this section and also provides an interesting spatial representation of the novel. ELIZABETH DUCHESNE ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: For this project, I worked with the text Les Misérables and used the crafting medium of embroidery. Les Misérables is a deeply detailed novel in terms of location, with the last three parts taking place primarily in Paris. I wanted to explore place in conjunction with perspective within the text and how these aspects of the text might be depicted in a physical medium. As part of my making, I employed both drawing and embroidery, as I needed a base layer of map that could be clearly differentiated from the embroidery. I created an embroidery that displays both location and perspective for all of the characters, as well as the places mentioned within narration (in light purple) and digressions (in dark purple). For this piece, I aimed to combine the aesthetic elements of embroidery with data visualization and mapping. For depicting the different ways characters inhabit locations, I employed a few different techniques. For digressions, which did not include a particular perspective or place, I used a chain stitch (one stitch per page). For places where characters spent several pages, I used petal stitches to depict the number of pages they spent there. For journeys and for pages that discussed going to more than one place, I used a French knot as a marker for when the page changed. When working with ‘narrator’ sections where no specific character was focalized, I noticed that these scenes often worked as montage sequences, with at times ten or fifteen places mentioned per page. This increased frequency of location shifts produced the effect of the city being alive with activity. The most intense pages were those describing the insurrection, where Hugo would mention 10-20 different locations on each page. Through embroidery, I think I captured the intensity of this sort of urban wildfire, particularly in the sense in which Hugo describes it: “The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel” (Hugo 915). Hugo’s most evocative description compares the innumerable uprisings springing up to “a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder” (914). I think the intensity of the overlapping threads conveys this imagery well. I started this project by going through my chosen section of the novel (Part 4) and typing out the various perspectives and locations within it. For better clarity with locations and paths, as well as for the map to base my craft on, I referenced “Visualizing Les Misérables,” a website that exists as part of a research project conducted by Michal P. Ginsberg at Northwestern University. The novel’s major locations within Paris were marked within the project’s maps, as well as a few of the paths of the characters in the fourth part. I then made a digital mock-up for my embroidery using a drawing program. For many of the places listed by the narrator, I had to search through either Google maps or the French language Wikipedia (if the street no longer existed). I then cross-referenced that information with the 1834 map used by the Ginsberg project to locate the street itself. Some locations I was unable to find at all, and so I had to skip over them. This practice allowed me to consider how landmarks persisted or were destroyed over time in Paris since the setting of the novel. The novel itself was written thirty years after the book is set, so many of the places within the novel no longer existed at that point. The most notable landmark in this section is the elephant monument, which was situated at the Place de la Bastille and demolished sixteen years before the novel was published. Part of this novel’s purpose, then, was Hugo’s attempt to remember and preserve the Paris of his youth. Les Misérables’ original French publication was incredibly successful: shortly after its publication, the Daily News in the UK reported that “[w]ithin two days […] five thousand copies were sold; two editions were exhausted in one week, and a third, of 7000 copies, is announced” (“Literature”). Another British newspaper described how in Paris “[t]he booksellers’ shops were literally besieged as long as a copy remained unsold, and by four o’clock there was not one to be had” (“Foreign Intelligence”). Isabel Hapgood’s English translation also received great praise when published in 1887 in the US. Her edition was originally sold for the price of “$7.50” for five volumes bound in cloth, “15.00” for five volumes bound in leather, and in a “[p]opular edition in one volume” that cost a more affordable “$1.50” (“Multiple Classified Advertisements” 2). The Boston Daily Advertiser pronounced that Hapgood had accomplished the task of translating “with more than her accustomed skill” and furthermore declared that “Miss Hapgood ought to be congratulated on her success” (“Books and Authors”). When embroidering the piece, I found it easier to differentiate the threads as compared to the lines on the digital mock-up because threads had a feature of layering, which would show what came first or later. However, the multiplicity of the threads eventually culminated in viewers’ inability to follow the chronological order (particularly notable when the light purple thread crossed the middle section of the piece). I had originally intended for the path to be traceable, but this intention turned out to be difficult to achieve with the amount of overlap in the center of the piece. For future crafting exploration, I think I would recommend choosing a story with fewer overlapping locations. The piece still maintains its value in terms of representing the networks of the plot as a whole, as well as the significance of certain places (based on how many pages the characters stayed there). I think the value of the piece lies in expressing the frequency of location, the closeness of the places (for example, I had no idea that Marius’s house was only a few blocks away from the prison), and the frequency of characters’ perspectives within the plot. Eponine, for example, only has around nine pages where her perspective is at the forefront. The other difficulty I found with the actual embroidery was the inability to be exact in terms of location. Since I had to trace the map onto fabric, inevitably the fabric shifted, and some of the road placements were moved closer or farther apart. The locations of the major places are correct, but for the one-off locations mentioned in the narrator-montage sequences, the roads were often too small to draw in, so I had to approximate based on landmarks. The other difficulty I found was that when transferring the digital lines into embroidered stitches for the insurrection sequence, it was very difficult to tell the lines apart, and I got lost. I eventually made my way to the end of the sequence, but it was a bit more approximate than I intended. My methods were unable to capture everything, nor was I realistically able to do so. Embroidery has been used across cultures and centuries, but I feel that the form that I was most inspired by for this object was Victorian embroidery. In “Fancywork and Bourgeois Culture,” Nancy Bercaw argues that by “consciously endowing each object with a message, fancywork makers created a bond between the object and the self” (Bercaw 243). Victorian women used their embroidery as carriers of self-expression and self-encoding. By creating embroidery, as the maker, I am implicitly adding something of myself to the object. However, just as crafting is able to encode messages about the person making it, so too is it useful for encoding other information. By combining aesthetic techniques with data, one can make meaning in ways that actively engage the viewer more than plain text would. As Talia Schaffer notes, Victorian crafting was conceived as “improv[ing] on nature by preserving, cleansing, arranging, and fixing the materials that nature had left in chaos” (Schaffer 32). By crafting, materiality is made into meaning—and, for this project, materiality is made into a unique understanding of Les Misérables.