Truth in Sorrow, Truth in Joy

Truth in Sorrow, Truth in Joy

Summary:

Jehan Prouvaire has lent Feuilly a book, and rambling discussion of Othello, of being an outsider, and of the roles of sorrow and joy in perceiving reality ensues. Basically, a book club run rampant.

Jehan looked up as Feuilly laid the thin black volume on the table. “Did you enjoy it?” he asked, examining his friend’s sober face.

Feuilly’s forehead creased. He lowered himself into a chair across from Jehan, taking a deep breath. “It… it is a sad text,” he said.

Jehan smiled softly, sympathetically. “A very sad text,” he murmured. “A foreigner working his way into society that despises his people. A woman who loves him, and is loved in return, but never fully trusted. A man who wants to wreak destruction, and a woman who—despite the fact that her loyalty lies elsewhere—is bound to him. In the end, chaos, stemming from one person’s hatred and another’s mistrust.”

“I do not think I have understood all the levels yet,” Feuilly said, running his hands along the cover. “This Shakespeare has a great deal of depth.”

“So he has.” Jehan’s smile widened a bit. “I admire him a great deal for his insights into humanity. But you did not answer my question: did you enjoy it?”

Feuilly stared at the cover for several long moments before looking up again. “Yes,” he said slowly. “It is a sad text, but I enjoyed it. There is something—something very true—”

He trailed off. “What specifically caught your attention?” queried Jehan, his head tilted with interest. “I have seen a great many true things in Othello.”

But Feuilly found that he could not speak. All the thoughts that had been so clear in his head when he’d sat on his bed talking them out alone the night before, that had fallen neatly into sentences when he had looked over some scenes again during his lunch break, were now muddled and locked behind some solid door. “I—” he started, “well, I am interested in—I mean, the character of Othello is…”

And he looked at his hands, helplessly. Parbleu, he thought, why had he ventured to discuss literature with Jehan? History, politics—they accepted him there, even though his education was so shaky. But literature was utterly foreign to him, and Jehan was so well-versed in it. He must be looking down on Feuilly for his fumblings even now—

No, he hastened to correct himself, that was doing Jehan’s kindness an injustice. But still he must get his thoughts together, must try to sound like a person with legitimate things to say…

But Jehan was looking at him with gentle curiosity. “It’s Othello himself who catches your interest, then, above all? I can see that.”

“Yes,” said Feuilly, “because—because—” Oh hell, he wasn’t getting any more articulate. The only thing he could think of to say was that Othello made him the saddest, and that was hardly an insight.

Jehan waited.

“Because he tries so hard,” Feuilly finally managed. “And like you said, he can’t trust anyone. The one person he decides to trust ruins him.”

“He can love, but he can’t trust,” Jehan put in.

“Yes,” said Feuilly. “Because—because he is an outsider.”

And then Jehan gazed at him again with those keen eyes, and Feuilly felt uncomfortably, lovingly known, and he ducked his head.

“You know,” he said, slowly, “the issue with his marriage, for example. Even though he’s so well-renowned, he can never escape who he is and the inferiority that society has attached to that. Is he even called by name very often? He is always the Moor.”

(And Feuilly thought—and knew in the silence that Jehan was thinking—of the men from other Republican groups that had come to their meetings, and met Feuilly, and yet referred to him as the worker or the fanmaker long after they should have known his name. There had been one such contact joining them just last week, and Courfeyrac had led the charge in saying Feuilly’s name as many times as possible throughout the evening, which had flustered the man—as well as Feuilly himself—but had not convinced him to rectify his behavior.)

“He’s set off, separated from the rest of humanity by the way they refer to him,” Jehan mused. “But he is more than what they deem him to be by use of the label.”

Feuilly looked at Jehan bleakly. “…or is he?” he said. “In the end, he is violent and dangerous, deceived and suspicious. In the end he is the murderer of the very woman who consecrated her soul and fortunes to his honor and his valiant parts. He fulfills worse than their suspicions.”

“But not because that is his nature,” said Jehan. “Rather, he is manipulated by one of the characters who most maligns his identity.”

“So instead of his nature creating their attitude,” Feuilly said, slowly, “their attitude pushes him into being something that he otherwise would not be.”

(And he thought of all the people that surrounded him on a daily basis—the people who called the grasping poor, because they were not given fair pay and thus had to cling to each sou, or the lazy poor, because there were not enough jobs, or the deserving poor, because they tried to survive by conforming to the standards of a society that was designed to crush them, or the criminal poor because they rioted and drank and stole when they had had enough of getting nowhere by being “deserving.” He thought of talk he’d heard of the working class being bloodthirsty and restless, and needing a firm hand to prevent them from launching another ’89, and of the finely-dressed women who clutched their purses more tightly when he passed them in the streets. But would the working class have sought blood in ’89 if they had not been so oppressed to begin with? To assume that they were dangerous and thus keep them down and treat them with suspicion was to render them more dangerous yet.)

It was heavy, so heavy, and he ran a hand over his face as Jehan murmured, “Such, alas, is the way of the world,” and waited for him.

“It makes me—” Feuilly hesitated. “When I read it, and feel for him, it feels like grief. But it is a grief which makes me want to go on reading. It is—I don’t know how to explain it, exactly.”

But Jehan nodded at once. “It is a grief which feels somehow satisfying? Right and good, although in no way lessened in sorrow because of that?”

“Yes,” said Feuilly. “Yes, exactly. It is as if I am not merely grieving a character in a play, but an actual state of injustice which…which needed my grief.”

A melancholy smile crossed Jehan’s face. “That,” he said, “is because there is truth to be found in fiction…truths that come clearer for us because they are portrayed through another lens than that of our daily life. So through Othello, you have a new perspective on a reality somewhat similar to that which he faces, and you grieve because you have come face to face with truth all over again, and that truth is painful, but it needs to be known. And you are right, I think—it also needs to be grieved. Combeferre would say that grief is an essential stage in progress.”

“Hmm.” Feuilly ran his fingertips over the cover of the book again, tracing the lettering. “So sorrow is fitting, because it reflects reality.”

“Our sorrow acknowledges the weight of the world’s pain.” Jehan was talking to the tabletop, not from timidity or distance but from a depth of contemplation. “And its meaning as well.”

“In sorrow, truth,” summed up Feuilly, and he was about to take up Othello again and scan its pages to point out to Jehan passages which had affected him most, when a large hand fell on his shoulder.

“But,” said Bahorel, to whom that hand belonged, “in joy and laughter and cheer, truth as well!” He swung a chair over to the end of the table near Jehan and Feuilly.

“Come,” he continued, “my friends laden with melancholy and with heavy thoughts, we must see both sides of the world in order to have a fair picture of reality.”

Feuilly raised his eyebrows. “The ‘two sides’ of the world, as you put it, are hardly equal at present.” He moved his shoulder out from beneath Bahorel’s touch, turning to face him better. “Focus your attention on laughter, and you risk becoming blind to misery, just as so many have who see and do nothing because their eyes are fixed on their own pleasure.”

“Ah,” said Bahorel, “but what of laughter amid misery? Surely you would agree that those who are miserable need not always contemplate it?”

Feuilly’s brow contracted. “They should not be deceived by false pleasures,” he said tentatively, “things that would persuade them that their oppression is not so bad after all. But no, I do not begrudge pleasure of anyone who is suffering; that would be unkind.”

“I think,” said Jehan, “that the pleasures of those who are oppressed and suffering are not likely to be false, or cheap—to be designed to cloak hard truths. There is truth in joy, even for those in hard circumstances, and perhaps by finding joy they make joy true.”

Bahorel grinned. “It’s defiant,” he said. “Laughter defies circumstance, defies the world which seeks to crush. There are men, scores of men, in these days here in Paris, who look down on me because my parents are peasants, calling me farm boy, but I laugh at their idiocy and backwards ideas more heartily than they at my birth. Who wins?”

Feuilly hesitated, knowing his own indignation and sorrow at being looked down on, but Jehan smiled at him gently. “Both sorrow and joy, laughter and grief, exist, Feuilly,” he said. “Both are meant to be known and used; both are a means of finding truth. By sorrow we find the truth of current circumstance; by laughter we find the truth of our ability to surpass circumstance.”

“Balance,” Feuilly said. “Balance is key.”

“Yes,” said Jehan. “But balance by knowing both fully, not by limiting our experience of either.”

Feuilly looked down at the book on the table, and thought of his deep experience of vicarious sorrow while reading it, and of his keen awareness of how much of an outsider he sometimes was. But if balance was the key to truth—and since it was true, he realized, that different as he was he was accepted and equal here in this discussion—then perhaps now was the time for laughter.

He took a deep breath. “Let us, then, defy our circumstances,” he said.

Bahorel clapped him on the back and called for wine, and Jehan gave him a melancholy smile as he slipped Othello into his bag.