Heroes Enough
Feb. 20th, 2013 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJun 2012
Germinal - Emile Zola - Penguin Classics, 2004
* * * * *
I love it when I encounter a book that surprises me, and this one certainly did. I originally put it on my wishlist out of a sense of duty. Having read most of the significant British Victorian novelists, I thought it was time to give some of the continental ones a go. With Zola, I decided to start with what is generally regarded as one of his two best works, because quite frankly I couldn't see myself getting round to the rest of his prolific output (Germinal is the thirteenth of his monumental 20 novel Rougon-Macquart sequence, and he wrote a dozen others as well). The only things that I knew about him as a person was that he wrote J'accuse, the open letter which exposed anti-semitism in the French state in much the same way as the Stephen Lawrence case revealed institutional racism in the UK, and that he was a leading exponent of naturalism, a literary movement seeking to depict a grimy and gloomy everyday reality. So I had expected this tale of a strike at a coal mine in northern France to be heavy-handed and moralistic, like Dickens but without the imaginative turns of phrase, memorable characters and flights of fancy. What I hadn't expected was that it would I would have to completely revise my notion of what a Victorian novel can be.
The story is set in a bleak plain in northern France, where a village known only as Two Hundred and Forty has grown up to service a coal mine with the ominous name of Le Voreaux. Etienne, a young and handsome engineer who was thrown out of his previous job for insubordination, arrives on a freezing March night half dead from hunger and is immediately recruited to work as a putter (a pusher of coal-tubs) with the Maheu family. He takes a shine to the daughter, Catherine, but she already has a lover called Chaval, who treats her badly. Etienne gets to know the local socialist and anarchist dissidents Rasseneur and Souvarine, and when the heartless mining company cuts the wages of the already desperate miners (by the sneaky means of changing the system of payments for safety work), he leads the ensuing strike. But in the absence of an active trade union movement, not going to work means no food on the table. Will the miners win the day, or will starvation force them back?
What is extraordinary about this novel is the things that it dares to say. Think that no Victorian novel ever contained the F-word? Think again. Think that all Victorian novels were decorous about sex? Not this one. There is a great deal of casual sex and even more gossip about it. The lives of Maheu and his family, particularly his wife La Maheuse's attempts to keep the family going, are depicted with astonishing realism and psychological subtlety. They feel very real. And there is balance - the owners, investors and managers of the mine are also shown and we get a real sense that the miners' actions, however justified, will have catastrophic consequences for people who do not deserve them.
Zola is, however, a novelist, as the well-paced dramatic build-up and climax make clear. And despite the naturalism, the novel is not nearly as amoral as it tries to make out. It is telling that the worst characters are the ones who tend to have the grimmest fates. I also think that the outcome of the novel reflects Zola's own political views. Rasseneur and Souvarine are constantly exhorting the miners to take matters into their own hands, rise up against the bourgeousie and bring about the longed-for revolution. But in his meticulous depiction of their lives, Zola implies that the poor already have enough to do just trying to survive in a brutal world. To expect them to lead the way to a socialist or anarchist utopia is an act of cruelty. They are heroes enough.
Comparing Zola with Dickens is interesting. My expectations of what reading him would be like were largely fulfilled. His naturalistic approach feels much more grown-up than Dickens' caricatures, though it is also a lot less fun. But as a way of addressing the great themes with which any self-respecting story should grapple, his naturalisme is equally valid. And that makes him an equally great novelist.
Germinal - Emile Zola - Penguin Classics, 2004
* * * * *
I love it when I encounter a book that surprises me, and this one certainly did. I originally put it on my wishlist out of a sense of duty. Having read most of the significant British Victorian novelists, I thought it was time to give some of the continental ones a go. With Zola, I decided to start with what is generally regarded as one of his two best works, because quite frankly I couldn't see myself getting round to the rest of his prolific output (Germinal is the thirteenth of his monumental 20 novel Rougon-Macquart sequence, and he wrote a dozen others as well). The only things that I knew about him as a person was that he wrote J'accuse, the open letter which exposed anti-semitism in the French state in much the same way as the Stephen Lawrence case revealed institutional racism in the UK, and that he was a leading exponent of naturalism, a literary movement seeking to depict a grimy and gloomy everyday reality. So I had expected this tale of a strike at a coal mine in northern France to be heavy-handed and moralistic, like Dickens but without the imaginative turns of phrase, memorable characters and flights of fancy. What I hadn't expected was that it would I would have to completely revise my notion of what a Victorian novel can be.
The story is set in a bleak plain in northern France, where a village known only as Two Hundred and Forty has grown up to service a coal mine with the ominous name of Le Voreaux. Etienne, a young and handsome engineer who was thrown out of his previous job for insubordination, arrives on a freezing March night half dead from hunger and is immediately recruited to work as a putter (a pusher of coal-tubs) with the Maheu family. He takes a shine to the daughter, Catherine, but she already has a lover called Chaval, who treats her badly. Etienne gets to know the local socialist and anarchist dissidents Rasseneur and Souvarine, and when the heartless mining company cuts the wages of the already desperate miners (by the sneaky means of changing the system of payments for safety work), he leads the ensuing strike. But in the absence of an active trade union movement, not going to work means no food on the table. Will the miners win the day, or will starvation force them back?
What is extraordinary about this novel is the things that it dares to say. Think that no Victorian novel ever contained the F-word? Think again. Think that all Victorian novels were decorous about sex? Not this one. There is a great deal of casual sex and even more gossip about it. The lives of Maheu and his family, particularly his wife La Maheuse's attempts to keep the family going, are depicted with astonishing realism and psychological subtlety. They feel very real. And there is balance - the owners, investors and managers of the mine are also shown and we get a real sense that the miners' actions, however justified, will have catastrophic consequences for people who do not deserve them.
Zola is, however, a novelist, as the well-paced dramatic build-up and climax make clear. And despite the naturalism, the novel is not nearly as amoral as it tries to make out. It is telling that the worst characters are the ones who tend to have the grimmest fates. I also think that the outcome of the novel reflects Zola's own political views. Rasseneur and Souvarine are constantly exhorting the miners to take matters into their own hands, rise up against the bourgeousie and bring about the longed-for revolution. But in his meticulous depiction of their lives, Zola implies that the poor already have enough to do just trying to survive in a brutal world. To expect them to lead the way to a socialist or anarchist utopia is an act of cruelty. They are heroes enough.
Comparing Zola with Dickens is interesting. My expectations of what reading him would be like were largely fulfilled. His naturalistic approach feels much more grown-up than Dickens' caricatures, though it is also a lot less fun. But as a way of addressing the great themes with which any self-respecting story should grapple, his naturalisme is equally valid. And that makes him an equally great novelist.