The Drinking Den

by Emile Zola

  She thinks and feels in the everyday language of her class, which is why Zola also felt obliged to offend the sensibilities of his readers by the use of slang. This was not his own everyday speech and he researched it as conscientiously as he did the locations for the novel. He turned mainly to two monographs, Alfred Delvau’s slang dictionary, Dictionnaire de la langue verte (1866), and Denis Poulot’s Question sociale, le sublime, ou le travailleur comme il est en 1870 et ce qu ’il peut être (1870), a curious work that analyses different types among the members of the working class, from the ‘true worker’ to various types of idler whom Poulot classifies under the general title of ‘le sublime’. Looking at his definitions, it is not hard to apply them to the characters in The Drinking Den, with Goujet as the ‘true worker’, Lantier as a ‘sublime’ of the type Poulot calls ‘Son of God’ (who ‘wears a jacket… talks politics, reads the newspapers, very idle… allows others to support him’) and Coupeau as the true sublime who works half a week and is always between two glasses of spirits. The names of Coupeau’s drinking companions, Bibi-la-Grillade, Mes-Bottes and Bec-Salé, are taken directly from Poulot (something that helped to encourage the charge of plagiarism).

  Clearly, much of what Poulot says might have been applied to urban workers elsewhere, but conversely a good deal is specific to the time and place about which he was writing. Similarly, the slang, which Zola borrowed from him, like all slang, was peculiar to the working class of Paris in the mid nineteenth century. Even the title of the novel, which is an obscure word for a drinking den, derived from the verb assommer (‘to bludgeon’), was unfamiliar to most of Zola’s first readers and would probably have vanished from the language altogether had it not been for this book. The slang in the text is mostly comprehensible to a French reader, either from context or because it is still in use, but modern editions include a glossary of about one hundred and twenty terms of argot that have now become obsolete, usually with the definitions that Zola himself would have found in Delvau or Poulot.5

  As well as drawing inspiration from sociological and medical works, glossaries of slang and literary novels by other writers, Zola gives a nod to the theatre, where the drunkard’s decline was a popular subject for melodrama. The first stage version of The Drinking Den, in which he collaborated quite extensively (while insisting that his name should not be associated with the production), makes the story more theatrical by omitting Adèle and having Lantier leave Gervaise for Virginie, who then continues to plot against her rival. Early film adaptations also interpreted the story as this kind of melodrama, giving it titles that include A Drinker’s Dream, The Victims of Alcohol, The Poison of Mankind, A Drunkard’s Reformation (the version made by D. W. Griffith in 1909) and Drink (by the British director Sidney Morgan, 1917); and in that way linking Zola’s novel to a whole literature of anti-alcohol propaganda between the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century. The story of Bijard can be seen as one of these popular moralities in miniature: the wicked drunkard beats his wife to death, makes a martyr of his saintly daughter, then repents at her deathbed, even as she mutters her forgiveness…; and there are other genres referred to in the novel. There is a great deal of satire and humour in The Drinking Den – more, perhaps, than in any of the other parts of the Rougon-Macquart. The struggle between Goujet and Bec-Salé at the forge, by contrast, suggests an epic treatment of some myth involving gods and demigods (Vulcan or Thor),6 with the Lorilleux, in their attic, as evil dwarfs hoarding their gold; note that while the Lorilleux transform gold into something that looks to Gervaise like dirt or base metal, Goujet can turn iron into ‘a veritable jeweller’s piece’ (Chapter 6). The story of Nana (Chapter II) is also a separate morality tale: ‘A Young Girl’s Downfall’, perhaps.

  The later novel, Nana, which is the sequel to the events of that chapter, has been criticized as a succession of loosely linked episodes rather than a balanced whole. The same criticism cannot be applied to The Drinking Den, despite the presence within the novel of these distinct episodes and of the famous setpieces – the fight in the wash-house, the wedding-party’s visit to the Louvre, Gervaise’s feast – because of the tight structure of the whole and because of the recurrent elements that bind the story together: the drinking den itself, with its sinister distilling apparatus; Bazouge, the undertaker, after his first ominous appearance at Gervaise’s wedding; the rain that falls on Gervaise at the moment of her greatest shame (Chapter 12), recalling the water splashed around the wash-house in her moment of greatest self-assertion (Chapter 1); and many more. Images of high and low, rising and falling also run through the whole book: the novel opens with Gervaise looking down into the street, then up at the new hospital building. When she first arrives at the tenement building where she will eventually live, she looks up at the window with the flowers, ‘with the sensation of being inside a living organism, at the very heart of a city, regarding the house with the same interest as she would had she been confronted by a giant being’ (Chapter 2); she will later look down into the courtyard at the place where she stood, recalling this moment. Inanimate objects repeatedly take on the features of living beings:7 the environment, which is the cause of Gervaise’s tragedy, is often personified in this way, almost invariably as malevolent.

  These and many other aspects of the novel have provided material for scholarly analysis in the century and more since it was published, and Zola’s reputation has grown, though he was to remain a controversial figure for a considerable time after his death in 1902. His status, both in France and abroad, has been to some extent conditioned by views on his treatment of sexual matters and by his political opinions, though outside France Henry James’s essay on him in 1903 was an important step in consolidating his reputation as a major figure, despite what were seen as his faults. Of course, James had reservations about Zola’s lack of ‘taste’, and he writes in a typically Jamesian manner, qualifying, hinting, modulating shades of meaning, criticizing Zola for lack of psychological subtlety, saying that he is more effective when dealing with the outer life of crowds than the inner life of individuals, and accusing him, at times, of sacrificing art to a mechanical ‘system’. Yet, in the end, ‘the more he could be promiscuous and collective… the more he could strike us as penetrating and true’. Among all the novels, he singles out The Drinking Den for the highest praise and the portrait of Gervaise in particular, describing the intensity of her creator’s vision of her fate as ‘one of the great things the modern novel has been able to do’.8

  Zola’s reputation was always high in Russia and, as one might expect, after 1917 he was to be highly regarded in the Soviet Union and later in the East European socialist countries, though primarily for the reasons set out in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (3rd edn., 1975) – that ‘he debunked bourgeois-republican demagoguery and the hypocritical lie about class harmony…’ A. V. Lunacharsky, Lenin’s Commissar of Education, and Maxim Gorky, whose work was taken as the model of Socialist Realism, both admired the Rougon-Macquart, giving a definitive seal of approval to Zola’s work in the Soviet Union.

  In England, despite James, Zola’s reputation was to remain for a long time on far shakier ground. Up to the Second World War, the French Literature syllabus at Oxford did not extend beyond 1870, excluding virtually all Zola’s work, including The Drinking Den. Then, in the period immediately after the war, the scholar Martin Turnell published an influential study of the French novel which, in much the same way as F. R. Leavis had done for the English novel in The Great Tradition (1948), set out to characterize the specific features of France’s contribution to European fiction. He found this French ‘great tradition’ in a particular type of psychological novel, from Madame de La Fayette to Proust via Stendhal and Flaubert, ruthlessly excluding whatever did not fit his thesis. Both Balzac and Zola were almost entirely discarded, the second being outrageously dismissed in a single phrase – ‘the dreary realism of novelists like Zola’9 – which makes one wonder if Turnell had actually read the Rougon
-Macquart cycle. He did relent somewhat in a later study, though grudgingly.10 His earlier book, however, had become a standard text in English, widely used by both students and general readers.

  The publication of Angus Wilson’s little book on Zola’s life and work in 1952, and the more extensive studies of F. W. J. Hemmings, including his biography in 1953,11 did something to redress the balance; so, too, did the appearance of modern translations of the major works in collections such as the present one. Leonard Tancock’s version of L’Assommoir was published by Penguin Classics in 1970. Tancock, who described this in his Introduction as ‘one of the funniest novels of the nineteenth century’, translates it in a way that stresses the element of social satire and the grotesque. In dealing with Zola’s slang, he opts for a mainly British and Cockney language that has already dated after some thirty years, and he tends actually to exaggerate the crudity of some expressions that Zola uses – so that Coupeau’s remark: ‘T’as l’air d’une nourrice’ becomes, in Tancock’s English: ‘You look like a fucking nurse.’

  A version of the novel that was suitable for the early 1970s, when there was still excitement at the fact that the most commonly used sexual expletive in English could at last be set down in print, may be less appropriate at the end of the century, at a time when few people are scandalized (and fewer still surprised) to hear it spoken in films or on television, or to read it in newspapers. At any rate, nothing is achieved now by calling Zola’s plain nourrice ‘a fucking nurse’. It was time to take a new look at The Drinking Den, to produce a version that would go beyond the succès de scandale and reveal for English readers what those who read French have long been able to appreciate – a marvellous, warm and human novel, neither boringly Naturalistic, nor shockingly crude, but wonderfully evocative of its time and place, with a tragic heroine who is among the most touching and credible creations in all the literature of the nineteenth century.

  FURTHER READING

  Baguley, David, Emile Zola: ‘L’Assommoir’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Emile Zola (1953; London: Paul Elek, 1977).

  Wilson, Angus, Emile Zola, An Introductory Study of His Novels (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952).

  Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Essays in Honour of F. W. J. Hemmings), ed. Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).

  A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  Slang presents a peculiar set of problems for the translator. While the standard literary dialect of a language aspires to a form of universality – wishes to be generally understood and to impose itself as the ‘correct’ form of the language – slang is very specific to a particular group of people or section of society in one place and at one time. Everyone agrees that slang is colourful and energetic, but it is not always appropriate as a means of communication. It often has the effect of defining the group that uses it and may be designed to exclude all but the initiated, as in the case of Cockney rhyming slang, school slang and the dialects that serve to distinguish one generation from its elders. Much slang can therefore be seen, not as an attempt to communicate as widely as possible, but the very opposite – in other words, as a kind of ‘anti-translation’.

  The translator could try to put Zola’s French into the language of the Bronx, or the London Docklands, or the Gorbals in Glasgow; but it seems pointless, even if one has the necessary expertise, to transfer the text from one language that the English-speaking reader does not understand into another that most English-speaking readers will not understand. Moreover, because slang is so closely linked to particular places or social groups, many of the references in the book become anomalous in such a translation – references to Parisian localities, wine-drinking, foods and so on, which formed part of the culture of the French working class during the nineteenth century, but not that of Cockneys or Glaswegians or Italian-Americans, for example. To suggest that the characters were living in the London Docklands or downtown Chicago is arguably more ‘unfaithful’ to the novel than to imply that they spoke in the language of the French middle class. My own preference throughout has been to aim for comprehensibility and readability, while using enough colloquial language to convey the feel of the original.

  Zola’s slang has been a problem, of course, for translators into other languages as much as into English, and the difficulty starts with the title. English has used a variety of solutions, from preserving the original French to approximate translations such as The Dram Shop or The Drunkard – and the one that I have chosen, The Drinking Den. None of them conveys the full meaning of the archaic slang word assommoir (see Introduction and note 1 to chapter 2). The problem can be seen in the solutions attempted by translators in other languages: Spanish has used La Taberna, German, Der Totschläger (The Bludgeon), Russian, Zapadnya (The Trap), Italian, La Scannatoio (The Slaughter-House). The 1956 film directed by René Clément (and ably adapted by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost) quite sensibly retitled the story Gervaise, which not only has the effect of emphasizing the centrality of the character (played by Maria Schell), but also shifts the emphasis away from the problem of alcoholism, which had been the focus of earlier film versions. This was the title that Zola himself originally meant to use; and he would have saved translators a good deal of head-scratching if only he had stuck to it.

  THE DRINKING DEN

  PREFACE

  The Rougon-Macquart will be made up of twenty novels: the general plan was set out in 1869, since when I have followed it with extreme precision. We have come round in due course to The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir) and I have written it, as I wrote the others, without deviating for a moment from my course. This is my strength: I have a goal.

  When The Drinking Den appeared in a newspaper, it was attacked with unprecedented savagery, it was denounced and accused of every crime. Do I really need, in these few lines, to explain my intentions as a writer? I set out to show the fatal collapse of a working family in the poisonous environment of our city slums. With drunkenness and laziness come the loosening of family ties, the filth of promiscuity and the gradual abandonment of decent feelings; then, in the end, shame and death. Quite simply, this is morality in action.

  L’Assommoir is undoubtedly the most decent and moral of my books. I have often had to touch on quite appalling ills; but only the form has shocked. People have been angered by the words. My crime is to have had the literary curiosity to collect the language of the people and to pour it into a highly crafted mould – but the form is the great crime! Yet there are dictionaries of this language and scholars pore over them and enjoy its freshness, its vigour, its startling quality and its forceful images. It is a delight for scholarly linguists. Despite that, no one suspected that my aim was to engage in a purely philological exercise, which I believe to be of considerable historical and social interest.

  In any event, I am not defending myself. My work will defend me. It is a truthful work, the first novel about the people that does not lie and which carries the scent of the people. From that, one should not conclude that the people as a whole are bad – because my characters are not bad; they are only ignorant, vitiated by the environment of harsh labour and poverty in which they live. And one should read my novels, understand them and see them clearly as a whole, before making the kind of trite criticisms, the grotesque and repulsive assessments that one hears about myself and my works. Oh, if people only knew how much my friends laugh at the incredible myth about me that is foisted on the masses! If they could only know that the savage, bloodthirsty novelist is in reality a respectable bourgeois, devoted to scholarship and art, who lives quietly in his corner with no ambition except to leave behind him as great and as vital a body of work as he can! I am not refuting any of the fabrications, I am getting on with my work and leaving it to time and to the good faith of the public to reveal me as I truly am beneath the stupidities that have been heaped upon me.

  Emile Zola

  Paris, 1 January 187
7.

  NOTES

  1. For the title of the novel, see A Note on the Translation, p. xxxiii.

  2. In a letter to Le Bien public, 13 February 1877.

  3. Napoleon Ill’s rule was problematical for Karl Marx, since it appeared to have no basis in any particular class in French society; he analysed the class character of the regime in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

  4. Joy Newton has followed this theme of the countryside as an ideal through the whole novel in ‘Conscious Artistry and the Presentation of the Persistent Ideal’, in Zola and the Craft of Fiction, ed. Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (see Further Reading), pp. 67-79.

  5. See A Note on the Translation.

  6. Zola was an admirer of Richard Wagner, whose Ring cycle had been prepared at Bayreuth in 1876.

  7. And human beings are associated with animals, most noticeably by their names: Madame Lerat (‘the rat’) and the constable, Poisson (‘fish’), for example. It has been said that this indicates Zola’s belief that working-class people, corrupted by drink and poverty, underwent a sort of Darwinian evolution in reverse, bringing them close to animals; but the humanity that he attributes to the characters in this novel (not only Gervaise, but Lalie, for example) would seem to suggest otherwise.

  8. Henry James, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Morris Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 174.

  9. Martin Turnell, The Novel in France (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), p. 370

  10. ‘I think that the claims that have been made for him as one of the greatest European novelists, or even a great novelist, are exaggerated. It is evident, however, that he cannot any longer be dismissed as a boring out-dated Naturalist.’ – Martin Turnell, The Art of French Fiction (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), p. viii.