by Emile Zola
Throughout Germinal, as elsewhere in Les Rougon-Macquart, Zola constantly dispels our fond illusions by making a concerted attempt to break down the barriers between human beings and other animals, and between animals and plants or objects. The miners display the dumb submissiveness of the herd; the mob is like a river in spate. Horses like Battle and Trumpet are best friends, with memories and longings every bit as powerful as those of their supposed masters. The mine itself is a voracious beast, or a living network of veins and arteries which retaliates when injured. Whether it be the water flooding the mine or the alcohol-tainted blood pumping through Étienne’s brain, fundamental – even cataclysmic – natural processes are at work which render the distinctions of the world into animal, vegetable and mineral at best irrelevant and at worst deceptive. Seen in this light Zola’s Naturalist world is an entropic world, in which nature inevitably reverts to a state of chaos, despite all human effort to create order and to dominate its course. What is natural can no more be withstood or reversed than, it seems, one can protect a mine like Le Voreux from the great underground sea known as the Torrent.
And yet Le Voreux is destroyed, first and foremost, by human agency. The Torrent is unleashed by a crazed and perverted application of human reason. The mine, on the contrary, has become a safer place since the days when young girls would plunge down its shaft to their death with the merest loss of footing. If being part of the natural process means being shaped by heredity and environment and being assimilated to dumb animals and plants, by the same token it also means being part of a process of evolution. Where historically there is hope at the end of Germinal, because the future contains the legalization of trade unions, then ‘naturally’ there is hope also. For we carry within us the seeds of eventual betterment. Education – which the miners lack but are gradually receiving, which Étienne lacks but gradually acquires – is the key. Human beings can learn, and what they learn is genetically transmissable. The aristocracy and the bourgeoisie call this ‘breeding’; Zola calls it ‘progress’.
This central Zolian tenet is more plainly illustrated in La Bête humaine, published five years later, where the central psychopathic character finds himself unable to kill in cold blood because of the ‘accumulated effect of education, the slowly erected and indestructible scaffolding of transmitted ideas’. His hand is stayed by ‘human conscience’, an ‘inherited sense of justice’: only when his mind is overwhelmed by atavistic dark forces of primordial bloodlust at the sight of a woman’s white flesh does Jacques Lantier kill. But Zola’s idea of ‘civilization’ as a process of intellectual and moral evolution is already present in Germinal, where the novel ends on an optimistic note because human conscience has clearly taken a step forward. Though defeated, the miners have become more aware of their situation and of the possibility of improving it. The strike may have seemed like all the strikes before it: born of fond hope and killed by cruel reality. But with each strike the hopes become less fond and the reality slightly less cruel. For Zola it is possible to envisage that in demonstrating the ‘truth about humanity’ – as Étienne in his way has just done for the mining community of Montsou – the novelist is himself educating his reader and contributing to the gradual ‘evolution’ of a more civilized, less inhuman society. Indeed perhaps Zola is the real hero of Germinal, for as a consciousness-raiser his rhetoric is far superior – and far more insidious – than that of his leading character.
Presentation and Progress
As a revolutionary leader Étienne tends to talk in clichés, borrowing ideas and phrases from Marx and others or relying on the familiar vistas of the promised land and the city on a hill. But Zola’s moral landscape is a flat, open plain, a level playing-field on which to enact a Darwinian struggle in which humanity itself is fighting for survival. Not for him the quasi-mystical perpectives which beguile Souvarine and Father Ranvier so that these ideological opposites are united in their murderous obliviousness to the realities of human experience. Rather, a powerful symbolic vision of life itself in which the forces of creation and destruction are waging an eternal war and in which human beings might, just might, be able to help the cause of creation.
Following completion of the novel and its publication in book form, Zola was quoted in the Paris newspaper Le Matin on 7 March 1885 as saying that as far as he was concerned a novel consisted of two things: the material and the process of creation (‘les documents et la création’). Two weeks later he elaborated in a letter to Henry Céard:
We [novelists] are more or less liars, but how do our lies work and what are the thoughts behind them?…For my own part, I still believe that my lies lead in the direction of the truth. I have enlarged upon the facts and taken a leap towards the stars on the trampoline of precise observation. Truth soars upon the wing of the symbolic.4
Zola’s symbolic vision is certainly a ‘Naturalist’ vision in that it presents human beings as subject to nature, and it is also Darwinian in its emphasis on life as a battle of the food chain. Ours is a voracious universe, and images of eating and devouring and consuming and gobbling up abound. Human antagonisms – the class struggle, sexual rivalry, even the sexual act itself – are all presented in terms of eating. Mealtimes structure the narrative and demonstrate the central and fundamental divide between the miner’s ‘prison-house of hunger’ and the groaning tables of centrally heated bourgeois dining-rooms. Even the daily alternation of day and night becomes a dialectic of eating and being eaten. And Zola’s vision is also, to use David Baguley’s term, an ‘entropic vision’, in which individuality and orderly difference give way to the chaos of the mob and an orgy of undifferentiated desire. Take for example the several accounts of the rampaging mob in Part V, or the astonishing description of Widow Desire’s dance-hall in Part III, the scene of a Bosch-esque bacchanalia of mingling limbs and liquid dissolution with beer flooding through the human body as the Torrent will later inundate the mine. The thirst for beer, sex and justice seems one and the same.
But even here there is emphasis also on regeneration, on collapse as being merely part of a broader cycle of integration and disintegration. The mass drinking-binge at Widow Desire’s at once builds to an orgasm of contentment (‘God! This is the life, eh?’) and precedes a multitude of innumerable private orgasms: ‘From the fields of ripe corn rose warm, urgent breath: many a child must have been fathered that night.’ Similarly, the destructive debauches of the rampaging mob will sow the seed of a heightened political awareness. In fact these ‘entropic’ elements are part of the broader picture of an epic struggle between human beings and nature, and indeed of the epic struggle going on within nature itself. To sink a mine-shaft is a human assault upon nature, but, as with the disused mine at Réquillart, nature soon reclaims its territory as shrub and bramble grow back and two trees appear to have sprung from the very depths of the earth. The ant-like activities of human beings digging up the earth are as nothing compared with the vast and eternal forces of nature, where today’s flooded mine offers ‘a reminder of the ancient battles between earth and water when great floods turned the land inside out and buried mountains beneath the plains’.
This sense of a ‘broader picture’ is given also by the quasi-mythological portrayal of the human condition in Germinal. The quite unnaturalistically named Widow Desire is herself like some Mother Earth, a fount of fertility and indirect progenitrix of every miner in the region. For a desire whose permanent partner is always dead and in the past is a desire that cannot rest. Similarly, the women laying waste the boilers at a mine are participants in a witches’ sabbath. The succeeding generations of the Maheu family seem like a dynasty of slaves who have worked for the ‘hidden god’ of capital since time immemorial, this ‘squat and sated deity’ who demands human sacrifice – like a latter-day Moloch – but remains constantly out of sight. The mine itself, and especially the unquenchable fires of Le Tartaret, are evocative of a Christian hell in which the damned live out an eternity of torture and irredeemable subjugation. At th
e same time the mine is suggestive of the ‘hidden’ forces at work not only in capitalist society but also in the human body and the human psyche, a subterranean network of ‘pathways’ in which blockage means disaster and the accumulated pressures of desire and trauma may explode with all the fatal consequences of firedamp. It is a place in which to confront the past, as when Étienne remembers his own in Part I, Chapter IV, or a place, as Étienne, Chaval and Catherine discover at the end, to plumb the violent reality of lust and sexual rivalry. In short, the mine is what lies beneath the surface: dark, monstrous and frightening.
But that is indeed Zola’s purpose: to reveal, to bring to light what lies – literally and metaphorically – beneath the surface. At one level Zola goes to great lengths to allow us to visualize the action of the novel, which is no doubt why there have been so many successful film versions of Germinal. Thanks to his own on-the-spot investigations he knows exactly what the inside of a mine or a pitman’s house actually looks and feels like, and the role which he adopts as the narrator of the story is essentially that of a dispassionate and anonymous cameraman focusing his lens on some powerful and eloquent evidence. But he is not merely a documentarist. He is also a demystifier. Where some myths disguise and obfuscate – like the picture of the happy worker which Mme Hennebeau blindly peddles to her Parisian visitors – his novels are intended to demonstrate the truth and thus contribute towards the creation of a better society. While such an ambition may itself seem quaint in a postmodernist world where all discourse is suspect, it is not necessarily a risible or a nugatory aim. Moreover, the Zola of Germinal – and indeed of Les Rougon-Macquart as a whole – is alive to the insidious and corrosive power of what is now called ‘spin’ or ‘media management’. Throughout the novel we see how ‘capital’ covers up the truth, playing down the extent of the damage to its mines in order not to worry the shareholders and attempting to ‘bury’ the news of miners being shot in order to deflect public outrage. The readiness of the uneducated to cross their fingers or to believe in the existence of ghosts is seen as part of their submissiveness, as part of their understandable but fatal inability to confront, assess – and change – the reality of their situation. But if the uneducated have every excuse, how much worse it is that a benign couple like the Grégoires can be quite so blind to this reality, or that Deneulin’s pleasant and capable daughters should be so appallingly content to view the murderous destruction of Le Voreux as a ‘thrilling’ aesthetic experience.
Just as Zola catalogues, through Étienne’s ‘education’, the various political responses which it might be possible to have towards the actualities of mining and working-class life, so too he is careful to record a wide spectrum of ‘interpretative’ responses in order to highlight quite where he himself stands as a novelist writing about this subject. If he had to masquerade as Giard’s secretary in order to research this subject at Anzin, that was no doubt because he feared the charge to which the bourgeois and indeed many members of the mining community are open at the end of Germinal: namely, that they are tourists. It has become fashionable to visit the scene of disaster, be it the collapse of Le Voreux or the rescue attempt going on to save the trapped miners. But Zola is no gawping rubberneck or heartless aesthete. Above all he is not simply the professional novelist doing the research for his latest, money-spinning bestseller, exploiting human suffering before he returns to his house in the country to write it up before a four-course lunch. Perhaps indeed that is why his documentation at Anzin was quite so thorough, and so valuable: he had a guilty conscience.
And his only saving grace can be that of ‘education’. As Étienne walks along the road from Marchiennes to Montsou at the beginning of the novel, he is not only destitute, he is also ignorant. The world of mining is a closed book to him, and the plain itself is a barren, windswept wasteland. His only hope is that sunrise may bring a modest rise in temperature. At the end, as he walks along the same road in the opposite direction, he has become knowledgeable, and he has a job to do. He is a man with a train to catch. The new dawn means progress. The world of mining – and the workers’ struggle for justice – has become an open book, and the plain is now a teeming, ‘germinating’ surface from beneath which the truth is just waiting to spring into view: ‘a whole world of people labouring unseen in this underground prison, so deep beneath the enormous mass of rock that you had to know they were there if you were to sense the great wave of misery rising from them’.
Buried beneath our own ignorance and incarcerated within our own prejudice, we readers of Germinal have similarly been provided with a map to the unknown. But we have not been lectured or subjected to the ‘humanitarian claptrap’ of the kind which Étienne himself still foolishly rehearses in his head: ‘Discomfited by the workers’ reek of poverty, he felt the need to raise them up to glory and set a halo on their heads; he would show how they alone among human beings were great and unimpeachably pure, the sole font of nobility and strength from which humanity at large might draw the means of its own renewal.’ Rather we have been given a warning:
Germinal is about compassion, not about revolution. What I wanted was to say loud and clear to the fortunate of this world, to its masters: Take heed. Look beneath the surface. See how these wretched people work and suffer. There may still be time to avoid total catastrophe. But hasten to be just, or else disaster looms: the earth will open at our feet and all nations will be swallowed up in one of the most terrible upheavals ever to take place in the course of human history.5
It could be argued that when Zola wrote those words in December 1885 (to David Dautresme, editor of Le Petit Rouennais) he was simply demonstrating the cynical pragmatism of a successful bourgeois who did not want his new-found wealth taken away from him. But it might more persuasively be argued that Germinal is a piece of shrewd propaganda, the work of a man of genuine compassion who was appealing to the cynical pragmatist in his fellow bourgeois in order to improve the lot of his fellow human beings.
Is Zola’s warning still of relevance? It may seem not. In some so-called developed countries the mining industry itself has almost ceased to exist, and even the manufacturing worker is an endangered species. Social and economic conditions have changed enormously since the second half of the nineteenth century. But the fundamental issue in Germinal perhaps has not. Shoot the miners or pay them a fair wage? That question now seems simple. But it might not seem so simple – even if today’s reader of Germinal still wished to give the same answer – if the issue were put more broadly. Should ‘the fortunate of this world’, its ‘masters’, stamp out the expression of grievance or seek to eradicate its cause? What if the choices were different, more contemporary? Tiananmen Square or a measure of democracy? A War on Terror or an autonomous State of Palestine?
When Zola was asphyxiated by the fumes from his bedroom fire on 29 September 1902, it was discovered that his chimney had been capped during repair work. Was this an accident or did someone on the political Right who objected to his defence of the Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, plan his death? Already he had accepted a prison sentence and exile in England as the price of his defence of this innocent man. Had he now paid with his life for his belief in the truth? The answer to that question is not known. But on 5 October some 50,000 people followed his funeral procession through the streets of Paris, including a delegation of miners from the Denain coal-field. And from the single word they chanted during the procession it is evident that they at least believed in the authenticity of their champion – and in the power of that one word to symbolize protest against injustice wherever and whenever throughout the history of human affairs that injustice may be found: ‘Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!…’
NOTES
1. Émile Zola, Correspondance, ed. B. H. Bakker (10 vols, Montreal and Paris, 1978–95), vol. 5, p. 126.
2. Ibid., pp. 240–41.
3. Quotations from ‘Notes sur la marche générale de l’œuvre’ in Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart (5 vols, Paris: Ga
llimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1960–67), vol. 5, pp. 1738–41.
4. Zola, Correspondance, vol. 5, p. 249.
5. Ibid., p. 347.
Further Reading and Filmography
In English
All twenty novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle have been translated into English, and the principal ones are available in Penguin Classics, as is Thérèse Raquin.
BIOGRAPHIES
Frederick Brown, Zola. A Life (New York, 1995; London, 1996)
F. W. J. Hemmings, The Life and Times of Émile Zola (London, 1977)
Graham King, Garden of Zola (London, 1978)
Alan Schom, Émile Zola. A Bourgeois Rebel (London, 1987)
Philip Walker, Zola (London, 1985)
CRITICAL STUDIES
David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction. The Entropic Vision (Cambridge, 1990)
— (ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston, 1986)
Elliot M. Grant, Émile Zola (New York, 1966)
—, Zola’s ‘Germinal’. A Critical and Historical Study (Leicester, 1962)
F. W. J. Hemmings, Émile Zola (2nd edn, Oxford, 1966; reprinted with corrections, 1970)
Irving Howe, ‘Zola: The Genius of Germinal’, Encounter 34 (1970), pp. 53–61
Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (eds), Zola and the Craft of Fiction. Essays in Honour of F. W. J. Hemmings (Leicester, 1990; paperback edn, 1993)
Brian Nelson, Zola and the Bourgeoisie (London, 1983)