As Ira Shor has clearly shown in the article, Zola's of structural devices and organizational principles can furnish important clues coneeming his ideological I feel that an examination of Zola's use of imagery (comparisons, similes, metaphors) can also be of gregt importance in determining his ideology. Specifieal]y, the imagery Zola uses in Germinal clarifies his notion of capita], his conception of the working class, and his understanding of their role in the movement of history.
In Germinal, Zola frequently compares capital to a hidden God, unseen by the workers but feeding on them, as in the following pus, sage: "Yes, labour would can capital to account, capital, that impersonal g(xi, unknown to the worker, crouching somewhere in his mysterious tabernacle whence he sucked the blood of the poor starving devils he lived on."l The nature Of capital revealed here—anonymous, abstract and absent—goes far in clarifying Etienne [Antier's political position at the end of Germinal.
His decision to abandon direct, immediate concrete action at the grass-roots level, in order to attack capitai on its own terms, on its own grounds—Paris—seems quite consistent With Zola's conception of the abstract nation of capital.
In another passage involving the hidden-god image Zola had already that Paris was probably the center of the power structure entrapping the miners: "the real masters" were in "Paris, presumably. But they [the miners] could not say for sure; the whole question was receding into some distant and terrifying place, some far off, metaphysical region where the un known god was crouching on his throne in the depths or the tatm•nacle. They would never see this god, but they felt him NS a power, weighing down from afar on the ten thousand miners of (p. 217).
Indeed, the only hint of capital's vulnerability occurs at the very end Of the novel as Etienne is on his way to Paris, developing a program based on legal actiön, syndicalism and high level organization rather than on direct action at the grass-roots level: "Ah, then indeed truth and justice would awake! Then that crouching, sated that monstrous idol hidden away in his secret tabernacle, gorged with the flesh of poor creatures who never even saw him, would instantly perish" (p. 498).
While Marxist critics could hardly agree with Zola's final political position, it is undeniably that this position is based on a consistent ideological conception revealed primarily. through the imagery in Germinal.
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