Emile Zola Germinal ( Oxford World’s Classics)
Topics Emile Zola, Germinal
Collection opensource
Language English
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!"
While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and power in this new translation. It is also the thirteenth book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
Emile Zola
Germinal
A new translation by Peter Collier
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
GERMINAL
Emile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian
engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence
where he made friends with Paul Cezanne. After an undis¬
tinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris,
Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette which
he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel
and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories
followed until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his
Rougon-Macquart series with the sub-title Histoire naturelle et
sociale d'me famille sous le Second Empire^ in which he sets out to
illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range
of characters and milieux. However, it was not until 1877 that
his novel L 'Assommoir^ a study of alcoholism in the working classes,
brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart
series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less
successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his
vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His
marriage in 1870 had remained childless but his extremely happy
liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic
servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.
Peter Collier is Fellow in French at Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge, and University Lecturer in French,
Robert Lethbridge is Professor of French Language and
Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. For Oxford
World’s Classics he has edited Zola’s LAssommoir (1995) and La
Debacle (2000) and Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (2001) and Pierre et Jean
(2001).
Translated by PETER COLLIER
With an Introduction by ROBERT LETHBRIDGE
1. Labor disputes—France—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
====
CONTENTS
- Introduction vii
- Note on the Translation xxix
- Select B ihliography XXX
- Chronology of Emile Zola xxxii
- Plan of Mont sou and surrounding areas
====
INTRODUCTION
Germinal is a resonant title^ in every sense. Fifty thousand
people followed behind Emile Zola’s funeral procession on 5
October 1902, and among them a delegation of miners from
the Denain coalfield rhythmically chanted, ‘Germinal! Germi¬
nal!’ through the streets of Paris. Even today, the novel has a
special place in the folklore of the mining communities of
France. It also enjoys a critical reputation as Zola’s masterpiece.
When it was first published, in 1885, it caused a sensation. A
nineteenth-century public needed no reminding that ‘Germi¬
nal’ was the name given to the month of April in the immediate
aftermath of the French Revolution, when those convinced
that 1789 marked a new beginning had recast the calendar,
starting with year I. More precisely, it was on ‘12 Germinal,
year III’ that starving Parisians staged a famous uprising
against the government of the Convention.
Such revolutionary echoes did not make of Germinal an
urgent recall to the barricades. Zola himself claimed that he
was looking forward rather than back. In his work-notes for
the novel, he deliberately termed it ‘prophetic’; it posed, as he
said, ‘the twentieth century’s most important question’, namely
the conflict between the forces of modern Capitalism and the
interests of the human beings necessary to its advance. The
Industrial Revolution had come later to France than to Eng¬
land. Zola had already devoted a novel {UAssommoir in 1877)
to one of its consequences, the urban slum. The growth of the
heavy industries, linked to the development of the railways and
the means to make and power them, provided the writer with a
subject of greater dramatic potential. A series of miners’
strikes, from the late 1860s onwards, brought to national
attention the fact that the working class was becoming union¬
ized as the only effective way of protesting against inhuman
exploitation. For the leaders of these early proletarian move¬
ments, party politics as such were irrelevant. There were more
fundamental issues at stake when children of 11 were working
a fourteen-hour day, pitiful wages were habitually further
reduced to starvation level in response to what we now call
‘market forces’, and troops were sent at the first sign of
trouble.
Before Germinal^ Zola had never visited a coalfield, let alone
gone down a mine or witnessed a strike at first hand. Industrial
unrest in the Valenciennes area, in February 1884, gave him
the opportunity to do so. When he went there, in order to
familiarize himself with his subject, he was struck not by the
violence which had been reported in the press, but by a
chilling resignation and despair. What Zola found in the region
close to the Belgian border was human suffering in contempor¬
ary form. Although he conceived Germinal as a political novel,
it has an epic sweep which transcends a particular time and
place. And Zola’s stance is ultimately to be located between
compassion and an awareness of fatalities which combine to
render almost insignificant the vicissitudes of individual lives
(on both sides of the class struggle). There has been more
than a century of debate about whether Germinal is a revolu¬
tionary or reactionary work. It can be argued that it leaves
unexamined the ideological implications of the social issues
foregrounded by the text. Modern commentators have stressed
that even its mythical dimension is problematic. For if Zola’s
title self-consciously warns of revolutionary forces at work, it
literally refers to the germinating spring with which the novel
ends. Revolution, in the other sense, speaks of coming full
circle. Economics and politics are thus reinscribed in the
eternal cycle of the seasons. But what is certain is that those
same timeless qualities have been responsible for GerminaPs
effect on generations of readers. It is widely recognized as one
of the finest novels ever written in French,
Germinal was the thirteenth novel in Zola’s twenty-volume
Rougon-Macquart series. The latter’s subtitle is ‘A Natural
and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’,
thereby making explicit the seminal influence of Hippolyte
Taine, most notoriously formulated in the Positivist philoso¬
pher’s isolation of three principal determinants on human
behaviour: heredity, environment, and the historical moment.
By tracing the destiny of a single family and its descendants.
Zola felt he could give due weight to biological imperatives
lent added intellectual credibility in PVance by the 1865 transla¬
tion of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. That is to suggest
neither that Zola uncritically subscribed to theories of heredity
being popularized at the time, nor that these are systematically
illustrated in his Rougon-Macquart novels. Preliminary notes
for the series as a whole, drawn up in 1868-9, make it clear
that he considered heredity a conveniently scientific substitute
for the outmoded concept of Fate. Above all, it was intended
that the twin focus on the Rougon and Macquart branches of
the family would endow Zola’s fictional world with an internal
coherence. This would be afforded not only by blood ties and
comparative experiences, but also by reappearing characters.
Etienne, the hero of Germinal., is the son of Gervaise Macquart,
whose alcohol-ravaged decline is chronicled in VAssommoir.
Just over half-way through this earlier novel, and while still a
boy, he is sent away from Paris to find work in Lille. It is
accordingly from here that he comes into Germinal.
Cross-references (see pp. 46, 384) serve, or seek, to enhance
the illusion of overlapping books and lives. It was not one Zola
himself necessarily respected. In the initial planning stage of
Germinal Etienne Lantier, with his ‘tainted blood’, appears as
a homicidal maniac rather than with a personality more com¬
patible with that of a leader of striking miners. And the
arbitrary status of Zola’s exploitation of hereditary principles is
confirmed by the novelist subsequently, and belatedly, having
to invent another Lantier brother with the requisite psychotic
disorder to sustain the murderous plots of La Bite humaine
(1890). Although his protagonists have nominal relationships
across different texts, they remain as autonomous as the separ¬
ate frames which constitute the Rougon-Macquart, and their
construction is subordinate to Zola’s shaping of the novel in
hand.
A less suspect unity of design is to be found in the historical
ambitions advertised by the subtitle of Zola’s series. Each of
the Rougon-Macquart novels explores a specific milieu so that,
together, they form a panorama of Second Empire society.
Notwithstanding differences of authorial approach which Zola
was at pains to point out, he aimed to provide for the reign of
Napoleon III what Balzac had done for the Restoration and
the July Monarchy. This is what distinguishes the novel-cycle
from Zola’s earlier work. A text like Therese Raquin (1867),
for example, is equally informed by a physiological explanation
of private dramas; but its characters are not positioned in
relation to external events. Zola’s rereading of La Comedie
humaine in 1869, coinciding as it did with his assimilation of
Positivist thought, left him in no doubt that the determining
social context of his own age was a ready-made subject for
the young writer working in Balzac’s gigantic footsteps. That
does not prevent us from resisting the claim that the Rougon-
Macquart are exclusively anchored in the years 1852-70. When
Zola was preparing the opening novel of the series. La Fortune
des Rougon^ in 1869, its satirical evocation of Louis-Napoleon’s
coup d'etat of 2 December 1851 was of the utmost topicality at
a moment when the illegitimacy of the regime was the polem¬
ical concern of those opposed to it. By the time Zola completed
his encyclopedic project in 1893, it was inevitable that events
subsequent to the Second Empire’s demise in 1870 should be
superimposed on a period increasingly consigned to an archival
past.
In this respect, Germinal is an exemplary case. Although
precise allusions and chronological co-ordinates are few and far
between, the novel supposedly takes place in the closing years
of the Second Empire. It could be said to be loosely based on
two major coal-strikes which occurred in 1869, the first at La
Ricamarie (near Saint-Etienne) and the second at Aubin (in
the Aveyron), both of them marked by bloody confrontations
between soldiers and miners. But Zola was perfectly aware that
such incidents merely offered him an ex post facto justification
consistent with his series’ self-imposed historical constraints.
Not only is the real model the Anzin strike he went to observe
in 1884; without it, the novel might have borne only a super¬
ficial resemblance to Germinal in its definitive form. The subject
had not been included in Zola’s original (ten-volume) outline
for the series. It is clear that the Commune was decisive in
persuading him that, at some stage, a novel needed to be
devoted to revolutionary action in a contemporary setting. In
retrospect, at least, the savagery of 1871 could be interpreted
as the culmination of strains and tensions which imperial
dictatorship had tried to suppress.
During the preparation of L*Assommoir, Zola promised him¬
self that he would complement it with another study of the
working class, but this time with politics at its centre. Only
towards the end of 1883, however, does he seem to have made
up his mind to proceed with such a novel; and it would
therefore bring together his reflections on two decades of a
militant socialism neither checked by, nor limited to, a failed
revolution. Germinal^ impact derives, at least in part, from
this sequence of temporal displacements. Rather than being
circumscribed by its origins in specific events of 1869 or 1884,
the novel accommodates the conflicts of the century extended,
by a process of repetition, from 1789 onwards. If its title
announces the paradigm, nowhere are the implied analogies
more forcefully aligned than in the ‘vision^ of revolution
articulated in Part V, Chapter V. The collective demand for
bread reminds the reader of a famous vanguard of women,
with the same battle-cry, advancing on Versailles during the
Terror. And a supplementary conflation of time-frames is
effected by points of contact between, on the one hand, miners
rampaging across the landscape and, on the other, the mind¬
lessly destructive hordes roaming across the plains of France
described by historians of 1789—themselves writing in the
equally terrifying shadow of the Commune.
This widening of perspectives is one of the most remarkable
features of Germinal as a whole. Because it is grounded in
identifiable realities, its compelling story is also a plausible
one. The novel’s richness lies in its associative texture and
symbolic patterning. Replying to expressions of admiration for
such an interplay of the factual and the poetic in Germinaly
Zola defined this dynamic as ‘a leap to the stars on the
springboard of the exactly observed’. The latter is assured by
the process of documentation which is perhaps the best known
of his habits of composition. For Germinal this involved sub¬
stantial research. Zola read numerous books on the economics
of the mining industry, the topography of the Valenciennes
coal-basin, and the history of working-class politics; and, in
order to minimize the possibility of anachronisms, he consulted
Second Empire accounts of the day-to-day life of miners and
their families as well as those detailing the technical workings
of the pits. This note-taking operation occupied him during the
early months of 1884, from late January until the beginning of
April. By far the most important phase of it was the week or so
(23 February-2 March) spent in Valenciennes itself.
From
there he visited Denain, Bruay-sur-Escaut, and, especially,
Anzin, where 12,000 miners had gone on strike a few days
before. To a colleague in Paris Zola wrote that he had found a
‘superb landscape in which to set my book’. He drew sketches
and maps; he questioned union officials and mining engineers;
he talked to colliers, sat in their cafes, and was invited into
their homes. He was taken deep underground, in the tunnels
of the Renard pit at Denain, which was still working.
In the
evenings, in his hotel, Zola transcribed his pencil jottings. And
he returned to the capital with a sheaf of papers under the
generic heading ‘My Notes on Anzin’ which form a unique
document in their own right, as an extraordinary record of
things seen and heard. Germinal is indelibly marked by these
personal impressions, overlaid on the other sources of informa¬
tion which guarantee its ‘exactitude’.
The function of such documentation is often misunderstood.
In Le Roman experimental (1880) Zola claimed that the docu¬
ments assembled by Naturalist novelists like himself were
entirely responsible for the structure and content of their
works: they both preceded the elaboration of character and plot
and were transposed so directly that the creative imagination
was virtually redundant. Even Zola’s metaphor of the ‘spring¬
board’, applied to his procedures in Germinal^ repeats this
prioritization of the verifiable over the inventive. Scholars with
access to the preparatory notes for his novels have since shown
the more dogmatic statements to be highly misleading, and
intelligible only in a critical climate in which Zola was violently
attacked for his depiction of unaesthetic physical appetites and
social conditions; in other words, as his opponents insisted that
obscenity and bias resulted from a perverse and politically
motivated representation of reality, Zola found himself denying
that any such distortion had taken place; quasi-scientific evi¬
dence, he argued, was at the heart of his objective realism.
Yet to acknowledge that polemical pressures vitiated Zola’s
accounts of his own achievement does not mean that we can
invert the proposition and relegate his documentation to a
secondary position. Its relative significance, in the composition
of Germinal^ is to be gauged by the fact that, before he went to
Valenciennes, work on the novel’s properly fictional outline
was already in progress.
Zola began this Gauche (a pictorial
term for such an outline) on lo February 1884, and completed
over a third of it prior to his visit to the coalfields. These first
thirty manuscript pages, in the form of an interior monologue,
are crucial in determining the directions which subsequent
planning would take. They speak of Zola’s intention to end the
novel with the defeat of the miners, while simultaneously
suggesting the provisional nature of such a conclusion to the
informing conflict of capital and labour; and they contain, in
embryo, many of GerminaPs scenes and characters, as well as
the matrix of its images and thematic structures. Nor are ‘My
Notes on Anzin’ those of a social scientist; they too are
interspersed by novelistic reflections and play with potential
scenarios and descriptive effects. On the other hand, this
documentation radically modified some of Zola’s original ideas;
it prompted as many new ones; it acted as a restraint on
melodramatic intensity. Its role is thus creative as well as
authenticating. The preparation of Germinal bears witness to
such a fertile interpenetration of narrative requirements and
the historically true, artistic licence and factual detail.
Less visible within this dialectic, but none the less present,
are the more indirect sources of the novel. Zola’s long career as
a journalist, for example, had put him in close touch with issues
and attitudes of the day over the preceding twenty years.
There are other aspects of Germinal which seem to have no
basis in reality at all, and which may have more to do with the
writer’s subconscious than it is possible to confirm. In any
case, however scrupulously he planned its scenes, chapters,
and fictional portraits, there remains an irrecuperable distance
between even the fullest of his notes and the corresponding
finished page. What we do know is that this enormous novel
took Zola hardly ten months to write; he penned its opening
lines on 2 April 1884, and finished it on 23 January 1885.
Serial publication in Le Gil Bias had begun on 26 November
1884 and lasted until 25 February 1885. The next month
Germinal appeared in volume form.
Those first lines of Germinal are a marvellously conceived way
of bringing the reader into the novel. Far from starting to fill
in a recognizable background, they plunge us into a world
which, at every level, is difficult to negotiate. We are thus put
precisely in the position of the man, as yet unnamed, who
emerges into a disturbingly alien location, relying on his sense
impressions to try to situate himself in relation to a profoundly
unfamiliar context. All we register initially is the blackness and
the numbing cold, a brutally physical environment properly
incapacitating to the extent that it is beyond the control of the
rational intelligence. As the man gradually makes out fearful
sights and sounds, the reader is confronted with a fantastic
vision, alerted to a monstrous presence barely seen but (and
with lasting consequences) already personified. Hallucinatory
silhouettes are synonymous with material shapes; and meta¬
phors are immediately substituted for points of reference.
Even before Etienne simultaneously introduces himself to the
reader and to the stranger he comes across in the midst of a
tangible desolation, the mood of Germinal is set. But so too is
the creative tension between the novel’s realistic effects and its
symbolic meanings.
The latter have been subjected to such a wealth of critical
scrutiny that GerminaPs realism is sometimes taken as read
rather than underlined. Readers of the novel are, of course,
virtually saturated with prosaic information: about mine-shafts,
tunnelling techniques, working conditions, the price of coal,
wage-levels, underground accidents, respiratory diseases, the
lexical, sexual, and eating habits of miners; it ranges from the
anecdotal details of their growing vegetables to the organization
of working-class associations, and from wash-tubs to syndicalist
theory. To learn all this is to be forcibly reminded, not only of
Zola’s documentation, but also of the pedagogic aspirations of
much nineteenth-century French fiction. In an era of educa¬
tional enthusiasm, reflected in publishing ventures like diction¬
aries and encyclopedias, novels in the realist tradition teach
their readers about realities behind appearances or beyond
horizons. That is not to conclude that Germinal is a compen¬
dium of facts re-presented with artistic skill, or that these form
a residual body of knowledge ensuring that we suspend our
disbelief. It is certainly one of the reasons why we take the
novel seriously. Though it is told in the past historic of
narrative convention, we are absorbed into the present tense of
a world which patently exists.
These effects are also integral to the means whereby the
novel, as opposed to a treatise, a history, or a newspaper
report, assumes its more general significance. Not the least
important is the representative status of Zola’s scenes and
characters. If the very topography of Germinal^ setting, for
example, is typical of the somewhat featureless countryside of
much of northern France, so too its mining community could
be any such community of the period. But this broadening of
perspectives is not merely spatial or temporal. The archetypal
is engendered from the same descriptive fabric which highlights
the typical. A specific industrial landscape is transformed into
the barren stage on which we see enacted the basic human
struggle for existence. There are certain repeated sequences—
the descent into the pit, the miners, pickaxe in hand, at the
coal-face—which become recurrent motifs of the text rather
than simply indications of a routine: men are momentarily
seized in the statuesque incarnation of their lives; their ritual
tasks are those of allegorical figures of toil and suffering. And
the multiple connotations of the mine itself reinforce such
suggestions. While it is through Etienne’s bewildered eyes that
we are first alerted to the voracious appetite of the appropri¬
ately named Le Voreux, what was introduced as an unreliable
image is, for the rest of the novel up until its destruction, a
substantive: the monstrous presence is an ever-present monster.
Its labyrinthine corridors evoke the buried cities of legend; in
it the miners are entombed, as the living dead vainly searching
for an escape from claustrophobic oppression. It is also a
primeval world where bestiality breaks out in murder and sex;
and it is a place of torture and eternal damnation, irresistibly
associated with Hades or hell. For these are the comparisons to
which Zola has explicit recourse in explaining the intolerable
temperature or the choking dust. In the process of detailing
utterly factual determinants^ his descriptive language generates
associations which are the shared references of the cultural
imagination.
A similar mythological enrichment of the text can be seen in
Zola's handling of his characters. Their movements and conver¬
sations have a crucial documentary function; but GerminaPs
central figures are also organized into a narrative pattern as old
as literature itself. In both respects, Etienne plays a structuring
role. His progress through the novel delineates its shape, with
his departure at the end symmetrically balancing his arrival at
the beginning. In between, it is his struggles, his loves and
friendships, his moments of triumph and defeat which carry
the reader forward. From the opening sentence, which picks
out the solitary hero on the road, what is set in motion is, both
literally and figuratively, a quest. His meeting with Bonnemort
takes the analogy with the prologue to a classical fable one
stage further. For the old man is more than simply a retired
collier of 1866 fortuitously found, but strategically positioned,
to answer Etienne’s (and the reader’s) questions; he is the
spokesman for the suffering of over half a century; and he is
the voice of wisdom. He initiates the young hero into the
nature of his future battle with the malevolent beast swallowing
its daily ration of human flesh. Complementary to this encoun¬
ter is the initiating journey into the mine with Maheu, Whereas
Bonnemort, however, is a guide only to an external decor and
prepares action by speech, Maheu is a kind of king of the
underworld who dispenses knowledge, work, and food; he also
brings Etienne to his daughter. And the narrative model is
completed by the meeting with Chaval, thereby plotting a
rivalry in both work and love which must, of dramatic neces¬
sity, be violently resolved.
We can accept the intentionally symbolic naming of people
and places, and still ask whether it was consciously or not that
this plot was drawn from the legacy of story-tellers down the
ages. Such curiosity is ultimately less rewarding than an aware¬
ness of the far-reaching implications of the allegories encoded
in GerminaPs exposition. In particular, the synthesis of the
archetypal and the documentary creates a logic which owes as
much to narrative imperatives as to the dictates of reality. The
series of intersecting affective triangles relating the protagonist
to Maheu, Catherine, and Chaval ensures that Etienne is given
a freedom of movement enjoyed by no other character. As he
appears at every moment of drama, so his visits to each of the
novel’s locations, whether domestic or public, allow him to
become the roving focus of Zola’s textual vehicle of informa¬
tion. But these comings and goings are inseparable from a
narrative dynamic perhaps less easily reconciled with Gertni-
wafs realism.
The successive elimination, for example, of all four figures
so significantly met by Etienne in the opening chapters is
explicable in terms other than the statistics of mortality in
nineteenth-century coalfields. It is directly linked to the phas¬
ing of Etienne’s quest, discreetly aligning his desire for Cather¬
ine and his desire for social justice. In the preparatory notes
for Germinaly it is exactly at the point that personal and
collective destinies are synchronized that the strike-leader be¬
comes, in Zola’s mind, ‘a hero’: ‘and the counterpoint of his
attraction to Catherine, his conflict with Chaval the traitor.’
This antithesis is developed on opposing sides of Maheu’s
authority. Chaval is the outsider: he quits the leader’s team,
violates the family sanctuary, ravishes the daughter, and re¬
moves her from the paternal hearth. Etienne, by contrast, is
the prodigal son, taken in under Maheu’s roof, reintegrated
into the communities of work and leisure. In such a scheme, it
is inevitable that the ensuing duel should see him heroically
prevail over Chaval as villain.
Yet Maheu’s death is also necessary. While Etienne sleeps
alongside fraternal bodies in Catherine’s room, his sexual
longing is kept in check by a taboo akin to incest. Only once
the father-figure is removed can he become her lover. Nor can
she live on, however, after the failure of the strike. As the filial
bond with Maheu is broken and Etienne’s quest for justice is
abandoned, he returns to solitude. With Bonnemort terminally
paralysed, there is a sense that Etienne takes his place: when
he emerges from the mining disaster, having survived as
miraculously as Bonnemort had earned his nickname, it is now
Etienne who is described as the ‘old man’ (p. 512); and he
takes with him into an untold future his own version of a bitter
experience once recounted to him. Here, in other words, is a
saga working itself out in pre-ordained fashion, a story which
can have no other conclusion.
Nor is Zola’s arrangement of his characters limited to putting
in place these ‘eternal triangles’ as a source of dramatic tension
and narrative development. There are also parallels and in¬
verted symmetries as obliquely related to verisimilitude but no
less signifying. The trio of Jeanlin, Bebert, and Lydie, for
example, deliberately echoes the Etienne-Chaval-Catherine
triangle. And this suggestion of reduplicated scenarios across
the generations is heightened by the rigorous correlation of
parents and children. Between the corresponding members of
the Gregoire and Maheu families there is an opposition which
speaks of a class struggle with its origins in an ancestral past
and which will be inherited by the future. Many such juxtaposi¬
tions merely serve to bring out essential contrasts: between
Hennebeau’s tortured sexuality and the miners’ uncomplicated
promiscuity; between a Catherine inaccessible to Etienne and
La Mouquette’s availability. Other patterns are less straightfor¬
ward, such as Ma Brule’s butchering of Maigrat, and the
murders of the sentry, Chaval, and Cecile, by (respectively)
Jeanlin, Etienne, and Bonnemort.
The degree to which characters are subject to GerminaPs
thematic structures, as much as representative of the social and
political realities it depicts, is illustrated by the antithesis
between Etienne and Souvarine. The latter’s documentary
function is to articulate, within the collectivist debate which
opposes Etienne and Rasseneur, the anarchist objection to
Marxist evolutionary theory; and although he is not based on a
specific individual, his Russian origins are testimony to Zola’s
reading about Kropotkin and Bakunin.
Etienne, on the other
hand, is the repository of ideas which make him into a compos¬
ite portrait of union officials the novelist met during his fact¬
finding tour of the coalfields. But beyond the dialogues which
serve to affirm their alternative conceptions of working-class
history, Etienne and Souvarine have fictional destinies which
dramatize the cosmic themes of life and death, and of destruc¬
tion and rebirth. They evolve in opposite directions. In sabot-
aging the mine, Souvarine renounces humanity in the name of
his intellectual nihilism. That same cataclysm is instrumental
in awakening in Etienne a regenerative hope. For as he emerges
from the flooded mine into Negrel’s embrace, he can be seen
to reject Souvarine’s despair; and his sun-drenched departure
at the end of the novel is contrasted with Souvarine’s silent
exit into the night.
We should nevertheless refrain from reading into the final
pages of Germinal the triumph of positive forces. Zola leaves
us with the impression that Souvarine and Etienne both go on.
As that quite extraordinary episode in the depths of the mine
makes clear, it is Souvarine’s act of destruction which creates
the very conditions in which Etienne can kill Chaval and then
make love to the dying Githerine. In an elemental space
realistically mapped but resonant with mythological associa¬
tions, Eros and Thanatos intertwine as precisely as consumma¬
tion and corpse. Within perspectives constrained by neither
politics nor credibility, Etienne and Souvarine play out the
same dialectical relationship which orders the seasons into
cycle rather than sequence.
Zola’s characters are seldom admired for their innate psycho¬
logical complexity or the subtlety with which nuances of mood
and feeling are conveyed to us. Consistent with physiological
explanations, his technique is to work from the outside, to
isolate expression and gesture. Thus the contradictions in
Souvarine, for example, are exemplified by his habit of watch¬
ing the smoke from his cigarette drift upwards in a mysterious
reverie while, at the same time, caressing the soft coat of the
rabbit which points to his lingering human instincts. The
instinctual, indeed, is privileged at the expense of the inner life.
What impels Etienne forward as Germinal begins is, first and
foremost, the need to warm his hands. When he retreats to the
enclosing warmth of the disused mine-shaft of Requillart he is
like a hibernating animal. Above all, the characters are driven
by their appetites; and amongst these basic physical needs,
food and sex take pride of place, nowhere more graphically
imbricated than in Maigrat’s exchange of one for the other and
the revenge wrought on him by the women who stuff earth into
his mouth while holding his mutilated genitals aloft.
To measure Zola’s characterization against that of a Henry
James would be just about as perverse! His achievement in
Germinal is to have constructed a set of interlocking and
inexorable causalities: historical^ social, and physical; but also
textual and cosmic. And if we are moved by the novel it is
surely because we are pressed up close to the suffering of its
characters, and simultaneously made aware that the universal
drama in which they play their given parts is plotted beyond
their control.
Together with his role in the Dreyfus Affair, it is Germinal
which has been largely responsible for Zola’s reputation as a
writer of the Left. Few novels, of any period or in any
language, so forcefully dramatize the cruel exploitation of men,
women, and children in the interests of unseen shareholders;
and perhaps none shows with such clarity the emergence of a
new historical force in the shape of the working-class struggle
for dignity and justice. Within the text, a key moment in this
respect occurs in Part IV, Chapter II: for there, and in a
language which cuts across political theorizing, Maheu gives
expression, at first haltingly but then increasingly fluently, not
to union demands but to a human protest; Hennebeau, the
miners’ delegation, Etienne, the narrator too, are all reduced to
silence, thus allowing Maheu to speak directly to Germinal's
readers. And many of the latter would subscribe to Irving
Howe’s view that the novel itself tells one of the great stories
of the modern era, ’the story of how the dumb acquire
speech’;* or, to put it another way, of how the passive objects
of manipulation at the bottom of the system begin, at least, to
transform themselves into active subjects determined to create
their own history.
What seems less certain is the outcome of the crisis and
impending conflict which Germinal predicts. That future is
articulated most explicitly in the novel’s final paragraph. Al¬
though its images of fecundity are anticipated, in passing,
earlier in the text (see pp. 166-7, 288), only at the moment we
put the book down does our reading of Germinal in terms of
the thematic signposting of its title appear to be confirmed. It
is interesting to note, therefore, that what readers of 1885
found most confusing was that, within the novel, there was no
evidence whatsoever to justify its lyrical conclusion. Huysmans
summed up their reaction to a catalogue of unrelenting misery
when he spoke of being overwhelmed by GertninaPs ‘terrible
sadness’.^ Even socialist commentators pointed not to the
radiant future it announced, but to what it revealed in the
present about the appalling conditions in which the prole¬
tariat lived and worked. The most famous contemporary re¬
sponse is that of the eminent critic Jules Lemaitre: for him,
the final page of the novel was so ‘enigmatic’ that it was
virtually meaningless; he described Germinal as a ‘pessimistic
epic of human animality’;^ and when Zola replied to this, it is
significant that it was only to the ‘animality’ that he objected.'^
This pessimism is due, in part, to the failure of revolutionary
action. Its leaders, like Rasseneur and Pluchart, are portrayed
by Zola with a distrust which reflects his lack of sympathy for
the demagogues of the Commune. Even Etienne is not invulner¬
able to such charges, as Zola traces a self-aggrandizement in
which the character sees himself as an ‘apostle’ of truth (p.
281), ultimately despising the ignorance of those who reject his
leadership. The experience of the Commune also informs
Zola’s nightmarish vision of the unleashed mob. He had
intended that ‘the bourgeois reader should feel a frisson of
terror’ at the spectacle. To this end, he plays on fears of evil
spirits and hobgoblins emerging from the dark in order to
conjure up the uprising of the disinherited from the bowels of
the earth; a localized industrial incident thereby becomes a
vision of the apocalypse. But in the evocation of demonic wolf-
men and collective dementia there is more than a hint of Zola’s
own revulsion. Unforgettable his crowd-scenes may justly be;
here revolution and anarchy are perilously synonymous.
There is, at best, a precarious balance between the despairing
prediction of social catastrophe and regenerative optimism. If
Zola’s politico-economic analysis is subordinate to the myth of
Eternal Return, it is sustained by a conception of society as an
organic unity forever evolving towards a utopian order of
justice and harmony situated somewhere down the endless
corridors of time. The class struggle is thus relativized within
the same antithetical pattern which opposes fertility and steril¬
ity, mortality and rebirth, winter and spring. Germinal is
organized in these binary terms, starting with its topography.
We get the impression that the miners’ houses are so cut off
from the rest of the world that the occasional visits to the
Gregoire mansion are like expeditions to a foreign planet. We
tend to overlook the fact that Montsou is an industrial city
with a sugar-refinery, workshops, and a number of other
factories; and that while the miners live in one of its outlying
suburbs, the bourgeois family of the novel live two kilometres
to the east of Montsou, on the other side. We do so because, as
a consequence of the conflict which structures every aspect of
GerminaPs fictional reality, the territory between these poles is
only intermittently in focus. That polarization is sometimes so
schematic as to be heavy-handed: on the one hand there is the
rich Cecile Gregoire of pale complexion, staying in her cosy
bed until all hours of the morning and then getting up to her
hot chocolate and deliciously fresh brioche; on the other there
are the poor, miserable, sallow-skinned Maheu children rising
at 4 a.m. desperate for their thin gruel and dry crust. So too
when the miners trudge into Hennebeau’s sumptuous
drawing-room, there is a dramatic contrast between rich and
poor. What is not filled in is the causal mechanism by which
bourgeois affluence is in precisely inverse proportion to
working-class starvation. Responsibility for the latter is deleg¬
ated instead to an impersonal god of Capitalism crouching in
a tabernacle.
Nor is this antithetical structuring limited to Zola’s elabora¬
tion of a conflict between social classes. The same principle
opposes night and day, darkness and light, under the ground
and above it, the haves and the have-nots; and these work
across the class divide, so that Hennebeau, for example, shares
the suffering of deprivation at the very moment he watches a
sexual satisfaction which compensates for the miners’ lack of
food. But it is also the correlation between natural and social
oppositions which suggests their permanence. This is un¬
doubtedly the implication of Zola’s choice of metaphors in
his description of revolution. The crowd streams across the
landscape like a river overflowing its banks; its thundering
is compared to a stampeding herd. Human action is transposed,
in effect, into natural schemes of catastrophe like floods,
fires, and earthquakes. And the assimilation of men and the
animal kingdom is underpinned by common physiological
determinants. The effect of such equations, it can be argued,
is to reinscribe the specificities of politics or history into the
unchanging, and unchangeable, natural order of things.
Time and again, in Germinal^ human beings are described
as insects, insignificant dots powerless to modify a cosmic
process.
The directions of that process are far from being entirely
elucidated by the novel’s closing lines. To be sure, the bursting
fertility of Requillart is a prophetic symbol of what Le Voreux
will one day be. But the renewal of the natural world operates
within a cycle less infinitely prolonged than liberal-positivist
promises of human happiness. The cycle of individual lives, in
Germinal^ is one of monotony and repetition. The symbolic
parallel between the horses and the miners is double-edged. If
only the latter have a capacity for rebellion, Bataille and
Trompette share both their misery and their dreams: of light
and air, of breaking out of their imprisonment, of wide hori¬
zons; and these are indistinguishable from the utopian future
imagined by the assembled miners in the forest clearing—
which is, ironically, the high-point of their illusions.
Less illusory, of course, is the violence which punctuates the
second half of Germinal, But though the deaths of the sentry,
Maigrat, and Cecile may all be motivated by social revenge, in
reality they have the status of ritual sacrifices; they achieve
nothing. Nor does the destruction of the mine. For if the
future is simply a continuation of the past and present, the
novel ushers in the possibility that it will be a continuing
degradation: when the miners are forced back to work at the
end, conditions are even worse than before; and La Maheude
herself has to return to the pit where she had slaved like her
daughter, this time simply to keep the rest of her broken
family alive. More disturbing still is that virtually the last
survivor in this Darwinian scheme is the animalized Jeanlin.
Throughout the text he is closely identified with Etienne:
structurally, within the infantile version of the hero’s rivalry;
emotionally, in the murder so obsessively witnessed; themat¬
ically, at Requillart. Such a chain of substitutions may well
make us wonder whether he is also the leader’s obscene
successor. To set such undertones against GerminaPs rousing
finale is not to deny the latter’s impact or the feeling that it
somehow ‘fits’ nevertheless. It is to stress that, resulting from
the meeting of the lucid observer and the lyrical optimist,
there are ambiguities in Zola’s novel which can be more easily
reconciled in terms of poetic coherence than in those of
political discourse.
Readers will judge for themselves whether Germinal remains
a novel about revolution rather than a revolutionary novel. A
related question is the extent to which the text itself reveals an
awareness, on Zola’s part, of its limits as an effective instrument
of political change. The question is prompted by the recogni¬
tion that between Etienne and his creator there are a number
of telling analogies. At the simplest level Zola seems to have
projected on to the fictional character aspects of his own career
and personality. More sophisticated analysis of the rhetorical
strategies employed by both the novelist and his more articulate
protagonists has allowed Naomi Schor to conclude that ‘Zola’s
leaders are all variants on the writer’.^ It is also worth remem¬
bering that, within the Rougon-Macquart series, Germinal is
situated between two of Zola’s most introspective novels,
namely La Joie de vivre (1884) and UCEuvre (1886). In Claude
Lantier, the artist-hero of the latter, Zola provides a partial
self-portrait. And it has been shown that Claude’s failed
ambitions precisely echo those of Etienne in Germinal.
As far as the potentially autobiographical dimension of
Etienne is concerned (always allowing for differences of con-
text), there are coincidences it is difficult to ignore. As in
U Assommoir, Zola refers to Etienne sending back money to his
impoverished mother, as he himself had done when he had
first left his home in the Midi. In Germinal a whole career is
evoked: the thrill of earning fees from his early writing, the
beginnings of popularity, the hopes of playing a major role in
the shaping of the future, becoming head of a militant group,
gradually listened to and increasingly admired. As in UCEuvre^
this mirroring process by no means precludes self-irony,
whether at the expense of inflated vanity or messianic preten¬
sions; and a bitterness, about the progressive disaffection of
disciples, inseparable from the fact that in 1884-5 Zola’s own
(literary) grouping was starting to disintegrate, fitienne and the
novelist certainly have more in common than just their south¬
ern accents. The character shares, for example, Zola’s long-
held fear (dating from a childhood trauma) of being buried
alive, as well as a repressed sexuality.
It is possible that this kind of unconscious projection was
catalysed by the actual preparation of Germinal, In his notes,
Zola identifies so closely with Etienne that he often substitutes
a first-person pronoun in his vivid imagining of the character’s
actions or feelings. Above all, if it is Etienne’s responsibility to
distribute Zola’s information within the text, the novel also
ascribes to him the very process of documentation which had
been the writer’s own. Thus when Etienne first goes down the
mine, his intense anguish is exactly that felt by Zola himself
during the exploratory descent recorded in ‘My Notes on
Anzin’. His evening conversations with Souvarine are those
Zola had with Turgenev about anarchist movements in Russia.
And Etienne has to work through much of Zola’s biblio¬
graphy, including ‘treatises on political economy [...] full of
arid and incomprehensible technical detail’ (p. 164). Both of
them undertake an education in socialist theory, leading to
the repudiation of the naive idealism with which they had
set off
To approach the novel in.this way is also to register moments
when Zola appears to prefigure its reception. We know that
Germinal was planned with one eye on its reading. The writer’s
notes testify to his concern to alternate between action and
description, narrative development and panoramic views of the
landscape. And he is continually alive to what should be
withheld from the reader at certain junctures in order to
heighten the suspense. When the miners are trapped under¬
ground, for example, there is a highly deliberate deferral of the
climax through interweaving the narrative of their plight with
scenes simultaneously taking place elsewhere. Powerful linguis¬
tic effects are self-evidently integral to our response to Germi¬
nal^ whether this is one of fear, pity, or excitement. The
novel’s own reflections on language are thus of considerable
interest. Sometimes these are merely wry: for instance immedi¬
ately after his own evocative rendering of a vision of revolution
designed to scare bourgeois readers out of their wits, Zola
refers to handwritten texts ‘threatening to rip open the bellies
of the bourgeois; and although nobody had read one, there
were still those who could quote from them word for word’ (p.
351); and the terrifying accounts of the strike which appear in
the Parisian press provoke ‘a violent polemic’ (p. 380) but are
of no practical consequence—with the added irony, as Zola
well knew, that the subscribers to Le Gil Bias were thoroughly
enjoying his own.
More significant is that Etienne’s role as surrogate novelist
is at its most explicit when his facility with words is mocked.
Zola continually uses the term ‘histoire’ to liken his eloquence
to that of a story-teller. For as he expands his metaphors of
hope into a dazzling version of the future, his listeners are
entranced, as carried away as he is himself by the beauty of his
construction. Even La Maheude’s pragmatism (‘Can’t you see
he’s telling us fairy-tales.?’ (p. 169)) yields to Etienne’s rhetori¬
cal talents. The most damning critique of them is Souvarine’s,
‘the only one who had a lively enough intelligence to analyse
the situation’ (p. 174). He calmly warns Etienne that verbal
skills will serve no purpose whatsoever, and that revolution
involves action rather than ‘phrases lifted from literature’ (p.
242). As Zola imaginatively elaborates Germinal^ his notes are
full of reminders to himself to ‘analyse’ this or that problem,
alcoholism, diet, child labour; and to ensure that all aspects of
the plot are ‘logically’ worked out. One of Souvarine’s functions
is thus to act as a counterpoint to a textual fabric so poetically
charged that there is a risk of the novel leaving behind its
original intention to ‘study’ the social conflicts of the day.
These unresolved tensions are perfectly illustrated by
Etienne’s great speech at Le Plan-des-Dames which is, in
every sense, the culmination of Part IV of the novel (pp. 279-
91). It is prepared by the character with the same care Zola
had devoted to this long-foreseen chapter. All the half-formed
ideas assimilated by Etienne were to be welded together into a
coherent political programme; and, indeed, all those Zola had
drawn from his own reading; for, prior to writing the speech,
he went right back through his notes, often adding the cross-
reference ‘(in the forest)’. Here, as he put it, was to be a
reasoned exposition of the necessity of a future radically differ¬
ent from the social injustices of the present. But Zola the
novelist also wanted it to be a chapter of tremendous ‘momen¬
tum’ which would dramatize, for the reader, the apogee of
Etienne’s popularity with, and power over, the crowd. The
result is that we are offered both a summary of GerminaPH
ideas and a microcosm of our response to the book as a whole.
The shifts in narrative focus may distance us from the quasi¬
religious fervour of Etienne’s listeners; but, like the clouds
passing over the moonlit scene, these interruptions do not so
much break the spell as create a lull which paradoxically
intensifies its rhythm. Similarly the gap between the suffering
Etienne recalls and the brave new world he evokes justifies the
dream rather than deflates it. It is as difficult for the reader as
for the crowd not to be sw^ept away by the sheer force of
Etienne’s language. To reread the final paragraph of Germinal
in the light of his speech is to realize how precise an echo it
contains of Etienne’s earlier image of a germinating army of
men breaking upwards through the ground and into the sun.
If Germinal poses such questions about the relationship
between imaginative language and reality, it also asks them of
us. At one extreme we may ponder Bonnemort’s blunt remark
that Etienne’s fictions will do nothing to improve the soup (p.
170); at the other, there is the admiration of Lucie and Jeanne
exulting over the aesthetic qualities of the horror (pp. 348-9,
486), Where do we ourselves stand in relation to the inhuman
violence viewed through the barn-door by the bourgeois
characters? Are we dispassionate observers, or fearfully trans¬
fixed by the novel’s spectacle of human distress? The problems
raised by Germinal have to be addressed from within the
admission that, alongside the novel’s terrible sadness, there is
also a terrible beauty.
Robert Lethbridge
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