Zola as Myth-Maker in Germinal

Zola as Myth-Maker in Germinal

Zola as Myth-Maker in Germinal

A. J. EVENHUIS

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Zola as Myth-Maker in Germinal

A. J. EVENHUIS

To cite this article:

A. J. EVENHUIS (1985) Zola as Myth-Maker in Germinal, Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 64:1, 101-111, DOI: 10.1179/ aulla.1985.64.1.001

To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1179/aulla.1985.64.1.001

 

ZOLA AS MYTH-MAKER IN GERMINAL

A. J. EVENHUIS

University of Tasmania

The casual reader of us Rougon- Macquart may well be surprised at the assertion that Zola, that naturalist par excellence, is a creator of myth. After all, what could be more 'real' or down to earth than the slums of Paris in L'Assommoir, the grimy railway-setting of La /Jete Humaine or the sordid milieu of peasants in La Terre? Yet, evenin such novels, myth has a part to play.

When Gervaise recalls scenes from a happier past in Provenceglimpses of green trees and clear-flowing stream-Zola, wittingly or unwittingly, strikes the chord of 'paradise lost', a frequent mythic motif in literature. Does not the author of La Terre establish mythic parallels between the cyclical pattern of sowing and harvest-time and the sexual activities of his characters? Who has not sensed that Lison, the locomotive in La B'ete humaine, so ardent and supple in its youth, so poignant in its death-agony, is more than a personified machine? And does not Zola himself, at the end of the same novel, suggest that the run-away express, spreading horror and death down the line as it heads for disaster 'sans conducteur,au milieu des tenebres,en bete aveugle ... ', is a graphic picture of France before the events of 1870? (Modern readers may conclude that the scene is just as ominous for them!)

The above are examples of isolated scenes with mythic undertones, but Zola is quite capable of structuring a whole novel around a myth. La Faute de l'abbi! Mouret is clearly a zolaesque version of the story of Adam and Eve, complete with its own paradise (Le Paradou), fatefultree and avenging angel (Frere Archangias).

In the case of Zola's masterpiece, Germinal, it will be shown that mythic motifs are either incorporated by calculated design, or else woven unwittingly into the fabric of the novel. (The present writer holds that myths may be created more or less consciously to reflect, explain or justify natural cycles, social mores, political structures, religious beliefs etc., but that man also has the capacity for unconsciously absorbing basic patterns or blue-prints of reality from milieu, from the observation of natural phenomena or from familiar

stories and that such patterns tend to find their way into artistic creations.

My pre~ent interest is not to trace particular mythic motifs-a task admirably performed by Philip Walker in his 'Prophetic Myths in

Zola'l-but rather to extract a total picture in an attempt to reconstitute Zola's personal myth-his way of viewing reality.

The very title of Germinal is a symbol that lends itself to mythic elaborations: borrowed from the ~calendrier republicain"s name for the first month of spring, it aptly brings together the season of germinating seed and the idea of social revolution. The events portrayed in the novel may amount to little more than a false spring, but the work as a whole is meant to prefigure an apocalyptic upheaval that Zola expected to occur at the end of the nineteenth century. He half hoped the event would herald the dawning of a new age.

The hero, Etienne, first makes this theme explicit as he dreams aloud in front of the Maheu family:

~Mais, a present, Ie mineur s'eveillait au fond, germait dans la terre ainsi qu'une vraie graine~ et 1'0n verrait un matin ce qu'il pousserait au beau milieu des champs~ oui,il pousserait des hommes, une armee d'hommes qui retabliraient la justice.'

(Part III, Chapter III)

Etienne will revert to this mythic imagery (vaguely reminiscent of the army of warriors that sprang from the dragon's teeth in the myth of the Golden Fleece2 at the height of his popularity, when he delivers his harangue in the moonlit forest. Like germinating seed, bursting from the ground ~un jour de grand soleiI', the proletarian army will one day deal with capitalism and its evil, remote god.

Finally the narrator himself will round off the theme in the epilogue.

In a setting of spring and dawn, featuring a soaring lark, he proclaims:

~... Ie vieux monde voulait vivre un printemps encore.'

Merging together the evocation of bursting seeds and the miners tapping away at the coal-seams deep underground, he prophesies about 'une armee noire vengeresse' that will arise at the end of the century.

This consistency of theme, imagery and setting is aesthetically satisfying in itself. It is quite possible, however, that Zola used his mythic allusions to intensify his bourgeois readers' apprehension about a revolution that was as sure to occur as the coming of spring or the breaking of dawn.

Whatever Zola's motivation may have been, it is clear that he likes to weave mythic elements into his apocalyptic scenes. A most pregnant instance of this is found just before the climax of the novel, as engineer Negrel and the mine manager's wife Mme Hennebeau nervously watch the streams of miners tramping across the countryside on their way to create havoc and destruction:

C'etait la vision rouge de la revolution qui les emporterait tous, fatalement, par une soiree sanglante de cette fin de siecle ... Des incendies flamberaient, on ne laisserait pas debout une pierre des

villes, on retournerait a la vie sauvage dans les bois, apres Ie grand rut, la grande ripaille ...

(Part V, Chapter V)

The expression 'fin de siecle' may be just a cliche, but it is a keyphrase in Christ's discourse on 'the last things' in Matthew 24. The same chapter contains the warning that 'no stone will be left upon another'. Could Zola be exploiting the emotive value of Biblical phrases-phrases that matched the fears of many bourgeois of his day? Is he using mythic allusions as trigger mechanisms to make his readers believe in the reality of his 'vision rouge'? It would seem so. To make sure that no one is left unaffected-not all readers are sensitive to religious terminology-he throws in a vague atavistic memory, an allusion to the spectre of death and chaos that terrified our ancestors at the onset of the dark ages: 'leur poussee debordante de barbares . . .'

The reference to barbaric hordes is all the more effective because, as a symbolic statement, it activates those deep-seated fears about chaos and the break-down of communication that we usually manage to keep suppressed.

When Zola speaks of the coming revolution in terms of 'Ie grand rut, la grande ripaille', he goes back even further to the orgiastic Dionysian festivals that marked the death of the old year and mythically recreated the original chaos from which civilization arose. Passages like the above keep us guessing whether Zola is simply threatening affluent bourgeois with rape and plunder (for purposes of stimulating social reform) or whether he half-believes the pagan and Biblical myth that order is born out of chaos.

Death and destruction are but the dark side of Zola's myth of rebirth and renewal: the germinating seed may violently crack open the soil, but Utopia will rise from the dust of the old order-a humanist equivalent of the heavenly Jerusalem that St. John writes about in the book of Revelation. Formulating the socialist vision of his miners, Zola writes:

Une societe nouvelle poussait en un jour, ainsi que dans les songes, une ville immense, d 'une splendeur de mirage ou chaque citoyen vivait de sa tache et prenait sa part des joies communes.

(Part III, Chapter In)

While insisting that the man-made Utopia must replace the Christian notion of a heavenly paradise, Zola repeatedly draws parallels between the idealistic hopes of his miners and the faith of the early Christians 'qui attendaient la venue d'une societe parfaite, sur Ie fumier du monde antique.' However, his use of words such as 'songe' and 'mirage' in the above quotation suggests that he is not altogether convinced that the workers' mythic dream will be realised. When their faith rises to fever-pitch in the course of Etienne's nocturnal harangue, Zola refers to this as 'Ie coup de folie de la foi' and compares it to the insane exaltation of a religious sect that, tired of waiting for the promised miracle, resolves to provoke it. The author seems to share the reserve of the impassive moon overhead:

Et la lune tranquille baignait cette houle, la foret profonde ceignait de son grand silence ce cri de massacre.

(Part IV, Chapter VII)

Zola, in fact, is rather sceptical about the efficacity of revolution.

That is why, after the abortive revolt of the miners, he introduces a much more sinister myth-an alternative prophetic scenario which centres around the nihilist Souvarine. This sombre, brooding anarchist had turned bitter during his pre-revolutionary days in Russia when his mistress was publicly executed by the authorities. As he lives among the miners, he indulges in dark dreams of mass extermination, in the vague hope, perhaps, that a better world may arise from the smouldering ashes-'On verra ensuite'-but in reality to avenge himself for the loss of his ideal. (His mistress seems to have been his personal symbol of life, hope and tenderness.)

For a while he manages to contain his destructive anger, as he strokes the ever-pregnant white rabbit on his knee, 'cette douceur tiede et vivante', his new unconscious symbol of purity, fertility and life. Coral Fuller argues very plausibly that the white rabbit, Souvarine's 'surrogate mistress', acts as a restraining influence on his destructive impulses-until the animal's demise-in the same way that La Maheude (mother of many children) is at first a soothing influence on her husband.3 On a deeper, mythic level this notion of tranquillizing sexuality could be taken to reflect Zola's belief that natural, lifeaffirming activities are a check on human destructiveness. After the rabbit has been tortured by the miners' children, can no longer bear its young and is finally eaten, Souvarine turns into Siva the destroyer. He plans and executes the horrendous mine-catastrophe that is clearly a small-scale enactment of the end of the world. We last glimpse him as he disappears into the night to exterminate mankind. And Zola as Myth-Maker in 'Germinal'

so it would appear that, at least at this stage of his life, Zola had more faith in the end of the world than in the dawning of a new age.

But old beliefs die hard: parallel to his contrasting visions of Utopia and Apocalypse, Zola features, within the wider setting of Germinal, a little heaven and a little hell. The latter takes the form of Le Tartaret, an aptly-named subterranean region of smouldering peat and coalseams, a sulphurous 'cuisine de diable'. According to old tales, the heroine (Catherine) tells Etienne, depraved miners' girls are punished there for ever for their sexual misdemeanours.

Philippe Lejeune's alternative interpretation of Le Tartaret as a graphic picture of the miners' poverty and of 'la violence politiq ue qui couve au sein de la classe ouvriere'4 lacks conviction. Not only does his association of the word 'Tartaret' with 'les Tartares' and 'les barbares'5 seem superfluous when the allusion to Greek mythology is so obvious, but Zola himself makes his intentions plain enough in his Dossier preparatoire de Germinal. Referring to the underground fire he comments: 'Je n'ai plus qu'a montrer Catherine dans cet enfer ou plutot dans un enfer semblable. '6

This equivalent of the mythical Tartarus (and the Biblical hell) performs several functions in the novel. Not only does it offer some insights into miners' superstitions and provide a focus for Catherine's lingering sense of sexual guilt, but it seems appropriate enough that the livinghell of the miners should be matched by a realistic microcosm, a miniature emblem of their world.

When it comes to La Cote Verte, Zola's equivalent of paradise or heaven, it is more difficult to define its function in the economy of the novel. Philippe Lejeune's claim that La Cote Verte is an allegorical landscape representing the bourgeois life-style, precariously based on the proletarian vulcano,7 must be rejected. Zola's stress on the region's fertility is in flagrant contradiction to the sterility of the bourgeois women (Cecile dies a virgin; Mme Hennebeau is childless), whereas phrases used by Zola like 'eternel printemps' are clearly inappropriate for an imperilled society threatened with extermination. Why then does the author take some time off to describe this 'miracle d'eternel printemps '-an idyllic mountain-slope paradoxically situated over the very top of Le Tartaret (which heats it from below), where the grass and the beeches are always green, where one can grow three crops a year and nature is beyond the ravages of frost? Why have a realistic, tangible counterpart to the insubstanital dream of Utopia-a dream that Zola obviously has doubts about? Has the author retained from his Catholic childhood the dim notion that no world-view is complete unless it features both a heaven and hell? Or does the very act of 105 .

 

analysing in detail a depressing, infernal nightmare, like the life of the miners, prompt in him the need to formulate the opposite dream as well? Is his curious idea of situating paradise on top of hell (cf. the medieval three-decker universe) a pictorial way of showing that the compensatory vision of paradise is nurtured by the actual experience of hell? It is certainly true that, for all his materialism and determinism, Zola continues to be an idealist who is haunted by a mythical landscape of paradise. One can only guess whether this goes back to his religious upbringing or whether it is simply a fictional counterpart to the real Paradou, the stony, sun-drenched region of Provence where young Emile used to wander in innocent bliss in the company of carefree Romantics such as Cezanne and

BailIe.

From the contrasting strands of Apocalypse and Utopia, it emerged that Zola's faith in the myth of 'Germinal' (crisis leading to rebirth and renewal) was not very solid. One reason for this could be that, subconsciously, he entertained doubts about the precise identity of the enemy. The surface-reality, looming at the centre of the novel, is the all-devouring mine, Le Voreux, but does not this greedy monster show that ambiguity, that 'polyvalence' that often characterizes myth? On one level it is simply capitalism over-running the modern world, oppressing the workers and swallowing up the individual. At times, however, one gains the impression that the dark mine symbolizes death or, more precisely, the dread of mortality-an obsessive fear that was very real to Zola. Then again, Zola seems fascinated by the idea of presenting Le Voreux as a kind of dragon or a hollow idol-the local manifestation of a remote, inaccessible, cruel divinity that preys upon mankind.

The struggle between capitalism and the proletariat is gripping enough in its own right to hold our attention. Yet there is more to the novel than class-warfare: as a mythic tale with universal implications, it seems to portray the unrelenting battle of light and darkness, life and death. Why do we share Etienne's fascination, early in the novel, as he watches the endless chain of miners descending into the abyss?

... Cela s'emplissait, s'emplissait encore, et les tenebres restaient mortes, la cage montait du vide dans Ie meme silence vorace.

(Part I, Chapter III)

Is it not the perspective of death that closes in upon us, as we then join Etienne in his fearful descent into the pit, his personal initiation into the living death of the miners?

 

Just as, in general human terms, the experience of hell often provokes an affirmation of paradise or Utopia, the threat of death may prompt the reassertion of life. Among Zola's miners this takes the form of a purely instinctive reaction: their only recourse against encroaching death is rampant sexuality. That is why the author presents the promiscuity practised around the abandoned mine-shaft of Requillart as 'une revanche de la creation', suggesting, in the surrounding setting, that nature is playing the same age-old, mythic game:

... une vegetation drue reconquerait ce coin de terre, s'etalait en herbe epaisse, jaillissait en jeunes arbres deja forts.

(Part II, Chapter V)

Similarly, the miners' festival day, La Ducasse, turns into an orgiastic affirmation of life, with the aptly-named widow Desir officiating as high-priestess:

Un souffle ardent sortait des bles murs; il dut se faire beaucoup d'enfants cette nuit-Ia ... [La veuve Desir] se vantait aussi que pas une herscheuse ne devenait grosse, sans s'etre, it l'avance, degourdi les jambes chez elle.

(Part III, Chapter II)

Life, then, asserts itself in the face of death. Yet it is characteristic of Zola's Weltanschauung in Germinal that he has no more confidence in the ultimate triumph of life than he has in the future of Utopia. When, at the height of the famine, the white mother-rabbit is first maimed and then eaten, the author is probably suggesting that starvation eventually gets the better of procreation. When the pit horse Bataille, a symbol of the miners' fighting spirit, their will to survive, tries to flee from the rising flood, is trapped in a dark, narrowing shaft and finally drowns (and how desperately we wanted the brave horse to escape!), this is an ominous mythical enactment of defeat. It is one thing to call one's novel Germinal, but unless one accepts the metaphysical implications of that word, how is one to believe in the ultimate victory of life? Zola may derive comfort from the cyclical pattern of nature, where spring ever follows winter, but he rejects the deeper intention of the words of Christ that fascinated Gide: 'Unless a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.' (John 12:24).

In fact, far from considering Christianity as a fortress against death, Zola can see only a Church that identifies itself with the comfortable middle-elass and the oppressive mast~rs of capitalism. In the plot

of Germinal, this finds its echo in- the ineffectual abbe Joire who is on the best of terms with the establishment (the newcomer, l'abbe Ranvier, who takes the part of the starving miners, is promptly removed from the scene).

In the mythical framework of the novel Zola's hostility towards the Church is reflected in the religious aura he sometimes creates around M. Hennebeau, the mine-manager, and around the mine itself. Just as la veuve Desir virtually acts as high-priestess during the miners' dionysian affirmation of life, M. Hennebeau, Zola hints, is a priest to a distant, remote Parisian divinity. While the miners' deputation is waiting uneasily in the manager's drawingroom, the narrator draws attention to the altar-front drapings that cover the chimney and to the chasuble (=priest's vestment) embroideries on the doors. For good measure he sums up the decor in the phrase 'luxe de chapelle'. The intention of this ecclesiastical setting (Hennebeau is obviously not a religious man) becomes clear towards the end of the chapter in question, when the author formulates how the miners view the Parisian board of directors, the infinitely remote body that controls their destiny:

. . . cela se reculait dans un lointain terrifiant, dans une contree inaccessible et religieuse, ou tronait Ie dieu inconnu, accroupi au fond de son tabernacle ...

(Part IV, Chapter II)

As early as the opening chapter of the novel, the old miner Bonnemort had expressed similar views when Etienne asked him about the owner of the mining enterprise:

Sa voix avait pris une sorte de peur religieuse, c'etait comme s'il avait parle d'un tabernacle inaccessible, ou se cachait Ie dieu repu et accroupi auquel ils donnaient tous leur chair et qu'ils n'avaient

jamais VUe

In the remainder of that first chapter, the mine takes on the form of a vast, voracious monster, a Moloch-like idol, that preys on the miners. The idol, of course, is eventually destroyed and Zola delights in depicting its horrific death-throes, but the evil deity it represents lives on.

In the light of the above imagery-the phrase 'divinite cmelle et inaccessible' virtually becomes a leitmotiv-would it be too far-fetched to see Germinal in part as a mythical allegory of the human condition? Does Zola see man as the victim of a callous, remote God who reserves the pleasures of heaven for a few favourites, but who relegates his

 

countless victims to the tortures of hell? If this is so, Zola has completely reversed the situation that prevails in the book of Revelation. Its author, St John the Divine, also features a mythical monster-the Dragon of old, the real power behind an idolatrous image-but, according to his visions, it is Christ who destroys the image and who incarcerates the dragon.

We are now in a position to grasp the connection between Zola's ambiguous use of the mine-symbol and the pervasive pessimism of his tale: since he associates capitalism with all-powerful death and with a cruel, evil god, it is small wonder he can but indulge in wishful thinking when it comes to the new dawn of his concluding chapter.

Consistent with the novel's negative, depressing perspective, the hero himselfcan be seen as a false messiah or, may be, a latter-day Orpheus, who charms people with the music of his voice (his Utopian message), but who will one day emerge from Hades without his Euridice. Without actually sharing the fate of Orpheus at the hands of the Bacchantes, Etienne is not exactly viewed with favour by the women when he comes out of hiding after the collapse of the strike.

Tempting as the Orpheus parallel might appear, it probably would be more in keeping with Zola's conscious intentions to concentrate on Etienne as a flawed or false messiah-false messiahs, of course, being the only variety that Zola could accept as real. Once again Zola can be shown to partly follow and then invert a Biblical scenario.

My findings in this field agree only in part with those of Pierre Aubery in his 'Imitations de Jesus chez Zola: Germinaf.8 Aubery goes to unreasonable lengths in pursuing his comparisons. His parallel between the twelve-year old Jesus astounding the doctors of the law

in Jerusalem and Lantier conversing with Souvarine and Rasseneur (p.34) is forced, to say the least. When he attempts to identify Jesus' encounter with Mary Magdalene with Etienne's furtive adventure with La Mouquette (p.37) he would have done better to point out the inverted scenario (Christ redeems a fallen woman, Etienne betrays his true love by yielding to the promiscuous La Mouquette). Aubery's remark that 'Lantier, monte it Paris, va sieger it la'droite de son pere Pluchart . . . (p.40)' is clearly the conclusion of someone who has made up his mind to assert, by hook or by crook, that Etienne resembles Jesus, rather than to demonstrate it through an objective analysis of the facts.

Admittedly, Aubery himself expresses doubts about his thesis: he can see, for instance, that Etienne's desperate decision to join the miners in their confrontation with the soldiers is not exactly the action of a lamb that offers its life for the redemption of the world. (p.38) In the end he is prepared to conce<;ie that the hero is 'un messie

 

egolste qui n'a assure veritablement Ie salut que d'un seul: lui-me me ... ' (p.46). Nevertheless, Aubery structures most of his article around the premature conclusion that Zola is following the life of Jesus, whereas, in fact, more often than not, Zola departs from that model.

Like the Christ of the Gospels, Etienne comes in from the outside to share the life and condition of the oppressed. Both proclaim a message of hope-Jesus about the coming Kingdom, Etienne about his earthly Utopia. This, however, is where the resemblance stops and where Zola departs, not only from the Biblical pattern, but also from the usual mythical messianic scenario favoured by Semitic,

Persian, Indian etc. cultures. During his temptation in the wilderness,

Christ resists the allurements of materialism, pride and power, whereas Etienne, among his miners, begins to relish his popularity, decides it is time to indulge in some finer clothes and swells with pride as he sees himself 'devenir un centre'.9 Christ's 'Sermon on the Mount' could be said to correspond to Etienne's forest harangue-after all, Zola does refer to his eloquent hero as 'l'ap6tre apportant la verite'but his revolutionary message is the very antithesis of Christ's promise that the meek 'shall inherit the earth'. While Christians celebrate the ultimate success of Christ's mission, there is little doubt about the failure of Etienne: crushed by the burden of responsibility, he becomes the 'chef angoisse'; losing control over the uprising, he has to face the remorse of not having been adequate to his task, to suffer the scorn and disgrace of a failed leader. Far then from re-enacting a myth of deliverance, salvation and victory, Zola has created what one might call an 'anti-myth' that reflects his scepticism about messianic hopes.

The flawed messiah scenario becomes more obviously mythical if we compare it to the parallel symbol of the horse Trompette. As a new arrival from the world of light, this animal brings the minehorse Bataille the long-forgotten smell of sun-bathed grass. For all his trumpet calls of hope, however, he will pine away in the dark mine, becoming a sym bol of claustration, death and defeat.

It is remarkable, nevertheless, that Zola will not allow his messiah to fail altogether: he may die as a popular leader, but he experiences some kind of resurrection in the concluding chapter of the novel. Dawn, the season of spring, the rising lark, all match the resurgence of Etienne's hopes of being a socialist orator. And so Zola presents us with a paradox. He has told the story of a failed uprising, a failed leader and a failed lover-a man who fought to win his Catherine from the bestial Chaval, but who lost her in the end-yet our wouldbe hero rises phoenix-like from the ashes of despair to pursue a new dream-or is it the old one? Zola has acted out the myth of modern.