Michael Wood: Near a Dying Star

Michael Wood

In a 2002 speech marking the centenary of Zola’s death, Jacques Chirac said that ‘to speak of Émile Zola is quite simply to speak of France … of this France which … is a language, an idea, an ideal of justice and freedom.’ If it hadn’t been for him, ‘this France’ would still be working on the 1789 Revolution. I don’t think Chirac meant to suggest that the France of the 19th century had no ideals or only the wrong ones, but Zola himself may well have thought something like that. In 1871 he wrote of ‘the fall of the Bonapartes’ as providing the ‘terrible and necessary dénouement’ of his fictional work, which ‘becomes a picture of a departed reign, of a strange epoch of human madness and shame’.

The few mentions of Karl Marx in Zola are enough to suggest that he had read The Eighteenth Brumaire, in which Marx reminds us of what Hegel said and didn’t say. One thing he did say was: ‘All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.’ But, according to Marx, ‘he forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Zola’s version of this proposition was an invitation: ‘Think back to the period of the 1848 Republic. All of its attempts failed, because … it was consumed by mawkish humanitarianism, by a purely speculative kind of socialism, by romantic rhetoric and the religiosity of deist poets. It never had a clear idea of the France it wanted to govern.’ Zola obviously knows whom or what he wants to blame, but perhaps doesn’t exclude himself entirely from all the guilty categories. French history as he mirrored it was full of farce. Who else would have twinned the death of a famous prostitute with the march of France into a terrible war?

‘Is there such a thing as an idealist Zola?’ Claire White asks. We find the beginning of an answer in the next sentence: ‘This book argues that Zola was drawn to the idealist imagination more than we tend to assume, and indeed more than he himself would admit.’ He insisted he preferred idealism’s opposite, ‘the naturalist novel, of which Madame Bovary is the prime example’: ‘The foremost characteristic … is the exact reproduction of life, the absence of any fanciful elements … All extraordinary inventions are therefore banished … No more furniture with secret compartments, no more papers brought to light just in time to save the innocent victim.’ Elsewhere he specifies further faults of idealist fiction and is a little more doctrinaire. White summarises his views:

First, idealism is an act of falsification and embellishment which promotes imagination over observation, passion over precision. Second, idealism is the product of the author’s pathological impulse: it appears as an excessive, insatiable, ‘constant need’. Third, idealism promotes a delusional disconnection from the referent that is, in the end, ethically irresponsible. The lie may be beautiful, but the anti-mimetic, even escapist, charm of the idealist aesthetic poses a threat to the impressionable (read: female) reader.

This is good material for an entertaining quarrel, but then you could define the categories in an entirely different way, as the critic Ferdinand Brunetière does in another quotation offered by White: ‘We shall call Naturalists all those who deem the imitation of nature to be the last word in art,’ he wrote in 1889. ‘Conversely, we shall give the name Idealists to all those who use the resources of nature to express their idea of how it could be or how it should be.’ Antoine Compagnon’s book on Brunetière recounts his subject’s denunciation of Zola in New York: ‘Zola! What has he done for literature? How has he illustrated naturalism, or realism, as he calls it? It’s true he has a rich imagination. He claims to describe life as it is. But what miserable failures his attempts are.’

White shows clearly that Zola is an idealist, of sorts. ‘For all its admonishments, naturalist literature returned insistently, I argue, to the terms of the lyrical.’ This is well put, but we need to leave some space for the mutual caricatures in the argument. Zola’s idealism is and isn’t the one he attacks. I think this is what White is suggesting when she writes of ‘the distorting mirrors of Zola’s literary writing’. They distort the already distorted.

‘He was only seven,’ Robert Lethbridge writes, ‘when the riots of February 1848 finished off the French monarchy once and for all.’ Zola was living in Aix-en-Provence and Lethbridge thinks he was ‘probably oblivious of bloody events on mainly Parisian streets’. But then he adds that ‘those upheavals, representative of abortive attempts to resurrect the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789, leave their marks not only on his fiction but on his thinking about the whole of a post-1848 period, coinciding with his adult life.’ All this, Lethbridge claims, ‘is less a background to Zola’s career than its properly informing context’. There is something a bit circular about the thought – Zola made certain marks on the page because certain marks had been made on him – but Lethbridge has turned it into a working guide. He tracks Zola wherever he goes and however he goes, turns a background into a shifting foreground. He quotes Zola as defining this trail: ‘Le moment est trouble. C’est le trouble du moment que je peins’ – ‘The moment is troublesome. What I paint is the trouble of the moment.’ (Lethbridge interestingly translates ‘le moment’ as ‘the contemporary anxiety’.)

One simple fact of Zola’s life offers us not a key but something like an invitation to endless argument. He marketed books before he wrote any. He worked for Hachette from 1862 to 1866 and published his first novel in 1865. In Lethbridge’s words, ‘Zola was responsible for a monthly bulletin, not merely listing forthcoming books but also, on his initiative, splicing bibliographical details with critical superlatives … Over the course of his later writing career, the launch of each and every one of his novels was conducted as a campaign.’ Lethbridge follows these campaigns closely, devoting two out of six chapters to the planning and writing of a cycle of novels, a notional ten that turned into twenty and took up ‘more than half of Zola’s adult life’. The cycle is called Les Rougon-Macquart, after the family whose adventures it portrays, and among its many interesting effects is one that remains something of a mystery.

‘Zola stressed that each episode could stand alone.’ He wanted to create an equivalent of Balzac’s extensively linked work in this respect, and Lethbridge at first says he does. The episodes seem freestanding, and ‘this remains as true for readers today as it did for contemporary ones.’ This sounds good, but how could this happen in a fictional world full of cross-references? Lethbridge steps back to the higher ground: ‘The Rougon-Macquart, teeming with hundreds of both fictional characters and historical figures, does bear comparison with La Comédie humaine.’ He’s right again, of course, but many of us will find ourselves caught up in Germinal or L’Assommoir without needing any other literary company for the moment. I don’t know how Zola does this.

Lethbridge is offering us ‘a reappraisal of Zola’s achievements in the light of what we now know about his life and work’. There is a lot. Letters by Zola and others; masses of journalism by him; notes for almost all his novels. A Collected Works of 1966-70, ‘its 20,000 pages including texts never before accessible’. His ‘nineteen failed attempts … to be elected to the Académie Française’ are well documented and Lethbridge himself points to the double meaning of his title, Émile Zola: A Determined Life. Zola was a determined fellow, and he is determined by the shifting, incomplete history of his time.

It’s worth considering Zola’s own account of what he sees as a major move in the world of fiction. In an 1878 essay called ‘Le Sens du réel’, he writes: ‘The most beautiful compliment one used to be able to offer to a novelist was to say, “he has imagination”.’ (Especially, we might add, if he were a woman, like George Sand.) Not now, though, Zola suggests: ‘Today, this compliment would almost be regarded as a criticism.’ Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue and Victor Hugo had imagination; George Sand ‘captured a whole generation with the imaginary loves of her heroes … But no one thought of attributing imagination to Balzac or to Stendhal … They are great because they painted their historical time, not because they invented stories.’

In a non sequitur of the kind he enjoys, Zola goes on to say that the decline (déchéance) of the imagination is ‘the chief characteristic of the modern novel’. This phrasing suggests the modern novel saw its opportunity rather than created it, and perhaps Zola half means just that. Another sentence raises further questions. ‘To make real people move in a real context, to give the reader a scrap [un lambeau] of human life, the whole purpose of the naturalist novel is there.’ Why does Zola shift from realism to naturalism so quickly? Why is the reader getting only a scrap of human life?

‘To have a sense of the real,’ Zola goes on to say, ‘is to respond to nature and to represent nature as it is.’ This ought to be easy but it isn’t. ‘Nothing is rarer. Painters know this well.’ But not all painters. ‘Every eye sees in a particular way.’ When he comes to ears, Zola makes an interesting distinction. ‘You will say we need delicate ears. We need accurate ears, no more than that.’ Zola writes ‘oreilles justes’, which doesn’t make any sense in literal English, but isn’t all that ordinary in French either. He goes on to illustrate the right kinds of seeing and hearing (and writing) in Stendhal and Balzac. Stendhal is great ‘because, in seven or eight scenes, he has dared to deliver the note of reality, life in what it has that is certain’. Balzac had ‘the most developed sense of the real that we have yet seen’, and among other things he showed us ‘the still living innards of our society’.

There is a lot of critical energy in these pages and a lot of reliance on simplified propositions. It is patently untrue that no one thought of attributing imagination to Balzac, and we might reach at once for a famous essay by Baudelaire (on Théophile Gautier): ‘I have often been astonished that the great triumph of Balzac was to be known as an observer; it has always seemed to me that his principal merit was to be a visionary and a passionate visionary at that … All his fictions are as profoundly coloured as dreams.’ But then these words do in their way confirm the real but erroneous nature of some of the features of Balzac’s fame. And we may have figured out that when Zola says ‘imagination’ he means something more severe and simple: the systematic denial of reality.

There is another, less binary way of thinking about the real and the imaginary and we slip into it (perhaps without knowing) as soon as we start to read almost any novel by Zola. Crudely evoked, the movement is based on the notion that reality itself is often fantastic; that language is a wonderful accomplice in this view; that ordinary talking life is full of tropes, exaggerations and indirection.

Nana (1880) offers comic lessons in realism. Two men in a theatre (Les Variétés, still functioning on the Boulevard Montmartre) are waiting for a show to start when they spot Bordenave, a famous director who is also the place’s owner. One of the men, Hector, meaning to be polite, compliments Bordenave on his theatre. The director promptly replies: ‘Say my brothel.’ He repeats the mock correction when Hector unthinkingly uses the word ‘theatre’ again. And when Hector makes the same mistake for a third time, right at the end of the chapter, Bordenave is furious. Why does he care so much? Is there anything unrealistic about his anger?

Earlier, Hector has asked his friend Fauchery, a journalist, if he knows Nana, the star of the show they are going to see. Fauchery pretends to be cross in Bordenave’s mode. ‘Oh no, not you as well … People have been going on to me about Nana all morning … Am I supposed to know all the prostitutes in Paris? Nana is Bordenave’s discovery.’ I have translated filles as ‘prostitutes’ rather than ‘girls’ because of the context, but the context gets richer on its own, or with Zola’s aid. We learn from the notes that Fauchery lives near the rue de Provence, a street famous at the time for the number of prostitutes who worked there. Nana opens with a realist description of the theatre’s interior. ‘At nine o’clock, the Théâtre des Variétés was still almost empty. A few stray people … waited in the dim half-glow of the lamps.’ The suggestion that it is a brothel could be a realistic correction of a certain Parisian ignorance. And Fauchery’s fake wrath at Nana’s fame may be an unrealistic attempt to ignore a fact.

Writing like this doesn’t contradict any of Zola’s broad critical propositions. It suggests that facts are welcome as they were not in an earlier world. But facts are tricky instances: sometimes available and sometimes not; sometimes easily avoided or squashed. And sometimes unbearable by any standards. As Rachel Bowlby writes in Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life, ‘it is impossible to separate a ground of reality from the scenes or illusions that surround or supplant it.’

The last chapter of Nana offers a wonderful instance of history filtered through fantasy. We have followed our heroine from the heights of success to scenes at home, on the town, and finally to her death. We first met her, so to speak, in L’Assommoir (1877), as a newborn. Now she is eighteen. She dies on the day the French government signs a declaration of war on Prussia, 19 July 1870. She has what is described as smallpox (la petite vérole rather than the more probable grande vérole, which is syphilis) and many members of the crowds waiting on the Paris streets for news of her demise are staying there because they don’t want to go too near the dying star. They are repeatedly distracted by pro-war marchers, who chant the name of the place they imagine France will soon conquer. Zola makes music out of the repetition of this chant, but History knows better, or likes ironic music. The novel places us in a moment that leads to defeat, the end of an empire, the Commune, and the desperate patriotism (or faith in the army) which meant that Alfred Dreyfus, for many people, had to be guilty, whatever he had or hadn’t done. All of this is represented by the chanters’ cry: ‘À Berlin! À Berlin! À Berlin!’ The triplet is first heard in the middle of the chapter, repeats eight times and outlives everything else in the novel, echoing insistently after a morbidly realist evocation of the room in the Grand Hôtel where Nana dies.

This room is a picture of an end, of what will happen to us all one way or another, if perhaps not so messily, and specifically to the people who live in this ‘epoch of human madness and shame’. The place was

a charnel house, and in it a heap of pus and blood, a shovelful of rotten flesh, dumped there on the pillow. Pustules covered the whole face, with one pimple touching the next. And withered and sunken, they looked grey and muddy, already like earth mould on this shapeless pulp … One eye, the left, had been completely swallowed by the seething purulence. The other, half open, was sinking like a black and ruinous hole.

The juxtaposition of the morgue and the dream suggests more stories than we can count. But Zola is careful to note that the ‘great breath of despair’ that follows rises not from the terminal room but from the boulevard of marching illusion.

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