The Fortunes of the Rougons - Emile Zola

 Finally, I found where to begin with Zola's Rougon-Macquart sequence.   Some of the novels I have already read and reviewed here belong to the cycle (The Belly of Paris, The Debacle, Germinal) but I wanted to start at the undisputed beginning.   That is here, with The Fortunes of the Rougons (1871).

The book is set in December 1851, when a coup d'etat in Paris installed Napoleon III and the Second Empire.   The key events were in Paris but there were also popular uprisings all over the country, including Provence.   Zola was partly raised in Aix-en-Provence which here he renames Plassans.

Zola made a key decision - to confine the action to Plassans and its immediate neighbourhood.   Action elsewhere is brought in by letter and, to a much lesser extent, newspapers.   There is a key period in the month when nobody in Plassans knows what is happening elsewhere.   Pierre Rougon, a middleaged bourgois, has a son in Paris who keeps him as up-to-date as he can.   Backed by his ambitious wife Felicite, Pierre seizes control of the town and acts as mayor - the actual mayor having been taken prisoner by the local insurgents.

The complicating factor, the stroke of authorial brilliance, is that Rougon's implacable enemy is his half-brother Antoine Macquart, who sets himself up as a rebel purely to oppose Pierre.   There was also a half-sister, Ursule, who married and moved away.   One of her sons has married one of Pierre's daughters, the other, seventeen year-old Silvere, is living in Plassans with his grandmother, the half-mad eccentric 'Aunt Dide'.

Silvere begins and ends the novel.   It begins with him and his thirteen year-old sweetheart waiting to join the army of insurgents heading their way.   The rebels pass through Plassans at dead of night, simply capturing a trio of big wigs they happen upon and moving on.   Around the midpoint of the book there is a battle in which the rebels are defeated.   Miette is killed, Silvere captured.   It ends with him being returned to Plassans where a gendarme he accidentally injured executes him.

Zola's second key decision is the way in which he includes the necessary back story.   There is a lot of it and it has to go in because, as he tells us in the preface, Zola's purpose is to prove that "Heredity, like gravity, has its laws."   Yet it must not be allowed to outweigh or unbalance the narrative.   So in Chapter One he deals with the rebels passing through Plassans and leaving with Silvere and Miette.   Chapter Two describes Plassans waking the next day, speculating on what happened.   Thus we meet people who live there and the relationships between some of them.   We meet the Rougons.   Pierre is embarrassed by his mother and half-siblings.   We then go back fifty years to when Dide was widowed and took up with the poacher Macquart, who sired Antoine and Ursule.

And so on...   The book hops backward and forwards in time in substantial chunks.   This means we always know when and where we are and are always uncovering more insights into the main characters.   By the end of the book this is what we are expecting, so Zola cleverly does something different.   The first clues to Silvere's death are delivered in what seems like a waking dream of Aunt Dide.   Even she does not know if it is real or not.   Antoine and Pierre both assume she is talking about the long-gone poacher Macquart and his lifelong war with the gendarmerie.   But no, Dide actually witnessed the death of her grandson while out buying brandy for Antoine - and wow, does that hit home.

I've been spending a lot of time recently considering the French Naturalists and Realists, notably the trio of Zola, Maupassant and Huysmans.   The fact is, I enjoy them all.   The Fortunes of the Rougons I particularly enjoyed.

Next question: do I continue in publication order or in the order recommended by whoever wrote the Wikipedia  essay?

Les Diaboliques - Barbey D'Aurevilly

 

Latest stop on my tour of decadent French fin de siecle literature is Barbey D'Aurevilly's collection of scandalous short stories from 1874 - so scandalous that it was confiscated by the Ministry of Justice.  You might think, so what?  Victorian sensibilities, even across the Channel, were very different to ours.  But no, the fate of the promiscuous woman in 'At a Dinner of Atheists' is horrific bordering on pornographic in any era.  Likewise the nature of the 'Woman's Revenge' in the final story.

It's called The She-Devils in most English translations but I think that leads to misconceptions of misogyny.  Each of the six stories features a strong, transgressive woman but I don't think for a moment that Barbey D'Aurevilly looks on them with contempt or disgust.  On the contrary, I believe he is fascinated by them - aroused, certainly, but also intrigued.  The stories are long - forty to fifty pages - and he gives himself plenty of time to probe their psychology and motivation - in itself a counter to any she-devilishness, because of course devils do devilish things for the sheer hell of it.

The authorial style, especially the at-one-remove (recit parle) storytelling, is not to everyone's taste but it is of its time - the parallels with Huysmans are obvious - and I was held spellbound.  Very dark material, not for beginners, but I want more.

Down There - J K Huysmans

 

The ultimate fin de siecle degenerate novel, so they say.  In fact La Bas is an academic discussion about the state of French literature at the end of the Nineteenth Century.  It was decadent, certainly, but that does not make a book about it decadent.  Durtal, our unheroic hero, is a middleaged novelist who has followed the naturalism of Zola about as far as it will go and found it lacking substance.  What he misses is the human soul.  So he sets out to bring naturalism and psyche together in a historical study of Gilles de Rais, the notorious 'Bluebeard' of medieval France.

Gilles de Rais interests Durtal because he started out as a pious soldier, the most important ally of Joan of Arc.  But after Joan's execution and the end of the war with England he becomes dissolute, debauched and appallingly depraved.  After he has defiled, butchered and discarded countless young children he is finally brought to book.  At his trial he confesses everything but recovers his Christian faith to such an extent that the parents of his victims escort him to his death, praying for his salvation.

Durtal wants to wallow in faith of the medieval kind.  He befriends the bellringer of St Surplice and through him an eccentric astrologer who claims he is being murdered remotely by a priest who has gone rogue and now celebrates the Black Mass.  It is the Black Mass which Durtal ultimately witnesses that gives the book its reputation.  Actually, this is nothing at all alarming, more childish than satanic.  What really did raise my eyebrows was what startled me a couple of years ago when I read Zola.  It's the sex.  Durtal finds himself being seduced by the wife of another dining companion and sleeps with her only because she can get him admitted to the Black Mass.

The end of the novel is something of an anticlimax.  The rest of it is absolutely fascinating.

Germinal - Emile Zola

Yes, here we are – another classic writer I have not read until late in life. Another I wish I had found earlier, though Zola wasn’t as prolific as many and there may yet be time.

I remember watching a BBC adaptation of Germinal back when I was a teenager, with Michael Bryant, I think, and maybe Rosemary Leach. Having read the book I now understand why nothing similar is offered today. For a book published in 1885 Germinal is tract for today – about the exploitation and progressive impoverishment of the poor by international capitalism. What struck me is that Zola is explicit – he uses those terms – and is equally open about the appeal of pure communism. This translation is by the first sexologist, Havelock Ellis, and he naturally does not seek to sanitise or euphemise Zola’s vocabulary for dealing with sex and nudity, of which there is plenty.

Zola was apparently criticised at the time for his lack of flowery description and for his unsentimental characterisation. For me the semi-journalistic style worked fine and the characterisation was plenty good enough to distinguish who people are among the huge cast. The main character is Etienne, who pitches up jobless and becomes leader of an all-out strike. The main female is the truck-puller Catherine, who Etienne should have taken up with to begin with. The ending, with the two of them trapped for days in the flooding mine, took my breath away. Superb.