Zolian lit crit from the profound to the arcanePart of the Bloom’s Modern Critical Views series from Chelsea House Publishers, the book simply entitled Emile Zola was published in 2004. Harold Bloom, renowned and/or notorious literary critic and professor, is the namesake of the series as well as the editor of record for the book. Given that there are over a hundred books in the series, however, it is unclear how active Bloom actually was in the selection of the contents, but he does supply a three-page introduction. The book contains essays on Zola by 13 literary critics. All of the chapters were taken from previously published books and journals going as far back as 1952, but most selections are from the 1990s. As is often the case with scholarly edited collections, the contents are varied, including the good and the bad, the profound and the obscure, the obvious and the insightful. I am not a literary scholar, just a Zola fan who has read his complete works. At least half of the chapters in this book helped me to see Zola’s writing in new and interesting ways, so overall I consider the reading of this volume a productive learning experience.
The most interesting essays in the book take a broad view of Zola’s life and career, rather than focusing on the minutiae of a single work. William J. Berg’s chapter on “Zola’s Theory and Criticism” draws heavily on Zola’s nonfiction work The Experimental Novel and helps to enlarge the reader’s understanding of Zola’s conception of naturalism. A selected chapter from Frederick Brown’s 1995 biography Zola: A Life provides some much-needed contextual background on the genesis of the Rougon-Macquart saga, as well as addressing what Zola owed to Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Jonathan F. Krell draws some interesting parallels between the plots of the Rougon-Macquart novels and the mythical tales of Mt. Olympus, while Henri Mitterand makes a very convincing case for Zola’s naturalism as the precursor to surrealism.
Zola’s novels The Fortune of the Rougons, The Sin of Father Mouret, Nana, Germinal, and Le Rêve (The Dream), as well as his novella The Death of Olivier Bécaille are all singled out for inspection by individual chapters devoted specifically to them. Sometimes the focus can be quite concentrated, for example when Hollie Markland Harder uses one particular symbol of a statue to expound on gender theory in The Sin of Father Mouret. Others venture farther afield. P. M. Wetherill’s essay “Flaubert, Zola, Proust and Paris” is mostly about Proust and barely mentions Zola, making one wonder if the editor actually read the article before selecting it for inclusion (not that there’s anything wrong with Wetherill’s writing). Similarly, Nicholas Rennie’s piece on “Benjamin and Zola” does more to define Walter Benjamin’s thought than Zola’s. Anthony Savile’s chapter reaches beyond lit crit to delve into the conflicting aesthetic philosophies of Locke, Hume, and Kant.
As expected from literary criticism, the book is full of spoilers, but chances are if you are considering reading this book you’ve probably read many of Zola’s works already. Several of these chapters were taken from French Studies journals, so a knowledge of the French language is assumed. The chapters are written in English, but the quotes from Zola’s literature are often presented untranslated. I have roughly a high school knowledge of French, but having previously read Zola’s works (in English) I didn’t have much trouble keeping up with the French excerpts. I would recommend this volume to any serious student of Zola. Not all the essays are compelling reading, but many are interesting, and a few are fascinating.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3ECA9UDH8BEV9/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Liberals vs. reactionaries in schools and courtroomsEmile Zola’s final novel, Truth (Vérité in French), was completed shortly before his death in September 1902 and published posthumously the following year. Truth is the third novel in Zola’s Four Gospels series. (At the time of his death he had not begun writing the projected fourth novel, Justice.) Each novel in the series features one of the Froment brothers—Mathieu, Marc, Luc, and Jean—as its protagonist, each of whom is faced with one of four social issues that Zola felt must be resolved in order for France to achieve its potential and live up to the Revolution’s promise of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.” Zola used these novels not only to illustrate in great detail the evils and ills facing French society in his day but also to spell out his own utopian vision of an ideal France. Thus, all three of Zola’s final novels begin in his characteristically dark and pessimistically critical fashion but ultimately conclude with surprising messages of optimism.
As the novel opens, Marc Froment, a schoolmaster in the small town of Jonville, is visiting his wife’s family in the nearby town of Maillebois. At the time, each town in France had its Catholic school and its secular public school. Marc runs the secular school in Bonville and is on friendly terms with his counterpart in Maillebois, a Jewish schoolmaster named Simon. One morning Simon’s nephew is found murdered, and Simon is charged with the crime, even though evidence points to the likelihood that one of the religious brothers at the parochial school is the killer. The Church launches a cover-up to protect its reputation. Marc, who has devoted his whole life to teaching his students to pursue truth, becomes the most outspoken proclaimer of Simon’s innocence. The legal proceedings prove divisive within the region, pitting conservative and anti-Semitic citizens against the community’s more liberal Republican members. The majority of the populace refuses to see the truth of Simon’s innocence, including Marc’s wife and her family.
The Simon affair is an obvious metaphor for the Dreyfus affair, the real-life criminal case in which Zola had recently played the part of Marc Froment. Both cases involved anti-Semitism, but the Dreyfus affair was a military scandal while the Simon affair is a religious scandal. As he has done in other novels, Zola uses the fictional affair to attack the Church, but here he specifically focuses on the contrast between religious and secular education. In Zola’s view, the latter option is the only means to an enlightened populace and an egalitarian future. He condemns the Roman Catholic Church as the deliberate sower of ignorance and superstition, the enemy of knowledge and progress, and the betrayer of Republican ideals.
Zola’s last novel is also his longest. It is comprised of 16 chapters, each as long as a novella. Lengthiness in itself is not a fault, but this book does feel overly protracted and repetitive. Like the other Gospel novels, Fruitfulness and Labor, Truth spans the better part of a century and features scores of characters over four generations. The story takes place in four or five different towns, each of which has its confusing roster of schoolmasters, clergymen, and politicians. Zola could easily have pared the narrative down and still made his point effectively. From a literary standpoint, this isn’t his most compelling novel, but as a freethinker I admire the audacity of his strident arguments against religion and his condemnation of reactionary ignorance and deceit. Though Truth was written over a century ago in a foreign land, it is easy to see parallels between this story and the state of America under and since the Trump administration. It is a shame Zola never got to finish his Four Gospels, but Truth is a commendable capstone to a stellar career.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
Zola’s incendiary editorials |
| Emile Zola |
Alfred Dreyfus was a captain in the French Army who was court-martialed and convicted of treason for disclosing secret information to the Germans. In reality, however, Dreyfus was framed for the crime by military and government officials who considered him an easy target because he was a Jew. At the height of this divisive scandal, author Emile Zola emerged as an outspoken defender of Dreyfus. Zola published four newspaper editorials in which he vehemently criticized this gross miscarriage of justice, spoke out against antisemitism, and demanded a reopening of the Dreyfus case. The book The Dreyfus Case: Four Letters to France, published in 1898, reprints these four editorials in English translation. Zola wrote these articles in the form of open letters addressed to particular officials or groups of French citizens. The purpose of these letters was to bait the accused parties into charging Zola with libel, thus bringing about legal proceedings that would make public new evidence in Dreyfus’s favor. The strategy worked, and Zola was convicted of libel. He fled the country and lived in exile in England from July 1898 to June 1899.
The best-written and best-known of these essays is the third editorial, “Letter to M. Felix Faure, President of the Republic,” also commonly referred to as “J’Accuse . . . !” Certainly one of the most famous newspaper editorials of all time, this work is an artful exemplar of persuasive rhetoric with several quotable nuggets of liberal eloquence. In the last several paragraphs of the essay, Zola singles out specific officials who contributed to the railroading of Dreyfus and introduces his itemization of each party’s crimes with a condemnatory “I accuse.” The fourth letter in this book, “Letter to the Minister of War,” is merely a brief recapitulation of the points made in “J’Accuse . . . !”
In the book’s first two entries, “Letter to the Youth of France,” and “A Letter to France,” Zola addresses the general public. In both cases, he recounts details from the case and persuasively lays out his argument for Dreyfus’s innocence. The one addressed to youth is aimed at students of high school and university age, criticizing their apathy and urging them to care about injustice. At the time these letters were published, the audiences to which they are addressed would have been quite familiar with the details of the case, so while Zola does recap certain events and evidence, he does not provide a comprehensive narrative of the Dreyfus affair. This English edition includes a brief summary, but even American and British readers of the time were expected to know the fundamentals of the scandal, so while these editorials from Zola are valuable historical documents, they don’t provide the reader with a complete education into the details of the Dreyfus case.
Of the four letters, “J’Accuse . . . !” is the only one that really rises to any remarkable level of literary merit. The rest are well-crafted essays that inform more than they stir the soul. Nevertheless, this book provides admirers of Zola with a good look at his role in the Dreyfus affair and his persona as a public intellectual in fin-de-siècle France.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/RWN1WEX23NAHZ/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Zola’s socialist utopia
Emile Zola’s second-to-last novel was published in 1901 under the French title of Travail. English editions are titled as either Work or Labor. This is the second book in Zola’s Four Gospels series, preceded by Fruitfulness (1899) and followed by Truth (1903). (The fourth novel, Justice, was never completed.) Zola designed the Four Gospels series to address four social issues that were important to him. In each novel one of the Froment brothers—Mathieu, Marc, Luc, and Jean—tackles the issue at hand. In Labor, Luc Froment is confronted by problems of labor and capital, income inequality, and the poor living and working conditions of the laboring class.
Luc, an engineer, is summoned by an old friend to the town of Beauclair in the heart of an industrial region known for mining and smelting ore and manufacturing goods of iron and steel. Upon arriving in town, Luc strolls through the streets and also visits a neighboring steelworks. In both locations, he is appalled by the conditions of poverty, squalor, depravity, and ill health under which the factory workers live. He wishes he could do something to alleviate their suffering. Luc’s friend Jordan owns a blast furnace and foundry named La Crêcherie. The chief engineer of the works has recently died, and Jordan asks Luc for some advice on how to run his operations. A deal is struck between the two by which Luc agrees to manage La Crêcherie as long as Jordan lets him experiment with a new scheme of running the works under a cooperative model.
Zola envisions a socialist utopia based on the theories of French philosopher Charles Fourier, who conceived of the phalanstery, a type of self-contained communal living community. Luc turns La Crêcherie into a kind of independent socialist city-state where the workers enjoy profit-sharing, free housing in a charming residential village, high quality education for their children, and opportunities for social and physical recreation. Eventually, La Crêcherie’s communal influence expands to include the farms of the surrounding countryside and the merchants of Beauclair. Zola hints at the proliferation of similar communities throughout France and the world until socialism rules the globe, at which time mankind will be truly happy and fulfilled.
The first two books of the Four Gospels series are shockingly optimistic. In each case, the hero comes up with a grand scheme that is wildly successful because the whole purpose of the series is to illustrate Zola’s theories on social reform. The cynicism and vulgarity for which Zola was often criticized are not entirely absent, however. That’s what the supporting characters are for, in particular those who oppose the hero’s scheme—in this case, the merchants and industrialists who support the old way of doing business, the capitalistic system that crushes the souls of workers. The villains suffer while Luc and friends reap the benefits of their socialist paradise. This good-versus-evil didacticism results in a narrative that is not as realistic as Zola’s quintessentially naturalist novels. Labor is like the literary equivalent of a Diego Rivera mural. One scene shows capitalists wallowing in their wealth. Another depicts the workers rising up to take charge of their own destiny. Another glorifies the machines that liberate mankind from back-breaking toil. Each scene functions as a symbolic piece in a revolutionary political and socioeconomic statement.
Surprisingly, Zola’s socialist utopia even ventures into the realm of science fiction. His characters learn to utilize solar energy to produce all their electricity, and Zola even presciently prophesizes World War I and the Russian Revolution. Though it strains believability, Labor makes some valuable points and reveals much about its author’s political thought. It will appeal mostly to die-hard Zola fans or those with a pre-existing interest in socialist utopias. For everyone else, Zola already wrote the greatest novel on labor ever written, 1885’s Germinal.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2QLHK9Z3OXZ5Q/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Diary of a fugitive
At the end of the 19th century, France was embroiled in the political scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair. A French army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused, tried, and convicted of espionage, largely on the basis of anti-Semitism. High-ranking officials in the French military fabricated evidence and even protected the real perpetrator of the crime, another officer who was not a Jew. This divisive scandal was the cause of great outrage in France. Among those who spoke out publicly against the miscarriage of justice was Emile Zola, who published his incisive editorial “J’accuse . . . !” in an 1898 Paris newspaper. Because of comments he made in that essay about three handwriting experts who helped to convict Dreyfus, Zola was charged with slander. On July 18, 1898, the Assizes Court at Versailles found Zola guilty. Rather than face a prison term and hefty fine, Zola fled the country that very same night. Notes from Exile is Zola’s diary of his life as an expatriate in England.
An English translation of Notes from Exile, edited by Dorothy E. Spiers and Yannick Portebois, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2003. This edition includes 43 photographs taken by Zola himself of the English countryside, villages, and churches. These photos are as murky as one would expect of photos from 1898, and they don’t really add much to the narrative. Zola’s diary is a brief work, and only occupies about 33 pages of this 120 page book. Notes from Exile is really more of an article than a book, but it is educational and quite successful in giving the reader a glimpse into Zola’s personality. The editors also provide a detailed chronology of the Dreyfus affair, as well as an informative introduction, notes, and a bibliography.
Zola fled France with nothing but a nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper, and he barely spoke a word of English. He was aided by a few friends, primarily French painter Fernand Desmoulin and Englishman Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, who had previously translated most of Zola’s novels into English. With their assistance, Zola settles into his new life and eventually rents a series of country houses in Surrey. In this rural setting, Zola enjoyed exploring the English countryside by bicycle and taking photographs of the landscape. Still practicing his craft, he wrote his novel Fruitfulness by meeting a self-imposed quota of five handwritten pages per day.
His stay in England, however, was not entirely a pleasure trip. Since this is Zola’s personal journal, he is very candid in expressing his feelings, even though the entries are brief. Upon arrival he is troubled by his inability to speak English and plagued by anxieties. He worries about being recognized, for fear that he might be beset by journalists, attacked by anti-Dreyfus fanatics, or accosted by a process-server. Zola frequently laments his forced absence from the country he loves, but also curses the shameful corruption that has led to his unjust persecution. He sees himself as a victim, but not a helpless victim, and the indignation expressed in his journal entries sometimes rises to the strident tone of his socially conscious novels.
Zola’s last entry in his Notes from Exile is dated October 21, 1898. He did not return to Paris until June 5, 1999. A 33 page diary covering a year of Zola’s life may not be very thorough, but it is nonetheless revealing. Thanks to the fine presentation by the editors, one does learn a great deal about Zola’s involvement in the Dreyfus Affair.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R8MW61HVCUB50/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Can I get a mistress?
In my quest to read the complete works of Emile Zola, I am occasionally surprised to turn up an obscure short story that is inexplicably absent from the Complete Works collection I own. Such is the case with “Love’s Chase.” I’m not sure when or where this story was originally published in French, but an English translation was one of several thin volumes of Zola stories that were published in 1911 by the Warren Press. The Love’s Chase book runs about 90 pages. Scanned versions of these Warren Press books can be found at the HathiTrust digital library.
Love’s Chase reads more like a book of Balzac than Zola. The narrator, a young man named George de Vaugelade, has left his provincial home in Lower Normandy to venture into Parisian society. Under the guidance of a former school chum more experienced in worldly ways, Vaugelade clumsily navigates a dinner party at the home of a Comtesse who is a “sort of aunt” of his. The innocent Vaugelade has heard rumors of how married Parisian women take on young lovers for extramarital entertainment. When in Paris, he feels, he should do as Parisians do, so he sets about naively trying to figure out how to start one of these clandestine relationships.
At the Comtesse’s salon he meets two attractive candidates for the position of mistress, both married to politically influential men. At first he can’t decide which one to pursue, and when he does make up his mind, he can’t decide how to make a pass at her. I had trouble simply telling the two ladies apart. One is a blonde, the other a brunette; one is named Berthe, the other Louise; one is Madame Neigeon, the other Madame Gaucheraud. Which woman possesses which three of those characteristics, however, was often quite puzzling to me, and I’m not sure if even Zola got it right every time. Nevertheless, the story is about Vaugelade’s journey from provincial bumpkin to sophisticated paramour. Along the way Zola briefly sketches scenes of Parisian life, such as the annual salon at the Académie des Beaux Arts and the races at Maisons-Laffitte.
As one would expect from Zola, Love’s Chase is a fine piece of writing, but it’s neither satirical enough to be funny nor earnest enough to be meaningful. It amounts to a rather frivolous commentary on the notorious French custom of taking mistresses. The only thing characteristically Zola about this story is its anticlimactic ending, proving that in the name of realism he would rather deliver a let-down than a cliché. Zola is at his best when writing socially conscious works about the lower classes. A comedy of manners is not his forte and is best left to Balzac. Love’s Chase is not one of his better stories, and Zola fans need not consider it a necessary read.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R13H3GBOPX8RR8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Risqué humor elevated to literature
In its departure from European romanticism, Emile Zola’s writing was ahead of its time. His naturalistic style was so audacious for its day that many readers and critics considered the blunt and explicit realism of his works to be obscene. Before he ever achieved much renown in his French homeland, Zola found a receptive audience for his works in Russia. Early in his career, several of his short stories and essays first saw publication in the St. Petersburg journal Vestnik Evropy (The European Messenger). One such story, entitled “Shell-Fish,” appeared in the September 1876 issue of that Russian periodical. Perhaps because of this foreign debut, the story is one of Zola’s more obscure works, not found in many short story anthologies and often absent from even so-called “complete works” collections. In 1911, however, the English-language publisher Warren Press produced a series of thin volumes by Zola that includes Shell-Fish as a stand-alone book of 64 pages. A scan of this book can be found online at the HathiTrust website.
Monsieur Chabre is a retired grain merchant, 45 years of age, with a healthy fortune and a beautiful young wife of 22. The one great unfulfilled desire of his life is to have children. The Chabres’ efforts toward this goal, however, have not been successful. At first Monsieur Chabre blames Madame Chabre for the couple’s infertility, but when she suggests that perhaps the problem lies with him, he consults a physician. The doctor prescribes an unscientific remedy to boost Monsieur Chabre’s reproductive potency: shell-fish (a word which is always hyphenated in the book). Willing to try anything, the Chabres retreat to a secluded seaside resort in Brittany so that Monsieur can indulge in all manner of oysters, mussels, limpets, and shrimp.
Shell-fish, therefore, is basically just a risqué joke about a married couple’s sex life that Zola has elevated to a brief literary novella. Zola takes the racy humor a bit further than just the eating of molluscs. To reveal more would be to spoil any possible surprises, but the average reader will likely see where this story is headed a mile in advance. That doesn’t lessen its appeal, however, as Zola handles the humor deftly. True to his more serious works, the characters are well-developed personalities based on keen social observation. The coastal setting also benefits from Zola’s excellence at natural description as he picturesquely brings the resort culture of Brittany to life, though not without a fair helping of wry criticism.
In his more serious novels, Zola often features humorous subplots and buffoonish supporting characters, so the sense of humor he displays here will not be unfamiliar to his habitual readers. Amid a career filled with masterpieces, Shell-fish is a rather inconsequential work, but it is nonetheless a fine piece of writing that demonstrates that Zola could also excel at lighter fare.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R3PNOTYNBBBX1N/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Deceptively romantic short story
“For a Night of Love,” a short story by French author Emile Zola, was originally published in 1876 in the Russian literary journal European Messenger (Vestnik Evropy). For whatever reason, it never made it into one of Zola’s canonical short story collections, such as Contes à Ninon or Parisian Sketches, so this story is little-known and often absent from “complete works” collections of Zola’s writings, at least those published in the English language. In 1911, however, the Warren Press published a series of thin volumes of Zola works in English that includes For a Night of Love as a stand-alone 64-page book. Unlike the earlier stories of Contes à Ninon, which dabbled in popular romanticism, “For a Night of Love” was published in the midst of Zola’s work on his extraordinary Rougon-Macquart cycle and thus displays his mature naturalistic style. In subject and tone it most closely resembles Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, which in 1867 was a flagship publication for the school of naturalism and his first overt declaration of independence from the conventions of romanticism.
Though the title is deliberately misleading, the story begins as love stories often do. A shy, awkward young man who lives alone spies his beautiful neighbor enjoying the moonlight on her balcony. He worships her from afar but considers her out of his league. To liven up his solitary existence, he plays simple tunes on his flute, until one night he discovers his lovely neighbor is actually listening to his musical efforts and apparently finding enjoyment in them. From that moment on, he plays only for her, secretly hoping that by pleasing her ear he might somehow win his way into her heart.
Just when you think you know what you’re in for, Zola, as he is often wont to do, takes the story in a dark direction. From that moment on, the narrative firmly falls within the bleak, harsh realism of Zola’s powerful naturalist novels. More than a mere romance, For a Night of Love is a profound study in human psychology. True to the literary tenets of naturalism, Zola documents the relationship between Julien and Therese with the observational precision of a scientist. Through his depiction of the love that binds the couple together and the differences of class and culture that separate them, Zola illustrates how nature and nurture develop human character and influence the course of life and death.
In my opinion, Zola is history’s greatest craftsman of prose fiction, and For a Night of Love is a very fine example of his work. Its biggest flaw is its brevity, which hinders it from competing with the sheer impressiveness of Zola’s more monumental novels. Along with this obscure little book, the Warren Press also published the hard-to-find stories Love’s Chase and Shell-Fish, as well as a little-known collection of five stories entitled Death. Scanned copies of these books are available for reading and download at the HathiTrust website.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://smile.amazon.com/review/R1LOOVA9UEZY1V/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
Agrarian epics from around the world
As an enthusiast of classic literature, Old Books by Dead Guys loves to review epic novels. Just because a story is epic, however, doesn’t mean it has to be set in ancient Rome, a war-torn battlefield, or outer space. Some of the best epics take place right at home on the farm. In these “peasant” epics, hard-working multigenerational families carve a living from the soil while contending with poverty, family conflicts, and the unforgiving elements. Such books often bear a strident message of social justice, the dignity of labor, and in some cases perhaps even hints of socialist revolution. Every nation’s literature has got to have at least one great agrarian epic. Realist writers of all nations have captured the heroic drama in the daily life of their homeland’s agriculturalists. Today at Old Books by Dead Guys, we celebrate the literature of “earth,” “soil,” and “dust,” listed below in chronological order. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.
Sons of the Soil (Les Paysans, 1855) by Honoré de Balzac (France) - 3.5 stars
This is Balzac’s final novel, also known as Les Paysans or The Peasantry. The story takes place in the Burgundy region of France and focuses on the antagonism between a land-owning count and the peasants of his district. Rather than glamorizing farming life, Balzac approaches the story from an aristocratic perspective that makes the poor farmers the villains of the story. The plot is like a comical chess game in which the peasants try everything they can think of to rob, cheat, or swindle their landlord. Not exactly the message one usually looks for in an agrarian epic, but it does make for one entertaining novel.
Virgin Soil (1877) by Ivan Turgenev (Russia) - 4 stars
Virgin Soil is Russian realist Ivan Turgenev’s final novel. This is not really a peasant epic, but it does deal with agricultural life. The narrative takes place in the 1860s, at a time when a populist movement was gaining influence in Russia. Urban middle-class intellectuals venture out into the farmlands to preach socialist ideas to workers and the rural poor, hoping to inspire a revolution against the feudal system maintained by the Tsarist government. Like Balzac above, however, Turgenev’s depiction of these revolutionaries is quite unflattering and satirical. Though the main focus of the novel may be political, it does provide a vivid depiction of rural life in Russia.
The Earth (La Terre, 1887) by Emile Zola (France) - 5 stars
The official opinion of Old Books by Dead Guys is that Emile Zola is the world’s greatest novelist, and this is his second greatest novel, after Germinal. The Earth takes place in the Beauce, an agricultural region between Chartres and Orleans, where families have cultivated the same plots of land for generations. When one of these veteran farmers, Old Fouan, feels himself ready for retirement, he divides up his holdings among his three children. Not one of them, however, is happy with the portion he receives, which leads to animosity and treachery. Zola’s depiction of farm life is gritty and unglamorized. He captures both the dirty, exhausting toil and the spiritual satisfaction of agriculture in a range of moods from the terrifying to the hilarious. A masterpiece.
Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896) by Hendrik Pontoppidan (Denmark) - 4.5 stars
This is one of only a few works available in English by Pontoppidan, a Nobel Prize winner. The story takes place in rural Denmark in the late nineteenth century. As in Turgenev’s Virgin Soil, discussed above, the proliferation of liberal democratic ideals has begun to undermine the authority of the conservative aristocracy and the Church. A new young priest arrives in a seaside parish in rural Denmark. Rather than adopt the party line of his church, he sympathizes with the peasants and bears a romantic image of the farming life as a more honest and natural way of living. Such liberal ideals infuriate his superiors and threaten his career in the clergy. Through expert descriptive prose, Pontoppidan delivers an authentic slice of Danish rural life.
The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris (California, USA) - 5 stars
Although it doesn’t have “Earth” or “Soil” in its title, The Octopus is one of America’s greatest agricultural epics. It concerns the lives of wheat farmers in Tulare County, California. Based on a real-life incident, the Mussel Slough Tragedy (1880), this novel tells the story of a violent conflict between the farmers of this community and an all-powerful railroad corporation (the “octopus” referenced in the title). In his portrayal of the rural landscape and agricultural life, Norris displays an extraordinary faculty for natural description and an exceptional talent for drawing gripping scenes of ordinary people faced with extraordinary circumstances. If you’re looking for the Great American Novel, this is it.
The Peasants (four volumes, 1904-1909) by Wladyslaw Reymont (Poland) - 5 stars
This lesser-known Polish novel just might be the gold standard by which all peasant epics must be measured. The Peasants (Polish title: Chlopi) was published in four volumes, one for each of the seasons of the year: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer must be read in order. Over the course of that fictional year, the reader becomes intimately involved in the lives and loves of the residents of the rural town of Lipka. The children of the village’s most prosperous farmer, Mathias Boryna, want him to step down and divide his land among his descendants, but he scoffs at them by marrying a young bride, thus inciting family conflict. Similar in style and subject matter to Zola’s The Earth (see above)—it’s a toss-up as to which of these two epics is the greater work of literature.
Growth of the Soil (1917) by Knut Hamsun (Norway) - 5 stars
This is a masterful peasant epic from Nobel laureate Hamsun. A solitary figure, heavily laden with supplies, trudges into the Norwegian wilds, a day’s walk from the nearest village. He selects a plot of land, cuts the timber, and begins turning the soil. One day a woman comes. Together as man and wife they carve out a living from the earth and build a home, a farm, and a family around which a community forms. Bad influences from the city, however, threaten the peace of their agrarian life. This novel is a truly powerful and moving reading experience.
Dust (1921) by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (Kansas, USA) - 5 stars
Written by Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius, who ran America’s largest publisher of socialist literature from a little town in Southeastern Kansas. Dust is set in that very region and depicts agricultural life in hard-scrabble, unromantic terms. The novel’s primary concern, however, is a dysfunctional marriage between a husband who believes hard work, livestock, land, and profits are all that’s valuable in life and a wife who longs for love, happiness and beauty while condemned to a life of unrelenting toil. The setting may be reminiscent of Willa Cather, but the story bears the brutal naturalism of one of Frank Norris or Emile Zola’s darker works. A Kansas classic!
The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl S. Buck (USA, raised in China) - 5 stars
Pearl S. Buck, though born in America, was raised by missionary parents in China. Her second novel, The Good Earth, took the Western world by storm, for it was the first authentic literary peek behind the silk curtain of Chinese life. Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan start out as poor farmers in a mud-brick house, but through hard work, personal sacrifice, and a little luck, their family gradually rises from humble beginnings to a position of security and status. The story spans the first few decades of the early twentieth century, including scenes of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. Though steeped in Chinese culture, The Good Earth transcends time and place with universal themes of love, family, pride, and greed. This is the first volume in a trilogy, followed by Sons and A House Divided.
Of course, you can’t really talk about peasant epics without mentioning John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). I have not read that book in the last eight years, so it hasn’t been reviewed at Old Books by Dead Guys. I do have a copy and hope to get to it in 2020.
False Alarms
Judging from their titles, these books might sound like agrarian epics, but in fact they are not:
Shallow Soil (1893) by Knut Hamsun (Norway) - 4.5 stars
Although this is a very good novel by Hamsun, it is not about “soil” or anything remotely agricultural. It is a story of modern urban life in late-nineteenth century Kristiania (present-day Oslo). I believe Hamsun uses the title Shallow Soil as a critical metaphor for the lack of national spirit necessary for Norway to develop into a great nation. (His opinion, not mine.)
Children of the Soil (1894) by Henryk Sienkiewicz (Poland) - 1 star
This is a terrible novel and again has very little to do with farming. Some of the characters do own agricultural lands, which peasants farm for them. This is a book about rich people’s problems, however, and a depressingly grueling examination of the institution of marriage.
The Native Soil (1957) by Alan E. Nourse (USA)
This is actually a science fiction novel about a planet made of mud. Definitely not a peasant epic.
Secular pro-life argument
Originally published in 1899 under the French title Fécondité, Fruitfulness is the first book in Emile Zola’s final series of novels, Les Quatre Évangiles (The Four Gospels). It would be followed by Travail (Labor or Work), Vérité (Truth), and Justice (never published because Zola had barely begun writing it when he died). The Four Gospels were intended to sum up Zola’s personal philosophy by exploring the four qualities he felt were necessary to a healthy society or, more specifically, to a flourishing France. In Fruitfulness, Zola proposes that the prosperity of France depends upon a robust birth rate and an ardent devotion to agricultural development.
The protagonists of The Four Gospels are all sons of Pierre Froment, who starred in Zola’s previous trilogy, The Three Cities. Mathieu Froment lives in the suburbs of Paris with his wife and children. He ventures into the city every day to work as a designer for a company that manufactures farming implements. Pierre and his wife Marianne have a loving relationship and a devil-may-care attitude toward producing children. As they gradually crank out more and more babies over the course of the book, a cast of supporting characters views them with disgust, contempt, and envy. Among the couples in the Froments’ social circle, representing a variety of social classes, each has an excuse for choosing to have few or no children. To them, the happiness that the Froments enjoy among their burgeoning brood is a slap in the face highlighting their own discontent. Mathieu inspires further ridicule and disbelief when he decides to leave his job at the factory and become a farmer.
In examining the lives of the supporting characters, Zola highlights a number of societal ills related to reproduction and child-rearing, including neglectful nannies, corrupt child care professionals, exploited wetnurses, ghoulish orphanages, back-alley abortions, and unwarranted hysterectomies. The novel primarily consists of Zola contrasting the idyllic happiness of the baby-making Froments with the shameful and depressing lifestyles of their acquaintances who have chosen to limit their reproductive output. After a while, even Zola seems to realize how simplistic and unrealistic this dichotomy is, so about halfway through he attempts to balance the scales a little by inflicting some melodramatic tragedy upon his heroes. Despite some of the eyeroll-inspiring plot turns, however, the last several chapters are really quite entertaining, and the reader truly does care about the characters, even though the ensemble cast is so vast it is often difficult to tell them all apart. If ever a novel needed an explanatory list of characters or a genealogical tree, it’s this one.
Fruitfulness is not Zola’s best work. While he often crafts the lives of his characters to illustrate social ills, here he has the Froments and friends unrealistically debating the French birth rate in almost every chapter. It is also odd to see the liberal Zola taking such a conservative stance on these particular issues. At one point he suggests that any mother who doesn’t breastfeed her own children should be convicted of a crime. Alas, times were different back then. Though Zola wrote the novel to controvert Malthusian theory, we now can see how so many of the world’s problems are caused or heightened by overpopulation, making the book’s arguments seem antiquated and naive. Nevertheless, it’s still a good piece of writing for diehard fans of Zola. Those unfamiliar with his work, however, would be better off sticking to one of the better-known novels in his Rougon-Macquart series.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/RBE8VJK5QV50W/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm
The naturalist manifestoes
 |
| Emile Zola, by Manet |
The Experimental Novel and Other Essays is a collection of French author Emile Zola’s nonfiction writings on literature. It was originally published in 1880, followed by the English translation by Belle M. Sherman published in America in 1893. In a brief introduction, Zola explains that the five lengthiest essays in the book were originally published in Russia, because no literary journal in Paris would accept them. The remaining assortment of seven-to-nine-page pieces, grouped under the headings of “The Novel” and “Criticism,” first ran in the French journals Le Bien Public and Le Voltaire.
Though many consider Zola the father of the naturalist school of literature, in these essays he vehemently shuns such a label, claiming that naturalism is not a school but a method or tendency that has been present throughout the history of literature, even as far back as ancient times. In the 19th century naturalism was overshadowed by romanticism, and Zola merely sees himself as a vocal advocate for its resurgence in the modern era. He repeatedly credits Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert with pioneering the naturalist renaissance in French literature, although each sometimes waxed romantic in their turn. Even if Zola isn’t the founder of naturalism, he is clearly its most strident proponent and purist. In the opening essay, “The Experimental Novel,” he likens the writing of a novel to the practicing of medicine and draws upon a medical text from Claude Bernard to back up his argument. For Zola, what separates naturalism from other literary movements is its devotion to science. This manifests itself in the sense of reality established by the author and the refusal to deviate from natural laws for the convenience of telling a story. Man is not an actor on a stage, but an organism subject to environmental and evolutionary forces. “Determinism dominates everything,” asserts Zola.
In addition to pushing his naturalist agenda, Zola also champions the novel as an art form, asserting that it is the literary medium that best speaks to the modern world and its scientific concerns. He avows that the novel’s capacity for realism will eventually win out over the favored vehicles of romanticism: poetry and drama. From today’s perspective, his prediction certainly seems to have come true. He nevertheless hopes that realism will also someday come to inhabit the stage, which certainly did happen in the early 20th century. One might argue that naturalism also triumphed on the silver screen. At the time Zola was writing these essays, however, naturalism was a dirty word, and he its staunchest defender, a freedom fighter liberating literature from the yoke of romanticism.
In the five longer essays, which run about 50 pages each, Zola can get a bit long-winded and repetitive in his arguments, as if he’s writing to fill a word count. Because of the very nature of the collection, which brings articles from different times and venues into one volume, naturally some themes are brought up again and again. Several of the shorter pieces consist of Zola merely railing against a critic who has insulted Balzac. Nevertheless, for anyone who is an enthusiast of Zola’s novels or has an interest in literary naturalism in general, this book provides invaluable insight into Zola’s thought process as a writer and his personal philosophy of art. Such readers will also be interested in a similar volume by America’s foremost Zola disciple, Frank Norris, entitled The Responsibilities of the Novelist. Both books are essential texts in the naturalist canon and fascinating reading for those with a love for this school of literature.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R1UYPML382IMI4/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
A cry for justice
Though a newspaper editorial may seem an unlikely subject for a book review, “J’accuse . . . !” may just be the most famous newspaper editorial of all time. Published in the 13 January 1898 edition of the Paris newspaper L’Aurore, the piece was written by Emile Zola in the form of an open letter to the President of the French Republic Felix Faure. In it, Zola passionately defends Alfred Dreyfus, the persecuted artillery officer caught in the center of what became known worldwide as the Dreyfus Affair, a government corruption scandal that rocked the French nation.
When it was discovered that a French officer was passing military secrets to the Germans, accusations fueled by antisemitism were leveled at Captain Dreyfus, who was of Jewish heritage. With little supporting evidence, army officials convicted him in a military court and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. As evidence arose that indicated another officer was guilty of the espionage, the army covered up the new information, refusing to admit its mistake. The Dreyfus Affair had a tremendously polarizing effect on French society, with the citizenry organizing itself into opposing camps of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, based on their political and religious inclinations. Into this breach stepped Zola, a literary celebrity and elder statesman with a track record of using his pen to champion society’s downtrodden. Zola’s 4,500-word open letter caused a sensation when it hit the newsstands, igniting the fervor of the Dreyfusards and making himself a target for the opposing faction.
Unfortunately, if you want to learn about the Dreyfus Affair, reading “J’accuse . . . !” is not the best way to go about doing it. Zola was writing for an audience of readers already familiar with the course of events. You’re unlikely to understand the point of his commentary and criticism unless you have already read a historical synopsis of the scandal. To that end, I would suggest at the very least boning up on Wikipedia before you attempt to tackle “J’accuse . . . !” For more curious readers, Frederick Brown’s biography Zola: A Life gives a very detailed, roughly 150-page, blow-by-blow account of the Dreyfus Affair (and if you’re a Zola fan, you’ll enjoy the rest of the book too). Without some degree of prior knowledge, “J’accuse . . . !” is bound to read like a legal deposition devoid of context.
Beyond its historical import, “J’accuse . . . !” also has literary merit as an exercise in persuasive rhetoric. Not surprisingly, the author expresses his cry for justice with great eloquence and passion. Would-be freedom fighters can draw inspiration from quotable nuggets like, “The truth marches on and nothing will stop it.” Soul-stirring passages are few and far between, however, amid the morass of legal detail. Those seeking moving examples of Zola’s social justice prose would do better to look in novels like Germinal or La Terre. The fiery rhetoric of “J’accuse . . !” may have also suffered the dulling effect of poor English translation (the translator of my copy was anonymous). The most incendiary portion of the letter is its hard-hitting finale, in which Zola points his finger one by one at the various guilty parties and enumerates their crimes with the condemning phrase, “I accuse . . .”
In return for the accusations he penned in “J’accuse . . . !”, Zola was convicted of libel and sentenced to jail time, but he fled to England instead, where he lived in exile for a year until a change of government allowed him to return to France. He died soon after, leaving behind one of the greatest bodies of literary work ever created by a man of letters. Even so, “J’accuse . . . !” stands as testament to the fact that he was more than just a man of letters. Zola was a potent force for change in French society and an outspoken proponent for human rights.
Uncharacteristically prudish of Zola
Emile Zola originally wrote the story of Madeleine Férat as a play, simply entitled Madeleine, but its lack of theatrical success inspired him to rework the drama as a prose narrative. The novel Madeleine Férat was originally published in the pages of the magazine L’Evenement in 1868. It was later released in book form in 1882. This was the last novel Zola wrote before embarking on his masterful 20-novel series known as the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and it does bear some stylistic resemblance to those later, greater works of literary naturalism. In terms of quality, however, this feels like an early, half-baked work by an author still trying to find his mature literary voice.
Madeleine Férat is one of the darkest love stories you’ll ever read. The title character is orphaned at a young age. When she reaches womanhood, she escapes the sexual advances of her guardian. Soon thereafter, she meets a young gentleman who takes her in as his mistress. Madeleine loves this man, but he sees her mainly as a plaything. Eventually he abandons her, and she finds herself alone once again. She then becomes the mistress of a second lover, named William. Unlike her first partner, William is a kinder, gentler sort of gentleman who truly falls in love with Madeleine. Despite warnings to never marry his mistress, he makes her his wife. William is a wealthy man, and for a time the two young lovers enjoy a comfortable life of newly wedded bliss. Reminders of Madeleine’s former life as a party girl and “kept woman” keep coming back to haunt them, however, putting a strain on the relationship between husband and wife. The fact that Madeleine once found happiness in another man’s bed may be too much for William to handle.
Nowadays, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that a woman is only allowed to sleep with one man during her lifetime, and if she breaks this rule, she must face a punishment of disgrace, ostracism, or crippling guilt. While in Zola’s time, obviously, sexual mores were stricter, he seems an unlikely spokesperson for this sort of socially enforced chastity. In his other works, Zola often treats premarital or extra-marital sex bluntly as a fact of life that must be accepted, so why the drastically different attitude here? In this novel, Zola advances the theory that once a woman loses her virginity she is essentially a physical and psychological prisoner to her first lover, who has left his mark of ownership upon her. Zola, who so often fought for social reform, seems here to be endorsing the moral code of a puritanical society. While he does illustrate how such an unrealistic double standard oppresses womankind, he doesn’t say much to refute it.
Zola was often accused of concentrating on the seamier side of life in order to deliberately shock and offend (and thus titillate) his audience. This is evident in some of his earlier works, and seems to be the case here. The love triangle in this book is not unlike that in Zola’s better novel Thérèse Raquin, but here the crime that binds the three main characters together is not murder but sexual promiscuity. Madeleine Férat is a relentless catalog of misery, loaded with as much imagery equating sex with death as Zola could dream up. The fact that the book is way too long only magnifies the unpleasantness. Each hour-long chapter ruminates the same dismal themes over and over again like the beating of so many dead horses. It’s hard to believe this was ever a play, because I don’t know who would want to sit through it. Madeleine Férat can be seen as a failed experiment by a great author, skillfully crafted in authentic detail but ultimately suffering from too many errors in judgment.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R6UZ3WXOFLYGG/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Love between rich and poor
Naïs Micoulin, a novella by Emile Zola, was published in 1884. The title character is a young woman who lives with her mother and father at a remote country estate on the coast of Provence. The family manages the land and maintains the house on behalf of its owner, Monsieur Rostand, a lawyer who resides in the nearby city of Aix. Occasionally Naïs ventures into the city to bestow a tribute of fruit and fish on the landlord, and the Rostands spend periodic vacations in the country with the Micoulins. Under this arrangement, Naïs grew up alongside the lawyer’s son, Frédéric, and the two formed a close childhood friendship. As he grows into manhood, Frédéric begins to take his father’s fortune for granted and becomes more and more indolent and rash. Unbeknownst to his parents, his evenings are often spent on wine, women, and gambling. One day, Naïs comes to Aix for one of her periodic visits, and Frédéric is astonished to find that she has blossomed into a beautiful woman. Naturally, he seizes the opportunity of another family trip to the coast to pursue a romantic relationship with her.
In many ways, this story is Zola’s love letter to Provence. He obviously delights in describing the beautiful countryside of his homeland—the forests, fruits, and flowers—and the rural lifestyle of the families that work the land and sea. Naïs goes about her chores with a naturalness and simplicity, as if she were an extension of the picturesque landscape itself. As one would expect from Zola, however, things aren’t all sunshine and roses at this seaside retreat. The old fisherman Micoulin beats the girl and treats her more like a slave than a daughter. Unwilling to allow Naïs a single ounce of happiness, her newfound romance with Frédéric infuriates him. With the master’s son as her lover, however, what can he do? As the relationship between Naïs and Frédéric progresses, the tension between the three key players escalates, and Zola ramps up the suspense accordingly.
Unfortunately, the ending of the story is a bit of a letdown. It’s almost as if Zola goes out of his way to disappoint the reader. He leads you to expect a climactic, romanticized conclusion, then pulls the rug out from under you. Though it may end with more of a whimper than a bang, the story nonetheless stays true to Zola’s naturalistic philosophy toward literature. Real lives don’t often culminate with bombastic confrontations or passionate romance. Nature is much more random, and we are often prisoners to the fate it deals us. Just as he so frankly portrays the darker, less idyllic side of this Provençal paradise, Zola opts for a bluntly realistic ending that spurns expectations honed by literary conventions. Balzac or Hugo might have given you the operatic climax you crave, but Zola makes you wake up and smell the stark reality. This work adheres closely to the mature naturalistic style in which Zola wrote the Rougon-Macquart series of novels for which he’s famous. Naïs Micoulin may not be perfect, or even one of Zola’s best works, but it’s still a beautiful piece of writing that holds true to the master’s literary convictions.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R41CMOETW9N0M/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
