The Assommoir, by Émile Zola, a new translation by Brian Nelson

Weeks before I listened to this very interesting webinar about ‘The Art of Reviewing Literature in Translation’, I had referred — in this #6Degrees of Separation — to Brian Nelson’s new translation of  Zola’s The Assommoir (L’Assommoir) and specifically mentioned reading the Translator’s Note:

I have just received a brand new translation of it by my favourite translator, Brian Nelson, Emeritus Professor of French at Monash University. Published by Oxford World’s Classics, it has the same Introduction by Robert Lethbridge as the 1995 Margaret Mauldon translation, but (of course) the Notes on the Translation are new, referring to the difficulty of translating C19th French slang and to a change of approach. Where Mauldon writes that she aimed for an English equivalent not of recent vintage to convey the vigour of the original, Nelson asserts the importance of writing for a contemporary audience, aiming to use vigorously colloquial contemporary language. So I am looking forward to see how these differences are manifested in the new translation.

So, listening to the webinar, I was interested to hear that at least one prominent (i.e. paid) reviewer had complained about an aspect of translation that had been specifically explained in a Translator’s Note.  Quite rightly, this not bothering to read the Translator’s Note was judged by the panel to be shabby behaviour, but that behaviour made me realise how far I have come in thinking about translated literature since the early days when I began reading it via the home of translated fiction, Stu’s blog Winston’s Dad.

First up, yes, translators feel strongly that reviewers should acknowledge that a book is translated and has translator.  So that’s a tick for me, because I’ve been doing that for years.  But then it’s a question of how it’s acknowledged.  It’s not just a matter of #NamingTheTranslator, it’s a matter of acknowledging that the work is a co-creation which emerges when a translator reworks the original text and recreates it. That’s not something I’ve always acknowledged, and what’s more, I don’t agree entirely that a translator can or should, to use an example from the webinar, change culturally specific Israeli jokes into something else more accessible.  Firstly, there is always Google; secondly, there can be explanatory notes; and thirdly, whose alternatives do we get that aren’t culturally specific to somewhere else anyway?  Those of us who live in The Rest of the World all know how often there are tiresome assumptions that we are familiar with US culture.  (Anyone learning languages with Duolingo has to put up with this all the time).

Whatever about that, if you — whether reader or reviewer — are at all interested in the reviewing of translation, this webinar is a helpful guide to doing it well, though the speakers were all at pains to say that all reviews of translated fiction are welcome, because it isn’t reviewed enough and nobody wants to discourage potential reviewers with exacting standards…

So in the spirit of the suggestion that reviewers of TL should be ‘daring’ I’m going to assert that Brian Nelson’s translation of The Assommoir is a ‘new book’ in the sense that the panel explained it.  It is a co-creation with Zola, reworked for contemporary readers.  The most obvious aspect of this is the use of contemporary language as an interpretation of Zola’s use of 19th century French slang.  It is, as we often tag it, ‘robust’!

Reading a new translation for review has been a different kind of reading for me.  I already know this powerful story of a woman from the French underclass who starts out well but lapses into moral and financial decline, and you can read my review of the Margaret Mauldon translation here. So I was reading partly for the pleasure of re-reading, but also to note differences in the translation.  This is a kind of reading that scholars and editors do, but I don’t pretend to have that kind of expertise.  For me, comparing the text line-by-line would have killed the pleasure of reading it, but when I came across sections that seemed to me to be new or different or more modern, I compared the two texts.

But first, of course, there’s a different cover, and much as I liked the melancholy of the portrait by Edgar Degas in the Margaret Mauldon edition, ‘The Absinthe Drinker’ also by Degas more acutely depicts the sodden couple and their degradation.  They are together, and yet alone, separated by their addiction and the squalor of their lives.  To me, this new cover represents the way that Coupeau’s role in the novel and the social milieu are integral to Garvaise’s downfall, along with her own fatal flaws.

I admit to being disappointed that this new edition retains the Introduction and Notes by Robert Lethbridge.  I am unabashed fan of the clarity and accessibility of Brian Nelson’s no less comprehensive introductions, which were — from the time I first encountered the one for The Ladies Paradise — the catalyst for me to read the entire Les Rougon-Macquart Cycle.  As far as I can tell, the Introduction and Notes in The Assommoir/L’Assommoir are pretty much the same, except that quotations from the novel in the new edition use the Nelson translation, and there are amendments to some of the Notes as well. (For example, in the notes about the allusion to Pascal, mentioned on p. 89, there is additional information about the poet and song-writer Béranger as an ironic cultural counterpart.) 

There is a world of difference in the Translator’s Notes:

The Assommoir, transl Brian Nelson

L’Assommoir, transl by Margaret Mauldon

The act of translation is an empathetic act in the sense that it allows translators to become the authors they admire, to recreate through language the narratives they love. This is doubly true in the case of L’Assommoir, insofar as the central effect of the novel itself is empathy: that is to say, the reader is invited to enter the character’s world, to see and feel the world as they do. This effect is created partly by the phenomenological quality of Zola’s writing: the sensory immediacy that informs his characters’ relationship with their environment. The effect is greatly heightened, however, by Zola’s astonishing invention of a narrative voice that absorbs into itself the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

L’Assommoir is a notoriously difficult text to translate. No translation, however faithful its rendering of the novel’s gutter slang and obscenities, could possibly recreate the impact of that language on the nineteenth century reader. Today’s readers have become accustomed to slang and are no longer shocked by obscenity. It follows that much of the original of L’Assommoir to command attention by its unorthodox and audacious language is lost forever—and lost, of course, not simply in translation but to readers of the original text as well.

I see myself as a student encountering this book for the first time as a set text, and I know which one makes me want to read the book.  Not the edition that asserts a sense of loss, but the one that lures me with a promise of empathy.

So, onward with my reading of the edition that does not attempt to recreate French slang that was outmoded and obscure even in Zola’s day, but rather conveys the vigour of the original without introducing incompatible English or American connotations.  

An early example of the difference occurs when Gervaise is warding off Coupeau’s advances.  Gervaise is talking about her contemptible lover Lantier who abandoned her as soon as they got to Paris, leaving her with two small children to support: 

The Assommoir, transl Brian Nelson	L’Assommoir, transl by Margaret Mauldon
‘Don’t be silly!’ Gervaise was saying to Coupeau. ‘Sex is all you think about! Of course I loved him… But after the awful way he walked out…’ (p.34)	‘Don’t be silly! What a dirty mind you have!’ Gervaise was saying to Coupeau. ‘Of course I loved him… Only, after the horrible way he left me…’ (p.37)

Here’s another example, from the rank humidity of the laundry, where Clemence has stripped off her bodice because of the heat:

The Assommoir, transl Brian Nelson

L’Assommoir, transl by Margaret Mauldon

‘Clemence, put your bodice back on,’ said Gervaise. ‘Madame Putois is right, it’s not decent… People might start thinkin’ my shop is something else altogether.’ So Clemence got dressed again, grumbling as she did so. What a fuss about nothing! As if passers-by had never seen a pair of tits before! And she took out her annoyance on the apprentice, squinty Augustine, who was standing next to her ironing easy stuff like stockings and hankies; she pushed her and knocked her with her elbow. But Augustine, with the sly bitchiness of an ugly duckling always being picked on, got her own back by spitting on her dress from behind, without anyone seeing. (p. 125)

‘Clemence, put your bodice on again,’ said Gervaise. ‘Madame Putois is right, it isn’t decent… People’ll take my shop for something it’s not.’ So the great tall girl got dressed again, grumbling. What a lot of bellyaching! Hadn’t the passers-by ever seen a pair of books, then! And she worked off her anger on the apprentice, that cross-eyed Augustine, who was standing beside her ironing plain things like stockings and handkerchiefs, she pushed her, bumping her with her elbow. But with the peevish, shifty nastiness of an ill-favoured drudge Augustine spat on the back of her dress, without anyone seeing, in revenge. (p.139)

The songs are different too.  This one is a washerwoman’s song, capturing in the Nelson translation both the drudgery of the work and the way the women expressed their sorrows:

The Assommoir, transl Brian Nelson	L’Assommoir, transl by Margaret Mauldon
‘Thwack! Thwack! Margot at the wash…. Thwack! Thwack! Swings her beater— slosh… Thwack! Thwack! Washing from her soul… Thwack! Thwack! Misery black as coal….’ (p.28)	Bang! Bang! Margot’s wash she’s thwacking, Bang! Bang! With her beater smacking, Bang! Bang! Washing out the stain, Bang! Bang! Of her heart’s black pain. (p.31)

Of course, this is not about picking out snippets to compare a different choice of words.  For most of my reading I was wholly absorbed in the story even though I’d read it before.  I was more conscious this time of Goujet, the gentle giant whose love for Gervaise is unrequited while Gervaise refuses him from the moral high ground of ‘respectable’ marriage when really, it’s her her lazy habits and easy-going ways that keep her mired in degradation.  And —having read Nana since first reading L’Assommoir— I was more alert to the portrayals of Gervaise’s daughter in this novel.  It is quite heart-breaking to read about the birth of this child, her father’s delight and Gervaise’s prescient anxiety about the risks girls faced in a city like Paris, and then to come to the end of the novel where we see Nana beginning her life as a prostitute, entering high society in a grand carriage as her alcoholic mother dies pathetically in abject poverty.  

The new edition also has a much expanded Bibliography, and the Chronology of Zola’s life has slight differences. 

Highly recommended.

Credits:

Webinar: ‘The Art of Reviewing Literature in Translation’ (NBCC), featuring Tara Merrigan, Samuel Martin, Shelley Frisch, Emma Ramadan, Kevin Blankinship, Jeremy Tiang.

‘The Absinthe Drinker in a café’, by Edgar Degas: National Gallery of Victoria.

Author: Émile Zola
Title: The Assommoir (L’Assommoir)
Translated from the French by Brian Nelson, with an Introduction and Notes by Robert Lethbridge, and a map of the setting and a family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts. 
Publisher: Oxford World’s Classics, 2021, first published 1877.
ISBN: 9780198828563, pbk., 411 pages
Review copy courtesy of OUP, with thanks to Brian Nelson.

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers. 

Doctor Pascal, by Émile Zola, translated by Julie Rose

It was a disappointment when, back in 2016 when I read the last of Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart series, Doctor Pascal was not available in a modern translation. I ended up reading a 2012 Virago Press Kindle edition which was translated in 1898 by Mary Jane Serrano (c. 1840 – 1923).  Serrano was primarily a translator of Spanish but she also translated from French and Portuguese, and I read her translation in preference to the 1894 edition translated by Ernest Vizetelly or the Elek edition translated by Vladimir Kean in 1957.  It really is quite remarkable that it has taken so long for a modern translation to become available but Oxford World’s Classics has at last completed its project to publish the entire Rougon-Macquart series in modern translations, and Doctor Pascal is now available translated by Julie Rose with an accompanying introduction and notes by Brian Nelson.

Australian Julie Rose is a world-renowned translator of French literature.  She is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres and has translated Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, as well as works by Dumas, Moliere, Racine, and Marguerite Duras.  (See Australians lead the way in French translation (smh.com.au).  You can see the difference in style from Serrano in this excerpt:

Ah, those abominable papers! she saw them at night, in her nightmares, revealing in letters of fire, the true histories, the physiological blemishes of the family, all that wrong side of her glory which she would have wished to bury forever with the ancestors already dead! She knew how it was that the doctor had conceived the idea of collecting these documents at the beginning of his great studies on heredity; how he had found himself led to take his own family as an example, struck by the typical cases which he saw in it, and which helped to support laws discovered by him. Was it not a perfectly natural field of observation, close at hand and with which he was thoroughly familiar? And with the fine, careless justness of the scientist, he had been accumulating for the last thirty years the most private data, collecting and classifying everything, raising this genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquarts, of which the voluminous papers, crammed full of proofs, were only the commentary.    (Doctor Pascal, translated by Mary Jane Serrano, 1898, Chapter 1, Kindle Location 204)

Ah! She saw those abominable files, at night, in her nightmares, setting out in letters of fire the true stories, the physiological defects of the family, the whole seamy side of its glory that she would have liked to bury once and for all, along with the ancestors already dead! She knew how the doctor had got the idea of putting those documents together when he first embarked on his great studies on heredity, how he’d been led to take his own family as an example, struck by the recurring cases he noted in it and which supported the laws he’d discovered. Wasn’t it a perfectly natural field of observation, one right there in front of him, which he knew all about firsthand? And with the robust disinterestedness of a scientist, he had spent the last thirty years accumulating the most intimate information on his nearest and dearest, gathering and classifying everything, drawing up this Rougon-Maquart Family Tree, of which the voluminous files were merely a commentary, stuffed with proofs. (Doctor Pascal, translated by Julie Rose, 2020, Chapter 1, p.16-17

Likewise, you can see how much more readable the modern translation is in this excerpt from Chapter 2.

… Dr. Pascal had only one belief—the belief in life. Life was the only divine manifestation. Life was God, the grand motor, the soul of the universe. And life had no other instrument than heredity; heredity made the world; so that if its laws could be known  and directed, the world could be made to one’s will.  In him, to whom sickness, suffering and death had been a familiar sight, the militant pity of the physician awoke.  Ah! to have no more sickness. no more suffering, as little death as possible! His dream ended in this thought  – that universal happiness, the future community of perfection and felicity, could be hastened by intervention, by giving health to all.  (Doctor Pascal, translated by Mary Jane Serrano, 1898, Chapter 2, Kindle Location 457)

… Doctor Pascal had only one belief: the belief in life.  Life was the sole manifestation of the divine.  Life was God, the great engine, the soul of the universe. And life had no instrument other than heredity, heredity made the world; which meant that, if you could only understand it, harness it so as to control it, you could make the world however you liked. Because he’d seen sickness and suffering up close, a doctor’s militant compassion was stirring inside him.  Ah, to stop people getting sick, stop suffering , to keep people alive as much as possible.  His dream ended in the thought that you could spur on universal happiness, the future city of perfection and bliss, by intervening and ensuring health for all.  (Doctor Pascal, translated by Julie Rose, 2020, Chapter 1, p.16-17

But, as I have said so many times before when lauding this OUP series, it is not only that the new translations don’t betray Zola’s work with self-censoring excisions and abridgements or inaccuracies.  It is not only that contemporary translations avoid the florid prose of the 19th century Vizitelly editions or the dated expressions in the Elek editions.  The OUP series all come with introductions that set the series and the individual title in context.  Brian Nelson, Professor Emeritus of French Studies at Monash University and  author of, amongst other works of literary criticism, Émile Zola a Very Short Introduction (2020) has done eleven of these introductions and I credit the one he wrote for The Ladies Paradise as the catalyst for my entire Zola Project.

The introduction for Doctor Pascal introduces Zola as

…the quintessential novelist of modernity, understood as a time of tumultuous change.  The motor of change was the rapid growth of capitalism, with all that it entailed in terms of the transformation of the city, new forms of social practice and economic organisation,  and heightened political pressures. Zola was fascinated by change, and specifically by the emergence of a new mass society. (p.vii)

For those entirely new to Zola, the Introduction explains how the three branches of the Rougon-Macquart family represent layers of society in 19th century France, and how the series as a whole is an assault on bourgeois morality and institutions.  Zola was above all else, committed to the value of ‘truth’ in art and his belief that the writer must play a social role:

to represent the sorts of things—industrialisation, the growth of the city, the birth of consumer culture, the workings of the financial system, the misdeeds of government, crime, poverty, prostitution—that affect ordinary people in their daily lives.  (p.vii)

I can think of no living writer doing the same thing to the extent that Zola did.

If you’re not familiar with Doctor Pascal you can read my review to get a grasp of the novel, but to understand its place in the series you need to read Nelson’s explanation of the climate of ideas in France in the mid- and late nineteenth century.  Over the course of his career Zola weathered changes in the intellectual climate, from the middle decades of the 19th century when science not only acquired enormous intellectual prestige as the principal, or even the sole, model for the creation of true knowledge, to a reaction against it.  The entire Rougon-Macquart series is predicated on Zola’s belief in a ‘scientific’ form of realism which he called ‘naturalism’.  His characters act the way they do because they inherit behaviours from the inexorable laws of their physical nature.  So Doctor Pascal aims to counter the emerging distrust of science and the growing mood of pessimism during the fin de siècle.  

It’s also a very personal novel because it transposes intimate aspects of Zola’s own life.  Pascal, he says, is a surrogate of of Zola. 

Pascal may thus be seen as Zola’s double in philosophical, writerly and autobiographical terms.

Most importantly, Zola wanted to respond to critics who dismissed his work as morbid because of its dark themes.  He wanted to demonstrate his essential optimism, i.e.  a myth of catastrophe is opposed by a myth of hope. 

The translator’s note clarifies how much I missed by reading an earlier translation.  (I’ve pruned this a little to avoid spoilers.)

Both Serrano and Vizetelly cut sexual material from the text.[…] Yet even Kean, cutting nothing and writing with such uninhibited modernity, can be censorious, as when he described the doctor’s ‘sordid escapades with the first loose women he met’ in Marseilles, adding the adjectives ‘sordid’ and ‘loose’ and thereby providing a judgement Zola carefully refrains from making.  (p. xxii)

In my previous reading of Doctor Pascal, I had missed entirely a significant aspect of the relationship between MaÎtre Pascal and his disciple Clotilde. 

Julie Rose thanks Judith Luna as the guiding spirit of the Zola retranslation program for Oxford’s World’s Classics, and I do too.   It’s a different book when it’s translated for our times.

Author: Émile Zola
Title: Doctor Pascal Translated by Julie Rose (2020)
Introduction and Notes by Brian Nelson (2020)
Cover illustration: detail from Sous la lampe, 1887, by Marie Bracquemond
Publisher: Oxford World’s Classics, OUP (Oxford University Press), 2020, first published in 1893,
ISBN: 9780198746164, pbk., 296 pages (not including the Explanatory Notes at the back of the book)
Source: Review copy courtesy of OUP.

Cross-posted at  ANZLitlovers

Emile Zola, a Very Short Introduction, by Brian Nelson

There are good reasons to read this book: if you know nothing about Émile Zola, Brian Nelson’s Very Short Introduction will convince you to add Zola to your TBR; and if you’ve read Zola in a general reader’s kind of way, the VSI enhances your knowledge of the author and his books, making you want to read or re-read more of this author.

This VSI also explains why you might not want to read the Rougon-Macquart cycle in the chronological order that I used, because themes reveal themselves differently if you read the novels in publication order.  The VSI also provides the historical context for the novels in a way that you might not have understood if you don’t have the OUP editions with their excellent introductions.  (Some of the novels were not available in OUP editions when I first started reading Zola, a problem since rectified.  See my post ‘The Art of Book Introductions, or Why You Should Always Buy the Oxford Editions of Zola’.)

Brian Nelson, Emeritus Professor of French Studies and Translation Studies at Monash University here in Melbourne, translated some of the recent editions of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and wrote the introductions.  His style, as you will know if you have read the OUP editions that he translated, is clear, free of pedantry and academic jargon, and easy for a general reader to enjoy.  I was really pleased to add this edition to my collections of VSIs.

Zola, (1840-1902) like his predecessor Balzac (1799-1850), used storytelling to examine his society, but Zola’s focus was the changing cultural landscapes of the late 19th century.  He was a novelist of modernity driven by industrial capitalism.  He was interested in the new shapes of the city, new forms of social practice and economic organisation, and the heightened political pressures of the era.  One of the innovative features of his novels is the portrayal of crowds, a feature of the emerging mass society.

Committed to a literature of truth, and to a new freedom of expression, he introduced a new realm of subjects: urban poverty and the working class; class consciousness and class relations; sexuality and gender.  Truth, for him, was not just a matter of personal integrity, but also an aesthetic principle.  He believed in telling it like it is, with no aspect of human experience out of bounds.  He believed [and I do too] that a writer plays a social role.  What Zola shows is the lives of ordinary people but within the context of change: how they were affected by the growth of the city, by the abuse of power, by the growth of consumer culture, by banking, crime, poverty and prostitution.

His style was not documentary but ironic and satiric.  Zola was provocative, combative, critical and subversive.  He was the most criticised and maligned writer of his day, but also the most popular.  Today he is recognised as a narrative artist, a craftsman, a storyteller and a fabulist.

Chapter One delves into Zola’s research methods and his narrative genius.  His best works, says Nelson, are visionary.  They employ poetic character with movement, colour and intensity.  His descriptions are more than just that—they eclipse human beings to express a vision and magnify the material world.  An example from The Ladies Paradise is the cascading images and rising pitch in the description of the department store sales which suggest loss of control, the female shopper’s quasi-sexual abandonment to consumer dreams while mirroring the perpetual expansion that defines the economic principles of consumerism. [And it’s still very relevant today.  Reading this novel and Brian Nelson’s introduction to it redefined my understanding of the way marketing works and I am a cannier shopper for that.]

The predominant feature is Zola’s oeuvre is the machine, in entities that function like one: the department store, the mine, the stock exchange.  He also uses his theme of heredity selectively to create a sense of doom, like an ancient curse.  But running through all his works is a mythopoeic vision, not just parallels between his characters and figures from classical mythology, but also influencing the narrative patterns of his novels.

There is the origin myth of the first novel of the series, The Fortunes of the Rougons; the myths of hell and the universal flood in Germinal; the myth of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge in The Sin of Father Mouret (La Faute de Abbé Mouret, 1875); the myth of Man’s lost majesty in The Sin of Father Mouret and L’Assommoir; the myth of the Eternal Return in Earth; the myths of Catastrophe and renewal in the later novels of Les Rougons-Macquart, from Nana onwards. (p.9) [I’ve reviewed all these, see here, but I didn’t recognise this aspect of the oeuvre.)

Chapter Two traces Zola’s career as a writer before he began the Rougons—I was interested to see that he learned the art of self-promotion at Hachette but he over-stepped the mark with Claude’s Confession, his second novel about a prostitute.  As an art critic he made himself notorious in the art world stoush over Impressionism v classical painting, but he also learned from Manet his guiding aesthetic, i.e. to look at life like a modern painter.

Novels which are discussed in detail in the VSI include

• The Belly of Paris (Chapter 3) from his ‘angry young man’ period;
• L’Assommoir (Chapter 4), the scandalous first great novel of working-class life;
• Nana (Chapter 5), about a prostitute whose life span symbolises the disfigurement of French society from the coup d’état in 1852 to the declaration of war against Russia which signalled the collapse of Empire;
• The Ladies Paradise (Chapter 6): a transitional novel, from the private lives of the bourgeoisie in Pot Luck to a new optimistic focus on progress which depicts the Darwinian struggle between small business retailers and the new new phenomenon of the department store;
• Germinal (Chapter 7) is about class conflict and the struggle between capital and labour, which Zola foresaw would be the most important question of the 20th century. But it’s also a novel about the importance of working-class leadership: Zola was well aware of the risks of muddled thinking and patchy reading and the consequences for demagoguery;
• Earth which Nelson thinks is one of Zola’s finest achievements, demolishing the myth of the inherent goodness of peasants and depicting them as they really were, primitive and insular in a harsh environment.  Their savage, sometimes murderous attachment to land is an anti-pastoral.

Chapter 9 introduced me to novels I haven’t read: the more mythic Three Cities trilogy (about a priest who loses his faith) and the unfinished quartet of the Four Gospel novels (exploring a secular replacement for Christianity). In this later period—amid the ideological shifts in la fin de siécle—Zola’s themes were life and death, creation and destruction, degeneration and renewal.  But his signature naturalism began to be rejected, Catholicism was on the rise and there was pessimism about the nation’s future.  Nelson says that some of these are more like tracts.

And then Dreyfus affair overshadowed everything else.  This VSI has one of the best and clearest explanations of this affair and its long-lasting effects on France.  And he also says that it may well have led to the probable poisoning of this genius of French literature.

Author: Brian Nelson
Title: Émile Zola, a Very Short Introduction
Oxford Very Short Introductions Series
Publisher: OUP (Oxford University Press), 2020
ISBN: 9780198837565, pbk., 144 pages including

• A chronology of Zola’s life and works
• References
• Further reading, and
• Index

Review copy courtesy of Oxford University Press.

Available from Fishpond: Emile Zola: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers

(Re-reading) His Excellency Eugène Rougon (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon) by Émile Zola, translated by Brian Nelson

I have been re-reading His Excellency Eugène Rougon (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon) because I have a lovely new OUP edition, translated by Brian Nelson.  I’m not going to review the novel again because I’ve already reviewed the Vizetelly translation as part of my Zola Project to read the entire Rougon-Marquet series, but I do want to comment about why it’s so much more enjoyable to read a new edition than a freebie from Project Gutenberg.

I admire the whole concept of Project Gutenberg, and I’ve read plenty of their titles that I couldn’t otherwise source. The wonderful team of volunteers at PG have saved many titles from oblivion, and these titles are free, which makes them accessible to all budgets. But there are limitations with some titles, and the Vizetelly translations of Zola’s novels are particularly problematic…

I call them Vizetelly translations, but actually, Vizetelly was the publisher and although Brian Nelson says in his Translator’s Note that His Excellency was translated by Henry Vizetelly’s son Ernest in 1897, Wikipedia says that it’s not known who the translator was. That’s probably just because WP hasn’t caught up with the scholarship, but it is true that Gutenberg editions sometimes don’t #NameTheTranslator because translators weren’t acknowledged in the original editions. In the case of Zola, it may be that anonymity was desired, perhaps by a lady translator, because Zola was considered salacious and as Vizetelly learned to his cost, it wasn’t just risky for a lady’s reputation… there were worse consequences than that.

Henry Vizetelly (1820-94) was fined and imprisoned for three months in 1889 over the publication of La Terre, which was considered offensive. Subsequent editions of all of Zola’s novels were heavily edited by his son Ernest Vizetelly (1853-1922) in order to avoid further prosecutions. (Source: The Books of Émile Zola)

In the case of His Excellency the 1897 translation is after Henry’s gaol term, so it falls into the category of ‘heavily edited’.

So it’s not just that contemporary readers of Vizetelly have to adjust to reading a 19th century English version of 19th century French. It’s also that the novels were self-censored, as it were. Sometimes this prudishness doesn’t much matter. The missing details of Clorinde in scandalous (un)dress holding court to a coterie of admiring men while an artist paints her as Diana the Huntress, are hardly significant. OTOH readers would understand something completely different about a lovers’ relationship from Nelson’s use of the word ‘enslavement’ when referring to a woman wearing a dog collar and a badge inscribed with ‘I belong to my master,’ compared to Vizetelly’s coy ‘servitude’. Even though I read the Vizetelly back in 2014, I became quite adept at identifying text that had been cut or sanitised. ‘I bet that’s not in Vizetelly!’, I found myself saying, and each time I was right.

But also, there are details which make no sense to a modern reader without explanatory notes. For example, when Rougon is being told about a plot to assassinate the emperor, his informant suddenly says:

‘It’s planned for tomorrow night… They aim to assassinate Badinguet outside the Opera, as he is going in.’ (p.185)

Huh? thinks the modern Australian reader, who is this new character Badinguet and what has he got to do with anything? The Gutenberg edition on my Kindle leaves me none the wiser, but Brian Nelson’s Explanatory Notes helpfully explain that Badinguet was a derisive nickname for the Emperor. Louis-Napoleon had made two unsuccessful attempts at a coup before his triumphant third attempt, and was imprisoned after the second one. He escaped in disguise as a labourer by name of Badinguet. It’s not just a clever bit of French history thrown in at random: Zola is showing that this Emperor is still widely held in contempt.

I don’t often re-read books but this new translation based on the original French was a real treat. Extra features of this edition which enhanced my reading so much compared to the Kindle edition of the Vizetelly translation, include an Introduction; the Translator’s notes; a Bibliography, a Chronology of Zola’s life, and a Family Tree of the Rougon-Macquart, and Explanatory Notes.

PS I should add that there was a 1958 translation by Alec Brown for Elek Books, but my experience with Brown’s translation of La Bête Humaine was that it was utterly unreadable so my advice is to avoid Brown’s translations at all cost.

Author: Émile Zola
Title: His Excellency Eugène Rougon (Son Excellence Eugène Rougon)
A new translation by Brian Nelson
Publisher: Oxford World’s Classics, OUP (Oxford University Press), 2018, first published in 1876, 333 pages (not including the Explanatory Notes)
ISBN: 9780198748250
Review copy courtesy of Oxford University Press.

Available from Fishpond: His Excellency Eugene Rougon (Oxford World’s Classics) and from OUP. (Not the easiest site to navigate to find the rest of the Zolas, but if (from the Oxford World’s Classics home page) you click on Show More, and then Click on View All Titles, and then choose search ‘from Z to A’ all the Zolas in OUP editions come up, one after the other.)

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers.

His Excellency Eugène Rougon: Zola (new translation by Brian Nelson)

A few years ago I completed Zola’s 20 volume Rougon-Macquart Cycle. As I worked my way through the 20 books, I came to the conclusion that some would forever have a place on my-best books of all-time list: The Kill, Nana, L’Assommoir, PotLuck, Money, Earth, The Ladies’ Paradise, Debacle, His Excellency, The Masterpiece, while others were bridge-books and not so memorable. At the time only some of the books were available in new or newish translations, and that left me with the 19th century Vizetelly translations. I don’t intend to knock the Vizetelly translations as the Vizetellys believed in these books, tried to publish them and were heavily penalized for their efforts.

When I discovered the shocking fact that many of the 20-volume cycle hadn’t been re-translated since the 19th century, I thought that the reason these books hadn’t been re-translated had to be because they were the minor novels in the series. But as it turns out, my theory wasn’t correct.

That brings me to the new translation of His Excellency Eugène Rougonfrom Brian Nelson. Nelson has previously translated the following novels in the series:

The Fortunes of the Rougons

The Ladies’ Paradise

Earth

The Kill

Pot Luck

The Belly of Paris

I’m excited about this translation as His Excellency Eugène Rougon is due for a reread, and what better reason than a new translation. If you want to read my review of the book, it’s here, but this post is about translation.

The main character, power-hungry Eugène Rougon has a certain attitude towards women:

Vizetelly translation:

“Yes, beware of women,” Rougon repeated, pausing after each word so as to glance at his papers. “when a woman does not put a crown on your head, she slips a halter around your neck. At our age a man’s heart wants as carefully looking after as his stomach.”

Brian Nelson translation:

“Yes, be very careful with women,” Rougon repeated, pausing after every word as he peered in a file. “If they’re not putting a crown on your head, they’re slipping a noose round your neck… At our age, a man should look after his heart as much as his stomach.”

Perhaps those two quotes don’t seem so different at first glance, but I read them both several times. In the first quote, the word “halter” evokes the imagery of a man being controlled whereas in the second quote, “noose” implies a much more terminal position. Plus then there’s that last line … “a man’s heart wants as carefully looking after as his stomach,” versus “a man should look after his heart as much as his stomach.” The matter of who is doing the care-taking of the heart is not in question in the Nelson version, as we would expect with Eugène Rougon, whereas the Vizetelly version implies that a woman could perhaps be taking care of the heart and the stomach which is in complete contradiction of Rougon’s speech.

But here’s a meatier quote:

Vizetelly translation:

“What had first attracted him in Clorinde was the mystery surrounding her, the story of a past-away life and the yearning for a new existence which he could read in the depths of her big goddess-like eyes. He had heard disgraceful scandal about her–an early love affair with a coachman, and a subsequent connection with a banker who had presented her with the little house in the Champs-Elysees. However, every now and then she seemed to him so child-like that he doubted the truth of what he had been told, and again and again essayed to find out the secret of this strange girl, who became to him a living enigma, the solution of which interested him as much as some intriguing political problem. Until then he had felt a scornful disdain for women, and the first one who excited his interest was certainly as singular and complicated a being as could be imagined.”

Nelson translation:

“What attracted him in Clorinde was the quality of the unknown, a mysterious past, and the ambition he thought he could read in her big, dark eyes. Frightful things were said about her–a first attachment to a coachman, then a deal with a banker, rumoured to have paid for her false virginity with the gift of a house on the Champs-Élysées. On the other hand, there were times when she seemed such a child that he doubted these stories. He swore he would get the truth out of her himself, and kept going back hoping to learn the truth from the strange girl’s own lips. Clorinde had become an enigma which began to obsess him as much as any delicate question of high politics. He had lived his life thus far in disdain of women, and the first woman to whom he was attracted was without doubt the most complicated creature imaginable.”  *(and there’s a note here that Clorinde was modeled on the real-life Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione)

Comparing the two, IMO, the Nelson version is much smoother and also much more effectively conveys Rougon’s fascination with Clorinde. Significantly, Clorinde’s sexuality is absent from the Vizetelly quote. Back to censorship and what the Vizetellys had to deal with. Zola’s incredible, unforgettable characters are human beings who experience great passions: whether is be the passion/obsession for power, money, revenge, or sex, and it’s a shame  crime against literature that the Vizetellys were forced to tone down their translations. Henry Vizetelly was convicted twice for obscenity when he published versions of Zola novels. But that was the 19th century, so I’m going to celebrate the 21st century with a re-read of His Excellency Eugène Rougon.

Review copy

The Art of Book Introductions, and why you should always buy the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Zola

I like Book Introductions. I find them very helpful when I’m reading classic literature, especially if the book is from a less familiar culture or an historical period I don’t know much about. I like it when an expert puts the work in context for me, and draws my attention to aspects of the novel that I might otherwise miss. But it is always a matter of judgement whether to read the Introduction before reading the book, or afterwards.  And if I decide that the work merits reading it with some understanding of its context and features, I get very snaky indeed if the Introduction reveals spoilers.

One could argue that anyone who reads an Introduction beforehand does so at their peril.  But I think that the best writers of Introductions don’t ruin things for their readers, and if they must reveal some crucial plot point in order to discuss the novel, they signal it properly in time for the reader to decide whether to continue or not.

At the beginning of the Brian Nelson’s Introduction in the Oxford World’s Classic edition of his translation of Zola’s The Fortune of the Rougons, there is this clear warning:

Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword.

Yes, this brings me to the Introductions in Oxford World’s Classics.  My Zola Project took me two years to complete, and I read a variety of editions to achieve it.  I read some Elek editions with their lurid covers from the 1950s, a couple of American editions with unfortunate translation issues, a dog-eared old Penguin, and – worst of all –  a couple of archaic self-censored editions from the 19th century publisher Vizetelly (who was scared of being locked up for obscenity that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow now).  When I could get my hands on them, I read modern Oxford World’s Classic editions but alas, at the time I was reading my way through The Rougon-Maquart Cycle, OUP hadn’t issued editions of the whole series.  As time went by, however, my reading coincided with the release of new editions, and OUP kindly sent these new editions to me as they were published.  One (La Débacle) was a welcome reissue of an edition that had gone out-of-print (and all I’d been able to get hold of was an ancient library copy), but the others were beaut new translations which enhanced my reading of Zola enormously.  But even when I’d already read the novel in some other edition, I kept the OUPs to read the Introductions, with the intent of also re-reading the novel in due course.

Reading Brian Nelson’s Introduction to The Fortune of the Rougons is a real treat.  Nelson is Emeritus Professor of French Studies and Translation Studies at Monash University, and he is IMHO the best translator of Zola, effortlessly capturing the nuances of dialogue amongst the different classes as the Americans don’t seem to be able to do.   I never imagined that one day I would become a fangirl of a translator, but it is such a pleasure to read Nelson’s translations that I find it difficult not to gush when I meet him at Translation events with AALITRA (the Australian Association for translators, who put on occasional events that are of interest to readers of translations like me).  And he is so knowledgeable about French culture and history of the 19th century that his Introductions are gems, as I first discovered when I read The Ladies’ Paradise.

Nelson’s Introduction to The Fortune of the Rougons  begins with a general introduction to Zola as the Balzac of his era and includes a helpful summary of the way the characters of this novel all become protagonists of novels in the rest of the series.  If you can’t remember where Angélique Rougon ends up, page viii tells you that her story is The Dream and lists all the others as well. There is also an explanation of Zola’s ‘scientific observation’ and his poetic vision, which is important to understand when you encounter the criticism that his naturalism was considered ‘putrid’ by some of his contemporaries. There is a warning not to skip Zola’s celebrated physical descriptions [despite the occasional temptation to do so] because they express the very meaning, and ideological tendencies of his narratives.

… the originality of Zola’s fiction lies in its remarkable symbolising effects.  Emblematic features of contemporary life – the market, the machine, the tenement building, the laundry, the mine, the apartment house, the department store, the stock exchange, the theatre, the city itself – are used as giant symbols of the society of his day. Zola sees allegories of contemporary life everywhere. (The Fortune of the Rougons, translated by Brian Nelson, Oxford World’s Classics, 2012, p.xi)

I wish I’d realised this right at the beginning of my Zola Project when I read my first Zola, Germinal!

There’s also a very helpful section on the historical and political themes in the series, and in The Fortune of the Rougons in particular.  French history in this era is very complicated yet in a masterful page and a bit, Nelson manages to explain how Louis-Napoleon’s seizure of power was achieved by fraud, duress and murder, but it had the overwhelming backing of the French people. With respect for Nelson’s warning about spoilers, I shall say no more, except to note that reading this Intro four years after reading the book brings it to life again before my eyes.  And as it happens I have a spare copy of this edition, and for readers with an Australian postcode who have read thus far, a giveaway copy is available and all you need to do is say that you want it in the comments and it will be yours.  (First in, best dressed, as we say!)

In 2017 Oxford World’s Classics published The Sin of Abbé Mouret with an introduction by Valerie Minogue who also did the translation.  Minogue is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Wales, Swansea, co-founding editor with Brian Nelson of the journal Romance Studies, and co-editor of the Emile Zola Society Bulletin. I had already read the 1969 Prentice-Hall edition translated by Sandy Petrey, (complete with a dustjacket that gives away a good part of the plot) and you can read what I thought about the translation in my review.  But you will also see from that review that I was floundering with the change in Zola’s approach in this novel, and that I did find Petrey’s Afterword helpful.  But Minogue’s Introduction is more expansive.  I was especially interested in the explanation about the research that Zola did for his priest-in-love novel.   

He studied the Bible, the Catholic Missal, and the methods and teachings of the seminaries.  He went to Mass and made detailed notes on clerical dress and accessories, and the whole complicated choreography of the ritual.  He read L’Imitation de Jésus Christ, the fifteenth-century Catholic devotional book generally attributed to Thomas à Kempis, and the accounts of saints and martyrs that were part of the education of would-be priests.  He read the Spanish Jesuits on the cult of Mary, as well as general works on the Church and the priesthood. (The Sin of Abbé Mouret, translated by Valerie Minogue, Oxford World’s Classics, 2017, p. ix).

If that ain’t authorial dedication to research, I don’t know what is!  (I can’t help imagining the disapproving looks of the parishioners as they see Zola scribbling away in his notebooks at Mass!!)

What is also revealing is Minogue’s suggestion that the theorising Zola is overtaken by the creator in this novel and how his interest in contemporary art in the era of the Impressionists influenced his aesthetic.  I hadn’t noticed either, as I read on through the series, that the best of Zola’s priests turn away from the Church and become parents and reformers rather than priests.  Another snippet of interest is that Zola’s disapproval of celibacy came at a time when there was serious concern in France about the declining birth rate.  And I also like the feminist slant on the characterisation of Rosalie as a valuable commodity.  Again the Introduction comes with a warning about spoilers, so again I shall confine myself to saying that this novel is first on my list for re-reading in due course.

Second on my list for re-reading is Germinal, the first Zola that I read, in a battered 1969 reissue of the 1954 Penguin edition, translated by L.W. Tancock.  The reissued 2008 Oxford World’s Classics edition from 1993 is translated by Peter Collier, with an introduction by Robert Lethbridge (who also wrote the splendid Introduction for the OWC edition of La Débâcle.) OUP sent me this one right at the beginning of my Zola Project but I’d already read Germinal and put it to one side to read the others in the series first. I should have paused to read the Introduction anyway because it begins like this:

Germinal is a resonant title, in every sense.  Fifty thousand people followed behind Émile Zola’s funeral procession on 5 October 1902, and among them a delegation of miners from the Denain coalfield rhythmically chanted, ‘Germinal! Germinal!’ through the streets of Paris.  Even today, the novel has a special place in the folklore of the mining communities of France. (Germinal, translated by Peter Collier and an Introduction by Robert Lethbridge, Oxford World’s Classics, 1993, reissued 2008, p.vii)

Can you imagine miners in Australia in procession behind an author’s cortege?  Perhaps that’s because no one has written a novel that speaks to them as Germinal did for the miners of France.  (Has Thomas Keneally done so?  Or maybe David Ireland?)

Lethbridge goes on to explain other resonances that I did not know about from reading Tancock’s somewhat discouraging Introduction in the Penguin edition.  I’m sure Tancock didn’t mean it to be, but after beginning with a quotation from André Gide that says Germinal is one of the ten best novels in the French language, he goes on to devote an entire paragraph to criticism of the novel as unsubtle and crude, oversimplified and melodramatic, psychologically rudimentary and improbable not to mention bestial and insulting to our dignity as human beings, its language coarse and obscene, its style repetitive and emphatic.  And while he goes on to be patronising about the critics who say these things, he seems blissfully unaware that he’s adding to the damage himself! I suspect that Tancock was an old Tory because he’s not happy about Zola’s ‘socialism’ and he rants on about how Zola painted inaccurate pictures of industrial conditions which took no account of things that had ‘been put right’.  Tell that to modern-day miners, still working in perilous conditions and not just in China – as the recent Pike River disaster in New Zealand and the Beaconsfield Mine Collapse in Tasmania show.  Anyway, enough about him… Tancock was a product of his Cold War times.

Lethbridge explains that

‘Germinal’ was the name given to the month of April in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, when those convinced that 1789 marked a new beginning had recast the calendar, starting with year 1.  More precisely, it was on 12 Germinal year III that starving Parisians staged a famous uprising against the government of the Convention. (ibid, p.vii)

Perhaps this is information known to every French schoolboy but it was news to me, and of course it adds immeasurably to understanding the novel.  (BTW this edition doesn’t come with a spoiler warning).  Lethbridge tells us also that Zola knew it was prophetic of ‘the twentieth century’s most important question’, namely the conflict between the forces of modern Capitalism and the interests of the human beings necessary to its advance.  (As it turns out, that question is just as relevant in the 21st century, if not more so, given that there’s no socialist alternative to offset unbridled capitalism and many people are finding that their working conditions are bearing the brunt of it.) And far from being inaccurate about mining conditions, Zola had visited industrial unrest in the Valenciennes area in 1884, and found himself struck not so much by the violence he’d read about in the press, but by chilling resignation and despair.  What Zola found in the region close to the Belgian border was human suffering in contemporary form.

Zola’s stance is ultimately to be located between compassion and an awareness of fatalities which combine to render almost insignificant the vicissitudes of individual lives (on both sides of the class struggle). (ibid p. viii)

Lethbridge goes on to discuss the debate about whether Germinal is a reactionary or a revolutionary work but he says it is a timeless work and one of the finest novels ever written in French. 

I like the way Lethbridge clarifies Zola’s problematic interest in biological imperatives, (something I have sometimes mocked in my reviews).

By tracing the destiny of a single family and its descendants, Zola felt he could give due weight to biological imperatives lent intellectual credibility in France by the 1865 translation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. That is to suggest neither that Zola uncritically subscribed to theories of heredity being popularised at the time, nor that these are systematically illustrated in his Rougon-Maquart novels.  Preliminary notes for the series as a whole, drawn up in 1868-9, make it clear that he considered heredity a conveniently scientific substitute for the outmoded concept of Fate. (ibid p.ix)

The sections that outline Zola’s thinking as he worked his way through the Rougon-Maquart cycle are fascinating, showing that rather than being circumscribed by its origins in specific events of 1869 or 1884 [the Anzin miners’ strike which Zola also observed first-hand], the novel accommodates the conflicts of the century extended, by a process of repetition, from 1789 onwards. Lethbridge says that in this way this novel of the working class brought together his reflections on two decades of militant socialism neither checked by, nor limited to, a failed revolution. 

Lethbridge’s is such a very good Introduction that I am not surprised that OUP felt no need to commission a new one for their reissue.

I do hope that I have convinced would-be readers of Zola’s Rougon-Maquart Cycle that the OUP editions are the ones to read, not only because the translations are infinitely better than anything else I found, but also because the Introductions will add to your enjoyment of the novels and the series.

Cross-posted at ANZLitlovers.

 

L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop) by Émile Zola. Translated by Margaret Mauldon

L’Assommoir is a stark, emotional story of one woman’s struggle to find happiness in working-class Paris. The seventh title in Émile Zola’s 20-novel cycle about the Rougon-Macquart families, it ultimately cemented Zola’s position as a leading European author although at the time of its publication in 1877 it was hugely controversial.

French conservatives, sensitive to the political implications of the novel, accused Zola of grossly exaggerating the fetid, crowded, unsanitary conditions inhabited by his characters. Zola insisted that his depiction was authentic. It was, he said ‘the first novel about the common people that does not lie’, because it was based not only on his own detailed observations of the lives of the working class but on extensive research of medical texts on the effects of alcoholism.

Zola said his purpose in writing the novel was to show how the fate of the individual is governed by hereditary and environmental forces outside his control. No matter how hard they try, they cannot escape the moral flaws passed down through the generations and the dehumanising effects of the slum conditions that were the product of rapid industrialisation.

His main focus in L’Assommoir is Gervaise Macquart, a laundry worker treated brutally by her lover Lantier and then deserted by him, leaving her and her two children destitute. Eventually she finds a new life with the roofer Coupeau, gives birth to a daughter Nana and begins to dream of owning her own laundry. A loan from a neighbour who is secretly in love with her enables to achieve her ambition. Through determination and hard graft, she makes it a success.  Fate of course has something other than happiness in store for her. Copeau lets his attention slip one day and falls from the roof. Though he survives, he is disabled.  No longer able to resume physical work he spends his days drinking rot gut at L’Assommoir bar. Gervaise’s desire for the good things in life lead her to overspend and from there into a cycle of debt, squalor and despair from which there seems no way out.

The power of this novel comes from the way Zola commands our sympathy for this woman, showing the gulf between her modest dreams and the reality of her life.  Towards the end of the book she reflects what had been her ideal:

To be able to get on with her work, always have something to eat and a half-decent place to sleep, bring up her children properly, not be beaten, and die in her own bed.

Instead she ends up sleeping in filth in a courtyard that feels like a cemetery,  starving battered by her husband and alone, her daughter having become a prostitute.

Although we as readers keep hoping against hope that she will gain happiness, there is a sense of inevitability that this will never be the case given Zola’s view of the world.  His main characters have, like the great tragic heroes, a fatal flaw. A tainted inheritance is repeatedly invoked as a factor that loads the dice against he characters  efforts to avoid a  virtually preordained degeneration. Copeau becomes an alcoholic just as his father did, and also like him, suffers a similar accident. Gervaise, abused by her partners just as her mother was, has a physical defect also in the form of a limp.  Weakened by their inherited flaws, these figures are powerless against the forces of the poisonous atmosphere of their slum neighbourhood.

The world of open sewers and overflowing drains, of the stench of unwashed bodies and discharges from slaughterhouses, that is their mileu are guaranteed to crush the human spirit in Zola’s view. In the preface to the novel he declared:

Intoxication and idleness lead to a weakening of family ties, to the filth of promiscuity, toe the progressive neglect of decent feelings and ultimately to degradation and death.

My characters are not bad, they are only ignorant and ruined by the conditions of sweated toil and poverty in which they live.

Pessimistic yes. Grim, assuredly. But it’s in Zola’s ability to force us to confront the reality of life at a particular moment in time as seen through one woman’s experience, that the enduring power of this novel lies.

Cross-posted at BookerTalk’s blog as part of the Zola Project 

Great news! New editions of Zola titles

Readers who followed my Zola journey will know that there were some titles in the Rougon-Macquart cycle that were hard to find, and #BeingPolite there were others that needed a modern translation.

The standard, for me, was set by Brian Nelson’s translations for Oxford World’ Classics: not only were the translations very good, there were also excellent introductions which enhanced my reading of the series.

Well, I was delighted yesterday to find two new editions in my postbox: La Débâcle, translated by Elinor Dorday – a title which was out of print and very hard to find – has been reissued by Oxford World’s Classics, and *drumroll* they have also issued a new translation of The Sin of Abbé Mouret.  It’s by Valerie Pearson Minogue, who also translated the recent edition of Money in 2014.

As usual in this series, the cover art comes from French artists.  The image on the cover of La Débâcle is a detail from Artillery Skirmish in the Forest during the Siege of Paris by Édouard Detaille, and Cézanne is featured on The Sin of Abbé Mouret with a detail from Forest Interior, 1898-9.

Both titles are available now and you should be able to find them on any online site or in good bookshops.

As I’ve said before, I know that you can find free versions of Zola’s novels online, but if you can afford it, buy these OWC titles, they really will enhance the reading experience for you.

‘Paris’ by Émile Zola

Image source: scan of personal copy

Paris is the last volume in the Three Cities trilogy and was first published in 1898. After the struggle I had with the previous volume, Rome, (see here and here) I did wonder if I would ever finish the trilogy; but I have. Even the first volume in the series, Lourdes, was a bit of a struggle. The main character throughout the series is the Abbé Pierre Froment, a priest who no longer retains his faith, and although Zola makes us sympathise with Froment’s predicament we know right from the start that he will end up leaving the church; it just takes so bloody long for it to happen. The whole series is seriously flawed, in my opinion, Lourdes would have worked better as a piece of journalism, Rome should have been abandoned completely, although a short story could possibly have been salvaged from it, and Paris, which was the best of the three, would still have worked better without Pierre’s struggle with his faith.

Paris opens with Pierre agreeing to take some alms from Abbé Rose to a former house painter, called Laveuve, who is on the verge of starving to death. Abbé Rose is being watched by his superiors as his persistent alms-giving is starting to annoy the church hierarchy. Pierre agrees to take the few francs to the man and visits Laveuve in his working-class slum. Pierre witnesses many scenes of poverty which Zola describes ruthlessly. Pierre enquires with a family as to the whereabouts of Laveuve, whom they know as ‘The Philosopher’. Pierre eventually locates him in a nearby hovel.

Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve’s unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, deformed by hard toil, lamed, worn to death, and now only good for the knackers.

Pierre not only delivers the alms from Rose but he also spends the rest of the day trying to get Laveuve admitted into the Asylum of the Invalids of Labour by using his connections with the wealthy people on the board of the organisation. Zola here presents the high-society of Paris, particularly the Duvillard’s family and friends; the Baron Duvillard is a banker involved in an African Railway scheme and his wife, Eve, does at least want to help Pierre. But he’s passed around from person to person, none of whom are willing to help him directly. In the end all his efforts are in vain as Leveuve dies before any decision can be made. He is disgusted with himself that he had allowed his hopes to rise once again, to hope that he could actually help people with charity, and as a result his doubts return.

He had ceased to believe in the efficacy of alms; it was not sufficient that one should be charitable, henceforth one must be just. Given justice, indeed, horrid misery would disappear, and no such thing as charity would be needed.

Pierre is then witness to an act of terrorism as he notices a man, Salvat, whom he had seen when visiting Laveuve, meet Pierre’s brother, Guillaume. Salvat walks away to the Duvillard’s mansion, followed by Guillaume, who is followed by Pierre. Pierre watches Salvat enter a doorway and is soon seen running from the building; Guillaume enters the building and there follows an explosion. Pierre helps his injured brother get away and lets him stay at his house to recuperate. The only casualty of the bomb is a young servant girl.

Pierre and Guillaume, who had been estranged, now become better acquainted and Pierre gets to know both Guillaume’s family and his revolutionary friends. Guillaume is a chemist who had been working on a new explosive and Salvat had managed to pilfer some of this when he was working briefly for Guillaume. The rest of the novel now concentrates on Pierre’s complete disassociation with the church and his appreciation of Guillaume’s scientific and atheistic outlook on life. Pierre is completely astonished and then smitten by Guillaume’s fiancée, Marie, who seems to embody the best of this new, more open, outlook to life. Now that Pierre has lost his faith in God he seems to find a new faith in some sort of scientific positivism, whereby all the problems of the world are going to be solved by socialism, science and work. This was no doubt close to Zola’s personal views but it certainly seems to be highly unrealistic to a modern reader. I wonder how the contemporary reader would have found these arguments? It is strange that all the political talk about socialism and anarchism concentrates on Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon et al. rather than Marx, Engels, Bakunin et al.; it’s almost as if a hundred years of political thought meant nothing to Zola.

There is a lot more in this novel as well; there’s the manhunt of Salvat as well as his public execution; the threat of terrorism; there’s Zola’s look at bourgeois society and its decadence at the end of the nineteenth century by portraying political, financial and moral corruption; there’s the joys of cycling (for men AND women); the joys of marriage and fatherhood. Unusually for Zola this novel has a very positive, almost utopian, ending, predicting the downfall of Catholicism and the rise of Science and Justice.

Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility!

I wonder what Zola would have made of the world today?

The novel ends with the whole family looking out over a Paris bathed in golden light from the setting sun. Marie holds up her son, Jean, to look at the sight, promising him that he’s going to reap the benefits that Science and Justice are going to bring. Jean would be aged sixteen in 1914.

This was cross-posted on my blog Intermittencies of the Mind.

A New Book About Zola…

There is a new book about Zola coming out in 2017. The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case by Michael Rosen will be published by Faber on 5 January, and you can read the author’s summation of it at The Guardian.

Update 18/2/21 Jonathan has reviewed this book here.