by Emile Zola
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE EARTH
EMILE ZOLA, born in Paris in 1840, was brought up at Aix-en-Provence in an atmosphere of struggling poverty after the death of his father in 1847. He was educated at the Collège Bourbon at Aix and then at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. He was obliged to exist by poorly paid clerical jobs after failing his baccalauréat in 1859, but early in 1865 he decided to support himself by literature alone. Despite his scientific pretensions Zola was really an emotional writer with rare gifts for evoking vast crowd scenes and for giving life to such great symbols of modern civilization as factories and mines. When not overloaded with detail, his work has tragic grandeur, but he is also capable of a coarse, ‘Cockney’ type of humour. From his earliest days Zola had contributed critical articles to various newspapers, but his first important novel, Thérèse Raquin, was published in 1867, and Madeleine Férat in the following year. That same year he began work on a series of novels intended to follow out scientifically the effects of heredity and environment on one family: Les Rougon-Macquart. The work contains twenty novels, which appeared between 1871 and 1893, and is the chief monument of the French Naturalist movement. On completion of this series he began a new cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894–6–8), a violent attack on the Church of Rome; this led to yet another cycle, Les Quatre Évangiles. He died in 1902 while working on the fourth of these.
DOUGLAS PARMÉE studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, the University of Bonn, and the Sorbonne. After serving in RAF Intelligence, he returned to teach at Cambridge, where he was Fellow and Director of Studies at Queens' College. He now lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He has written widely on French studies, notably on 19th and 20th century French poetry; he is also a prize-winning translator, mainly from French and German. His other translations in the Penguin Classics are Maupassant's Bel-Ami and Fontane's Effi Briest.
ÉMILE ZOLA
THE EARTH
[La Terre]
TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
DOUGLAS PARMÉE
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation first published 1980
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Copyright © Douglas Parmée, 1980
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-0-14-193320-7
INTRODUCTION
ÉMILE ZOLA (1840–1902) first planned his vast cyclical series of novels, under the title histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire, in the late sixties of the last century. While Balzac's Comédie humaine cast its vast shadow over the project, Zola's cycle, concerning five generations of the Rougon-Macquart family, was intended to be much more overtly and consciously ‘scientific’. He had been greatly attracted to the ideas of the positivist philosopher Hippolyte Taine, who particularly stressed the influence of the physical over the psychological. Taine's conclusion that there are three main determinants of personality – la race (heredity), le milieu (environment) and le moment (not only the moment of time but the dynamic momentum of an age) – was eagerly accepted by Zola; and later on, under the influence of the great French physiologist Claude Bernard, he entertained far more nonsensical ideas, for example using the novel as a sort of laboratory to prove certain hypotheses. Fortunately, by the time he came to write La Terre, these scientific enthusiasms had considerably waned and despite the fact that a closed, materialistic agricultural community offered great scope for the observation of heredity and environment, Zola managed to resist this obvious temptation. The most superficial reading of his novel makes it plain that psychology is not ruthlessly sacrificed to physiology and that many, indeed most of his characters, despite the material pressures, lead vigorously independent mental and moral lives, often of considerable subtlety. The image of Zola as a depicter of mindless automata is sheer myth.
The idea of a peasant novel seems to have come late to Zola. His preliminary project on the cycle makes no mention of such a work nor is there any trace of it in the first genealogical tree in 1878. The family's representative in La Terre, Jean Macquart, was originally intended to figure only in La Débâcle, a later novel dealing with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71; indeed, in the last chapter of La Terre he is seen deciding to join up and ‘bash a few Prussians’, though in the event he is the one who is bashed. Readers of La Terre who find him interesting – and Zola did his best not to make him too much of a pure accessory, even though he still seems rather unresolved – may like to know that he recovers from his wounds and in Le Docteur Pascal, the last novel of the series, he goes back to the land – in the less bleak region of Provence – remarries and rears a family. In La Terre, he has one distinguishing moral quality: unlike almost all the others, he is shown as capable of tenderness, in his relation with his future wife Françoise; as Jean is very much the outsider in this village community, is there not a suggestion here that tenderness is a luxury that peasants cannot afford? Be that as it may, the link between La Terre and the rest of the series is a tenuous one and the novel seems all the better for the fact that Zola steers clear of too much science and gives freer rein to his imagination.
Not until 1880, then, do we first find mention of La Terre, when at its very conception he announces that it is going to be his favourite work. His confidence was well-founded. By 1880 he had already written nearly half of his cycle, covering such fields as provincial life (Plassans, alias Aix-en-Provence); political intrigue in Paris; les Halles, the Parisian central food market (in his younger years Zola was something of a gourmand and his description of piles of French cheese is mouth-watering); the Parisian slums (L'Assommoir) and the life of high-class prostitution (Nana). Both of these last novels obtained such a succès de scandale that he would have been silly not to realize the market value of squalor and eroticism, and such considerations cannot have been completely absent from his mind in writing La Terre. However, before La Terre was published, he was to write five more novels, including studies of the urban middle classes, of artistic circles (which cost him the friendship of his old friend from Aix, Paul Cézanne) and also perhaps his best known work, Germinal, a novel situated in a northern French mining village. In a word, he had ranged very widely and was a master of his craft.
This craft was that of the naturalist, and it is in this light that we must now examine La Terre. Leaving aside the scientific pretensions already mentioned, naturalism in the novel revolves around one main concept: impartial truth to life through documentation. It is incumbent on the naturalist to acquire, from all sources – books, people, direct experience – all the knowledge indispensable to the content of his novel: as Zola wrote, ‘Take what you know as a starting-point, firmly
establish the terrain on which you'll be working.’ Only from such a foundation can a novelist exercise his true creative function. How thorough, how systematic and how impartial was Zola in acquiring this knowledge? Our first answer, on the evidence available, is simple: he was not impartial, only partly systematic and his thoroughness was far from scholarly. To counteract such deficiencies, it must be added that he had two outstanding gifts: a genius for noting detail and a powerful creative imagination that could dispense with scholarly thoroughness. As far as knowledge of the peasantry was concerned, he had also a great number of excellent cards in his hand. He had grown up in the provinces, having spent his childhood in Aix-en-Provence. His mother came from a country family settled on the borders of Beauce and Zola speaks of listening avidly to his grandfather's conversation about this region – a factor that may well have weighed with him in his final choice of scene for the novel, after he had rejected certain other parts, such as Brittany, which he described as ‘too dismal’. With hindsight, however, we can see how Beauce exactly fitted his bill, with respect to covering as broadly typical a canvas of peasant life as possible and suggesting the general through the particular. Quite apart from its convenient proximity to Paris, Zola found, when he went there for a few days in May 1886 with his plans for the novel already well advanced, precisely what he had hoped for: a smallish village beside a river (Romilly, which became Rognes in the novel), close to a market town (Cloyes in the novel but with similarities to Châteaudun) in which he could set up his middle-class characters, such as a doctor, a veterinary surgeon and a tax-inspector (taxes are very important for smallholders) as well as magistrates and law courts (for the law also plays a big role in La Terre). In Beauce there was a wide variety of farmers – large ones, some of them absentee landlords, struggling share-croppers, tenant farmers and peasants, smallholders scratching a laborious living, sometimes from a couple of acres or less of land – and many types of farming – sheep-rearing, small dairy-farming, forage crops and, most important, wheat, the very staff of life, for Beauce was the vast granary of France. There was another crop, smaller in extent but an equally important pillar of French society: the grape. So we find Bread and Wine almost as two protagonists of the novel. The latter in particular provides a lot of good, clean (or at least, not very dirty) fun in the novel: no reader can fail to be fascinated by the chapter devoted to the grape-picking scenes, when the laxative effect of eating too many grapes causes as many petticoats to be lifted as does, later on, for different reasons, the fuddling effect of drinking their juice. Chartres was also near by and useful to Zola not, oddly enough, for its superb cathedral but because it was large and, with its garrison, busy enough to support a brothel or two, which Zola reconnoitred during his visit. Zola's determination to make the novel not unrelievably gloomy is shown, incidentally, by his description of the Beauceron as ‘gay’, hardly the impression left by a first quick reading of the novel, despite the many moments of rather coarse fun.
Zola had already had far more direct and prolonged contact with French country manners and customs before his brief Beauce trip, although his notes from that trip show much acute and relevant observation. In 1877, following the resounding success of L'Assommoir, he had bought a large house in Médan, a village of less than 200 inhabitants, near Paris but not yet engulfed in the suburbs of the capital. He was henceforth to spend up to six months or more there every year. In 1881 he became for a short while (like a number of the characters of La Terre) a municipal councillor, although frequently an absentee one. There were farmers on the council and it is interesting to know that during his tenure of office there arose, as in La Terre, a question of building a new road and compensating owners for their expropriated land. Zola speaks of the secretiveness and suspicion of the local peasantry and of having as a result to resort to culling information and gossip from his servants. In his preliminary plans, we even find him using one or two local names for his characters.
All in all, therefore, his direct knowledge of French country life was not inconsiderable and probably superior to that of the background of any of his other novels in the series. His documentation from secondary sources is not easy to evaluate. He certainly consulted, if only cursorily, three or four general works on the history of French agriculture and rural population, one of which provided the basis for the long account of the French peasant through the ages (the symbolic Jacques Bonhomme) that occupies such an important position towards the end of the first part of the novel and is clearly intended to place his characters in their proper social, economic and psychological perspective. But it is significant that the work shown by his notes to have most impressed him was a chapter from the very jaundiced Pensées, published in 1886, of an Abbé Roux, concerning his parishioners in a little village in the Corrèze. The similarities between Roux's peasants and Zola's are striking: they are tough, harsh and ungrateful, concerned solely with their own short-term interest, understanding only coercion and thus kowtowing to any established authority, superstitious, barely Christian though perhaps deists, childish, deceitful, stoical, mean and greedy (if someone else is paying): in a word, completely self-centred. Such nasty characteristics are understandable in a context of unremitting toil and grinding poverty. Roux's influence is significant, first because it is living source material about aspects of character – already the very stuff of a novel – and secondly because his disabused opinions chime in completely with Zola's temperament, for we must not forget that, despite his insistence on documentation, Zola defined the work of art as un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament.
There remained one further type of source for the indefatigable Zola: direct discussion, through personal contact and correspondence. One of his important sources here was an interview which he engineered with the leading French socialist of the time, Jules Guesde, who enlightened him on many matters that recur constantly in the novel: the dangers inherent in the French system of inheritance, which led to ever-increasing subdivision of the land; the threat of imports of wheat and meat from the vast prairies of North America, undercutting the French market; the reluctance of the French peasant, because of conservatism, lack of capital or the poor profitability of his small plot, to embark on modern methods; in general, the precariousness of the peasants' lot and the miserable rewards for their endless toil. All these are constant threads throughout La Terre and there are at least three exponents of left-wing ideas in the novel: the republican ‘Jesus Christ’, still fired by the ideals of the 1848 Revolution; his buddy, the extremist Canon; and the frustrated, bullying schoolmaster who reveals himself at the end as the most anarchistic of all. Zola is obviously determined to offer not only an historical perspective but glimpses of much broader problems that give an important extra dimension to La Terre, absent from many others of the cycle: a sense not only of the past but also of the future, giving an impression of timelessness in human affairs and matching the perennity of natural phenomena.
Not that Zola was unaware of the importance of le petit fait vrai to lend verisimilitude. Both his earliest notes for the novel and his observations from his trip to Beauce deal with just such petty yet indispensable details: peasants coming out with their lamps to inspect the damage after a hailstorm; a woman and a cow giving birth simultaneously; a father chasing a wayward daughter with his whip; the colour and texture of the soil; the changing light over the plain: all most important to ensure concreteness and vividness. In such a vast work, however, breadth and vigour of imagination, combined with meticulous planning, are equally important assets.
His planning was both broad and precise, as we can learn from his vast wad of notes for La Terre held in the Paris National Library. He starts from the grand premise that the heroine of the novel is Mother Earth herself, in all her moods, and he divides his work into five parts, covering a time-span of some ten years, into which he introduces every aspect of country life: the whole cycle of the seasons with their agricultural counterparts, starting with an autumn sowing a
nd ending with a spring sowing, with, in between, all the manifold seasonal activities of manuring, reaping, haymaking, sheep-shearing and grazing, cattle-breeding, vine-growing, wine-making, all measured against the human cycle of birth, marriage (the first often precedes the second) and death, with the accompanying country events of markets, fairs, weddings, feasts, wakes, funerals and odd festivities that can only be described in the most familiar terms as booze-ups and blow-outs; village pump politics with their envies and jealousies and the basso continuo of crass self-interest; economics – chemicals versus old-fashioned muck (not only animal muck); machinery (liable to break down) against manual labour – the latter generally prevailing, for it is as cheap as muck in family farming; and finally politics, both national (protectionism versus free trade) and personal (the hated institution of ballot for conscription into the army and various ways of avoiding it). All this takes place against the essential backdrop of the weather, devastating hail and murderous summer heat, pallid springs and gorgeous Indian summers, chill winter rains and parched dusty autumns.
Stated in these terms, the novel sounds too carefully organized, but in fact Zola never works abstractly and all these aspects are realized in terms of human character: as Zola himself said, ‘I want to write the living poem of the Earth; but in human terms, not symbolically.’ For example, it is during the famous episode of autumn sowing that Jean first meets his future wife Françoise, accompanies her back to the farm and watches her take hold of the bull's pizzle and direct it into the cow – an episode that predictably aroused the ire of the prudish; and haymaking, with its mixture of toil and excitement and languor, is the occasion for Françoise, sweating and smelling of hay and odor di femmina, to jump down from a stack into Jean's arms, making him for the first time conscious of his desire for her, which grows into love; and during the threshing of the wheat by Françoise and Buteau, the rhythmic beating of their flails and pounding of their hearts smelts them into a single person long before Françoise has the ecstatic realization, after he has raped her, that he is the man she loves. So the set-pieces are also functional, even although we become a trifle bored with being told of the flatness and boundlessness and fertility of Beauce (Zola is rather heavy-handed in his attempts at being poetical); but it is also worth remembering, if we find some repetitiveness in description and in reference to events, that La Terre first appeared in serial form and this inevitably leads to repetition from one episode to the other.
