by Emile Zola
For ordinary people (pace many linguisticians and others suffering from a surfeit of structuralism and certain other isms), important though background is, a novel stands or falls to a great extent by its plot and its characters, both of which must carry conviction. The point of departure of the plot is elegantly simple: an old peasant, Fouan, who has coveted and tended his acres like a man in love with a woman but has become too feeble to continue to look after them properly, decides to divide his land between his three children, so that it will continue to be well farmed. He is to receive from them a pension in return. Two of them, his daughter Fanny, who has already made a good match with a farmer, Delhomme, possessing more land than most, and his good-for-nothing drunkard of an elder son, whose beard and hair have earned him the ironical nickname of Jesus Christ, accept their share immediately; the third, Buteau (a name connoting, in the French buté, bloody-minded pigheadedness) for a while refuses, claiming that he has been diddled in the drawing of the lots. From the moment he dispossesses himself, Fouan's fate is sealed: a man without land is a man of no account. Only Delhomme pays him his pension regularly; Jesus Christ never pays him a penny and indeed sponges on him, as well as selling off his share of the precious, hard-earned family land to outside buyers – a heinous crime in such a close-knit community. Buteau eventually takes up his share when the building of a road enhances its value; he also marries his cousin Lise (by whom he has already had a son a couple of years before) because her land runs with his. Buteau is the real anti-hero of the novel: a bully like his father before him, he is also a randy goat, soon eager to add Françoise to his harem, not only because he lusts after her but also to maintain control of her land. He is also wily and a blatant and unrepentant liar, but he has redeeming qualities: he works like a slave – and indeed, like so many of the characters, he is a slave to the land – and he has a blunt joviality and sly sense of humour, even though his grin comes from a mouth framed in the ferocious jaws of a gorilla.
The heroine counterpart to Buteau is his cousin Françoise. It is notoriously difficult to make jeunes filles interesting, for ‘nice’ girls tend to be colourless: but Lise's sister Françoise is far from this. Her distinguishing characteristic, apart from the fresh beauty of her face and her sturdy peasant body, is a sense of justice, largely lacking in the other, completely utilitarian characters, except perhaps in her husband Jean, who, as an outsider, is relatively uncorrupted by the meanness and single-minded egocentricity of the peasantry. Yet even Françoise, as she lies dying, with her belly and unborn child slit by being thrown, deliberately and impulsively, by her sister Lise onto a scythe blade, refuses to make a will in her husband's favour, as in all fairness she should. Why should this be? Zola, like all good novelists, leaves an area of ambiguity: perhaps it is because she has discovered that she loves Lise's husband Buteau, perhaps because Jean is an intruder with no real right to Fouan property? Certainly it is a free personal choice and we are left in doubt as to the outcome until her last breath; we cannot feel that she has been entirely determined by either heredity or environment.
The main plot of the novel thus follows Fouan's downward path. When his wife dies, partly as a result of her son Buteau's brutality, he goes to live with Fanny but cannot bear the constant pinpricks of her cheeseparing meanness; from there he goes on to the Buteaus where he is at first fêted like a lord, for, well-treated, he could prove a profitable milch-cow. However, things go wrong when he takes Françoise's part against the lecherous Buteau, who is pestering her with his far from delicate attentions (he enjoys taking handfuls of her pubic hair). So Fouan moves to Jesus Christ's subterranean hideout in the tumbledown cellars of the old castle, only to move out again in terror when his host and particularly his daughter La Trouille institute hair-raising methods of surreptitiously searching not only his clothes but his body in an endeavour to uncover a packet of bonds that represent his nest-egg, saved from a lifetime of toil. He goes back to Lise where, after a vain attempt to assert himself and a dreadful experience (Zola had King Lear in mind) of exposure to the elements, he is reduced to impotent sullen silence until, enraged at his refusal to die and terrified because he had witnessed Françoise's murder, Lise and Buteau smother him and burn his body to make it appear accidental death: a scene all the more macabre in that, halfway through the burning, Fouan briefly revives and, from his eyes set in his charred face, glares with hatred at the criminal pair. Over-melodramatic? Perhaps: yet at about the time that Zola was launching into his novel, in the autumn of 1886, the trial took place at Blois of a man and his wife accused and found guilty of having thrust the wife's mother into the fireplace and holding her there, alive, until she had burned to death – a cause célèbre that Zola could hardly fail to know.
The most illustrious member of this respected Rognes family, which she terrorizes, is old Fouan's sister, Marianne, nicknamed La Grande, so despicable a matriarch as to be almost a caricature: her eyes are like a vulture's, her skeletally thin body shows no trace of her gluttony, and her cold-hearted implacability and meanness are such that when her daughter marries for love against her will and dies leaving two orphaned children, Palmyre and Hilarion, she refuses to have anything to do with them and, despite her relative wealth, lets them subsist in squalor and destitution. Hilarion, a deformed village idiot, is kept alive by his saintly sister, who accepts the hardest tasks in the fields and at the markets to provide for the two of them until, in one of the many unforgettable scenes in the book, she falls exhausted to the ground while harvesting and lies dead, crucified beneath the implacable sun. Her brother and lover (she has given him her body, since no one else could be expected to do so) howls like a dog for the whole night following her death, while La Grande seizes her chance of unpaid domestic labour to take him into her household as a beast of burden. Finally, infuriated as she belabours him for his clumsiness, he attempts to rape her (she is now in her late eighties) and has his skull split open with a cleaver for his pains. At the end of the novel, La Grande survives, serenely convinced that she has many years to live (and we feel she may be right), happy in the thought that she has, in any case, devised such an intricate will that the Fouan family will be at each other's throats for many a long year, enriching the lawyers by trying to sort out its complications.
A notable family, of which one further scion must be briefly mentioned: Fouan's son Jesus Christ does not follow in the family footsteps: he is an amiable, soft-hearted, drunken, lazy, greedy layabout of a poacher, obviously intended to supply some light relief. For example, though having few moral principles himself, he becomes infuriated when his (illegitimate) daughter sleeps around (being kind-hearted like her father) with the lads of the village; he then punishes such a blot on the family escutcheon by pursuing her across country with a horsewhip – a fine object lesson on the lack of deterrent power of corporal punishment. But Jesus Christ's outstanding and most amusing quality is his controlled anal flatulence, monumental in its proportions; he uses it to enliven parties, wins a competition against a presumptuous bumpkin from another village, and on one occasion produces so quintessentially concentrated a fart that it floors a bailiff's man like a gunshot. Zola has let his Rabelaisian imagination run riot, no doubt once more to provide some humorous counterpoint to the grimness of other members of the family.
There are numerous secondary characters, many of whom serve a similar funny or ironical purpose. Such are the Charles, rich retired townsfolk, highly regarded in the village, who are bringing up their granddaughter, as they had brought up their daughter, according to the strictest moral principles in a convent: it so happens that the source of all their considerable wealth (far greater than any peasant could hope to earn by a lifetime of toil) is a family brothel in Chartres. Zola's touch seems a trifle heavy here and the conversion of the shy, blushing virginal granddaughter into an assured married woman, highly efficient as a brothel-keeper, seems oversudden and implausible. Similarly the ‘Cognet girl’, Jacqueline, who from being the skivvy becomes the m
istress of Hourdequin, representative of the progressive large farmer interested in new ideas of chemical fertilizers' and machinery, seems almost too much of a nymphomaniac to be true. Zola still had a tendency to see the Scarlet Woman around him, a tendency which only vanished when he had established, a couple of years later, his liaison with his own servant, Jeanne Rozerot.
There are many other vivid, concretely realized, minor characters. We see the comical drunken gamekeeper and bell-ringer Bécu, the constant drinking companion, ironically enough, of the professional poacher Jesus Christ, who enjoys also the favours – perhaps services is the better word, for she is extremely ill-favoured – of the skinny Madame Bécu. There is Berthe, the daughter of one of two feuding innkeepers and their warring wives, nicely contrasted, one nastily bitchy, the other sluggishly apathetic – the lads of the village call her Berthe Not Got Any, for she is rumoured to be bald in parts hardly ever hairless, at least not in western Europe. How do they know, we wonder? And talking of fur, we must not forget that most human of animals – far nicer than some of the villagers – the intelligent donkey Gideon, who can open doors and knows that a good bucketful of wine is well worth drinking, even if it leads to his making an exhibition of himself in front of the shocked hypocritical Charles.
At the more respectable end of the scale there is the likeable priest Godard, the apoplectic and kind-hearted curé of a neighbouring parish ruthlessly exploited by the parishioners of Rognes, too mean to pay for a priest of their own and basically quite indifferent to religion or indeed God, yet insisting on his offering them regular Mass as well as providing them with church christenings, weddings and funerals. Poor Abbé Godard! His Daughters of Mary are continually becoming pregnant… One of them goes off to Paris and becomes a successful high-class tart, although there are hints that she finishes up in hospital with an assortment of nasty diseases. Indeed, although the villagers of Rognes are depicted so unflatteringly, Zola seems to give the impression that both those who leave the village and those who come in from outside are less admirable or vigorous characters than those who, so to speak, grin and bear it. The rather cocky Nénesse, Fanny Delhomme's son, who goes off to the city and ends up as the Charles' son-in-law running the brothel, is far less sympathetic than the honest, bullet-headed Delphin, who stays on the land; the craven, seedy bailiff's man is no match for generous-hearted Jesus Christ, scoundrel that he is; even Jean Macquart himself, gentle, rather clumsy and easily led, is pale beside Françoise and Buteau. Country folk may be dreadful: but here beats a mighty heart that, after all, keeps the whole of France alive with its produce.
So we find in La Terre a lively canvas, grand and broad, peopled by characters who can be almost heroic in their evil and, certainly, humorous in their humanity, and who often have something of each; but is this splendid canvas, worthy of Hieronymus Bosch or Bruegel, painted in over-sombre colours? Or worse, is Zola's picture of French peasants under the Second Empire so nasty as to be obscene? Many of his contemporaries thought so, and while the novel was still appearing in serial form five of his naturalist colleagues and acquaintances launched their celebrated manifesto in which, while quite reasonably exposing some of Zola's more pretentious scientific claims, they attacked him hip and thigh on other grounds. His observation, they cried, was superficial and his technique was out of date. His narrative style was common and flat – they failed to realize that rhetoric or other fine writing needs to be deliberately eschewed in such a slice of life. But above all, they thought, Zola had descended to such depths of filth that La Terre read at times like a collection of scatology. They charitably attributed this wallowing in dirty rubbish first to Zola's kidney trouble, secondly to his excessive chastity (this seems a very French argument) and thirdly (this is perhaps where the shoe really pinched) to his successful preoccupation with writing books that would sell – near-pornography is obviously a means of achieving this end. In this connection, it is amusing to note that one of the signatories of the Manifeste des cinq had recently written a book on the long taboo subject of masturbation.
However, our times are less innocent or less hypocritical than the 1880s. No one is likely to be greatly shocked by La Terre, which is no more scandalous or obscene than daily reports of happenings in our free media, read by millions. Indeed, from the beginning there were percipient critics who brushed aside the manifesto and, ignoring the brutishness of certain scenes (for when people are treated like animals they will behave like them – or worse), they drew attention to the many positive aspects of the novel: the epic grandeur of the theme of birth and death and rebirth; the sharpness of Zola's observation of people and things; his sombre but intelligent appraisal of so many social, economic and political aspects of the nineteenth century – even if his chronology was faulty, for the sixties were in fact a time of prosperity, not of hardship, for French farmers.
Almost all critics use the term epic of this novel; some – including that outstanding doyen of Zola studies in England, Professor Hemmings, and the equally outstanding French Zola scholar, Guy Robert, who set the standard for all future Zola criticism in his masterly La Terre d'Emile Zola – have gone so far as to apply the adjective tragic to it. I find it difficult to agree: certainly the novel arouses pity but tragedy implies a tragic flaw in a character punished with undeserved severity. But how could Fouan, loving the land and unable to till it, do otherwise than divide it amongst his children? He did it, in fact, with his eyes open and his children, as it happened – particularly Buteau – were as mean and brutal and ruthless as old Fouan himself is described as having been in his youth. Françoise, too, brings her own fate on her head and she is shown as realizing this herself by refusing to break the unwritten family pact of solidarity and make a will in Jean's favour. In a word, all these characters are so much of the earth, earthy, so much part of the soil, that there can be no question of tragedy, perhaps barely even of pity. With the land, with the soil, everything that is has to be: a hailstorm is a hailstorm, just as rape is just rape and incest just incest – both shown, indeed, as the almost everyday occurrences that they may well be for peasants, events more common than people think, if less common than people say. All these things are built-in necessities of an existence in bondage to that hard and impartial taskmistress, Mother Nature – a taskmistress whom the peasants are shown, rightly or wrongly, as unwilling to exchange for any other.
Nor is everything in the novel pathetic squalor, although any joy is usually sensual rather than spiritual: the peasants can no more afford love than they can afford religion and their relationship to the land is certainly utilitarian rather than aesthetic. But the peasant has other qualities and other rewards. His toil, if it provides little pecuniary reward, receives some compensation from the rich yellow soil of Beauce and the golden glow of its wheat. And if life connotes death, in between the two there is room for many things, not all physical misery or sexual indulgence: there is courage and deep moral satisfaction, and if the novel strikes many a chord of harsh pessimism, it ends on a heroic note; for in the last chapter, in early spring, after old Fouan's grotesque funeral, with its ludicrously petty and superstitious squabbles about the siting of his grave, the reader's eye, like Jean Macquart's, is seized by the green expanse of winter wheat and, as at the beginning, the peasants, like tiny insects dwarfed by the boundless horizon of Beauce, are once again, as they always have done and always will do, making the eternal gesture of the sower casting the good seed on the land.
In retrospect, we can now see that Zola stood at the right point of time to produce what is certainly a masterpiece. Under the influence of realism – the desire to depict, in painting and literature, the hitherto neglected lower-middle and working classes in all their contemporaneity – the urban and rural proletariat had become an accepted subject. Such a depiction, which aimed at objective impartiality, was certain to appear both unflattering and bold: middle-class critics were bound to hold up their hands in horror at, for example, a writer who not only wrote about coitus
interruptus, but described it in some detail – despite the fact that it must have been a universal practice as the poor man's contraceptive, and an important one when sex was the only free pleasure. So despite academic reservations about the solidity of his research, Zola's detailed, concrete and vivid observation – not necessarily, be it noted, of significant detail but frequently of meaningless detail, all the more effective and real because of its apparently random nature – creates a solid, satisfying effect of immediacy and plausibility. We feel that any appeal to the heroic or to our pity springs from the plain, unvarnished nature of the tale: we might be reminded of Courbet's paintings of the rural proletariat, such as the Casseurs de pierres, crouched and awkward at their toilsome yet so necessary task. And this is, I think, ultimately the sort of general image that remains with the modern reader, long after many details have faded from his mind; not so much the set passages, sometimes a trifle ponderous, but the honest, relatively balanced depiction, in its unspoken heroism as well as in its inevitable wretchedness, of a class that is at last granted citizen's rights in the serious novel. How true is this imaginative picture? Let us leave the last word to the inhabitants of Rognes/Romilly themselves. Zola's son-in-law went back there fifty years after the publication of La Terre. Were they appalled by the picture Zola had painted of them? Not at all: they knew the work well, they could quote episodes from it. Nowhere did he meet anyone who felt that Zola had blackguarded him and he adds, perhaps maliciously, that if nobody thought of recognizing himself in the novel, people were very ready to discover in it portraits of their neighbours…
