The Fighter_Literary Essays

by Tim Parks

  It must be a provocation, the reader decides, all the more so because the novel is the sixteenth in the great twenty-tome cycle Les Rougon-Macquart, in which Zola narrated the fortunes of two families with quite distinct hereditary traits over five generations throughout the life of the Second Empire. The novel that immediately precedes The Dream, The Soil, offered such a harsh picture of peasant life that some of Zola’s warmest admirers drew up a manifesto repudiating him and had it published in Le Figaro. In this author’s world view, we tell ourselves, the dream will always be brushed aside by brutal reality, ironised, crushed. Be prepared for a surprise.

  There are few novels in which I have had so much difficulty getting my bearings as The Dream. It is only when you are some way into the book that you appreciate that this disorientation is exactly the effect Zola is after. Yet the story opens in absolutely standard nineteenth-century fashion: a date – Christmas Day 1860 – a place – Lower Picardy – and above all an orphan girl freezing to death in deep snow at the locked door of an ancient cathedral. In fact, so conventional is the image that you can’t help suspecting a touch of parody. The dying girl looks up to see that around the arch above the lintel are depicted the sufferings and miracles of the child martyr St Agnes, culminating in the representation of a little girl being raised into heaven in a halo of glory and receiving a kiss of eternal happiness from her saviour and betrothed, Jesus Christ himself. This is laughable.

  Yes, but Zola wants us to take it seriously. Inevitably the girl is rescued. One fears some cruel exploiter of childhood innocence, the kind of selfish monster that inhabits The Soil, but Hubert and Hubertine are professional embroiderers, the kindest and most honest of people, who live in a house incongruously attached to the cathedral and spend their lives embroidering religious images on church vestments. Needless to say, they are childless. They believe they are cursed by Hubert’s dead mother who didn’t consent to their marriage. They decide to bring up the girl, predictably named Angelique, as an apprentice. Okay, it’s a fable, you decide.

  Utterly uninterested in any form of learning, Angelique falls in love with a book called The Golden Legend, a compendium of fantastic accounts of the saints’ lives. Zola seems to be having almost too much fun here as he lists the mortifications and miracles that fascinate the young Angelique: ‘A virgin ties her sash around the neck of a statue of Venus, who falls into dust. The earth quakes … executioners ask to be baptised … kings kneel at the feet of saints, who, dressed in rags have married poverty … St Germanus sprinkles ashes over his meals … St Bernard cares not to eat but delights only in the taste of fresh water … St Agathon keeps a stone in his mouth for three years … Molten lead is swallowed as if it were ice-water …’1 This goes on for quite a few pages until we hear that, in response to these tales, Angelique was eager to convert men to Christ and be arrested for it so that she could be ‘fed in prison by a dove before having her head cut off’.2

  Yet precisely the mad abundance of these stories, their grotesque and wayward fantasy, reminds us that Zola didn’t invent them. Written in the thirteenth century, hugely popular by-product of a delirious Christianity, The Golden Legend is as much part of the real world as the mineshafts so meticulously described in the author’s great novel Germinal of some years before. Zola has done his research. Like the gothic cathedral where Angelique was found and the wonderful embroideries that the young girl is learning to create, these stories are part of Christian culture and have a powerful hold on the mind. The most lush and lyrical descriptions of angels and saints lovingly recreated in green and gold tapestries are accompanied by detailed accounts of how such images are actually produced, of Angelique’s mastery of this or that technique, the needles she uses, the different threads, the way the fabric is tensed. Fantasy is bodied forth in art by a mixture of practical skill and an individual imagination that taps into collective archetypes. Realism, even naturalism, must take note.

  Not too far into the book, Zola contrives to let the reader know that the mother who cruelly abandoned Angelique is a member of the Rougon family who appeared earlier on in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. The girl has thus inherited a capricious, headstrong character. In combination with the religious environment she grows up in, the saints’ legends and the embroideries, this streak in her nature gives birth to a dream. It is the dream of all young girls in all fables: she will meet a fabulously wealthy prince; they will fall in love at first sight; they will marry.

  Precisely at this point, when you feel you have got a handle on the book – fantasy framed by realism – when you begin to fear that, whether fable or parody of fable, the story is going to be nothing more than a depressing account of the ingenuous girl’s inevitable disappointment as she engages with reality, The Dream surprises us. In some remarkable scenes Angelique, by sheer force of will it seems, conjures her prince into being. There are footsteps outside her window. She listens. There is a shadow moving in among the trees. The girl’s mind, like her needle, works and works. She creates. The shadows gather substance. There is a man, young and handsome, her prince no less, Felicien. It is as if the hierarchy of categories one had expected from Zola – dreams circumscribed by reality – were inverted. Reality is generated from dreams. Quite suddenly, we are reading the work of a mystic. There are lines in these descriptions that might be taken from the Vedic texts.

  At the same time, the dream itself takes on a deeper seriousness. Behind the story of the orphan girl who marries the prince lies the tale of St Agnes who marries her maker, and, more generally, the radically egalitarian vision of Christian idealism in which God accepts the church as his bride and every believer is equal before the Almighty. What we are talking about, in short, in the girl’s dreaming, is an immense act of will to cancel out the distance between the ideal and the real. It is the same act of will that drives all Christian humanism. When she and Felicien have married, Angelique decides, they will use his wealth to eliminate poverty in the world, once and for all. And now we remember that, as well as being an apparently pessimistic purveyor of determinism, Zola was also, rather paradoxically, a passionate defender of human rights and social justice: a dreamer, no less. He is on the girl’s side. And so are we.

  But can it happen? Can a poor little orphan marry her prince in a recognisably real world where Zola will never forget to tell us that the roof tiles of the cathedral date from the reign of Louis XIV and that Angelique is only two hours from Paris by rail? The Dream is a story full of twists and turns. A far greater writer than his theories would lead us to suppose, Zola overwhelms us with an abundance of description that oscillates between fantastical lyricism and meticulous realism, with plenty of rather wry psychological analysis to hold the two extremes together. Occasionally all these elements fuse, as when the young lovers meet for the first time in a field by a stream where the girl is trying to stretch out wet laundry to dry on the grass in a strong wind. Felicien offers to help, putting stones on the corners of sheets and underclothes that won’t stay still. Thus, as the lovers exchange their first words and glances, the whole world seems to be blown about in a beautiful scene, simultaneously real and surreal, and open to all kinds of interpretations.

  But the place where the ideal and the real, the fantastical and the prosaic, most convincingly overlap is in the church, the great cathedral that occupies such a huge space in the book. It is here, in tapestries, paintings and sculptures, that the collective imagination, inspired by the Christian message, has depicted a world made perfect in miracles. Readers should keep an eye, in particular, on the imposing door to the church. It is across that threshold that one passes from an imperfect world of contingency into a sacred space where dream and reality are reconciled. It is in that doorway that Zola’s story begins, with the little girl freezing to death in the snow, and it is there, in a more remarkable and dramatic scene, that it ends.

  A Matter of Love and Hate

  * * *

  [World Cup Football]

  HELD EVERY FOUR years, the
World Cup for Association football is now the world’s largest sports event after the Olympics. The present competition brings together thirty-two countries each of which has already survived a ferocious selection procedure. Even countries like the USA, where soccer is not one of the most popular sports, have made a huge effort to be present. It was not always thus.

  Largely responsible, in the second half of the nineteenth century, for inventing the modern game of football, and again for having taken the sport all over the world, the English nevertheless chose not to participate in the formation of the International Football Federation (FIFA) in 1904, nor would they go to the first three World Cup competitions arranged for the sport in 1930, 1934 and 1938. In its official history, the English Football Association now describes that decision as ‘a monumental example of British insularity’.1 But perhaps it would be more useful to see the refusal as betraying a tension between competing visions of the role of team sports in modern society and, at a deeper level, of conflicting attitudes towards the whole issue of community and group identity.

  After all, the English had long ago set up the first ever ‘international’ game between themselves and Scotland and by the turn of the century were regularly playing Wales and Ireland as well. Such encounters within the United Kingdom were necessarily galvanised by ancient rivalries and resentments. Adrenaline ran in rivers. Indeed, a hundred years later the annual England–Scotland game would have to be discontinued because of fan violence. What on earth would be the point, the English FA must have asked itself in 1930, of embarking on a three-week ocean voyage to Uruguay to play the likes of Brazil and Czechoslovakia?

  Rarely articulated in the media, the ‘insular’ attitudes that inspired the English FA in the early part of the century are still thriving, and nowhere more so than Italy whose sense of nationhood often seems to depend more on a series of ancient internal quarrels between erstwhile city states than on any sense of imposing itself on the outside world. In this regard the country is not unlike those families who are immediately recognisable as such because so intensely engaged in arguing with each other. In his speech to the nation on New Year’s Eve 1999, the Italian president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, spoke of ‘Italy, land of a hundred cities, that unites love of my hometown with love of my country and love of Europe.’2 On the website of Hellas Verona, the soccer club of the small town where I live, a fan signing himself Dany-for-Hell@s.it chose to respond in decidedly football terms with a list of all the opposing teams any Hellas fan necessarily hates: ‘Italian unity = Roma merda, Inter merda, Juventus merda, Milan merda, Napoli merda, Vicenza merda, Lecce merda. Need I go on?’3

  Always a favourite to win the World Cup, Italy thus often seems lukewarm and ambivalent towards its national team. At a recent local game, more than one fan told me they would be rooting against the national side during the World Cup. ‘The national team is made up of players from the big clubs, Juventus and Milan and Inter Milan. We can’t hate them all year round and then support them in summer just because they’re playing for Italy.’

  The word ‘hate’ turns up in private conversation in relation to football in a way it never seems to do in the quotable media, which froth with noble sentiments as the big ‘festival of football’ approaches. Immediately after interviewing me for national radio about a book I have written on Italy and fandom, the journalist removes his headphones and remarks: ‘You know, the wonderful thing about football is that it’s the only situation left where you really feel you have an enemy, someone you can hate unreservedly, someone you don’t have to make compromises with. Even with the terrorists you have to worry about whether you’re indirectly responsible for their extremism.’ ‘Why didn’t you say that on air?’ I asked. He laughed.

  But even in football there are enemies and enemies. On the famous Costanzo Show, Italy’s biggest talk show, a veteran player, Causio, insists that despite the fact that the Italian team never sing the national anthem when it’s played at the beginning of the match (indeed some players have admitted that they don’t know the words), despite the low attendance at many national games, nevertheless, when it counts, the nation rallies round. This is the official version and is no doubt true of that part of the public who are not regular football fans and thus not likely to put their local team first. But during the advertisements, the actor sitting beside me on the stage together with Causio remarks off the air: ‘No, football is about hate. When Roma play Lazio [local rivals] I really hate the Laziali. But how can I hate Ecuador? I don’t feel anything.’ The small South American country were Italy’s first opponents, or designated victims, in 2002.

  Necessarily, football began at local level and it was here that it took the peculiar and fierce grip on the collective mind that it still has today, in Europe, in South America. This happened at precisely the time when, with rapid industrialisation and better communications, local identities were becoming harder to maintain. Hellas Verona, for example, was formed in 1903, but it was not until 1912 that they beat their nearest neighbours and hence bitterest rivals, Vicenza. Reporting the crowd response when the jinx was finally broken, the journalist for Verona’s local paper was clearly witnessing for the first time a new way of expressing group identity. ‘Verona won! Nothing we could write to express our joy, if such a thing were possible; no declaration we could ever make … could be so eloquent as the powerful, almost savage yell of the crowd each time Hellas scored. The shouting slowly subsided to be replaced by a confused, never repressed clamour rising and falling with the anxious and diligent inspection of every move on the field. Verona won! A victory too long desired.’4 A few centuries before that historic moment, in his Discourse on the Game of Florentine Football, Giovanni Maria de’ Bardi defined the sport thus: ‘Football is a public game of two groups of young men, on foot and unarmed, who pleasingly compete to move a medium-sized inflated ball from one end of the piazza to the other, for the sake of honour.’5

  If ‘savage’ is the most interesting word in the first quotation, ‘unarmed’ is the crucial qualification in the second. That day in 1912 the Veronese crowd, savage but unarmed, discovered a new way of expressing their antique enmity towards their nearest neighbours, with whom of course it was no longer feasible that they might go to war, or even engage in a resentful round of trade sanctions. And for the first time that day the Veronese had the upper hand. They could take pleasure, unarmed, in their neighbours’ discomfort. They could taunt and gloat and be cruel within a framework that would allow everyone to escape unscathed and continue their lives as if nothing had happened.

  Ferocious taunting is a staple of Italian football matches and indeed this kind of embattled local pride, at once intense but, in the very extravagance of its expression, ironic too, is typical of local fandom all over Europe. ‘SINCE 1200’, read a banner at a recent game, ‘EVERY TIME THE VERONESE GO TO VICENZA, THE GROUND TREMBLES.’ In sharp contrast, when Ireland played Cameroon in the Niigata stadium, Japan, on the second day of the 2002 World Cup, the TV commentator was obliged to remark on how little the crowd was participating in the expensively staged event. How could they? Of what possible interest could it be to the polite, carefully seated Japanese which of these two countries won? They have no quarrel with either.

  If we were to ask, what has been the most dangerous emotion of the last two centuries, one possible answer might be: the nostalgia for community, the yearning, in an age of mechanisation and eclecticism, for the sort of powerful sense of group identity that will enable you to hold hands with people and sing along, your lucid individuality submerged in the folly of collective delirium, united in a common cause, which of course implies a common enemy.

  This desire for close-knit community at any price was no doubt an important factor in the rise of National Socialism, Fascism, communism and a range of recent and dangerous fundamentalisms. Football fandom, as it developed in the same period in Europe and South America, might be seen as a relatively harmless parody of such large-scale monstrosities, granting the sati
sfaction of belonging to an embattled community, perhaps even the occasional post-match riot, without the danger of real warfare. The stadium and the game have become the theatre where on one afternoon a week, in carefully controlled circumstances, two opposing groups, who at all other moments of life will mingle normally, can enjoy the thrills of tribalism. Hard-core supporters of the competing teams occupy opposite ends of the stadium generating a wild energy of chants and offensive gestures that electrifies the atmosphere. On the pitch, the extraordinary skill of the players, their feints and speed, the colourful pattern of their rapid movements, the tension as one waits and waits, heart in mouth, for the goal that never comes, create a collective enchantment that prolongs the stand-off between the two enemies, at once determining the rhythm of insults and keeping the crowds apart. At the end, if the police are efficient, and nothing too inflammatory has happened during the game, we can all return home with perhaps only a couple of stones thrown.

  ‘The civilising passage from blows to insults’, wrote the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, ‘was no doubt necessary, but the price was high. Words will never be enough. We will always be nostalgic for violence and blood.’6 Football, it has often occurred to me, offers an ambiguous middle ground between words and blows. The game appears to be most successful when constantly hovering on the edge of violence, without quite falling into it. Occasionally, of course, things will go wrong.