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| Wood engraving of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's drawing of working girls for the illustrated edition of 1878 |
L’Assommoir is the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart
sequence and the first that is still widely read, though Thérèse Raquin (1867) precedes all of them. Sometimes being a part
of a larger sequence prevents due recognition. L'Assommoir is one of the supreme European novels and it really
stands alone in Zola's work, despite such jaw-dropping successors as Germinal (1885) and La Terre (1887).
In English you have no choice but to read L’Assommoir through
a haze of jerky interference, even in Leonard Tancock’s translation. That’s
unfortunate if only because of Zola’s huge importance in the history of the
British novel. If you have ever wondered why, around 1875, the amazing
fertility of its own glory days, masterpiece after masterpiece, seems to yield
incomprehensibly to a trifling loss of confidence, then this is why. Zola,
above all, made our authors understand themselves as incapacitated (Ibsen was
possibly the second most potent author in this respect – i.e the reproof was
publically felt).
Thus in April 1866, Wilkie Collins wrote this, in his
Foreword to Armadale:
Estimated by the Clap-Trap morality of the present
day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which is
of all time, it is only a book that is daring enough to speak the truth.
Ten years later (January 1877), Zola’s Preface says:
L’Assommoir is without doubt the most moral of my books... It is
a work of truth, the first novel about the common people which does not tell
lies but has the authentic smell of the people.
In these combative prefaces the two novelists used almost
the same language, but once Zola had done it you’d be laughed at if you spoke
that way about books like Armadale.
There is thus a Zola-shaped recess in the English novel, and
in the next generation it’s followed by a Zola-shaped idea of what a serious
novel is, by now so ingrained and so coloured by the individuality of good
authors (Conrad, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence..) that we sometimes mistake it for
their own idea. I’m sorry to say that they were, on the whole, very ungrateful.
Tancock sometimes succeeds brilliantly, but at such a long
distance in time and place from the rue de la Goutte d’Or, he knew he had an
impossible mission. At its worst the prose looks clunkily bolted together out
of stock expressions that don’t quite fit, e.g.
she pitied her brother, that ninny whose wife
deceived him up hill and down dale, and it was understood that the only reason
why she still set foot in such a madhouse was for her poor old mother’s sake,
who was obliged to live in the midst of all these abominations.
At least Zola’s text was speaking the same language as its
characters – French, I mean. But then Zola’s project had intrinsic
impossibilities of its own. He appropriated the speech of the streets, an
essentially oral form, and tried to use it to make paragraphs in a novel, the
wrong tool for the wrong job.
“Up hill and down dale” is a phrase that you’ll never hear
in real life except in some connection with transport, this being the only
context where its powerful old image flames into life. There is a decorum in
common speech that resists transferred usage, unless it is instantly seen to be
natural (in which case it just as instantly ceases to be transferred usage, and
becomes a part of the common inheritance in its own right). Extension of usage,
the pressure of words placed in new contexts, is a literate practice
intrinsically alien to the language of the Goutte d’Or and to any other common
neighbourhood, where speech is a highly conservative medium and tiny deviations
mark the outsider, the person who can never be “one of us”.
This ill-chosen phrase is presumably Tancock’s fault, but
he’s not helped by having to slip these oral ready-mades into a syntactic
framework that consists of essentially literary language like “deceived”, “it
was understood”, “who was obliged to live”, expressions that are only used in
educated settings. That has to be Zola’s responsibility, the basic
contradiction in his method, which is something every novel needs to have.
Fortunately for the world he had the necessary drive and insensitivity to carry
it through.
When it operates as a kind of continuous unattributable
commentary the method does have a slippery potential. As the paragraph
continues, we drift away from Mme Lorilleux’s thinking into wider seas:
The whole district fell upon Gervaise. She must have
been the one to lead the hatter astray. You could see it in her eyes. Yes, in
spite of the ugly stories, that artful dodger Lantier got away with it, because
he went on with his gentlemanly airs in front of them all, strolling along the
pavements reading the paper, full of gallant attentions to the ladies, always
giving them sweets or flowers. After all, he was only behaving like a cock
among hens, a man’s a man, and you can’t expect him to resist women who throw
themselves at him, can you? But there was no excuse for her; she was a disgrace
to the rue de la Goutte d’Or.
The commentary doesn’t speak with a single voice, since for
the space of a brief shimmy it seems to admit the “artful dodger” Lantier’s
culpability. We’ve seen what happened between Gervaise and Lantier, or we think
we have, so this commentary about Gervaise we assume to be a cloud of
commonplace-sexist prejudice and something that Zola doesn’t intend us to
accept. At the same time it has its influence on us, because its pattern is at
least comprehensible. We have not after all seen Gervaise’s eyes. She didn’t
mean to trap Lantier, but then you can argue that Lantier, pace Virginie’s
conspiratorial fantasies when he turns up, is a sponger and a drifter rather
than a Macchiavelli. He wasn’t really responsible for Coupeau fouling the
marriage bed with lakes of vomit. And didn’t Gervaise tacitly accept what was
bound to happen from the moment Lantier moved in? Goujet thought so. The
neighbourhood view, unlike the one that we take as bourgeois readers of a
bourgeois form, at least acknowledges Gervaise’s rare moment of triumph, even
if the neighbourhood condemns it.
You need a pattern, even if it’s far from accurate, and in
the next paragraph we see Gervaise working out her own changed circumstances on
the basis of more or less accepting the neighbourhood myth. It’s like a
communal thought-process.
Amid the general indignation Gervaise lived on,
calm, indolent, half asleep. At first she had felt very guilty, very dirty and
disgusted with herself. When she left Lantier’s room she washed her hands and
then wetted a cloth and wiped her shoulders hard enough to take the skin off,
as though to wash away her shame. If on such occasions Coupeau tried on any
funny tricks with her she would fly into a temper and run off shivering to
dress in the shop. Similarly she would not let Lantier touch her if her husband
had embraced her. She would have liked to change skins when she changed men.
But gradually she got used to it. It’s too tiring to have a bath every time!
Her laziness melted away her scruples, and her longing to be happy made her get
as much pleasure as she could out of her troubles. She was as indulgent towards
herself as towards others, and was only anxious to arrange things so that nobody
was too put out. After all, you see, so long as her husband and her lover were
happy, and the home went on in its regular routine and everything in it was fun
and games the livelong day, and everybody was nice and comfortable and pleased
with life, there was nothing to complain about, was there? And besides, when
all was said and done, what she was doing couldn’t be all that terrible, since
it was all working out so well to everybody’s satisfaction, and you are
generally punished if you do wrong. So her lack of shame had turned into a
habit. It was now all as regular as mealtimes; whenever Coupeau came home drunk
she popped over to Lantier’s bed, and that happened on Mondays, Tuesdays and
Wednesdays at least. She shared out her nights, and had even taken to leaving
her husband in the middle of his sleep when he snored too loud, so as to finish
off her own sleep quietly on the lodger’s pillow. It wasn’t that she felt more
attached to the hatter. No, it was simply that he seemed cleaner and she could
sleep better in his room – she felt she was having a bath. In fact she was
rather like a dainty cat who loves curling up on nice white linen.
The paragraph begins firmly and makes its way to the phrase
about changing skins as one changes men. In the same way the end of the
paragraph suddenly crystallizes into the picture of the dainty cat. Both of
these are things that we see Gervaise thinking, and they act like searchlights
into her mind with their common emphasis on cleanliness and bathing (by the end
of the paragraph, this has ended up meaning being in Lantier’s bed).
But between these illuminations the central part of the
paragraph is cloudy with parallel syntax and dithering qualifications like
“after all, you see... and besides, when all was said and done...”.
Coincidentally or not, “fun and games all the livelong day” is another judder
of the Tancock/Zola phrase-bolting machine. One of the difficulties Zola makes
for himself is that he hasn’t worked out a way of representing the silences of
consciousness. His Gervaise is compelled by the methodology of the novel into a
discursive and verbal awareness of her situation that is exactly how she wouldn’t think or choose to think, and
this is compounded by her being made to employ the street-language designed for
a different social context, which is bound to make her discursiveness seem
silly. She is not a novelist or a debater, and Zola has to make her into one,
even when she’s sick and starving in the twelfth chapter. Nevertheless his
method does lead to a dreadful effect in the final pages, when Gervaise is
wandering in her mind and the prose gradually withdraws from her consciousness,
eventually objectifying her as a huddled body under the stairs in Bru’s kennel.
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| Still from Albert Capellani's silent film of 1908 |
Where the method really catches fire it becomes a brilliant
expression of excited awareness – this is when Zola is going with the strength
of the street-talk and not trying to make it do things it was never intended to
do. This is Gervaise giving way to the thrill of the pawnshop:
Gervaise would have gladly sold up the whole lot;
she was seized with a frenzy for popping everything, and would have shaved her
own head if they would have advanced something on her hair. It was all too
easy; you couldn’t help going there for some money when you were longing for a
four-pound loaf. The whole shoot went that way – linen, clothes, even tools and
furniture. In the early days she took advantage of good weeks and got things
out of pawn, only to pop them again the following week. But later she couldn’t
be bothered about her belongings and just let them go and sold the pawn
tickets. Only one thing broke her heart,....
The prose does wonderfully with this dire over-heating, and
it is still doing it near the end, e.g. in Gervaise’s fascinated participation
in Coupeau’s death:
Seeing the doctors laying their hands on her
husband’s body, Gervaise wanted to touch him too. She went up timidly, put her
hand on his shoulder, and kept it there a minute. Good God, whatever was going
on inside there? The dance seemed to be going on right down deep in his flesh,
the very bones must be jerking about. From some remote source tremors and waves
were flowing along under the skin like a river. When she pressed a little
harder she could sense, as it were, cries of pain coming from the very marrow
of his bones. All you could see with the naked eye was wavelets hollowing out
tiny dimples, as on a whirlpool, but beneath there must be frightful commotion.
What a sinister job was going on down there, like a mole boring away! Old
Colombe’s poison was wielding the pickaxe on that job. The whole body was
soaked in it, so what the hell – the job had to be finished, crumbling Coupeau
away in a general, non-stop shaking of his whole carcase.
At such moments Gervaise ceases to be a case, the barriers
come down, commentary gets left behind; it’s me and you, hellbent.
The novel begins in 1850 and ends some twenty years later.
Zola has seamed so far into previously unworked chambers that we can easily
overlook his cop-outs, but there are one or two. Generally his over-arching
scheme of the Rougon-Macquart families does no good to the novels. Here, it
leads Zola into beginning his book by taking the familiar path of introducing
an outsider, Gervaise from Plassans, into a new neighbourhood. This has the
initial advantage that he can describe that neighbourhood through an outsider’s
fresh eyes, but it also means that he largely fails to confront working-class
experience as seen from within the structure of a family. Zola wishes to
reserve Claude and Étienne for other books, with the odd effect that Gervaise
appears to have no consciousness of her sons after they have been relocated. At
the time of her lonely death, she has two sons (or, as he later decided, three
sons) in the prime of manhood. These sons were born to her and Lantier before
the novel begins. Its difficult to decide whether Gervaise’s lack of emphasis
on her own motherhood is a novelist’s insight into the reality of dispersed
families or whether it’s just a convenience that frees her up to play out her
tragic decline on the stage that Zola has assigned to her. It’s a matter of
observation that families near the foot of the social ladder are often divided
by longstanding separations that no-one feels it’s possible to overcome – it
only makes more trouble – so you learn with surprise of children or brothers
who live in the next street but are totally out of contact. Many people lead
such extremely circumscribed lives, maintaining them with such difficulty or
lassitude, unable to accept even the most minimal derangement that any leg-up
necessarily entails, that contact with relations soon founders. But these
observations are misplaced; such family separations occur because of distress
and Zola nowhere concerns himself with Gervaise’s feelings about her sons,
distressed or otherwise; in the early pages they are quietly children, and then
they disappear, but this ought to mean more in the book than it does. Gervaise
also has a sister in Paris, whom she never contacts.
Nana is a different matter, and yet not altogether.
Conflicts between Nana and her parents are dealt with at length, but in these
striking pages there remains a sort of vacuum, at least to my eyes. Coupeau’s
rages and his sentimentality are comprehensible expressions of drunken feeling,
but there is a blankness where we look in vain for Gervaise, elsewhere so
implausibly verbal, to show some awareness of herself as a mother and Nana as
her daughter. It’s understandable that Nana should be experienced by Gervaise
primarily as a trouble, but what’s odd is that she seems to be only the same kind
of trouble that you might incur by taking in someone else’s teenage child. For
whatever reason, the bond on which all animal society is founded seems to have
gone missing from Zola’s novel. What I end up thinking is that the novel is
falsifying its account by omitting daily hours in which Gervaise and Nana must
have interacted in undramatic ways that would in fact have seriously
complicated the catastrophic image that Zola is trying to project.
But no matter. All reservations aside, L’Assommoir directly
confronts the most concealed of society’s existences with an amplitude that
even now few other novels have ever managed. For hundreds of pages, unbroken by
the entrance of even a single educated person, it operates outside bourgeois
limits in the nearest yet most intractable of territories. Now that we are not
exactly bourgeois ourselves, and a clearer understanding of the world around us
at last seems possible, it ought to be one of the dog-eared books we do more
than read.
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| Rue de la Goutte d'Or in 2012 |
Labels: Émile Zola, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Specimens of the literature of France
