The Pose of Naturalism in Zola’s Germinal

 

     Germinal remains, after over a hundred years, strong stuff.  Zola’s prose continues to deploy the luxurious richness of concrete specific detail found in Flaubert and Balzac, but here the facts alone are merciless and painful.  The excruciating miners’ lives, the consequence of an oppressive economic system, only seem the more miserably unjust when set off by a few scenes of the bourgeois comfort of their bosses.  The book seems in many ways tragic.  The workers, after suffering terrible privations and numerous casualties, gain nothing from their strike.  The unmerited suffering of the poor, rather than being (as in Christianity) redemptive, only degrades and brutalizes them further.   Yet the title is clearly hopeful with its reference to the 1789 Revolution and to germination, here referring to the coming of radical change, an implication made explicit in the final passage.

 

Men were springing up, a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages.  And very soon they would crack the earth asunder.  (trans. By L. W. Tancock)

 

Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre. 

 This incongruity between the ugliness of the miners’ degradation and the beauty of the utopian vision of a better economic order represents a more general tension informing the work as a whole.  While claiming to construct narratives out of lived experience alone, Zola consistently allowed observed facts to be overruled by his thematic enthusiasm as well as by emotion, literary convention, and allusion.   

     Zola’s Naturalism was for him a “scientific” method which he regarded as uniquely appropriate for his day.  In The Experimental Novel (1893) he explains that his approach to writing fiction is based on the rigorous research principles of Claude Bernard, the physiologist.  Quoting with approval Bernard’s characterization of the scientist as “the photographer of phenomena,” Zola notes that for the novelist no less than the biologist “his observation should be an exact representation of nature... He listens to nature and he writes under its dictation.”  Just as in the laboratory the scientist forms hypotheses first suggested and then tested by empirical facts, Zola maintains that the writer must survey the scene and formulate possible explanations for events, while remaining, like other researchers, ready to follow the data wherever they may lead.  For him this is possible because in his view human actions are the inevitable result of heredity and environment, just as evolutionary changes proceed independent of any creature’s choices and, in pre-Einsteinian physics, a mechanistic view is possible in which every event is theoretically predictable.  As Zola puts it, “There is an absolute determinism for alI human phenomena.”

     He rejects “the work of the idealistic writers, who rely upon the irrational and the supernatural,” and declares “The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man . . .. This view of the matter is a new one; we have become experimentalists instead of philosophers.”

     Zola went to some pains in pursuit of this goal of scientific objectivity.  In researching Germinal he visited northern French mining towns at least one of which had recently been through a strike and even descended into the pits under the pretense that he was a government representative.  He had set himself the ambitious goal in his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle of providing a comprehensive vision of Second Empire France recording not only its nature but also the process of historical change.  Such a picture could, he thought, only be generated through an accumulation of facts.

     Yet the author’s own emotions and the usages of literary convention often take precedence over the data of lived experience.  Though he conceived his project as dispassionate -- he uses the word “impersonal” and insists that “naturalism is not a personal fantasy” -- he nonetheless did not hesitate to include tendentious, melodramatic, and sensational material, elements that in fact made his work moving and popular even as it deviated from his theory. 

     Each of these thematic or affective aspects of his fiction is complicated by a certain ambivalence.  For instance, the most straightforward theme of Germinal, shaping much of the story, is certainly the denunciation of capitalism and the promise of socialism.  While this novel is one of the very best of tendentious revolutionary narratives, arousing sympathy for the exploited and anger against their callous masters, it avoids a reductive cast of heroes and villains while maintaining an unqualified support for socialism.  The miners and their families are not idealized.  All, including Étienne, the outsider, are flawed.  A few, like Jeanlin, can even kill without reason.  Some, like Catherine or old Bonnemort, are so victimized that they possess little other identity.  Many are subject to the temptations of the pleasures available to the poor, principally sex and drinking.  

     Meanwhile, the advocates of change are likewise imperfect tribunes of the people.  Étienne is capable of being seduced by his new celebrity as well as by the whims of an excited mob.  Meanwhile, Pluchart is a professional activist who seems more anxious to promote his own career in the Socialist International than to put himself on the line with the workers, and Souvarine is a Russian anarchist so seduced by violence that he holds himself aloof for much of the action and then sabotages the mine elevator, causing unnecessary workers’ deaths.  

     Rasseneur, the one-time miner who operates a tavern, supports the workers, but feels rivalry with Étienne’s more radical leadership.  Maigrat, the owner of the village shop, offers credit but also sexually exploits his customers.  Even higher on the economic ladder, Zola finds mixed characters.  M. Hennebeau, manager of the mine, is so miserable in his marriage that he fancies he would rather be one of his workers.  His nephew Négrel is already affluent, and is in addition engaged to Cécile Gregoire, the owner’s daughter, yet in the end this capitalist works tirelessly to save the trapped workers and embraces Étienne as a brother.  Deneulin, owner of a smaller nearby mine, tries to act in a responsible fashion, modernizing his operation even though he thereby reduces his profits, and for his pains he is gobbled up by his richer competitor. 

     The contradiction that exists between Zola’s straightforward view of a socialist solution which one might with justice term “idealist” and his more nuanced “realistic” depiction of the actors involved is not the only compromise of the “scientific” Naturalist theory  in the novel.  Lurid, sensational stories in fiction may indeed be equaled by lived experience, but such material is often emphasized in popular works like ‘thirties pulp fiction or Tarantino’s movies from the ‘nineties.  Incidents in Germinal like the women’s bacchante-like mutilation of Maigrat after his death, Bonnemort’s sudden murder of Cécile, and the underground consummation of love between Étienne and Catharine are possible but unlikely, included in order to heighten the story’s impact and to attract readers. 

     Each of these incidents is only barely plausible.  Maigrat’s end seems to owe a good deal to Euripedes.  Bonnemort’s act expresses, as Zola tells the reader, a lifetime of suppressed resentment.  A physician might find his act improbable for a stroke victim, but it is a powerful symbol of the potential explosive energy inherent in every worker.  While it is difficult to conceive of people near death as Étienne and Catharine are when trapped underground as inclined toward or even capable of sexual activity, their love it makes a touching, even sentimental, scene with the two characters with whom  the reader has been most in sympathy, forming a kind of denouement that, amid the ruination of the end, prefigures the novel’s hopeful final words.

     Clearly only literary convenience makes Étienne the tenuous connection of the miners’ saga with the larger Rougon-Macquart cycle.  Though a few references appear relating to other novels, such as the protagonist’s hereditary vulnerability to alcohol, no knowledge of other works is necessary for the reader of Germinal.  The entire encyclopedic concept is entirely artificial in spite of the pretension to scientific objectivity.  Zola’s ambition to render his times in such precise detail that he would be a dispassionate scientific observer, exhibiting neither abstract principles nor personal traits, but simply copying with accuracy the world around him can scarcely overcome one insuperable obstacle.  Every turn of Zola’s plot is the result of his own conscious decision.  His choices are surely based on his own life experience but they  are far from inevitable; the author’s claim to objectivity is untenable.

       Zola clearly distinguished his Naturalism from Balzac’s Realism in his essay Différences entre Balzac et moi (1869), saying “My work is less social than scientific.”  (“Mon oeuvre sera moins sociale que scientifique.)  in his view Balzac’s aim was to be wholly descriptive, simply to illustrate that “there are lawyers, idlers, etc. just as there are dogs, wolves, etc.  In a word, his work seeks to be a mirror of contemporary society.”  (“Il y a des avocats, des oisifs etc. comme il y a des chiens, des loups etc. En un mot, son oeuvre veut être le miroir de la société contemporaine.”)  In contrast for him “My great project is to be purely a naturalist, a physiologist.  In place of social concepts like royalty or Catholicism he meant to substitute scientific laws such as those of heredity” (“Ma grande affaire est d'être purement naturaliste, purement physiologiste. Au lieu d'avoir des principes (la royauté, le catholicisme) j'aurais des lois (I'hérédité.”).  He here disclaims any intention of suggesting themes, whether “political, philosophical, or moral.” For him his story is “the simple relation of the facts of a family, showing the internal mechanism that makes it act.  I accept even anomalies.”  (“Un simple exposé des faits d'une famille, en montrant le mécanisme intérieur qui la fait agir. J'accepte même l'exception.”)

     That last phrase provides the author a useful wild card.   In fact Germinal and Zola’s other novels are shaped by literary convention, as well as by ideology, taste, and a host of elements.  Zola outlines not a new, more scientific form of literature but rather a new posture meant to enhance the reader’s impression of  verisimilitude.  The Naturalist method, rather than delivering art over to science, constructs a new novelistic artifice.  By the profession of objectivity Zola advances his own thematic interest in asserting that the actions of individuals are the foreseeable result of their heredity and environment.  The claim that he is merely transcribing data from life is a rhetorical device to convince the reader that the novelist has been faithful to lived reality.  It is the nineteenth century version of the eighteenth-century writers who presented works of fiction as authentic letters or otherwise reflecting real events. 

     One’s critical estimation of Zola is in no way diminished by the idea that his Naturalism is a calculated effect rather than some new sort of objectivity.  Writing, after all, can be nothing but marks on a page which makes at best a highly selective and refracted use of the sense data of experience.  The literary devices used by writers can only be judged by  their effectiveness in context, and Zola in Germinal has told a dramatic, significant, and well-crafted story.  While the claim of Naturalism is a pose, it is neither more nor less “false” than the pretensions of some writers to relate the doings of divinities.  Everything in art is symbolic.  Whereas Bernard in studying the liver quite properly sought results “objective” enough to be replicated by other researchers, Zola’s view of the miners arose from his passion and the narrative in which it is contained owes more to literary tradition and to the author’s own imagination than to transparent, quasi-scientific reportage.