itself in which the forces of creation and destruction are waging an eternal war and in which human beings might, just might, be able to help the cause of creation.
Following completion of the novel and its publication in book form, Zola was quoted in the Paris newspaper
Le Matin
on 7 March 1885 as saying that as far as he was concerned a novel consisted of two things: the material and the process of creation (âles documents et la créationâ). Two weeks later he elaborated in a letter to Henry Céard:
We [novelists] are more or less liars, but how do our lies work and what are the thoughts behind them?â¦For my own part, I still believe that my lies lead in the direction of the truth. I have enlarged upon the facts and taken a leap towards the stars on the trampoline of precise observation. Truth soars upon the wing of the symbolic. 4
Zolaâs symbolic vision is certainly a âNaturalistâ vision in that it presents human beings as subject to nature, and it is also Darwinian in its emphasis on life as a battle of the food chain. Ours is a voracious universe, and images of eating and devouring and consuming and gobbling up abound. Human antagonisms â the class struggle, sexual rivalry, even the sexual act itself â are all presented in terms of eating. Mealtimes structure the narrative and demonstrate the central and fundamental divide between the minerâs âprison-house of hungerâ and the groaning tables of centrally heated bourgeois dining-rooms. Even the daily alternation of day and night becomes a dialectic of eating and being eaten. And Zolaâs vision is also, to use David Baguleyâs term, an âentropic visionâ, in which individuality and orderly difference give way to the chaos of the mob and an orgy of undifferentiated desire. Take for example the several accounts of the rampaging mob in Part V , or the astonishing description of Widow Desireâs dance-hall in Part III , the scene of a Bosch-esque bacchanalia of mingling limbs and liquid dissolution with beerflooding through the human body as the Torrent will later inundate the mine. The thirst for beer, sex and justice seems one and the same.
But even here there is emphasis also on regeneration, on collapse as being merely part of a broader cycle of integration and disintegration. The mass drinking-binge at Widow Desireâs at once builds to an orgasm of contentment (âGod! This is the life, eh?â) and precedes a multitude of innumerable private orgasms: âFrom the fields of ripe corn rose warm, urgent breath: many a child must have been fathered that night.â Similarly, the destructive debauches of the rampaging mob will sow the seed of a heightened political awareness. In fact these âentropicâ elements are part of the broader picture of an epic struggle between human beings and nature, and indeed of the epic struggle going on within nature itself. To sink a mine-shaft is a human assault upon nature, but, as with the disused mine at Réquillart, nature soon reclaims its territory as shrub and bramble grow back and two trees appear to have sprung from the very depths of the earth. The ant-like activities of human beings digging up the earth are as nothing compared with the vast and eternal forces of nature, where todayâs flooded mine offers âa reminder of the ancient battles between earth and water when great floods turned the land inside out and buried mountains beneath the plainsâ.
This sense of a âbroader pictureâ is given also by the quasi-mythological portrayal of the human condition in
Germinal
. The quite unnaturalistically named Widow Desire is herself like some Mother Earth, a fount of fertility and indirect progenitrix of every miner in the region. For a desire whose permanent partner is always dead and in the past is a desire that cannot rest. Similarly, the women laying waste the boilers at a mine are participants in a