Germinal

Germinal by Émile Zola Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Germinal by Émile Zola Read Free Book Online
Authors: Émile Zola
witches’ sabbath. The succeeding generations of the Maheu family seem like a dynasty of slaves who have worked for the ‘hidden god’ of capital since time immemorial, this ‘squat and sated deity’ who demands human sacrifice – like a latter-day Moloch – but remains constantly out of sight. The mine itself, and especially the unquenchable fires of Le Tartaret, are evocative of a Christian hell in which the damned live outan eternity of torture and irredeemable subjugation. At the same time the mine is suggestive of the ‘hidden’ forces at work not only in capitalist society but also in the human body and the human psyche, a subterranean network of ‘pathways’ in which blockage means disaster and the accumulated pressures of desire and trauma may explode with all the fatal consequences of firedamp. It is a place in which to confront the past, as when Étienne remembers his own in Part I , Chapter IV , or a place, as Étienne, Chaval and Catherine discover at the end, to plumb the violent reality of lust and sexual rivalry. In short, the mine is what lies beneath the surface: dark, monstrous and frightening.
    But that is indeed Zola’s purpose: to reveal, to bring to light what lies – literally and metaphorically – beneath the surface. At one level Zola goes to great lengths to allow us to visualize the action of the novel, which is no doubt why there have been so many successful film versions of
Germinal
. Thanks to his own on-the-spot investigations he knows exactly what the inside of a mine or a pitman’s house actually looks and feels like, and the role which he adopts as the narrator of the story is essentially that of a dispassionate and anonymous cameraman focusing his lens on some powerful and eloquent evidence. But he is not merely a documentarist. He is also a demystifier. Where some myths disguise and obfuscate – like the picture of the happy worker which Mme Hennebeau blindly peddles to her Parisian visitors – his novels are intended to demonstrate the truth and thus contribute towards the creation of a better society. While such an ambition may itself seem quaint in a postmodernist world where all discourse is suspect, it is not necessarily a risible or a nugatory aim. Moreover, the Zola of
Germinal
– and indeed of
Les Rougon-Macquart
as a whole – is alive to the insidious and corrosive power of what is now called ‘spin’ or ‘media management’. Throughout the novel we see how ‘capital’ covers up the truth, playing down the extent of the damage to its mines in order not to worry the shareholders and attempting to ‘bury’ the news of miners being shot in order to deflect public outrage. The readiness of the uneducated to cross their fingers or to believe in the existence of ghosts is seen as part of their submissiveness, as part of their understandable but fatalinability to confront, assess – and change – the reality of their situation. But if the uneducated have every excuse, how much worse it is that a benign couple like the Grégoires can be quite so blind to this reality, or that Deneulin’s pleasant and capable daughters should be so appallingly content to view the murderous destruction of Le Voreux as a ‘thrilling’ aesthetic experience.
    Just as Zola catalogues, through Étienne’s ‘education’, the various political responses which it might be possible to have towards the actualities of mining and working-class life, so too he is careful to record a wide spectrum of ‘interpretative’ responses in order to highlight quite where he himself stands as a novelist writing about this subject. If he had to masquerade as Giard’s secretary in order to research this subject at Anzin, that was no doubt because he feared the charge to which the bourgeois and indeed many members of the mining community are open at the end of
Germinal
: namely,

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