Sunday! “Germinal” by Émile Zola

One of the many stock arguments that gets trotted out like a show dog in this age of argument-as-performance-art goes something like this: the purity of art is sacrificed when the artist smuggles in ‘politics’- what results is not art, but propaganda. What the person making the argument means by ‘politics’ is usually political views to which they don’t subscribe; we enjoy agitprop that flatters our sensibilities. And it’s probably only easy to stay apolitical in pure fantasia art- which might be why there’s so much of it at present. If you try to tell believable stories about “real people” who happen to be apolitical, you quickly run into the problem that nearly all aspects of life are politicized now in a way that somehow blends the worst aspects of consumer choice and soft totalitarianism.

And so, most corporate art features slightly generic apolitical people who are aware of, but untroubled by, social issues, and all of whom are vaguely “middle class.” The rich fascinate us but they offend our sensibilities, while the working class risks being problematically “political” either to the left or right wing; really, any of their aspirations could upset the status quo- that which must be preserved at all costs. Therefore, our nice middle-class fictional protagonist- let’s say he’s a graphic designer and his wife is an ad executive- is aware of but untroubled by the knowledge that his entire life is facilitated, to a great extent, by others who are consigned to drudgery for life, and above all else, he never asks if things might be arranged differently.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, every human society believes itself to embody and reflect basic facts about human nature, no matter how much they might differ from every other society that embodies basic truths about human nature.

And yet, Western Modernity is still rooted in a very basic conflict we cannot resolve: as children of the enlightenment, we see ourselves as unique and unrepeatable individuals with a duty to develop our own special talents and articulate our own perspective; yet, for economic purposes, we are seen by others (plural: ‘the market’) in the most reductive terms: “warm bodies,” in many of our cases. And so, we feel a vague sense of unfulfilment. Ours is admittedly a mild form of the “social question” as we’ve largely exported the “dark Satanic mills” of Blake’s time out of our line of sight.  But the question remains: how do we maintain social cohesion when some of us will thrive by speculative means and other scrape by in drudgery? And how do you make a meaningful life if you’re born in the second category?

Udo Vester: The Ronchamp Coal Mines in eastern France, public domain. Wikicommons.

Contemportary art hardly ever asks these questions any more, which is why we look to older works of fiction from a time when capitalism was in its infancy. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century recommends Marx’s Kapital and Zola’s Germinal. It strikes me that Marx’s big mistake was his failure to understand how adaptable capitalism would prove to be, how it changes to survive. Still, the sections of Kapital dealing with what it was actually like to work in those mills remain powerful literature. Germinal by Émile Zola, meanwhile, is a sort of fever dream of hell on earth that still hits hard, even if you’ve never set foot in a coal mine.

It also strikes me that Zola’s novel succeeds as art rather than propaganda in spite of the fact that the author didn’t really accomplish what he set out to do. He had hoped to write what he called an “experimental” novel in the literal sense of putting character types in a specific setting and making observational notes on their behavior; it was meant to be as dispassionate as a lab report. It’s not. It’s grueling, heartrending, violent, agonizing; nothing like a social science paper, thankfully.

Recently restored photograph of Zola and his children.

The novel fits into Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart series of twenty novels, which were intended to anatomize France during “the Second Empire period (1852-1870), a time in which the ugliness was barely hidden by schlock- this was the “farce” that Marx was referring to in his famous line about history repeating itself the second time.” He focuses on a doomed bloodline, in which all of the offspring are cursed by drink or violence or other uncontrollable passions. A decade ago, I wrote that “Zola’s two great themes are poverty and vice. With a near-clinical precision, he shows them struggling against, while anchoring and giving rise to one another, fixed like the two headed serpent in Egyptian mythology.” No one in the family line ever quite gets free.

Nevertheless, it strikes me that Étienne, the hero of Germinal, did a lot better than his brothers: Claude, whose artistic frustrations drove him to suicide in L’Œuvre, or Jacques, who became a serial killer in La Bête humaine. Étienne, instead, shows up in a mining town in the north of France and leads a strike of the coalminers, which is ultimately futile, but he does survive, and only kills one person. You take what you can get in this family.

Workin in a coal mine, going down, down, down…

Zola paints an uncompromisingly bleak picture of the coalminers’ lives: pushed into cramped living spaces with no privacy, subsisting on a diet mere calories away from starvation, working until death, with no distractions save drinking and screwing their way to early pregnancies and more children for the mines. Germinal is as lurid as any pulp novel on those recreational activities; the teenagers are rutting in the outdoors as soon as they can and everyone knows whose wife takes lovers. At times, I thought the movie version of the book could be titled “Coal Miner’s Slutty Daughter.” It does, however, allow us a brief respite from reading about lives lived in the hardscrabble scrape to avoid being pushed off the edge of the table.

Something’s got to give and it finally does when the company cuts the men’s wages in an underhanded way that everyone sees through immediately following closely after a worker is killed in a mine collapse. The workers decide to strike, they pick Étienne as a natural leader, and, as the strike and its various sabotages drag on, eventually, everyone is brought to ruin.

And yet, the novel is tragedy where it might have been farcical propaganda. Zola is too smart to blame the bosses or depict them twirling their moustaches while scheming to screw over the workers. They’re all caught in the same machinery; when the global steel market declines due to a glut and loss of the American market, they have no choice but to tighten their (worker’s) belts, or face closure. They’re only slightly bigger fish still swimming like mad to avoid being eaten.  The industrial system has simply reached a point where it must adapt or die, and well, plenty of companies died here.

In fact, one of the most sympathetic depictions in the book is of a bourgeois manager who lives in relative comfort with a wife who no longer loves him, and so envies the workers for their easy sexuality. This could have been a cheap joke, but Zola understands that life can be miserable for all sorts of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with wealth. At best, life is only a little disappointing. If these people could work together, instead of fighting each other for scaps, they might live full and happy lives, but this isn’t a utopian novel.

The miserable cuckolded boss is in a scenario that strangely parallels Étienne’s mostly doomed love for the young cart girl Catherine, who fancies him but instead chooses a brute who simply struck while her iron was hot. Étienne is highly intelligent and fiercely idealistic, but he works against himself in most cases. Zola ties this back to his supposedly poisoned genetic line, which is an unconvincing argument throughout the series, but the upshot is he can’t quite seal the deal as a lover or a revolutionary.

Nobody ever gets what they want, in spite of their needs being quite reasonable, because they can’t see eye-to-eye; this is the nature of tragedy. All of it’s sadly quite realistic and true to life, and just like life, there’s enough sex and violence to keep things interesting until the end.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or struggling for this weekend?