Sunday Morning! The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola

It helps me to think of a story as a terrarium (really a vivarium) and remember that everything inside was selected and added by the writer to occupy his characters, assuming there are characters, and their readers, always hoping there are readers. It’s a useful image for me at least partly because it helps to remember how much of writing is selection, although I don’t want to go so far as those who suggest good writing is simply a matter of following the “Chekov’s gun” principle- there are, after all, some wonderful descriptions of completely extemporaneous things in Flaubert, and that’s kind of the point. But the vivarium image also captures what a writer actually does: construct a world and look in from the outside. For many writers, I believe, the actual world is experienced as if from a distance; as I argued in my book The Paris Bureau, the writer is a being who “writes their way into the world.” I think, in order to be good at the craft, it probably helps to cultivate this sort of through-the-shop-window perspective, remain a little detached, and share J.G. Ballard’s sense that “Earth is the alien planet.”

Emile Zola fills his fictional frame with everything he can cram in there- he’s a glutton for detail and the too-muchness of his constructed world is the key to his “naturalism.” He is simply interested in everything, which can be exhausting and superfluous at times, but it also brings his fictional Paris (a city that also runs on the too-much principle) to life. He shows the whole world- warts and blood and offal included- because he is trying, in the books of his Rougon-Macquart series- to give a cross-section of 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.

Of the twenty books in the series, many consider L’Assommoir or La Terre to be the masterpieces, but Zola said his favorite was The Belly of Paris and it might be the closest he came to Flaubert, which is saying something. It takes place in Les Halles, the fresh food market that really was the belly of Paris from the 12th century onward. In the 1850s, it was rebuilt with a massive iron structure that lasted until the 1970s. At the time of the novel, all of Paris was being brutally remade by the Baron Haussman in one of the largest urban renewal projects in history. The Baron claimed to be retaking the city from its “floating population” of the poor, who ruined the city with their “unintelligent vote.” By all accounts, the Second Empire was the revenge of the bourgeoisie on these classes, and yet, the stomach of the city couldn’t be filled without these people who, in spite of their bourgeois pretensions, were solidly working class. A bit like a stomach, Les Halles was an enclosed organ that took in and sent out food, prone to periods of indigestion when its internal balance was upset.

It was also crammed full of delicious food. Zola loves to describe food nearly as much as he loved eating it; as a young writer, he often went hungry and, when he could afford to eat well, he indulged, as pictures of the older writer make obvious. There is a description of a cheese shop in the novel as an olfactory symphony that is rightly famous. But all the passages about food are a little rapturous; it is no surprise this was Antony Bourdain’s favorite novel. In a larger sense, Zola is showing, in this gustatory epic, how consumer culture was growing enormous and almost militaristic in the Second Empire, dividing society off into fat men and thin men.

At the same time, France went through about two centuries in which revolutions and failed revolutions were as regular as seasonal thunderstorms. Social repression is the typical response to this particular sort of stormy weather, but it usually only creates a high pressure front and worse storms. As this story begins, Zola adds a tall lanky anti-hero named Florent to this Parisian subworld, newly escaped from Devil’s Rock, the penal colony in French Guiana, where he’d been sent for taking part in the 1851 uprising. This was a common destination for political prisoners of the time; many died and plenty escaped (and often died) although none likely returned to France. Although Zola couldn’t have known it at this time, he would eventually make his name in history, and likely lose his life, defending a French army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, who was sent to Devil’s Rock.

Zola is often held up as an exemplar of the politically-committed writer, a title he sought, and there are some who think that artists should steer clear of politics entirely, usually because they happen to have political opinions that few artists share. I think what they really object to is didacticism- the notion that art is supposed to instruct us, make us better people, which generally makes for bad art and worse instruction. This story would likely fall apart if Florent was a noble and committed revolutionary- Jesus in short pants. Instead, he’s a bit clueless, unsure about the social machinations going on around him, and more of a soft-hearted child than Che Guevara. He finds a group of pseudo-revolutionaries who meet in a pub to thump the table, but they’re a bit absurd. We don’t imagine they’ll be lining anyone up against the wall come the revolution.

Meanwhile, he’s living with his half-brother Quenu and wife Lisa, who help Florent find work as a fish inspector in the market. He becomes a figure of some, mostly illusory, authority, overseeing gossipy women who find him somewhat absurd. Nobody likes to be told what to do, the French even less so. And the story becomes a sort of Parisian Rashomon as the women try to figure out what nefarious misdeeds Florent is hiding, squabble with one another, and generally act as if the cloistered world of the market is their own little fiefdom.

Zola loves to depict the petty dramas with which his working class characters make their drab lives more interesting. His vivarium is crammed full and his descriptions of teeming baskets of fish and carts full of meat are echoed in his depictions of the zaftig market women, all of whom seem to have heaving bellies and enormous breasts. There’s something absurd and a little tragic about how seriously these people take all of this business, with the women trying to preserve the social order of France by spying on a relative nobody, and Florent dreaming of a revolution he’ll never wage. In one of my favorite comic bits, he has a job teaching one of the ladies’ sons to write and has the boy copying out revolutionary slogans: “The day of justice will come.”

Someday, maybe it will, Zola seems to be saying, but for now: Let’s eat.

And so, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or eating this weekend?