DNF Sirens
About halfway into The Fortune of the Rougons, I started to hear the enticing honeyed song of the DNF sirens.
“Come, steadfast reader, weary from rowing through enervating waves of exposition. Come and frolic in our melodious meadows!”
Most read this novel because they wish to cast off on Émile Zola’s epic Rougon-Macquart series from its entry point. Not me. I had no intention of reading all twenty volumes. I just thought the period of French history covered by the book was too eminently dramatizable not to yield thundering historical fiction. In 1851, Napoleon Bonaparte’s intransigently ambitious nephew, the duly elected President of France, sought to circumvent the Second Republic’s term limits with his third coup d’etat. How could a writer of Zola’s reputation write a tedious book about France’s “Great Ogre”? If I could just paddle through a few more weedy generations of Rougons, the narrative was bound to gain momentum.
“Life is short! Your TBR is long!”
But passage through Rougon family history only led to a confluence with Macquart family history. I had only myself to blame. I’d known from the outset that Rougons was reputed to be less dramatically satisfying than later Zola, but experience had trained me to distrust such warnings. I’d braved Honore de Balzac’s overlooked panegyric to governmental budget cuts, The Bureaucrats. I’d forded Henrik Ibsen’s 10-act Roman drama Emperor and Galilean. I’d traversed George Eliot’s oft maligned historical novel Romola. Lesser efforts by master authors are usually rewarding, particularly if the topic is interesting. But in chapter five, Zola’s teenaged lovers kept flirting and swimming and swimming and flirting, and that song was so seductive.
“Abandon ship and dock here amid the rotting piles of unread pages!”
Apparently, Zola’s emulation of Balzac’s 91-volume Comédie Humaine series mimicked his hero’s mind-numbing backstories and Parisian geographical digressions but not his penetrating psychological nuance. For a momentary escape, I clicked the “BuyBack” button on ThriftBooks. They were willing to pay me 81 cents for my copy of Zola’s Germinal. A click of the mouse and I could DNF Émile’s supposed masterpiece without ever having to read a word of it.
Yet as I scanned line after line of Zola’s stultifying prose, a glinting sentence caught my bleary eye. “Leaning back in the mayor’s armchair, steeped in the atmosphere of officialdom that pervaded the room, Pierre Rougon bowed to right and left, like a pretender to throne whom a coup d’etat is about to transform into an emperor.” Hold up, that was, wait, was that – funny? Gradually, the slack pace was intensifying. The bird’s-eye overview of history was swooping down into real-time specificity. The sketchily outlined characters were sharpening, if not into Balzacian humanity, at least into layered archetypes. The final pages did not succeed in “solving the dual problem of temperament and environment,” as Zola promised in his self-aggrandizing preface. But they evolved into genuinely engaging, “ripped-from-the-headlines” political satire that swaggered with biting, lived-in authority.
NATURALISM
The preface that precedes The Fortune of the Rougons teeters with the near-manic energy of a 28-year-old dreamer with far more ambition than discipline. “I shall attempt to discover and trace the thread that leads mathematically from one person to another,” Zola vows with an earnest solemnity that makes me want to proudly affix his doodling to my Frigidaire. He thought of himself as a scientist dissecting the hereditary and environmental factors that prefigured an individual’s behavior from birth. He was less invested in crafting a coherent and absorbing work of fiction than he was in founding a literary movement, which he called Naturalism to distinguish it from Realism in the Balzacian tradition. Balzac, the so-called Master Realist, wrote about the sociopolitical machinations of everyday people during the Bourbon Restoration, July Monarchy, and Second Republic eras that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. Zola, too, wished to focus on ordinary people, but he believed behavior was generated by larger forces than mere individual personality. Fortune was supposed to examine the way class and biology influenced the self-serving political positioning of Pierre and Félicité Rougon and their immediate and extended family.
EXPLOITING HISTORY
But if the overweening preface stipulates biological determinism as the novel’s raison d’être, the novel itself is sidetracked by the impulse to comment on unfolding historical events. The preface construes those disparate aims as compatible and interrelated. Louis Napoleon’s 1851 power grab was meant to be a perfect illustration of Zola’s Darwinian hypothesis. But looking back at the preface, I was struck by his giddy response to the regime’s eventual dissolution in 1870:
For three years I had been collecting the documents I needed for this great project, and I had even completed the present volume when the fall of the Bonapartes, which I needed artistically and always saw as the logical conclusion to my story, without daring to hope that it would happen so quickly, suddenly gave me the terrible but necessary denouement for my work. My scheme is now complete. Émile Zola, Preface to The Fortune of the Rougons
The fall of the Bonapartes is beyond the scope of the novel that Zola was introducing, but his description of it in the preface reveals that breaking news was by this point inextricable in his mind from his burgeoning literary project. A fierce supporter of the Republic, Zola had good reason to exult in the Great Ogre’s demise. But The Fortune of the Rougons exhibits a similar relish in the dramatic possibilities of the 1851 coup. Zola reads the headlines and can’t believe his luck. France is falling apart at the seams; this is a superb development for his novel! He is like a comedian cashing in on the comic insipidity of his nation’s leaders. In this way, Zola is just like Pierre and Félicité: he is exploiting national instability for professional gain.
IDEAS IN DRAMA
I am in no position to criticize Zola’s opportunism: his gain as a storyteller is my gain as a reader. The more Zola tries to explore his pet theories about behavioral tendencies visited from father unto son, the thicker his narrative molasses becomes. Riveting fiction doesn’t dwell in meticulously outlined family trees rationed from a distance into summary sentences. It feeds off the pulsating progressions of the here and now, the ceaselessly fascinating interplay of intention and obstacle. Grand-scale causes grow dull without attention to microscale effects. Imagine Leo Tolstoy cramming War and Peace into Fortune’s 293 pages. Rookie blunder. Zola gets away with it only because his small-town reflection of national tragedy blasts through his intellectual interests like dynamite.
Zola also illustrates this principle when he expiates his own grief at the loss of the Republic by patiently rendering a doomed incipient romance. In the first chapter, Silvère (17-year-old son of Macquarts) and Miette (13-year-old daughter of Rougons) both participate in and symbolize the fight for the Republic. Just three years before the novel opens, the French voter rolls had ballooned from 200,000 to nine million. Zola personifies the heady optimism of that period as a tentative puppy love, eschewing political oration for nostalgic depictions of first kisses stolen in public squares. His tender patience in the opening sequence lends emotional power to the mutual demise of lovers and Republic as the novel draws to a close. Here, because they are genuinely interrelated, big ideas augment individual drama and vice versa.
SATIRE WINS
However, the big ideas that drive The Fortune of the Rougons are not the notions of family determinism that Zola initially wanted to put under the microscope. Zola wanted to be a Francis Galton, Darwin’s eugenicist cousin, expounding the dominance of nature over nurture. But Galton’s theories have not aged well. In contrast, Zola’s portrayal of justice sacrificed on the altar of bourgeois success is more relevant than ever. What finally silenced my DNF sirens was not Zola’s notion that character is passed through the bloodline but his visceral portrait of weak character reaping bloodshed.
