The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) Read Free Page A

comment echoes Taine’s famous assertion:
    It matters not what the facts may be, whether physical or moral, they always spring from causes; there are causes for ambition, for courage, for veracity, as well as for digestion, for muscular action, and for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar; every complex fact grows out of the simple facts with which it is affiliated and on which it depends. 3
    These are, from both Zola and Taine, controversial statements: to demystify the vague but religiously, morally, and ideologically charged notions of vice and virtue is to invite opprobrium from a variety of sources, as well as to risk accusations of reducing human complexity to a series of equations and formulae. Zola certainly was attacked from all quarters: by conservatives for his republicanism and opposition both to the royalists and the Imperial regime, but also by Republicans for presenting the working class as animalistic and self-destructive. Writers and critics of varying temperaments—classical, romantic, symbolist, idealist—condemned his ‘putrid’ literature for what they saw as its ugliness, squalor, and amorality, and the little room it left for humanity’s so-called higher or more spiritual aspirations.
    ‘The Experimental Novel’ and the Poetry of Naturalism
    Zola’s fiction is in part an ‘experiment’ in which the scientist-novelist places particular characters in particular places and with particular circumstantial dramas, and observes how, given their temperaments, medical histories, and emotional inclinations, they react. Sometimes he will add or subtract elements—a change of scene, a new person, a love interest or an enemy, an accident or a bankruptcy or anillness—and observe how this alters the course of events. In this respect, he is like all novelists, creating characters and then letting them loose. While novels such as
The Conquest of Plassans
and
The Fortune of the Rougons
have unambiguously ‘straight’ titles, novels like
Germinal
,
La Bête humaine
,
Le Ventre de Paris
are more evocative and lyrical, and hardly seem to fit with the ‘Naturalist’ label of plain or scientific factuality. Zola always allows room in his writing for a ‘poetic’ or mythical interpretation of his human characters and the events that befall them. We might consider, in this context, the great descriptive set-piece in
Germinal
, where Zola likens the mine swallowing up the miners to some great beast of the underworld gorging itself on the blood of the living; or the ‘bête humaine’ of the eponymous novel, the murderous inner beast which Zola links, symbolically, with the driverless train hurtling into the darkness. Closer to
The Conquest of Plassans
, there is the symbolic space of Plassans cemetery described in
The Fortune of the Rougons
, so full of bodies that the earth seems to push them back up to the surface. It is a powerful metaphor for the way in which the living are haunted by the dead, and for how the old ailments and defects resurface in the here and now. When the old cemetery is cleared and a new one designated, the bones are carted across town, scattering human remains along the streets.
    Aunt Dide is given a mythical grandeur in chapter 7 of
The Fortune of the Rougons
, just before her children commit her to the lunatic asylum. She foretells the death of her nephew Silvère (François Mouret’s brother), the young Republican idealist who is betrayed by his own family and murdered with their connivance:
    I brought nothing but wolves into the world . . . a whole family . . . a whole litter of wolves . . . There was just one poor lad, and they’ve eaten him up; they each had a bite at him, and their lips are covered with blood . . . Damn them! They are thieves and murderers. And they live like gentlemen. Damn them! Damn them!
    Like some ancient prophetess, whose madness is also her lucidity and whose foresight goes unheeded, Dide curses the whole pack of