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In Our Time
Germinal (Archive Episode)
00:51:35
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's novel, set in a French miners' strike.
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- [00:00]
Edmund Burch
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Susan Harrow
This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [00:19]
Kate Griffiths
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [00:25]
Susan Harrow
Join me, Alex von Tanzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts, Inner Times.
- [00:43]
Melvin Bragg
On its annual break and we'll be back on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds on the 18th of September. Until then, each week we're offering an episode chosen from our archive of over a thousand programs, which I hope you'll enjoy. Have a good summer. Hello. In 1884, Emile Zola began to serialize his latest work, Germinal, for the French public. It was to prove his greatest success. The novel was the 13th in a series looking at one extended family, the Ruger MacArthur and the relative here is Etienne Lantier, already known to Zola's readers as one of the blighted branch of the family tree. It opens with him trudging towards a coal mine at night, seeking work, and soon he's caught up in a bleak world in which starving families struggle and then strike as they try to hold on to the last scraps of their humanity and the hope of change. With me to discuss Germinal by Emil Zola are Susan Harrow, Ashley Watkins, Chair of French at the University of Bristol Edmund Burch, Lecturer in French Literature and Director of Studies at Churchill College and Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, and Kate Griffiths, professor in French and Translation at Cardiff University. Kate Griffiths, what ought to we know about Zola in his early life?
- [01:58]
Kate Griffiths
Zolla was born in 1840 and he died in 1902. Though he was born in Paris, he spent most of his early life down in Aix en Provence. The family had moved there because his father was a civil engineer and had been hired to build a municipal water system. Now Zola's father died when he was 7 and the family was plunged into poverty. Notable amongst his friends when he was a child was the painter Paul Cezanne, who would become a Post Impressionist leading figure. Zola actually moved back to Paris to finish his studies, but he failed his baccalaureate twice and so had to leave. Could not continue on to university and was forced to find employment. He actually went through two years of unemployment with bitter poverty. Legend has it that he pawned all of his objects and survived by eating sparrows that landed on his garret windowsill. But he then got to taken on by Hachette, the publishing company, and this was to prove a key moment, because though he started as a clerk, he then went on to work in publicity, and he learned what it was that sold novels in the 19th century. So there's three big takeaways here. The first is that his writing draws on his life. It is very autobiographical. The second is that he is a writer who understands poverty. And it both drove his narratives, but it also drove his production, because he was someone who wrote a ferocious amount of work. He produced his 20 novel series, averaging about one novel per year, writing every single day. The final takeaway from his biography is that he knew what sold books. And in the 19th century, it was sensationalism, it was scandal. It was also being the head of a literary movement, and he cultivated those things. When he went on to write his.
- [03:48]
Melvin Bragg
Novels, what were his eyes with this series of novels?
- [03:51]
Kate Griffiths
Zola conceived of writing a series of novels in 1868. He originally planned that they would be 10 novels, but they expanded to 20, and they're known as the Rougon Macquart series of novels. They're based around one family. And Zola had three aims when writing these novels. The first was that he wanted to document his time. He wanted to give an accurate reflection of the era in which he lived. All of Zola's Hugo Macquart series are set in the period known as the Second Empire in France, which ran between 181852 and 1870. Zola was a huge opponent of the Second Empire because he believed it to be politically, morally and financially corrupt. The second aim that he had when writing these novels was to give us a vision of human behavior. He was interested in who we are and how we become who we are. And he had a very determinist vision of humanity. He believed that we are all the products of our environment, our era, our and our heredity. And so his 20 novel series traces those theories, looking at the ways in which those forces shape each and every one of his characters.
- [05:00]
Melvin Bragg
He's influenced by the philosopher 10, is that right?
- [05:03]
Kate Griffiths
He was very much so. 10 is not a fiction writer, but Zola takes his ideas and he enacts them in fiction. The final aim that Zola had within his novels was to write about the real, to find beauty out of everyday life. And so he marks a real turning point in fiction, because the subjects that he included were drawn from everyday life. He had this Belief that if something existed in life, then it could be put into art.
- [05:30]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much, Edmund Burch. Can we expand this, run these 20 novels in the Second Empire? Can you just tell listeners a bit more about how he was doing it and what they represented?
- [05:42]
Edmund Burch
One of the things that Zola does is he writes novels about different areas of society. So he looks at the Second Empire. This is a retrospective vision of the Second Empire, as Kate was saying, a period of which Zola was deeply critical. And he focuses his novels on different areas of life in the Second Empire. They have a panoramic quality. We might think of Larjean Money, a novel about the Bourse. Germinal, a novel about mining. L', Assommoir, an earlier novel, focused on urban poverty in the city of Paris. Le Ventre de Paris, focused on the market, Les Halles in Paris. So Zola takes different areas of life in the Second Empire, and he subjects these to scrutiny, to analysis. He explores them. He constructs a kind of vision of society, of this Second Empire world, through these different interlocking fiction.
- [06:39]
Melvin Bragg
What's the basis of his structure? Is he approaching it as much as a social scientist, as a novelist?
- [06:44]
Edmund Burch
There is that dimension to Zola. Zola does have a distinctly sociological dimension, and he was certainly to claim this. Zola reflected at great length at times on the influence of scientific models, models taken from popular science and the way these fed into his fiction. He was also motivated, as Kate was saying, by a kind of criticism of the period of the Second Empire as well.
- [07:07]
Melvin Bragg
This is a big one. Can you summarize the plot of Germinal? It was released in 89 episodes at the time, for which, alas, we haven't got the time. But at least you can give viewers an overall view.
- [07:20]
Edmund Burch
I'm sure the novel begins with our hero, Etienne Notier, arriving in a mining community in the north of France. He is hungry, he's desperate for work. He goes to work in the mine and he is shocked by the conditions of life that he finds in the mine, the conditions in which the miners live. In many respects, this is a novel about men and women who go to work in a mine, who get up at 4 o' clock in the morning and go to work in a mine. It's backbreaking work, it's incredibly dangerous work. And they come home and they can't afford to live. And Etienne notices this, and he is offended by this inequality. And he leads and he plays a leading role in a strike. The miners withdraw their labor. The strike is characterized by hardship Hunger and moments of violence. And in the end, in many respects, it is a failure. And the surviving miners go back to work. Etienne, at the end of the novel, leaves the community where the novel began with his arrival, it ends with his departure.
- [08:25]
Melvin Bragg
That's brilliant. On the way there, there are hundreds of pages with almost hundreds of characters. It does grip you, it takes you through. No wonder. It's his most successful novel, still read, still studded, still making television series of it, still making films of it. How did it go down at the.
- [08:42]
Edmund Burch
Time, the novel was a great success. One thing we can think about with Zola is that he spends a lot of time as the subject of various attacks by different figures in the literary landscape. Zola is criticized for the apparent immorality of certain of the subjects that he depicts. This had been a great feature of his earlier novel, l', Assommoir, a novel about the urban poor in Paris. So there's a question about how the subjects that Zola writes about are understood within the cultural landscape. There were further debates about the political implications and the political dimensions of the novel. How should its enigmatic ending be understood, for example? That was one question that was important.
- [09:32]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much, Susan. Susan Harrow, how did you prepare for writing this novel?
- [09:37]
Susan Harrow
He prepared himself in his traditional way, which was to be very meticulous, very comprehensive about the research he undertook. So that meant library research, going along to the National Library of Paris and reading treatises on the medical conditions of miners, on pathologies, the physiology of the miners, the whole spectrum of diseases, from pneumonia to scrofula to cholera epidemics. He studied geology, topography, the engineering side of mining. He learned a lot about the lexicon, the vocabulary of the mines, which he was then going to transplant into the narrative he did as well. And this is really central, remarkable fieldwork for this novel. He was invited by a left wing MP whom he'd met on holiday in Brittany, who invited him to come and get to know the coal fields. This man was called Alfred girard. So in February 1884 is very fortuitous. It's at the moment of a huge strike where 12,000 miners are out on strike. Zola zooms up to the border land between France and Belgium, near Valenciennes, to the place called Anzin. And he spends a full week interviewing miners, interviewing colliery managers and learning about the whole spectrum of mining activity and the community cultures around mining. At the center of this was a wonderful opportunity for him to actually go down into a mine. So he gets into the cage and he experiences that Terrifying drop that Etienne does as well. At the beginning of the novel, being the hero, as it were, our protagonist in the fiction drops to the bottom and is able to experience crawling Zola crawling on all fours down a very tight tunnel to get a really close up, literally close up experience of the miner's work. And this was no small feat for Zola at this point. He's in his mid-40s, he's corpulent, and he is a lifelong claustrophobe. So that was a really challenging moment. But he grasped it with both hands. And then, of course, he amplified that research on the ground and more especially under the ground, with lots of research around how the mining families lived, domestic cultures, community practices, high days and holidays, food, the whole gamut of life, everyday life. As Kate was saying, Sean, the first.
- [12:14]
Melvin Bragg
Encounter, as it were, we have with the book is when Etienne is walking, having been piled from his previous job for an attack on his boss. It's dark, it's muddy, it's bleak. It's rather like being down a mine, really. But in the distance there's this glow, this is this, and it becomes this, where he uses the idea of it being mythic. This is mythic thing going on, which is a mine, of course, but Zola begins to inhabit it with mythic qualities. Can you talk about that?
- [12:45]
Susan Harrow
Absolutely. So Zola, in that opening scene, very much constructs Le Voreux, the voracious one, the name of the mine, as a kind of mythic beast, a slumbering, sullen, malevolent deity. And in this, Sola is creating a kind of mythology of the modern, as if he's going back to Greek mythology, for example, with his vision of Tartarus. He calls it Le Tartaret in the novel. And he's making it modern. He's looking at one of the machines of advancing capitalism, the mining industry, Carboniferous capitalism. And he's really plunging into the fantasies, the fears that we all have associated with the dark, with the deep. And so that unrolls as a kind of dark fantastic as the novel unfolds. So this weaving together of his own mythology that's drawn through metaphor, through anthropomorphic visions, through almost hallucinatory writing sometimes.
- [13:48]
Melvin Bragg
And poetic writing, yes.
- [13:50]
Susan Harrow
It's kind of harsh, poetic writing, absolutely. I mean, he saw that as his mission, really, to use the real in which he's steeped, as well as a kind of springboard to that visionary writing or poetic writing, highly figurative, metaphoric writing that really produces a very compelling narrative fabric that's richly textured.
- [14:11]
Melvin Bragg
Do we know where he got the idea that this one man who would enter, this one foreign man as well, he was French, of course, but foreign to mining, would enter this and carry the burden of this long convoluted plot.
- [14:22]
Susan Harrow
It's certainly a kind of Bildungsromann, a kind of novel of an apprenticeship in a world of work that is quite alien to Etienne Lantier. It's as if Lantier, of course, he's been fired from his job on the railway. So another great big engine of modernity in a place of myth in Zola's fiction, that will be in La Betumaine, the human beast. And in a way, it's the atavistic violence that has arisen in Etienne, caused him to assault his boss and he gets fired, which makes him jobless and therefore seeking a new departure. So very much, I think there's a kind of blending of Etienne and the reader because we are seeing through Etienne's eyes and experiencing, almost through Etienne's viscera, the feelings of trepidation and terror that he experienced when he makes his first plunge into the vortex. Vortex of the mine in the opening scenes when he gets taken on.
- [15:23]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much indeed. There are so many characters in this, so many episodes. We're going to take Etienne as our way through it, as indeed he is, but let's have one or two others, of course. What about the Mahia family, Kate? Can you tell us about them and why they're important?
- [15:39]
Kate Griffiths
They're hugely important for a number of reasons. The first is that they are fairly revolutionary in literature at the time, because this is the first novel that really engages us with the daily minutiae of working class life, of poverty, of misery, in lots of different ways. Not only is the subject matter revolutionary, but the Mao are important because Zola will not allow us to judge them. They do some pretty horrific things in the course of this novel. They are part of a mob that pushes a man to his death and subsequently castrates him. They are part of the destruction of the mine. And yet, because we see through their eyes, because we live their emotions, because we walk in their shoes, we understand their actions. And they start this novel as the most moderate, hard working, decent family of the community. And so in a way, what Solaer encourages us to think about is if they are pushed to such violence, such desperation, it makes us re evaluate the nature of the poverty and understand that the fact is driving that he was.
- [16:44]
Melvin Bragg
Also very meticulous about the poverty, how women make a meal out of leftover vegetables. And so On. Can you elaborate on that a little?
- [16:52]
Kate Griffiths
Yes. There is a terrible detail in Zola's novels, and it is a detail of the everyday. What he does is he will take us through the daily life of these individuals and we watch them Scrabble for food. We watch them not able to feed their children. And I always find that reading a Zola novel is a little bit like being wrung out like a towel, because by the end of it, you have so engaged with these characters. It's a very powerful thing, though, because he's asking us to understand this poverty. He's asking us to empathize with a mob, you know, who strike, who break things, who kill people. But he's asking us to think about the reasons behind their actions.
- [17:28]
Melvin Bragg
And it's also a time when women are going down the mines and children are going down the mines, and it's important for this next point. And horses are going down the mines. There's one thing where a horse goes down and he says, that horse will never see the light of day again.
- [17:41]
Kate Griffiths
Absolutely. And the scenes in which that takes place are amongst the most harrowing. It's almost like he mechanizes the. The humans. He makes them machines. They are producing coal, they're producing money, and they lose some of their humanity. And yet the machines take on a life force. And we almost feel an immense larger amount of emotion for this poor horse than we do for the characters. Because the Maoa family that you asked about were. They're. Not only do we engage with them, but they represent a huge mass of people beyond them. And so he's using them as symbols. These, you know, these are very specific miners in a very specific mine. And yet we can extrapolate from them to workers around France and elsewhere.
- [18:22]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much, Edmund. Edmond, let's go back to Etienne Lantier. What does he bring to the village and how does he cope with what he gets?
- [18:31]
Edmund Burch
So in many ways, as Susan was saying, the novel resembles a Bildungsroman, a novel of apprenticeship, a novel of education. And we follow Etienne as he grows, as he learns about the world. What does he learn in particular? He learns about socialism, about political action and political engagement. Etienne embarks on a program of reading. He reads a wide range of books. He subscribes to different periodicals. So he thinks he becomes very skillful.
- [19:04]
Melvin Bragg
At his job and well thought of and very able. And therefore, although the money isn't good, he's at the top of the tree for earning the money that you do earn as a miner at that time.
- [19:12]
Edmund Burch
He also becomes a highly respected worker.
- [19:14]
Melvin Bragg
Precisely.
- [19:15]
Edmund Burch
One of the features of the novel is that it documents and thinks about the learning that Etienne does on political questions. But it insists repeatedly the narrative, that Etienne doesn't quite understand the reading that he is embarking upon. There's something he's confused about it. He's confused by these different socialist writers.
- [19:37]
Melvin Bragg
That he reads about anarchism and Marxism and socialism and so on.
- [19:40]
Edmund Burch
He gets it all a little bit mixed up. His reading is ill digested, in the words of the novel. He hasn't quite managed to digest it properly. And of course, this is a novel, as we were just hearing, that is fascinated by eating, that is about digestion. It's an activity in the novel. It's a metaphor. The mine is voracious. The mine wants to devour the miners. So Etienne's reading is ill digested. He hasn't grasped the political stakes of the material with which he's working.
- [20:07]
Melvin Bragg
And the material which he's working is that people are making a great deal of money out of keeping the mines going, and part of their purpose is to keep the miners working for next to nothing.
- [20:15]
Edmund Burch
Yes. And the depiction of poverty in this sense is unflinching. As we were hearing, there are numerous moments that are difficult to read in this regard.
- [20:26]
Susan Harrow
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [20:39]
Kate Griffiths
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sunny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [20:46]
Susan Harrow
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:58]
Melvin Bragg
Susan. It's been mentioned that Zola makes inanimate objects come alive. Living human body often becomes inanimate. Now, where does that take us?
- [21:08]
Susan Harrow
I think Sola's approach to the body is particularly, I would say, a muscular approach to the way he represents the body. So we get a very vivid, very raw sense of quite often the frictions between bodies. One great example of that, I think, is quite early in the novel, we learn that Alazire, who is one of the young daughters of the Mao household, has a deformity. She is humped back. And we learned that this Humphrey sticks into her older sister Catherine's ribs while the two girls sleep in bed. So we get a strong sense almost of a kind of bodies coming together, colliding, overlapping. It's a very Felt sort of novel. We talk about Zola as a visual writer, which he is, but he's also very alert to the full range of connected senses, if you like.
- [21:59]
Melvin Bragg
And he talks very vividly of the. The way that they are clustered together down the mine. And women, too, going into places that men can't go into, sometimes stripping off to go there.
- [22:10]
Susan Harrow
Yeah, men and women, young people and old people. So it's a very, very mixed demography. Catherine at one point divests herself of all her clothing, but there is nothing lewd or erotic here at all because she is covered in coal dust. In fact, Etienne, at the beginning of the novel, fails to recognize that she is a woman. She is dressed in the kind of gender neutral clothing of the miners. And she's rather amused that he hasn't noticed that she's actually a female. And so there's a love interest, there grows. I mean, one of the absolutely amazing instances where Zola gives us a sort of microscopic study of the body is when the narrator takes us into the body's cavity and into. Into the mouth of the old miner mook. And his mouth is blackened, it's bleeding. And we travel as readers along the gum line, the very gum line of the character. So it's as if we are inside their bodies. We know the surface of their bodies, the interior of their bodies, and there is this. This very strong sense of they. They work in the mine, they was living in the mine, but the mine is also living in them. And it's there in the black sludge that the. The miners expectorate.
- [23:27]
Melvin Bragg
That's right.
- [23:28]
Susan Harrow
And which is projected on the ground and creates dark patches. One of the very first observations that Etienne makes when he arrives and when he's trying to take in all these features, so very muscular kind of writing of the body. And of course, the body is at the center of the conflicted relationship between labour and capital, and also at the centre, the core, the pulsating core of relationships between the miners and their families. Because they're not a homogenous body of people. There are rivalries, conflicts, adulteries, transgressions, solidarities.
- [24:03]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Kate. Kate Griffiths. Some of the first reactions to Germinal were rather like some of the first reactions to Zola's work when he started writing. That they were trashy, that they were, I suppose we would say, touching on pornography, that they were too scandalous, they were second rate altogether. That has changed with Germany now. Can you develop that?
- [24:21]
Kate Griffiths
Absolutely. I mean, sensationalism in Zola's novels is really Important. He's doing it on purpose. He's doing it to sell books. He wants to be polemical. He wants the backlash. And he did get the backlash because there was a very famous critic called Ferragus who termed Zola's novels une flect de bouff, a puddle of mud. And Zola's response was. Was perfect, because he turned around and he said that truth, like fire, purifies everything. So the sensationalism was there. The other really interesting side of the sensationalism was that it traveled with Zola as he moved to different countries. When his novels were translated into English, there was actually a parliamentary debate in 1888, and a British MP called Samuel Smith, their debate was on problematic literature, named Zola as inartistic trash, and his English translators, the Visitles, amongst others. The father was prosecuted for obscene libel for publishing Zola, even in heavily edited form. But you're right to focus on women in Zola because they are hugely important. Yes, there is the sexual element that you underlined, but actually there is also, I would argue, a feminist side to Zola, because if you look at the heroine, La maude, in the 19th century, there was a huge debate about the place of women in society. They were supposed to be, you know, looked after by their husbands and their fathers. They were thought to be naturally weaker mentally and physically. And yet lamard blows all of those arguments out of the water. She's the one who looks after and cares for and provides for the men in her family. She's also the one who is able to interrogate Etienne and actually engage with his philosophies. So on the one hand, women in Zola are very, very sexual. Sexualized. On the other hand, you have some very strong figures who offer us a very different vision of gender in the 19th century.
- [26:12]
Melvin Bragg
This is before the strike, but just before the strike. Is there a sense of ferment? Is there a sense of the thing brewing? Edmund, can you take that up?
- [26:19]
Edmund Burch
It's worth considering in this respect why the novel is called Germinal and the novel is entitled this. It's a reference to the period of the French Revolution nearly a hundred years before Zola published this novel. Because Germinal was a month in the revolutionary calendar. One of the things the revolutionaries did is they transformed the calendar, the ordering, the organization of time. And Germinal was a month between March and April in the revolutionary calendar. So Zola is referencing specifically the legacy of the French Revolution. And there's many moments in the strike where we find elements of that Revolutionary iconography being noted, being explored.
- [27:00]
Melvin Bragg
Can you briefly tell us how did it start?
- [27:03]
Edmund Burch
The strike begins in the wake of a dispute between the miners and the company around pay, in particular around how wages are calculated and how safety is organized in the mine. Timbering in the mine. Initially there is a strike fund essentially planned by Etienne. But this gradually runs out and the strike is characterized by starvation, by poverty, by a lack of food, as well as by these moments of upheaval and violence, the miners, for example, rampaging across the different mines. Zola explores in this novel different visions of left wing politics in the ways that these relate to the strike. So in the character of Etienne, we have a relatively radical figure who's pushing for the strike, who believes in the strike. But that's not the only vision of left wing politics that we find in the novel. We might think of another character, Rasseneur, who is far more moderate than Etienne. And we also have the character of Souvarine, who is described in the novel as an anarchist. A Russian anarchist, precisely. He has a terrible backstory and he ultimately, in the novel, will sabotage the mind. And the one thing that we have to know and that we have to confront in this novel is, is the extent to which the strike is a failure. The miners go back to work. In many cases, their conditions may even be worse than they were at the outset. What does it say about this novel that it can't imagine a different kind of resolution to industrial action? It concludes, in other words, with a kind of grim acceptance of a status quo characterized by inequality.
- [28:42]
Melvin Bragg
Susan. Susan Harrow. Zola is very calculating. Well, so are many people. I mean, he's not an accusation, but one of the things he wanted to give his bourgeois readership, a sense of horror. How did he do that?
- [28:53]
Susan Harrow
Absolutely. He says in the Ebourch, in the description of his vision for this novel, that he wants to give them a shiver. He wants to set a tremor going in the reader. I think there are two aspects to this. When the novel was published in 1885, Zola gave an interview to Le Matin newspaper and he sort of explains his rationale there. And he says educated readers, the middle classes, need to wake up and they need to heed and respond to the growing momentum of the demands for social justice. And he said, if we don't do that, society as we know it will be swept away. Will my readers understand this? He hopes so, but he says, I don't know. And there's very much there, the voices, as Edmund's been saying, the voice of the Reformist, who wants to improve society, but who is not a revolutionary himself, doesn't want to sweep it away, but he does want to wake up and spark that coming to consciousness in his readers. So there's that the humanitarian, progressive, forward looking Zola, who's looking to the 20th century and saying, if we don't pay heed and respond, there will be a huge social fracture that will be devastating. And there's also maybe in a slightly lighter vein, the desire to give a thrill to the reader in that this is a long novel, 600 pages, seven parts. And as we were saying earlier, how does Zola sustain that lengthy narrative, which is quite technical in ways with the mining vocabulary, the processes, etc. And of course, some of the scenes of unspeakable violence and violation are ways in which we, in perverse ways, we find readerly pleasure, just like we love detective novels and murder mysteries. So there is that kind of sustaining of the fascination keeping the reader enthralled to the narrative through, for example, this coming back to Kate's point about the feminist side of it. The women who decide to take their revenge on a sexual predator, an economic exploiter, Migra, or at least on his corpse, he's dead, he's fallen, they emasculate him and they brandish his testicles at the end of a stick and carry that stick throughout the village because he has abused them, forced them to pay huge amounts of credit, sexually abused them and sometimes their daughters too. So it's a moment of feminist or feminine revenge. It's almost unreadable as an episode. I think it's the same in the film of Claude Berry. It's a powerful moment.
- [31:39]
Melvin Bragg
Can I so please come in.
- [31:41]
Kate Griffiths
Just that question that you asked about class is really, really intriguing because as I mentioned earlier, Zola takes us into the heads of the miners, the working class, so that we appreciate their plight. He also, in moments, takes us into the heads of the bourgeois characters. So we are not allowed fully to side on either side. Because what he will do is he will show us the bourgeois struggles. He will show us the Monsieur Hennebou who is desperately in love with his wife, who sleeps with everyone but him. And he will dramatise and have us live, you know, the envy that he feels for the miners because although they don't have food, they do have, you know, lovers. The other really interesting thing about Klaas is that when Zola circulated in England, he was heavily censored when he was translated. But if you were educated and rich enough to be Able to access the text in French, you could access Zola unexpurgated. So there is a really interesting class dimension about his consumption as well.
- [32:37]
Melvin Bragg
He's often linked, we've let it go with Impressionism from. From his early days in the friendships he formed in the south of France, near Aix en Provence. Can you develop that?
- [32:49]
Kate Griffiths
Very much so, because part of his relationship with key painters was autobiographical and he wrote it into his fiction. So Cezanne was a childhood friend. And although Zola didn't actually rate his painting that much, he did use the contacts and the environment that Cezanne provided as a background for some of his fiction, most notably a novel Love, the masterpiece that he wrote on the world of painting in 1885. I think that more important are his relationships with Manet. Now, Manet painted Zola in 1868 and he also painted one of Zola's characters, the character Nana. So there's a very close relationship there. What I want to underline are the links between the Impressionists and Zola's writing. They were both scandalous for their time. The Impressionists now have become very, very acceptable to us, but at the time, people thought they were unfinished. People thought that they were hasty in their execution. They couldn't understand the strange colours and the kind of unformulated approach to sort of positioning in the pictures. Zola claimed to translate the Impressionists into fiction, and you can see that in his novels, he takes the subject matter of the everyday, just as the Impressionists did, and puts it into art. So we see washing scenes, we see courtesans, we see bars. But it's not just the question of subject matter, it's also the question of style. One thing that sticks in my mind is that Monet did a series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral in different lights, in different seasons. In a funny kind of way, Zola's germinal anticipates this because he paints in words, the mine in different light conditions, in different seasons, and we get almost an Impressionist series painting of a mine. The final point that I would make on this is that there are certain stylistic techniques which link the Impressionists and Zola. My favourite Impressionist painting is Manet's Bard or Folies Barrett, Folies Bergere, and it crops. There's a beautiful little pair of tiny green shoes in the top corner of the painting, because what Manet wanted to do was show that his picture was a slice of life, that reality exceeded it. And if you look closely at Zola's descriptions of landscape in Germinal it does the same. It crops things at the edge of his descriptions, showing how far the. The description can go. The limits of his fiction.
- [35:15]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much. Edmund Burch, was he a revolutionary or a reactionary?
- [35:20]
Edmund Burch
This is a big question and it's been long debated. And one thing that's also been debated is whether the novel itself is revolutionary or reactionary. When we think about Zola and his political interventions, the key moment as we assess his career is, of course, his defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly accused of betraying military secrets to the Germans. And Zola famously defended Alfred Dreyfus in an article, J', accuse, published in 1898, surely the most famous article ever written in the history of the French press. So we know Zola as a public intellectual, as someone who is prepared to take a stand, to take risks in his political engagements. Germinal, too, is often held up as an important engagement from Zola, not least because of the way in which he represented the question of poverty. But on this issue of revolutionary or reformist, Zola, in most critical and historical accounts, comes out as a bit more of a reformist. He's different, for example, from his contemporary Valez, who was much more radical, politically radical, but also, perhaps more formally radical. Zola was much more uneasy about the violence of the Paris Commune.
- [36:36]
Kate Griffiths
Yes, come in on that question, on revolution, because obviously revolution has two meanings. You know, a clean break with the past, but also the revolution of a wheel, something turning full circle. Those two things are at conflict in Germinal, because the miners want a clean break from the past. But there is a brilliant character called Bonnemard, who is a very, very old miner, and he says when they're at their meetings, I've seen this before, I've heard these words before. And there's a brilliant line that he says, which I'll translate roughly, say whatever you want. It'll be as if you didn't say anything at all, because, you know, everything will come back as it was before. And really sadly, at the end of the novel, that is the case, the miners go back down and history turns on another cycle.
- [37:19]
Melvin Bragg
Susan, is there something about the way Zola writes that alerts us to the failure of the strike? And can we bring Etienne back into it now?
- [37:29]
Susan Harrow
Yes, I think Etienne's departure, you know, he. He has been the leader. He's been a kind of charismatic leader. He's been enjoying something of the cult of personality, too, in his nice boots and his nice jacket, addressing the crowd of striking minders. In the. The forests in of Vendam, by the moonlight. It's a wonderful chiaroscuro moment in Zola's writing, his wonderful colorist Sola. At the end of the novel, we see the miners returning, as we've heard. But Etienne is going off to Paris. He's got a date with Pluchard, who is his kind of socialist, inspiring agent. And we get the perspective of Etienne, who believes that as the spring is now springing and there's lots of sort of references to germination, green shoots pushing through the earth, he feels hope that Paris and a new departure and the narrative actually says he's going to follow Pluchard in Paris, he's going to become Pluchard. So he sees himself as having this political career. But, you know, as Kate was saying, we can't help thinking it's the return of the self same, the revolution that carries on circling round and round. So Zola leaves it open.
- [38:46]
Melvin Bragg
Kate, maybe all of you can join in. How did it move from being considered to be a trashy, a trashy writer to being a classic?
- [38:53]
Kate Griffiths
It was a very slow move. I think it's really worth underlining that Zola was not canonical in his lifetime. He was nominated, for example, for the Academie Francaise, the French Academy, 19 times, and never got elected 19, 19 times. And he set up a literary school. And yet in 1887, five of that literary school repudiated him and said, no, actually this is not what we want to do. I would suggest that he did not really become canonical until about the 1950s and the 1960s, when he started appearing on university syllabi. And I'm really intrigued by the fact that in 1908, shortly after his death, he was moved to the Pantheon. But Anatole France, the man who pronounced his elegy, his eulogy, lauded him as a moment in the human conscience. It was almost as if he was Pantheonized for his role in Jacuz that Edmund was talking about more than for his fiction. His fiction has become canonical now, but it certainly wasn't in his lifetime.
- [39:53]
Susan Harrow
Susan Harrow Van Gogh reads Germinal just weeks after it's published in 1885. And he writes to his brother Theo saying, I have just read Zola's Germinal. It is splendid, it is magnificent. The richness of vision has overwhelmed me, and it has provoked me to go immediately and start to draw ahead. And then he draws a series of minus heads. A little bit later, he comes back to Germinal in a letter and says, the reading that we Artists make of Germinal enters us, stays with us, inhabits us. So I think that's really incredibly interesting for the position of Zola, the stature he has among modern artists, and not simply the idea that he is influenced by modern art, which he is, but that the traffic is going to some extent in the opposite direction. He is influencing Post Impressionism. And so if we take a painting like the Potato Eaters, with a family huddled in all their distorted forms around a very meager supper table, with a very atmospheric yellowish light beaming out, that painting is produced in May, I think, of 1885. So two months after Van Gogh has read Germinal. That could be a scene from the Maurer family.
- [41:11]
Melvin Bragg
Edmund, do you want to come in on this?
- [41:12]
Edmund Burch
One anecdote that sticks out is the miners following Zola's funeral cortege and chanting the title of this novel, Jarminal, as a mark of respect to Zola.
- [41:23]
Melvin Bragg
We're near the end of the program now.
- [41:24]
Susan Harrow
Could you.
- [41:25]
Melvin Bragg
Can I ask each of you to summarize what the main chief legacy of it is today?
- [41:30]
Susan Harrow
Well, I think there's a strong legacy in terms of dystopian fiction and dystopian film, a 20th century legacy. And when I go back to those chasms of mouths that open up, one can see connections with Beckett plays like Not I, where the mouth is the main character. There is also a post colonial implication as well. From the reading of Germinal, the Senegalese author Ousmane Somben creates a novel around a major strike that took place in 1947 on this Dakar to River Mali railroad. God's bits of wood that's directly inspired by Germinal. Of course, there's D.H. lawrence from the the mining coal fields of Nottinghamshire and the Rainbow, 1950.
- [42:19]
Melvin Bragg
And so was there any evidence that Lawrence read Germinal?
- [42:22]
Kate Griffiths
Yes, I think Germinal has become almost like a myth for us. And that. That's an interesting thought to me because myth perforates this novel. It's a story that we keep retelling and we keep adapting it to our eras. So, I mean, it's not for nothing that this has been adapted into film, radio, television, theatre, almost any medium that you can imagine.
- [42:44]
Edmund Burch
What strikes me is that this, this is an extraordinary moment in the history of literary fiction. Who is granted access to the novel, who can be represented in fiction? And Zola plays an incredibly important role in that history.
- [43:02]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks to Susan Harrow, Gate Griffiths and Edmund Burch, and to our studio engineer, Emma Harth. Next week, Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which for two millennia shaped ideas on how life should be lived. Essential then. Fascinating. Now, thanks for listening.
- [43:21]
Kate Griffiths
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few.
- [43:25]
Susan Harrow
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:29]
Melvin Bragg
So I ask only one question, really, and that is, what did you fail to say, you'd like to have said starting point?
- [43:35]
Susan Harrow
I'd like to talk a little bit about colour in the visual practice of Zola as writer, because he is a very accomplished colorist. The palette that he presents to us, inky blues, black, silver, white and the whole spectrum of reds, from orangey reds through to the scarlet of blood, is once more a source of the poetry, if you like. Part of the. The myth making and part of the harsh beauty that he unfolds as he shows the relationship between human beings and the earth they walk. And I think there's lots for us to say, potentially, about the coincidence of natural ecologies and human ecologies here in the environmental aspect, which is so resonant for us in the 21st century.
- [44:27]
Melvin Bragg
Did you say that he didn't think greatly of his life of his boyhood friend and lifelong friend Suzanne, Suzanne's works? You said that, did you?
- [44:35]
Kate Griffiths
I did say that, because in his novel Le Havre, it's a novel about a painter, and a painter of huge, immense talent, but actually a painter who ends up committing suicide because he cannot realize that talent, he cannot actually produce Cezanne. And he rather famously ceased to be friends after the publication of that novel because Cezanne thought it was a story reflecting both on his art and on his trajectory as a painter. So whilst Zola was friends with Cezanne, the type of art that Cezanne produced didn't speak to him in the ways that the art of the Impressionists very, very clearly did. Now, I mean, obviously Cezanne has links with the Impressionists, but he's not someone I would characterise as a straight Impressionist, if there is any such thing.
- [45:23]
Melvin Bragg
Anything you want to talk about? Yes.
- [45:24]
Edmund Burch
I mean, it's fascinating to hear about these connections between Zola and Cezanne, Zola and the art world. But I wanted to add that we should also, of course, see Zola and his work as being bound up with the history of literary realism in France. So Zola very interested in Balzac and the legacy of Balzac. Zola very interested also in Flaubert. And there are other writers that we can touch on as well, such as the brothers Goncourt, who inspire Zola. Too, one of the interesting things that Zola does is he's associated with something called naturalism, literary naturalism. And this. There's many ways that we can think about and define this, but it is in all kinds of ways an extension of the realist poetics of the realist literature that had dominated France in the earlier part of the century. Flaubert, Balzac and so on. So Zola's connected to figures in the history of art and visual culture, but he's also very bound up with an important realist legacy in France.
- [46:24]
Susan Harrow
He writes an important essay on the differences between Balzac and himself. And of course, one of those major differences is this interest in heredity, the transmission of, as it were, the genetic flaw down the bloodline. And of course is a really fertile source of plot lines because it's about things going breaking down, things going chaotic. What we've called, following David Baguley, the entropic vision that Zola unfolds so that the speeded up rhythms that, you know, are going along being very productive. And then there is a tipping point where there's over acceleration, things fall apart, there's total destruction. So that kind of rise and fall is very much, you know, quite often powered by heredity, but also by questions of environment, questions of the. The moment in history at which the plot is set, create this upward and then steeply downward trajectory and really sustains the narrative momentum and readers interest, I think.
- [47:27]
Kate Griffiths
But what's interesting actually is what different eras keep from Zola. So whenever he is adapted or translated into a new context, it always strikes me the elements that are left out. So, you know, we keep the violence, we keep the sensationalism. These days we tend to minimize the political critique, but we also, in relation to Germinal, a lot of the adaptations keep hold of the Labour question because it still speaks to our century. So There's a brilliant 1970s BBC TV adaptation which takes Germinal, puts it into the north of England, into the mine. So the characters all have beautiful northern accents, but they still have French names. So you get a lovely fusion of Zola, but also contemporary 1970s UK.
- [48:14]
Melvin Bragg
Is this a series?
- [48:15]
Kate Griffiths
It is a series, yes. It was a multi part series that aired. It wasn't uncontroversial because it came out at the time where there was the morality campaign by Mary Whitehouse and she and the producer, the dramatist behind the Germinal, locked horns a little bit because of the content of that BBC adaptation.
- [48:40]
Melvin Bragg
Do you want to add anything?
- [48:41]
Edmund Burch
Yes, I mean, I think Zola famously thought about the novel as being prophetic. And so it seems to me, right, that we should be thinking about the way in which the novel has continued into the 20th century. Century and beyond continues to be debating. He saw this struggle between capital and labor that is at the center of Germinat. He saw this struggle as being one that the 20th century would have to deal with in some way. And of course, one of the features when you read Germinal is this thought that we're not past this. For all the specificity and the historical precision that Zola brings to the analysis of this world, of the miners, we're not. We're not actually beyond this fiction.
- [49:20]
Susan Harrow
I think there's something very holistic there in that Sola is writing about the Second Empire from a point in the Third Republic, but he's also writing about his own moment and his perspective in his Vision Forwards, because at the end of the novel, there are references to the coming century. So he's got that vision towards the 20th century. So really, it's a very holistic in its historical is recording of history, and it's thinking through history and it's projecting to the history of the future what.
- [49:50]
Melvin Bragg
Stamina to write 20 books.
- [49:52]
Kate Griffiths
Huge stamina. He used to have a little sign on his desk in Latin that said, no days without lines. And he would sit and he would write no days without lines, so that he had to write some text every single day. And I think, you know, in a way that takes us full circle back to the poverty that I talked about, talked about at the start. For me, that's what distinguishes Zola from Flaubert, from Balzac. And it's. For me, he's one of the first industrial writers, partly because he writes about industry, but partly because he treats his writing as a profession. And if he doesn't write, then at some stages in his career, he just doesn't eat. So there is a rawness, there is a kind of a torrent of production, but there's an energy that comes with that too.
- [50:35]
Susan Harrow
I think it's really amazing that on the back of the profits he made from L' Assommoir in 1877, which is really the novel of Etienne's mother, the laundress Gervaise Macquart. With the money he derives from that very successful novel, he's able to purchase a house outside of Paris, downstream of the capital at Mesdon. And he describes in a letter to Flaubert that it's a mere rabbit. Hutch is tiny with his increasing wealth, he's able to add extensions. And so I think it shows you something of Zola's affection for his work and for his characters. So one tower that he builds, he calls Nana, the. The round tower, the hexagonal tower. But like this hexagonal table, he names that one Germinal. So he's kind of inhabiting every day whether to play pool or, as Kate was saying, to write more lines of text, he's inhabiting those spaces. And so there's a kind of affection, I think, that comes through there, real authenticity, sheer joy in the energy of writing and being a creative writer who can afford to immerse in that in a wonderful setting.
- [51:46]
Melvin Bragg
I think our producer is bowing at the ground.
- [51:50]
Edmund Burch
Would anyone like tea or coffee?
- [51:51]
Melvin Bragg
I'll have some tea. Tea?
- [51:53]
Susan Harrow
I'll have coffee. And honour Germina.
- [51:55]
Edmund Burch
I'd love a tea.
- [51:56]
Susan Harrow
Two cheese, one coffee.
- [51:57]
Kate Griffiths
I'm fine, thank you.
- [51:58]
Melvin Bragg
Great. Thank you very much.
- [52:00]
Kate Griffiths
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.
- [52:09]
Melvin Bragg
I'm Amanda Iannucci.
- [52:10]
Susan Harrow
And I'm Helen Lewis, a comedy writer and a journalist teaming up like a pair of unkempt and unlikely superheroes. Our mission is to decipher political language, stress testing to destruction those youth and abused buzzwords and phrases, finding out what they really mean and looking at whether they're meant to deceive us or to distract us or to disturb us.
- [52:30]
Kate Griffiths
And our pledge is to help you spot the tricks of the verbal trade.
- [52:33]
Susan Harrow
But be warned, this series does feature strong political language that some listeners may find an inverted pyramid of piffle. Strong message here from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sound. This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.
- [53:01]
Kate Griffiths
You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.
- [53:08]
Susan Harrow
Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcast.