Zola: Master of the Macabre and of the Novel Of Social Justice
The author Emile Zola is most famous for the forceful nature of his realistic prose, found in his novels Germinal, La Bete Humaine, and Therese Raquin. But although Zola is noted for his work as a crusader for social justice during his lifetime these novels are also marked by his reliance upon grotesque details, events, and characterization. A reader is invariably provoked to ask this long-deceased author why would an author such as Zola, so intent upon using the artistic form for the purposes of social liberation be moved to use such tropes and narrative devices? Why was Zola so committed in his narrative structure to not conform to, what on the surface might seem to be more 'realistic' characters and events? Although Zola cannot provide an answer, the ability of the literary macabre to be both metaphorically forceful yet not tip over into unrealistic sensationalism can provide something of an answer.
The novel Germinal depicts the lives of miners and the oppression these working individuals suffered over the courses of their daily lives in Zola's time. However, rather than simply depicting this suffering in a state of gritty social verisimilitude, Zola creates potent metaphors to make the fate of the miners felt by the reader on a metaphorical as well as a realistic level. For instance, one small yet gripping detail that remains in the mind of a reader is inevitably...
The horses are brought down when they are foals, and grow in the mines and are raised in the mines until they go blind. Grown too large to go up and down, they exist as subterranean dwellers. They are fit for nothing but the pulling of coal carts, their innate purpose as free, roaming beings with independent wills inexorably perverted by the exploitative labor they are forced to perform by society. Although this detail is grotesque, it is potent because it comes to represent not only the cruel nature of mining, but also the miner's souls as a collective whole. As strange as this detail might be to the ear and eyes of a reader, it also is quite realistic in its nature, and thus the macabre becomes not only strong in a metaphorical fashion, it also has a realistic quality that makes it all the more horrifying.
In Therese Raquin, the focus of Zola is not upon an entire social movement as an unsatisfying marriage. Although the scope might not appear to be as broad as in Zola's later masterpiece Germinal, this does not mean that similar elements of the grotesque and the realistic come into play. The crux of the novel involves a murder committed as a crime of passion. Zola presents the title character and her lover with bestial metaphors, suggesting that she is motivated purely by lust and thus behave in a savage, sub-human animal-like fashion. The nature of the murder is presented…
