French cinema: history, styles, and cultural significance

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 that pull the carts in the mine. 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 in not only an unsympathetic way, but in a fashion calculated to draw the reader's horror and revulsion. Yet simply because the nature of the murder is shocking does not mean, again, that it lacks a realistic element. Zola admits that he paints a portrait of the extremes of human behavior, in this case murder. He presents an extreme version of the negative qualities of human beings as a whole. The extremity of the action is not wholly removed from the lurid and sensational versions of adulterous affairs from either the newspapers of Zola's times or of today's ripped from the headlines tales. Zola uses naturalistic detail to make the gore and the blood and the baseness of his heroine's passion seem both abnormal, yet still not removed from the realm of a possible, already existing reality with a life outside of the author's imagination.

La Bete Humaine similarly chronicles murder and debauchery, although its cast of characters and its events take place over a larger social milieu than the previous Therese Raquin. In this case, the protagonist is afflicted with a psychological disorder that makes him want to kill women. By focusing on this particular maladaptive condition, the author gains a greater understanding of misogyny in general, which afflicts many men in the society depicted by Zola in the novel, and also of the violence that is present in all of society. The narrative structure of the novel takes the form of a crime novel. However, there is no clear moral reckoning at the end, as the reader might desire and expect, given the surface genre of the creation. The most dramatic scene is that of a train wreck, a scene that might be taken from life in times of precarious journeys, yet has the force of the macabre because of the violent nature of climax.