Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

 Émile Zola 1840-1902

Despite being a loud-mouthed American who writes a blog about electronic editions of precious works of world literature, I feel it is my calling--nay, my duty--to try to write well-reasoned, insightful and penetrating observations about the great books I encounter. If I can't say something constructive, I will usually withhold comment. I don't trash books here, and I don't define my literary tastes in terms of what I don't like. The Overleaf  is a place for inclusiveness that seeks to make literature accessible, not to show off how cool and fancy my tastes are. I like to think of my readers coming along for the ride as we discover books together.

To respect, admire and enjoy a work of literature is the trifecta of a fulfilling reading for me.  If I finish a book and I'm able to apply those three words to the experience, I know that something truly speaks to me. Not that I expect books to consistently deliver on all three levels; sometimes the story or plotting aren't so hot, but the characters are brilliantly rendered. Now and then I'll encounter a work where the language may be a little stilted and the dialog somewhat stiff, but the theme is compelling. One can admire execution while expressing reservations about the overall result (or vice versa) without trashing a book. If I read something that I just don't care for, I usually keep mum about it here.

For the past couple of months, we have been looking at the development and influence of naturalism in the works of Ivan Turgenev, Theodore Dreiser, George Moore and James Joyce. I couldn't justify covering this topic without exploring at least one book by one of the granddaddies of naturalism, Émile Zola. French authors can be intimidating because it seems like those guys really enjoyed composing dense, grand, seemingly impenetrable, multi-volume novels it would take you a lifetime to read. And Émile Zola has a doosey--the Rougon-Macquart series, a twenty volume novel about life under Napoleon III. I'm sure it's wonderful, but no thanks! I just wanted a taste so I could put what I had learned about naturalism into broader perspective.

I was pleased to have found Thérèse Raquin, a stand-alone novel and his first to attract attention to his talents. This novel seemed the best place to start, and indeed it was; it gave me a great deal of insight as to how naturalism originated and evolved as well as into why this guy is so lauded as one of the great French novelists. After reading it, I can honestly say that he was a heck of a writer. But did I enjoy the book and the experience of reading it? Like a relationship in flux on Facebook, "It's Complicated"…

Thérèse Raquin (1867) by Émile Zola

Consider Madame Raquin. a widow who adopts Thérèse, a niece in need of a home after the death of her mother. She raises her with her son, Camille, a boy whose sickliness causes her mother to smother him with affection and care. Consider also that, despite Thérèse's good health, her aunt treats her the same as Camille--forcing her to take the boy's medicine along with him, despite her strength and health. Thérèse plays the part of an obedient, compliant daughter and companion to her cousin. Consider also that it is expected for these first cousins to marry someday so that Madame Raquin can have peace of mind knowing that her son will be looked after when she dies. As this destiny is fulfilled, so the trouble begins in Thérèse Raquin.

Forced to play a role in her family that is the exact opposite of her nature, it is no surprise that she avails herself of the first opportunity to feel real passion as Laurent, a co-worker of Camille's, becomes a weekly guest for dinner and dominoes every Thursday night in the apartment above Madame Raquin's mercery shop. Captivated by one another, they soon secretly seek each other's company and carry on a lusty affair. Dissatisfied with having to sneak around, Thérèse and Laurent decide that the best way to ensure their continued happiness is to kill Camille so they can be married.

And so they do. They drown Camille and claim it was an accident, fool everyone around them and get away with it. But they are then seized with ferocious guilt for their actions and are haunted nightly by visions of Camille's drowned body. Those visions don't go away after they're married, either; things get considerably worse. As their fear intensifies, the passion that brought Thérèse and Laurent together fades, and the now married couple descends into a nightmare of fear, hatred and self destruction. I won't spoil the ending for you, but I don't need to tell you that all of this doesn't end well.

In his preface to the second edition of this novel (quoted in the preface to the 1901 edition available on Project Gutenberg), Zola says that temperament rather than character was his primary interest in creating this novel. He treats his characters as though they are subjects in a scientific experiment. Yet the narrator isn't entirely disinterested, as he freely refers to his protagonists as murderers, brutes and fools throughout the novel. But indeed, every character present acts out of selfishness or at least self interest. As a result, there's no one really likable in this novel, and those who seek characters they like and identify with (all too common these days) will be sorely disappointed--at least not those who are unwilling to plumb the depths of their souls to find affinity with people who have committed acts for which they are ashamed and horrified. And we all have at least one or two of those, even if they are acts we have only committed in our hearts. 

I can see why Victorian England was uncomfortable with racy French books like this one. Compared to George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and W. M. Thackeray, this stuff is really off the hook. Zola speaks to the common undercurrent of guilt and fear that lurks in all human beings, and if you can't identify with that, you are probably fooling yourself. That's precisely why this novel works; it forces readers to confront their own unpleasant attitudes and experiences. That's one of the things truly great art does. Bravo to Émile Zola for using the medium of the novel so ingeniously, but one really wouldn't call the experience of reading it "fun". This book is well crafted, forward looking and disquieting. Worth reading? Definitely. But perhaps only once.

It would be easy to dismiss if it weren't so brilliantly written. The opening chapter that describes Madame Raquin's mercery shop and the greasy Paris neighborhood that surrounds it really draws the reader in with dark, exquisite detail. A gruesome chapter in which Laurent visits the morgue to see if his victim's body has been found is genuinely disturbing. The horrifying sights he sees are distressing enough to provide fodder for Laurent's nightmares and our nightmares as well. Zola describes the hideously bloated and mangled remains of drowning victims as they are observed by callous or indifferent onlookers. It is both chilling and a tremendous piece of writing. And the tension is maintained throughout the final third of the book leading to the final climax with meticulously well-metered prose. This guy knew how to write.

Thérèse Raquin depicts human beings at their absolute worst. Beneath the veneer of these middle class people lurk the hearts of savage beasts. Indeed, middle class gentility is scathingly rebuked to the point of being so over the top that it becomes almost comic. Maybe I'm a jaded twenty-first century reader who sees the middle class as too easy a target for such savage treatment. Perhaps I'm a bit nonplussed by Zola's oversized, overflowing coffers of boiling vitriol. I can't deny that Thérèse Raquin is an important novel that helped pave the way for modernism, the psychological novel, Jean Paul Sartre and Film Noir, but I can deny myself the anguish of a second read without much hesitation. My official verdict: Very good, but sheesh!

Download Thérèse Raquin from Project Gutenberg

"Dubliners" by James Joyce

 

James Joyce 1882-1941

For several weeks, we've been tracing the development and influence of naturalism, a literary movement that broke with the conventions of Victorian prose style. Naturalism is a crucial link between nineteenth century prose and the development of modernism that defined literature in the twentieth century. Naturalist prose introduced a more streamlined writing style and explored taboo themes and portrayed people, their motivations, behavior and the environment in which they exist in a more objective and realistic way.

First, we looked at Irish author George Moore's novel Esther Waters, a book that took a frank, unflinching look at the life of a single, illiterate mother in nineteenth century London. Moore questioned entrenched cultural beliefs about poverty, morality, religion and the social and economic hardships faced by the poor. We also explored Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, a rags-to-riches story (and vice versa) that openly questioned the American dream of economic and social mobility that equates ambition with virtue and poverty with moral failing.

Then we backtracked to explore A Sportsman's Sketches, a collection of short stories by Russian author Ivan Turgenev, a book that explored the harsh realities of life for Russian peasants during the waning days of Russia's feudal landowning system. After that, we traced the naturalist influence to another of George Moore's works, The Untilled Field (1903), another collection of short stories about life in Ireland about twenty years before independence that was directly influenced by Turgenev's book. In this work, Moore's stories show us a nation searching for its identity as the Catholic church's intrusive influence on the everyday lives of Irish peasants, deeply rooted economic problems and widespread emigration to America threatened Ireland's future.

Now we come to another collection of stories that follow the naturalist thread in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), a book that helped to secure Joyce's reputation as one of the world's most accomplished and influential authors while putting Ireland on the world cultural map. George Moore set the table for the emergence of a unique, distinctly Irish literary voice which turned out to be that of James Joyce. His work helped pave the way for modernism, a stylistic tide that spilled well beyond Ireland's geographical and cultural borders to influence world literature. Not bad for a guy who struggled for a decade to even get his stories published.

Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce

The mere mention of his name puts fear in the hearts of undergraduates, but don't worry; Dubliners is the most readable of James Joyce's works, although his prose is densely packed with meaning more implied than stated. By withholding information through the literary device of gnomon, the parts that are missing tell the real story. As a result, these stories break with narrative tradition by not resolving dramatically. He doesn't tell you what to think of the characters he draws, but relies on your ability to draw your own conclusions. Joyce would further shed conventions as his stream-of-consciousness narrative style became more pronounced in the novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. a brilliant but notoriously difficult and inscrutable work that still confounds even the most adventurous of readers. Nine out of ten people who claim to have read it are trying to impress and/or seduce you. (Just for the record, I haven't read it. I glimpsed a few pages once and became a little dizzy for a day or so, but I'm okay now.)

Whereas Turgenev's Sketches depicted the Russian peasantry as oppressed by an inherently unjust feudal system and Moore's book targeted the Catholic church's stranglehold on the mind and soul of the Irish peasant and explored the roots and consequences of Ireland's cultural identity crisis, Joyce concentrates on the day-to-day life of those in the urban Irish middle class. Many of the same forces are at work in Dubliners, but the conflicts are played out in psychological terms as each story gives us a view of the world from the main character's limited but revealing perspective. Joyce's protagonists wrestle with existential problems like inertia, crises of conscience, mental illness, alcoholism, family dysfunction and abuse, political conflicts, social ambition, piety, marriage and death--a veritable laundry list of issues dealt with in the next hundred years of fiction.

Dubliners contains thirteen unrelated stories, but taken linearly, these stories span the major stages of life from childhood to old age.  Each major character undergoes an epiphany about themselves and their circumstances, Sometimes these personal revelations are realistic, sometimes misguided, but always profound. I could write an essay about each of the stories, but here I'll limit myself to an overview of some of the stories and their themes.

Right from the get go, there's something distinctive about Joyce's words, as though his stories were pieces of sculpture. In Dubliners, fiction, like sculpture, is a subtractive medium, and we are to make sense of what the author hasn't taken away.. In "The Sisters", the passing of a mentally ill priest gives a young boy who was close to him his first experience of death and family and friends speak only indirectly about the man's troubles. Two boys encounter an odd. possibly perverted old man while playing hookey from school in "The Encounter", which deals with childhood friendships. Gnomon is consistently at work. We're as much in the dark about what befell the dying priest as the young boy, although as readers, we pick up on clues that he would miss; something sinister is implied in a way that has greater impact than explicitly stating it.

Young, idealistic love is the subject of "Araby", in which a teenage boy experiences the painful self consciousness of infatuation in a culture of sexual repression. His trip to a fair to buy her a gift ends in frustration and he returns home empty handed. The depth of his disappointment is in proportion to his unrealistic idea of love. This is the first of several foiled journeys that bring characters back full circle when they try to leave or change their circumstances.

In "Eveline", a young woman desperately seeking to escape her abusive father by marrying a sailor and sailing for Buenos Aires lacks the courage to follow through. Joyce draws our attention to descriptive details of her home and her possessions which give clues to her history and inner struggles.  In "A Little Cloud", unrealized dreams of a literary life haunt Little Chandler after dining with a friend who is a successful writer. He returns to his home in a foul mood, reminded of the shackles placed on him by his wife and child. Chandler's responses to his environment--in this case, drinking a bit too much in the presence of his former friend and being driven to the brink of brutality by his infant son's cries--tell us more than any explicit account of his state of mind. His fate, it would seem, was sealed by decisions he made long ago.

Three stories deal with social ambition. "The Race" is about a young man eager to impress his new, rich friends from school and to be successful in business. In "A Mother", Mrs. Kearny alienates those around her by being pushy as she zealously advocates for a promised performance fee at a charity variety show on her daughter's behalf. The proprietor in "The Boarding House" and her daughter craftily manipulate a lodger into marriage. It's interesting to note that he protagonists of these stories are, not surprisingly, the least inclined to struggle with the moral implications of their actions, and so we gain perhaps a little less insight into their thoughts and feelings.

Joyce's well chosen words evoke a nausea-free pathos that makes potentially melodramatic situations poignant rather than pathetic. Death, grief and guilt are dealt with squarely in "A Painful Case" when a circumspect middle aged man rebuffs a married woman's advances and is stricken with remorse when he learns of her pitiful, alcohol-fueled demise a few years later. His efforts to try to do the right thing result in doing a far greater injury. "Counterparts" depicts a scrivener's demise from drink and the resultant domestic abuse frankly and directly. He is a man paralyzed by his habits that endanger his job, his finances and his family. Anyone raised as an Irish Catholic, practicing or otherwise, can recognize the heavy burden of living with the moral implications of even well intentioned actions gone wrong, and no one portrays the psychological clash of intention versus consequences mixed with grief and alcoholism in quite the way Joyce does.

Three stories deal with community life, specifically the uncertainty and insecurity that arises when people see themselves in relation to those around them and whose actions fall well short of their ideals and beliefs. "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" deals most directly with the struggle for Irish independence as a small group of men campaigning for an upcoming election find themselves lacking in the looming shadow of deceased Nationalist leader Charles Parnell. "Grace" finds a group of middle class men giving lip service to the merits of temperance and spiritual values in the most agreeable, superficial and often erroneous ways. During a spiritual retreat intended to renew their commitment to spiritual values, even the priest reinforces their limited vision of themselves and their responsibilities. "The Dead", a novella-length story, is the most famous piece from this collection due to numerous adaptations for film and the stage. At a Christmas party (celebrating, in fact, the Feast of the Epiphany--get it?), Gabriel is painfully self conscious, so concerned with how others see him that after hearing his wife tell him the story of a former lover who died young, he considers whether dying young before having the chance to accrue more misdeeds and blunders is better than growing old.

This was a difficult work to put in a nutshell, but reading it is pure pleasure. Joyce's work has been analyzed to the hilt by many folks far more qualified that I am. There's no shortage of material about Joyce's works out there. If this book speaks to you, there are plenty of resources out there.

Next time, we'll conclude our series about naturalism by looking at Thérèse Raquin, the 1867 novel by naturalist granddaddy Émile Zola.

Download Dubliners from Project Gutenberg