“L’Assommoir” by Ėmile Zola, 1867
This is a marvelous story, part of Zola’s 20 novel cycle,
detailing Parisian proletarian life in the 18th arrondissement in
the ‘Gouette d’Or’ district, just above the Gare du Nord. At the time in 1850 when the novel starts, the
area was just outside the old city wall. It ends in 1869. It is the story of the rise and fall of a
young laundress, Gervaise. She is
abandoned by her shiftless lover with two children after being in Paris for
some months, then marries a young and responsible teetotaler and roofer. Together they are able to save enough francs
so that they can move to better quarters.
The neighborhood is full of factory men and working women, artisans and
shabby storefronts. Smells and stink;
dirt and wear surround the characters on the streets. Artisans labor in garrets, tiny rooms and
basements. Money is always dear; drunks
lie on the sidewalks, but Gervaisse works hard no matter what. Zola gives atmosphere, color and the sun,
light, rhythm and music to the neighborhood too – illuminating lives that can
be as ‘pretty’ as those of the rich in their odd way.
Memorable scenes follow: a huge
fight in a steamy self-service laundry; an odd marriage trek which involves a famous parade to and through the
Louvre; the new laundry on the Rue de la Gouette d’Or they rent; the tenement; an asylum for the DT's and mental illness; dancehalls, bars, the streets of Paris. They have a baby
girl, Nana, who also shows up in a later Zola book. Things seem to be going
well!
Politics?
At one point in the wedding feast the roofer Coupeau says “politics is bunk” and indeed, this is
not a directly political novel. Other than Coupeau’s on-a-lark visit to a
barricade in 1851 protesting the coup of Napoleon III, there is nothing
here. He reflects the sentiment of most
proletarians, who ‘leave politics to the
middle-classes.’ Some Marxists like
Georgy Lukács or Tony McKenna have a distain for Zola, finding Honoré Balzac to
be a ‘higher level’ humanist writer. They look down their noses at explicitly
political work. Zola’s classic political book, Germinale is written squarely about class struggle miners. L’Assommoir
is not, nor are others in the cycle. Gervaise’ little boy Etienne shows up in Germinale, but here he is a cypher... as
is politics. This book does not focus on
a whole society or try to, though implicit in part of the book is a sturdy,
working class feminism. The book is set
2 years after the barricades of 1848 – including barricades in the Gouette
d’Or.’ Of most importance, self-censorship
was in effect, as the censors controlled what was printed. This affected this book.
Balzac died in 1850 and was the naturalist forerunner and
inspiration to Zola and other naturalist / realist writers like Dickens,
Proust, Flaubert, Hugo and James. Zola also championed ‘naturalism,’ which is a
study of social life in literature. He was
not afraid to directly focus on the working poor while Balzac only touched that
class. Zola wrote the famous ‘J’Accuse’
letter against the anti-Semitic frame-up of Dreyfus. Balzac’s politics were conservative and royalist. Marx and Engels lived in Paris just prior to
1850, the period of the start of the novel, writing many of the founding
documents of communism. They were
referencing the same proletarian conditions in this book.
The early founders of communism appreciated Balzac because
he pictured all levels of a cruel and shallow, class-riven society. Most
importantly, he had published his books for them to read by 1850. Zola published L’Assommoir in 1976 and Germinale was serialized in 1884-1886
after Marx had died. Leftist critics who
ape Marx and Engel’s early preferences avoid history’s movement through
literary production. Zola reflects a
higher level of class struggle and modernism, just as Hardy did in comparison
to Dickens, Austen or the Brontës.
Proletarian
Life
Assommoir is colloquial French for getting hammered,
plastered or knocked out… so a bar with cheap liquor where you can drink to
bury your sorrows. In the U.S. parlance,
a dive bar. Zola was attacked for using
working-class colloquialisms, sly nick-names, slang, profanity and insults in
the book, as well as depicting such ‘low’ topics as poverty, hard work, abuse, bad
smells, omnipresent dirt, death and disorder.
He is accused of lying about and slandering the working class and his
response was that ‘I write what I see.’
He was not a romantic or social-realist propagandist.
The main issue in the book is whether the environment or individual
failings are the cause of downfalls. Whether ignorance and stupidity, overwrought
emotions, social climbing and lusts of various kinds are the real issue; not
the cruel environment surrounding proletarians.
In reading the book, they interrelate, as there is no simple answer. At first Gervaise and Coupeau are ordinary
people with good habits, kind and able. They
love each other, have a child together and start making a life. The ‘fall’ starts with a literal fall for
Coupeau. Roofing, even in 2021, is still
the 3rd most dangerous occupation and still filled with low-paid
immigrants working long hours. ‘Shit
happens’ – including temporary success. Some
marry the wrong man. Rent day is a horror in the tenements. Food and drink are the only comforts – if
there is any food. Children starve and
old people waste away under stairwells. Walls are thin, children and women are beaten;
drink abounds. Careful misers have a distinct advantage in a situation of proletarian
poverty. Zola ultimately comes down on
both sides of this issue, though a bit of a puritan in his language.
Gervaise at first assumes hard work, generosity and
kindness will suffice. Is this a
character flaw? “Hard work” is the
essence of the capitalist mode for workers.
Through labor power surplus value is generated for the capitalist and
through ‘hard work’ a sort of a living can be earned by the worker. This formula hasn’t changed since 1850. Gervaise rents a small shop and goes into a
large debt to a friend. So her condition
as an employed proletarian changes to self-employed laundress. This leap into another ‘higher’ class fraction
as a shop owner with employees is pressured by the social logic of capital - a
promise of greater earnings and independence. At first that is the case, and these scenes of
success are happy and beguiling.
The wedding parade in the Louvre is real because it shows
that workers never went to museums, and understood even less of what they were
seeing. This is similar to today. This
is Zola’s sly poke at high culture and archaic Christian culture versus low
culture – especially the ogling of painted nudes. Which as Berger pointed out in “Ways of Seeing” were the first porno
pin-ups.
The Troubles
A washerwoman doing clothes by hand knows the secrets of
every client through their intimate torn, dirty, stained and odiferous clothing. What she could tell! Zola crafts extended scenes of work – roofing a building; the
detailing in a laundry, the making of iron rivets in a foundry and a flower shop full of girls. He mentions Marx's theory of increasing mechanization leading to job
losses. Then just “a bit o’ fun” intrudes… the first spell of laziness after a
mountain of work; the first falling down drunk in the daylight; the first lewd
behavior in public, the first sensual instinct - and an end to saving. It is the ‘pleasure principle’ in
action. Another large debt is incurred to
become a landlord. There’s a triangle of
3 men interested in Gervaise, one a useless drunk, one a lazy opportunist and
one that actually works. The family holds a big, expensive Rabelaisian party. Sneaky adultery becomes normal, as divorce is
illegal. In a cruel capitalist context these are failings. Like the tight-rope walker hundreds of feet
up, a small slip is no small thing, but several, well...
Is this a tract against alcohol and adultery? Some will see
it as such, because alcoholics drag everyone down with them - Gervaise, the
laundry, her sexually precocious daughter Nana.
Eventually they lose the laundry and are forced into cold 6th
floor attic rooms. Gervaise loses jobs and Coupeau barely works,
hoarding his money for drink, which Gervaise takes to too. At one point Zola
says, after their daughter’s communion: “That
was the family’s last happy day.” Dance
halls, begging and an asylum fill the days.
Gervaise eventually ends up in the arms of a vile, drunken undertaker in
her tenement. Zola ends by saying "...she died from poverty."
The book is repetitive, overlong and overly-detailed in the
style of its day. It reaches levels of
melodrama at times. Some events or
concerns take many pages, like an involved, many-peopled scene in a film by Robert
Altman. L’Assommoir is 440 pages, so no one-day read. The ultimate impact is of being sent back in
time, dropped onto several streets in Paris in the mid-1800s, in a
neighborhood like a small village. It’s the only real ‘time travel’ there
is.
Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Ways of Seeing” (Berger); “Thieves of the
Wood,” “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “A Walk Through Paris,” “Poverty – What is it Good For?,” “The Lower
Depths” (Gorky); “U.S. Cities With Lowest Life Expectancy,” “Famished Road”
(Okri); “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance)’ “The Jungle” (Sinclair); "Palmer's Bar," "Anti-Fascism, Sports, Sobriety," "Lukacs."
And I got it at Chapman Street Books, Ely Mn!
The Cultural Marxist
June 1, 2023
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