The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) Read Online Free Page B

plotting complements something else too: a profound understanding of how to deploy a symbolic structure and a poetic, not to say lyrical, style. Zola choreographs symbolically charged scenes in which, for instance, a game of shuttlecock between children becomes an opportunity for Faujas to bring the (self-)interests of the two opposing factions into line with his own plan. Later in the novel, Mouret’s insanity and fall is symbolized by the way he returns to find his beloved vegetable garden has been pulled up and turned by Trouche, Faujas’s brother-in-law, into a vulgar and showy flower garden. Though Zola relied on documentation and textbooks to plot the different madnesses of Marthe and François Mouret, and even uses examples from contemporary medicine when he has Doctor Porquier cite case files of insane people, there is a powerful symbolic meaning to the couple’s fates. Mouret dies in the fire he starts which destroys his house, the place he loves, and has, in his insane way, reclaimed by killing the Faujas clan, while Marthe dies in her mother’s house, catching sight of her son Serge’s soutane in the red light of the flames as they flicker across the room. These are tragic homecomings, but they are homecomings nonetheless: theyfit together, and we might even say they ‘rhymed’. Even the novel’s ending casts ahead: Serge himself, drawn to religion by Faujas and his mother’s favourite child, will return with his own tragedy in the novel that immediately follows this one:
The Sin of Abbé Mouret
(1875). Like many of Zola’s books, this one thus ends on the cusp of the next instalment: people beget people, novels beget novels.
    The Scientific Novel
    ‘Heredity, like gravity, has its laws,’ wrote Zola in the preface to
The Fortune of the Rougons
, for which he proposed, revealingly, an alternative ‘scientific title’ with a deliberately Darwinian flavour: ‘Origins’. 5 Zola believed that art had a responsibility to understand its period and to show solidarity with its times. Later, Zola’s solidarity would become overtly political, with his famous ‘J’Accuse’ pamphlet during the Dreyfus case, in which he showed that political idealism was by no means incompatible with a deep and often pessimistic understanding of reality. Zola was also a materialist in the specific sense that he believed that what happened in the world was explicable by means of that world. This does not, as we have seen, prevent him from bringing his novels to melodramatic and symbolic climaxes—on the contrary, it suggests that these great melodramatic denouements, for all their excess, are firmly fixed in causes and effects that are rooted in sturdy plotting.
    Zola had, as a young writer, written poetry of a romantic and idealistic bent, but quickly turned his back on it in favour of a more documentary and socially committed literature. This commitment was never, in the novels at least, jeopardized by sentimentality, and this in part is what caused many of his critics to impute a bleak and amoral vision to his Rougon-Macquart series. Zola could be doctrinaire about his method and his subjects, and gathered around him a group of disciples who took him as leader of the ‘Naturalist school’ and met at his house in Médan. In 1880, Zola and a handful of fellow Naturalists produced the volume
Médan Nights
(
Les Soirées de Médan
), showcasing short stories by six writers: Zola himself, J.-K. Huysmans, Maupassant, Henri Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The book’s great success was Maupassant’s ‘Boule deSuif’, and it is revealing that, of the writers represented, Maupassant quickly moved away from the group and refused to be circumscribed by an ‘–ism’, Huysmans was leaning in the direction that would lead, four years later, to the decadent mystical masterpiece
Against Nature
, and Céard, Hennique, and Alexis, who stayed true to the Naturalist ethos, are now forgotten. If there is a moral to this story,