The Belly of Paris

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE WRITER'S BELLY
by Mark Kurlansky

THE BELLY OF PARIS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

NOTES ON FOOD AND HISTORY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The Writers Belly
Mark Kurlansky

To many Americans this may seem odd, but when I was a teenager my hero was Emile Zola. This was not because he spoke out so forcefully and dramatically against anti-Semitism and corruption in high places when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain, was framed for an act of espionage and was serving a life sentence in a penal colony. And not just because he did things like that all his life. It was because Zola was engaged, a writer who understood that his success gave him a platform, and he had a profound sense of the responsibility that implied. All over the world there have been such writers. Victor Hugo was another one, Latin America has been famous for them, so have Africa and Asia. America had James Baldwin and John Steinbeck. What was so exceptional about Zola was that he was one of the rare politically engaged writers who never let his political convictions compromise his artistry.

Zola came from a generation much influenced by Hugo. But Zola admired Hugo more for his political commitment than for his romantic prose, or, in Zola's words, his “mountainous rhetoric,” which he found “chilling.”

Zola, a highly political man, always insisted on the separation of art and politics. Though he very much wanted to be known for his political stances, he did not want his novels to be thought of as political pieces. In 1876, when L'Assommoir, sometimes titled in English The Dram Shop, was first serialized, critics infuriated Zola by calling him a socialist writer for his dark depiction of working-class life. He responded, “I do not accept the label you paste on my back. I mean to be a novelist, purely and simply, without any qualifying adjective; if you insist on qualifying me, say that I am a naturalistic novelist. That will not annoy me.” Of course, his concern for the plight of the poor did not necessarily make him a socialist. He read Charles Fourier, Pierre Proudhon, and Karl Marx, and he appreciated their arguments, especially those of Marx, which were presented in the structure of science, because Zola worshipped science. But he was never completely comfortable with the movement, which is probably why the revolutionaries depicted in his books, especially in The Belly of Paris, are virtually comic characters. He was clearly a progressive firmly in the left wing of nineteenth-century politics, but he wanted to keep the distinction between a leftist novelist and a leftist who writes novels.

It was his contention that it was the duty of writers to expose the weaknesses in a society and the duty of politicians to act upon them. He assumed both roles but never mixed them. He believed a novel should bear the mark of an individual and not an ideology. There are no tirades or polemics in Zola novels. Those he reserved for well-crafted newspaper articles such as the famous “J' Accuse!” in which he attacked the government for its persecution of Dreyfus. Some of his characters have such fits, but he always makes them look a bit overblown and even silly. Zola often laughs at political radicals. The convictions are there in the way he portrays life, the way all of his characters have someone bigger trying to step on them, the way most people are consumed in banal struggles. Do not look for justice in a Zola novel; his world is maddeningly unfair. But he always has humor and a thrilling, dark sense of irony.

You cannot help but laugh at the legitimate political anger of Florent when he vents it by teaching a child penmanship with such sentences as “The day of justice will come.” Who but Zola would give us a scene like the one in The Belly of Paris where one of the greatest human rights atrocities in French history is recounted as a bedtime story for a child, while her father's hands are soaked in blood from making sausages?

Zola was always a man of his times, deeply involved in the ideas and movements of his day. He was one of the first amateur photographers, beginning shortly after the pastime was popularized in 1888 by George Eastman's first portable camera, the “box model.” In the last eight years of his life, he became one of the first modern shutterbugs, shooting several thousand snapshots. Though he was plump and unathletic, he also took up the new bicycling craze. In an age of science, of Darwin, an age when it was believed that science held the solutions, he called himself an “evolutionist” and wrote, “I must therefore ask of science to explain life to me, to make it known.”

Zola, like many French readers of his generation, was a great admirer of Honoré de Balzac, who died when Zola was ten years old and had written a cycle of ninety novels and novellas that he called The Human Comedy. For a long time Zola struggled with the question of how to be more than just an imitation of Balzac, who was also a realist, was also concerned with the social ills of the bourgeoisie, and had also portrayed life in Paris and the French provinces with great descriptive detail.

In his late twenties Zola began contemplating an enormous project, a series of novels about successive generations of a family in which characters would do battle with their inner selves and the demons they inherited.