The Earth Read Online

In such a vast work, however, breadth and vigour of imagination, combined with meticulous planning, are equally important assets.

His planning was both broad and precise, as we can learn from his vast wad of notes for La Terre held in the Paris National Library. He starts from the grand premise that the heroine of the novel is Mother Earth herself, in all her moods, and he divides his work into five parts, covering a time-span of some ten years, into which he introduces every aspect of country life: the whole cycle of the seasons with their agricultural counterparts, starting with an autumn sowing and ending with a spring sowing, with, in between, all the manifold seasonal activities of manuring, reaping, haymaking, sheep-shearing and grazing, cattle-breeding, vine-growing, wine-making, all measured against the human cycle of birth, marriage (the first often precedes the second) and death, with the accompanying country events of markets, fairs, weddings, feasts, wakes, funerals and odd festivities that can only be described in the most familiar terms as booze-ups and blow-outs; village pump politics with their envies and jealousies and the basso continuo of crass self-interest; economics – chemicals versus old-fashioned muck (not only animal muck); machinery (liable to break down) against manual labour – the latter generally prevailing, for it is as cheap as muck in family farming; and finally politics, both national (protectionism versus free trade) and personal (the hated institution of ballot for conscription into the army and various ways of avoiding it). All this takes place against the essential backdrop of the weather, devastating hail and murderous summer heat, pallid springs and gorgeous Indian summers, chill winter rains and parched dusty autumns.

Stated in these terms, the novel sounds too carefully organized, but in fact Zola never works abstractly and all these aspects are realized in terms of human character: as Zola himself said, ‘I want to write the living poem of the Earth; but in human terms, not symbolically.’ For example, it is during the famous episode of autumn sowing that Jean first meets his future wife Françoise, accompanies her back to the farm and watches her take hold of the bull's pizzle and direct it into the cow – an episode that predictably aroused the ire of the prudish; and haymaking, with its mixture of toil and excitement and languor, is the occasion for Françoise, sweating and smelling of hay and odor di femmina, to jump down from a stack into Jean's arms, making him for the first time conscious of his desire for her, which grows into love; and during the threshing of the wheat by Françoise and Buteau, the rhythmic beating of their flails and pounding of their hearts smelts them into a single person long before Françoise has the ecstatic realization, after he has raped her, that he is the man she loves. So the set-pieces are also functional, even although we become a trifle bored with being told of the flatness and boundlessness and fertility of Beauce (Zola is rather heavy-handed in his attempts at being poetical); but it is also worth remembering, if we find some repetitiveness in description and in reference to events, that La Terre first appeared in serial form and this inevitably leads to repetition from one episode to the other.

For ordinary people (pace many linguisticians and others suffering from a surfeit of structuralism and certain other isms), important though background is, a novel stands or falls to a great extent by its plot and its characters, both of which must carry conviction. The point of departure of the plot is elegantly simple: an old peasant, Fouan, who has coveted and tended his acres like a man in love with a woman but has become too feeble to continue to look after them properly, decides to divide his land between his three children, so that it will continue to be well farmed. He is to receive from them a pension in return. Two of them, his daughter Fanny, who has already made a good match with a farmer, Delhomme, possessing more land than most, and his good-for-nothing drunkard of an elder son, whose beard and hair have earned him the ironical nickname of Jesus Christ, accept their share immediately; the third, Buteau (a name connoting, in the French buté, bloody-minded pigheadedness) for a while refuses, claiming that he has been diddled in the drawing of the lots. From the moment he dispossesses himself, Fouan's fate is sealed: a man without land is a man of no account. Only Delhomme pays him his pension regularly; Jesus Christ never pays him a penny and indeed sponges on him, as well as selling off his share of the precious, hard-earned family land to outside buyers – a heinous crime in such a close-knit community. Buteau eventually takes up his share when the building of a road enhances its value; he also marries his cousin Lise (by whom he has already had a son a couple of years before) because her land runs with his. Buteau is the real anti-hero of the novel: a bully like his father before him, he is also a randy goat, soon eager to add Françoise to his harem, not only because he lusts after her but also to maintain control of her land. He is also wily and a blatant and unrepentant liar, but he has redeeming qualities: he works like a slave – and indeed, like so many of the characters, he is a slave to the land – and he has a blunt joviality and sly sense of humour, even though his grin comes from a mouth framed in the ferocious jaws of a gorilla.

The heroine counterpart to Buteau is his cousin Françoise. It is notoriously difficult to make jeunes filles interesting, for ‘nice’ girls tend to be colourless: but Lise's sister Françoise is far from this. Her distinguishing characteristic, apart from the fresh beauty of her face and her sturdy peasant body, is a sense of justice, largely lacking in the other, completely utilitarian characters, except perhaps in her husband Jean, who, as an outsider, is relatively uncorrupted by the meanness and single-minded egocentricity of the peasantry. Yet even Françoise, as she lies dying, with her belly and unborn child slit by being thrown, deliberately and impulsively, by her sister Lise onto a scythe blade, refuses to make a will in her husband's favour, as in all fairness she should. Why should this be? Zola, like all good novelists, leaves an area of ambiguity: perhaps it is because she has discovered that she loves Lise's husband Buteau, perhaps because Jean is an intruder with no real right to Fouan property? Certainly it is a free personal choice and we are left in doubt as to the outcome until her last breath; we cannot feel that she has been entirely determined by either heredity or environment.

The main plot of the novel thus follows Fouan's downward path. When his wife dies, partly as a result of her son Buteau's brutality, he goes to live with Fanny but cannot bear the constant pinpricks of her cheeseparing meanness; from there he goes on to the Buteaus where he is at first fêted like a lord, for, well-treated, he could prove a profitable milch-cow. However, things go wrong when he takes Françoise's part against the lecherous Buteau, who is pestering her with his far from delicate attentions (he enjoys taking handfuls of her pubic hair). So Fouan moves to Jesus Christ's subterranean hideout in the tumbledown cellars of the old castle, only to move out again in terror when his host and particularly his daughter La Trouille institute hair-raising methods of surreptitiously searching not only his clothes but his body in an endeavour to uncover a packet of bonds that represent his nest-egg, saved from a lifetime of toil. He goes back to Lise where, after a vain attempt to assert himself and a dreadful experience (Zola had King Lear in mind) of exposure to the elements, he is reduced to impotent sullen silence until, enraged at his refusal to die and terrified because he had witnessed Françoise's murder, Lise and Buteau smother him and burn his body to make it appear accidental death: a scene all the more macabre in that, halfway through the burning, Fouan briefly revives and, from his eyes set in his charred face, glares with hatred at the criminal pair. Over-melodramatic? Perhaps: yet at about the time that Zola was launching into his novel, in the autumn of 1886, the trial took place at Blois of a man and his wife accused and found guilty of having thrust the wife's mother into the fireplace and holding her there, alive, until she had burned to death – a cause célèbre that Zola could hardly fail to know.

The most illustrious member of this respected Rognes family, which she terrorizes, is old Fouan's sister, Marianne, nicknamed La Grande, so despicable a matriarch as to be almost a caricature: her eyes are like a vulture's, her skeletally thin body shows no trace of her gluttony, and her cold-hearted implacability and meanness are such that when her daughter marries for love against her will and dies leaving two orphaned children, Palmyre and Hilarion, she refuses to have anything to do with them and, despite her relative wealth, lets them subsist in squalor and destitution. Hilarion, a deformed village idiot, is kept alive by his saintly sister, who accepts the hardest tasks in the fields and at the markets to provide for the two of them until, in one of the many unforgettable scenes in the book, she falls exhausted to the ground while harvesting and lies dead, crucified beneath the implacable sun. Her brother and lover (she has given him her body, since no one else could be expected to do so) howls like a dog for the whole night following her death, while La Grande seizes her chance of unpaid domestic labour to take him into her household as a beast of burden. Finally, infuriated as she belabours him for his clumsiness, he attempts to rape her (she is now in her late eighties) and has his skull split open with a cleaver for his pains. At the end of the novel, La Grande survives, serenely convinced that she has many years to live (and we feel she may be right), happy in the thought that she has, in any case, devised such an intricate will that the Fouan family will be at each other's throats for many a long year, enriching the lawyers by trying to sort out its complications.

A notable family, of which one further scion must be briefly mentioned: Fouan's son Jesus Christ does not follow in the family footsteps: he is an amiable, soft-hearted, drunken, lazy, greedy layabout of a poacher, obviously intended to supply some light relief. For example, though having few moral principles himself, he becomes infuriated when his (illegitimate) daughter sleeps around (being kind-hearted like her father) with the lads of the village; he then punishes such a blot on the family escutcheon by pursuing her across country with a horsewhip – a fine object lesson on the lack of deterrent power of corporal punishment. But Jesus Christ's outstanding and most amusing quality is his controlled anal flatulence, monumental in its proportions; he uses it to enliven parties, wins a competition against a presumptuous bumpkin from another village, and on one occasion produces so quintessentially concentrated a fart that it floors a bailiff's man like a gunshot. Zola has let his Rabelaisian imagination run riot, no doubt once more to provide some humorous counterpoint to the grimness of other members of the family.

There are numerous secondary characters, many of whom serve a similar funny or ironical purpose. Such are the Charles, rich retired townsfolk, highly regarded in the village, who are bringing up their granddaughter, as they had brought up their daughter, according to the strictest moral principles in a convent: it so happens that the source of all their considerable wealth (far greater than any peasant could hope to earn by a lifetime of toil) is a family brothel in Chartres. Zola's touch seems a trifle heavy here and the conversion of the shy, blushing virginal granddaughter into an assured married woman, highly efficient as a brothel-keeper, seems oversudden and implausible.