haonowshaokao

AKA “The Fortune Of The Rougons”

The first book in a series is often the most famous. Even if later works have much greater success, it will be revisited by readers, curious about the back-story of the characters – especially when it sets out the entire structure of the series. If someone think about making a series of films, they will usually consider the first book to start with. So why then is La Fortune des Rougon so obscure? Why has nobody tried to make a film of it when there have been at least four adaptations of Nana? Why has nobody even made a translation since 1886? These things don’t happen by accident. It was natural, therefore, that when I started to read I suspected that the book would quite likely substitute extensive family history and theories of heredity for real narrative drive and characterisation. I was partially right, but generally I was way off the mark.

The Fortune Of The Rougons is not a normal novel – it has a strange structure, an utterly tragic upbeat ending, and is set very much in historical events instead of just having them as a backdrop. The story starts with a sweeping pan-shot of the town of Plassans, which narrows in to show an emblematic private scene between a couple of young lovers, having one last night together before the boy goes away to fight in a war. It’s a very effective scene, as it must be – I can’t say whether Zola spent months on it, but it certainly seems well-honed.

The second chapter then suddenly jumps into an extensive family history – it’s a fairly decent chunk of the novel and contains no dialogue at all – the narrative never stops on any scene long enough to merit even a description. To be fair, it is an essential part of the story and needs to be told, but putting it in this form just leads to it being more confusing. At first the story concerns “Tante Dide”, the matriarch of the Rougon-Macquart family, but quickly the focus switches to her son Pierre Rougon, as he cheats her out of her money and sets himself up to climb the town’s social ladder. The narrative then thankfully slows down a bit and we get the background to the central events of the novel. Then we shift back again to follow the life of his half-brother Macquart, a lazy alcoholic wife-beater who lives off his family and bears a massive grudge against the equally unpleasant Rougon. Finally the third part of the family is introduced, Rougon & Macquart’s nephew Silvère, AKA the male half of the two lovers from the first chapter.

All this may sound pretty exhausing, and I’ve only skimmed the surface of the narrative, but it’s at once more confusing and more readable than it may seem. The love story between Silvère and Miette which follows is the real apex of the novel, though – the only two ‘nice’ characters spend a few years wandering the town and countryside together, swimming in rivers and climbing trees, before the fateful day when the Republic is overthrown in a coup and they both go marching off to fight a doomed resistance.

Meanwhile Pierre Rougon and his wife have been using the inside information gained from their son to organise a group of conservatives to support the coup and take over the management of the town when it happens. The three parts of the family are aligned against each-other and the climactic last few chapters make for a gripping, brutal conclusion, with one of the most horrific scenes imaginable juxtaposed with a triumphant, undeserved victory.

In conclusion, then, a slightly difficult novel, which takes a bad turn at the start, but recovers for a magnificent second half. Unfortunately the work done in the first half is necessary to set up the second. So what can be done?

Translation
A fairly ancient translation by Henry Viztelly, made less than 25 years after the book’s original publication, extensively edited by his son Ernest. Understandably it now seems quite old-fashioned and stilted. Earthy rural working characters tend to talk in a ridiculously literary way ("You’ll be in a fine plight when you’ve broken one of my arms or legs, who’ll keep you then, you lazy fellow?") and swearing is censored to the extent that the title of ‘old rogue’ is reserved for when the translator wants to convey a particularly foul insult. Nevertheless, the text is very readable, and the descriptive passages are very well-formed and lyrical.

Historical background
The central part of the novel takes place during the coup of 1851, where Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte overthrew the new Second French Republic to declare the Second French Empire. Zola’s personal experience of these times is self-evident, and the importance of these events to the story is obvious.

Naturalism
"I wish to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, conducts itself in a given social system after blossoming forth and giving birth to ten or twenty members, who, though they may appear, at the first glance, profoundly dissimilar one from the other, are, as analysis demonstrates, most closely linked together from the point of view of affinity. Heredity, like gravity, has its laws."
Zola’s naturalistic plan fails to show itself convincingly here, apart from a few heavy-handed asides. Presumably the plan was to start off with these characters and develop their inherited features in later books.

Film
No film appears to have been made from this novel, and it’s easy to see why – The story is impossibly convoluted and told out of order, and there are far too many characters. Still, it could be done, though it would have to cut most of the backstory. Which would mangle the rest of the plot immesurably. Some things just don’t work.

When I was 18 one of my ‘world of zines’ correspondents recommended a book called Germinal by a writer called Émile Zola. Back then I was even more open to new suggestions than I am now, so I dutifully went out to WH Smith and picked up a copy. The story inside had everything I was looking for in a book – stark, naturalistically-drawn characters, dramatic historical events, love and death, and an inspirational proto-socialist climax. I was impressed enough to go out and buy L’Oevre and Nana, both of which were almost equally impressive.
At some point I realised that these books were part of a larger series which followed the progress of the different members of a single family during the Second French Empire of 1852-1870, and decided to read all twenty of them. In the next year or two I got through La Terre, La Bête Humaine and L’Assommoir, before foolishly deciding that all this jumping backwards and forwards wouldn’t do, and that I really should read them all in order, starting from the first, La Fortune des Rougon. These were the heady pre-Amazon days, and though I tended to hang around in bookshops (and even work in one occasionally), this book proved impossible to find until 2002, when I’d gone off the project and was about to move to Prague for a few years.
These days I have a smartphone, reader software, access to any PDF I can think of and a lot of time spent on slow-moving public transport; so it looks like we’re on course to start this thing again. I cautiously expect myself to get through a book a month (reading nothing but Zola would undoubtedly lead to naturalisme burnout), and might have time to watch any film adaptations too.
By way of a brief introduction, then, Les Rougon-Macquart is a series of twenty books by this guy:

Émile Zola was one of the founders of the French “Naturalism” movement. Most artistic movements of this name tend to stress a gritty, down-to-earth depiction of “the common man” or the working classes in general, but Zola’s idea is both wider in scope and conceptually narrower. In the late 19th century new scientific, political and sociological ideas were exploding, and inspired by these Zola set out to demonstrate “scientifically” the influence heredity, social environment and other factors have on individual lives.

“I don’t want to describe the contemporary society, but a single family, showing how the race is modified by the environment…. My big task is to be strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist.”

Unfortunately for a modern reader the theories these books are based on have either been discredited or substantially modified in the last 150 years, and therefore they can’t really be read in the slightly odd way Zola intended. It doesn’t really matter, though – this concept doesn’t seem particularly present in the books that I’ve read so far, though another, much more exciting one is: the idea of writing serious, readable novels with shared characters moving through generations. It’s a huge shame that the idea of a saga has become so devalued by the tedious best-selling examples of the 20th century. The genre (or rather the idea) seems to have been cordoned off into a cosy ghetto, while often brilliant modern literature – structuralist, deconstructionist, poststructuralist, postmodernist, post-colonialist – tends to focus on individual, personal experiences.

What I really want to discover is something to do with this: A novel is perhaps a years work – that’s a year of living with your characters, your story, your style. If you follow those people through the years into subsequent generations, does that lead to greater insights into their characters, their world, life in general? The books from this series which I have read are generally from the latter half, and it’s therefore clear before I even start that the conclusions reached by Zola are in effect quite different, and significantly more complex than the fairly crude ones he starts the first book with. Is the project then an exercise in discovery about the world? Or even one of self-discovery (as messy and cliched a 20th century concept as that is)? I don’t have any answers to these questions, yet. But give it a year or so, and we’ll see.