64
PARTISAN REVIEW
instance of a new beginning, as a thrust into a salient of new experience.
But it is at this point that his problems really begin. In transcending
his political indifference, he has not, however, at the same time trans-
cended his political ignorance; and in turning away from individualism,
he will find that the method of inarticulate virility is no substitute for
consciousness. Emancipation from the most elementary bourgeois illu-
sions is in itself no great achievement, unless it is but the first step in
a development that leads one to perceive the world of materialist rela-
tions, and men themselves.
PHILIP RAHV
THE SYMBOLISM OF ZOlA
GERMINAL.
By Emile Zola. Translated by Havelock Ellis, with an
introduction by Matthew Josephson. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
Whatever the motive behind the re-issue of this particular novel of
Zola's at the moment, it does force us to mark off more carefully the
different stages in his career, to distinguish between Zola the salesman
for Naturalism and Zola the Man of Action, between Zola the in-
defatigable charter of "forces" and Zola the artist into whom he now and
then permitted himself to lapse. To put it rather naively,
Germinal,
which represents one of the more conspicuous of these lapses, is something
better than one had remembered Zola even at his best capable of doing.
Whether or not it is his most powerful novel, as Matthew Josephson
maintains in the introduction, it is likely to be found the most successful
of his novels that one has been able to get through. And one may im-
prove on Mr. Josephson's compliment---':that it can stand as a model of
the
social
novel-simply by making certain claims for it as a novel: it is
not, as a whole, in need of any such restrictive label. The point of this
review, as a matter of fact, will be that it succeeds when it does suc-
ceed in spite of rather than because of Naturalism or the attempt to
make of literary art the overworked drab of a mechanical philosophy. It
will' be seen as an example of quite another sort, a triumph of quality
over quantity, of imagination over "forces," of mind over lumpy nine-
teenth-century matter. And in all these respects it will be seen as a
particularly timely example.
From such a point of view its weaknesses, to consider these first, are
easily demonstrable as effects of the inherent unsuitability of Naturalism,
a system of causality based on quasi-scientic principles, to the practice
of literature, a matter of grasping wholes of intelligible experience.
Despite his determination to be "just" to the Hennebeaux,
the
Gregoires, and Dansaerts, the middle-class types required by the scheme,
he never succeeds in making them as credible as his miners, putters, and
others dwellers in the pit. Their conversations at dinner, their attitudes
and sentiments, such an incident as the delivery of bakery goods at one
of their doors immediately after a show of mob violence, all possess that
sharpness of contour which means that they are more the products of an
intellectual necessity than of a creative process. The will toward Justice
dissolves before the greater will to apply the law of the primacy of eco-
