BOOKS
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nomic forces. The single exception among these people is Deneulin, who
is ruined by the marauding strikers, although he has always been a
"good" employer. Up to a point Zola can ignore this man's role as
member of the owning class; he can place him outside the diagram; but
since he cannot make him too real without making him seem too sym-
pathetic he is forced to line him up with the other "pawns" on the flat
table of his doctrine. Irony is an uncomfortable mode for the doctrinaire;
having blundered into it, Zola retraces his steps as quickly as possible.
The greatest weakness in the novel, however, is the characterization, or
rather lack of characterization, of the central figure of Etienne Lantier,
through whom Zola reveals his own most profound embarassment. For
to Etienne is given the impossible role of demonstrating the laws of
heredity-a relative of the Macquarts, he is cursed with alcoholism and
insanity-and of being an inspiration to the miners to exert their will
sufficiently to throw off their chains. A dim phenomenon, arriving from
nowhere and returning to the same place, moving like a somnabulist
among the distraught miners but persuading them no more than the
reader of his reality, he reflects the essential contradiction of his creator's
career. That contradiction of course was how belief in any great creative
movement, whether of literature or life, could be reconciled with a
philosophy that gives to the individual so little control of the sources of
creation.
It will be a transition to more positive aspects to suggest that in his
practice Zola admirably transcends the theoretical recommendations of
Naturalism in regard to the handling of crowds and the use of detail.
Documentation was the name that the Naturalists gave to the concrete
vehicle that literature had always had, and must always have, in order
not to possess a body without substance. The peculiarity of Naturalism
was not in its fondness for details but in its peculiarly inorganic use of
them, which at times amounted to detail for detail's sake. Zola, a
notorious offender, has here achieved such relevance because, as will be
noted in a moment, most of his details are fused around a dominating
symbol. As for his actual rendering of crowds, it is something different
from the reference to vague "social masses" in his notes. A crowd is a
notion, an abstraction, a language symbol for an aggregate of separate
realities. To become a symbol for art or literature it must take on the
concretion that derives from its physical mass, as in the plastic arts, or
from metaphor and partial individuation, as in literature. Otherwise it
retains its abstract character, as in the Greek chorus, the anonymous
and depersonalized voice of the collective code. Zola
reali<;es
the crowd
that teems through the middle sections of the book through a wealth of
metaphors that would repay close study. But what really makes it come
alive is our previous familiarity with everything that need be known
about the Maheus, Mouquettes, Pierrons, and others who make it up on
the plane of intensive personal relationships.
Zola is probably so successful in treating these people because their
experience approximated his own so closely that he could render them
without the paralyzing interference of his system. There is also Mr.
Josephson'spoint that he had spent some seven months in close contact
with them in the mining region of the Loire valley. This desertion of the
longueurs
of the Medan villa was tantamount not only to an exchange
of theory for experience but to a profound alteration of method. For the
