Does Anyone Read Emile Zola?

 I knew of Emile Zola from reading about Theodore Dreiser. I did not get a chance to read him until prison. My notes on that reading lie some time in the future when I can get to my prison journal. However, I recall my general opinion - he wrote shorter, livelier novels than Dreiser.

Today, I want to point out Agnes Callard's Zola understood our lust for shopping from UnHerd. Although, I have not read the novel she writes about, what she writes reminds me of the Zola I have read.

The Ladies’ Paradise — Au Bonheur Des Dames — is named for the department store that is the novel’s true protagonist. It is described alternately as a monster, a machine, a colossus, a cathedral, and over the course of the novel it grows — in power and influence, in financial success, and in physical size, as it expands along the street to swallow up the small businesses that had flourished in the neighbourhood for generations. The fictional store and its fictional owner, Octave Mouret, are based, respectively, on Le Bon Marché, one of Paris’ first department stores, and the businessman Aristide Boucicaut, who grew a 3,000 square foot novelty shop with a handful of departments — buttons, lace, ribbons, umbrellas — into a 55,000 square foot colossus that sold everything. Zola carefully researched the business practices detailed in the novel: the replacement of haggling with fixed prices, the use of advertising, the introduction of returns and sales and discounts, the giant displays to encourage window-shopping, the routine rearrangement of the store to confuse customers into spending more time within its walls. The author’s journalistic eye for detail takes the reader back in time to watch something new coming into being — a new type of desire, a new set of human relationships, a new form of life. We witness the birth of shopping.

It is very hard not to be a moralist about capitalism. Veblen and Galbraith fall into the trap: one can hear the distaste in a phrase like “conspicuous consumption”. And these days, we are so accustomed to the word “capitalism” being followed by moralism that it comes as a shock to encounter Zola, who wants to talk to us about economic growth, about the lust for luxury goods, about the power of advertising and the many guises it can take, about the mannerisms of rich shoppers and the working conditions of the poor people who serve them — and yet doesn’t want to preach to us about any of those things. He wants to show you the splendours and the horrors of something; he wants to help you understand.

Is it possible that we cannot stand to see the horrors of modern life? We can write about a small child dying of cancer and its effect on the father. Are willing to read a novel about the system that produces carcinogenic substances that lead to the child's cancer? We have non-fiction for such a thing. Although, Joyce Carol Oates' The Falls does touch on the Love Canal debacle. Maybe fashion has always been against Zola, but the following brought to mind Upton Sinclair:

Zola wrote the kinds of novels critics love to trash, which is to say, the kinds of novels people actually enjoy: a contemporary journalist described him as “the most violently attacked and the most widely read author of his generation”. Zola understood that ordinary readers read for the plot: for romantic tensions, reversals of fortune, character-testing crises. The Ladies’ Paradise comes complete with a plucky heroine — and a will-they-or-won’t-they love story that keeps you turning the pages.

Nonetheless, all of that is secondary. Zola, who lived at the time when social science was beginning to come into its own as a field of research, could be described as the novelist who moonlit as a social scientist. This is why Havelock Ellis, a pioneer in the study of sexuality, wrote: “To look at Zola from the purely artistic standpoint is scarcely to see him at all.” When Zola is telling a story, he’s not only telling a story. While he has your attention, while you’re held in suspense over the heroine’s fate, you find yourself examining the inner workings of this colossus, this department store; you become captivated by its power. And slowly, over the course of the novel, you find yourself confronted by an uncomfortable thought.

Who would publish The Jungle today? It would be thought a pot-boiler (which it is if my memory serves) and a shocker (yeah, you read it and persist in eating hot dogs). I have tried to write a series of stories about the economic decline of an Indiana factory town. A friend criticized the lack of depth in the characters. I have rewritten them with this criticism in mind, but I doubt I have come even close to Zola's method. Reading this essay, I wonder if I have really pushed hard enough on the uncomfortable. If so, I can only blame it on my Midwestern upbringing where we are taught not to be unpleasant. I write that even though I feel sure "The Sloe Gin Effect" and "The Rational Actor" might make a certain class of readers uncomfortable. I still think this path is one worth following.

Ms. Callard may even shine a light on the path that could be followed:

For all the imaginative pleasure we take in the reassuring smallness of Moray’s shop, when it comes to actual shopping, we choose more and more of Mouret. After rejecting the small store in favour of the department store, we rejected the department store in favour of the shopping mall, and the mall in favour of Amazon. We willingly move deeper and deeper into a world that doesn’t feel like home, that maybe never will. And it is Zola who offers us a front row seat to the opening act of this drama, a chance to watch the new world rising from the ashes of the old, a chance to come to terms with the creatures that we have become.

I think I am too old for that theme. What about you?

sch 12/24