Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION - Arthur Goldhammer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
NOTES
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
About the Author
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
Arthur Goldhammer
Several years after Emile Zola’s novel The Kill 1 had run afoul of the Republic’s censor for its outrage to public morals and “gross materialism,” a poet for whom the words of literary language were but the pulsating ghosts of a material world annihilated in the service of the sublime offered him consolation in the form of a letter. Stéphane Mallarmé, whom posterity would assign to an altogether different slope of the literary Olympus from Zola, had just finished reading the sixth novel in the twenty-volume series of which The Kill is the second: the “Rougon-Macquart” saga, in which Zola had set himself the goal of working out the combinatorics of heredity and history that in his mind made orderly taxonomic sense of the profusion of the human jungle. His Excellency Eugène Rougon was in fact devoted to the brother of the hero of The Kill, and while the temporal and geographical locus remained the Paris of the Second Empire (1852–70), the focus of the action had shifted from the world of finance and speculation to that of politics. Yet Mallarmé’s appreciative eye, penetrating beyond the superficialities of plots that can fairly be described in both cases as creaky, remarked the quality that would make the novelist’s work impossible to ignore, even for readers like Henry James, who thought, at this early stage of Zola’s career, prior to the master stroke of L’Assommoir, that it stood out chiefly for its “brutal indecency”2and who found themselves put off by its minute attention to “misery, vice, and uncleanness.”3( James would later revise his judgment substantially, as we shall see.) The quality that appealed to Mallarmé was a certain novelty in the experience of reading: “I read it straight through,” he wrote to Zola of His Excellency, “then read it again piece by piece over several days. [The novel] lends itself to both ways of savoring a work—the old way, which is how it was when novels unfolded like plays, and the new way, which reflects the intermittence of modern life.”4
“The intermittence of modern life”: the phrase is especially apposite of The Kill, whose style, in its best passages, is “swift and transparent, like the glance of a contemporary, of your reader,”5and whose subject, more than the incestuous relationship between Renée Saccard and her stepson Maxime or the frenetic speculations of Aristide Saccard—husband of the one and father of the other—is in fact “the capital of modern life,” the city of Paris itself. For neither the speculation nor the incest would be conceivable without the modernity that is Paris, and that, far more than the “brutal indecency” of illicit sex, is the true object of Zola’s meditation. And at the heart of that Parisian modernity is ambivalence, for the modern has no fixed identity. It is never anything but the antagonist in a perpetual “quarrel of ancient and modern,” a quarrel in which the ancient, the world we are perpetually losing, provides the only beacons in relation to which the identity of its ineluctably if ephemerally triumphant opponent can be located.
THE CAPITAL OF MODERN LIFE
In The Kill we gaze upon Paris as if attempting to get a fix on our precise location from a variety of angles: from the window of a restaurant high above the city on the Buttes Montmartre; from the children’s aerie atop the Hôtel Béraud on the Ile Saint-Louis; from a carriage ambling through the scenic trumpery and social snobbery of the Bois de Boulogne or racing along new boulevards that paved the gas-lit way to perdition; from a mansion built in obedience to the dictates of “the style Napoléon III, that opulent hybrid of every style that ever existed”;6from across the dinner table at a banquet of the rich and powerful; from the muddy ruts of a vast construction site; from inside the studio of an illustrious couturier; from a private room in the Café Riche offering a panorama of gaudily lit kiosks and gaudily dressed streetwalkers. Each of these set-piece descriptions—cinematically precise, with lighting and angles carefully calculated by the auteur7— not only establishes a physical ambience but advances a moral argument. Description in Zola is never neutral, innocent, or passive, as the label Naturalist might suggest; it is a rhetorical weapon, a bludgeon with which to induce in the reader Zola’s religious terror of modernity as an implacable, engulfing flood: images of torrents, inundations, swollen seas, and raging rivers abound, but their purpose is to effect a transfer from the register of natural disaster to that of capitalist calamity. Thus urban development is represented by mountainous seas of rooftops; financial legerdemain eventuates in torrential rivers of gold. Mallarmé correctly grasped the intent of Zola’s prose paintings when he remarked, “I admire very much your backgrounds, Paris and its sky. . . . Everything comes from you, horizons included, and when I the reader leave the page to muse, you, bold tyrant that you are, hang a drop curtain behind my reverie.”8Naturalism was not so much an unvarnished description of what is as a willful imposition of images of a violence akin to nature’s own on the unnatural order of the new.
A violence akin to nature’s own: it was a problem for a novelist of Zola’s epic ambition that the order of the new, being unnatural, lacked the palpable conflict inherent in the natural order in which the strong devour the weak. The transformation wreaked upon Paris in the years preceding the writing of The Kill—the years of the Second Empire— did not “unfold like a play.” It respected no unities of time or place; its action took place behind closed doors. Its battlefields were contracts and counting houses; its victories, expropriations, and quarter-point discounts on promissory notes. Though an epochal feat, which shaped history as surely as a decisive battle, it was not a feat of arms. It did, however, have a general: Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, “the visionary prefect [of the Seine], who saw himself as an ‘artist of demolition,’ pragmatic, Protestant, modern, efficient.”9In the wake of the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, which ultimately elevated Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to the rank of Emperor Napoleon III, Haussmann was tapped to turn Paris into an “urban machine.”10The function of this machine was to accelerate the flow of goods and consumers and thus to quicken the lifeblood of the French capital. Broad boulevards were its arteries. Zola evokes the rapturous response to the enhanced perfusion of the urban tissue:
The lovers were in love with the new Paris. They often dashed about the city by carriage, detouring down certain boulevards for which they felt a special affection. They took delight in the imposing houses with big carved doors and innumerable balconies emblazoned with names, signs, and company insignia in big gold letters. As their coupé sped along, they fondly gazed out upon the gray strips of sidewalk, broad and interminable, with their benches, colorful columns, and skinny trees. The bright gap stretching all the way to the horizon, narrowing as it went and opening out onto a patch of empty blue sky; the uninterrupted double row of big stores with clerks smiling at their customers; the bustling streams of pedestrians—all this filled them little by little with a sense of absolute and total satisfaction, a feeling of perfection as they viewed the life of the street. . . . They were constantly on the move. . . . Each boulevard became but another corridor of their house.
This “absolute and total satisfaction” is altogether kinetic. Zola’s enumeration of visual stimuli—balconies, signs, sidewalks, benches, storefronts—moves as rapidly as the lovers’ coupé, as if to signal slyly that the blur of motion is essential, that none of these delights can bear much scrutiny or be lived with for very long without turning into ennui, the affliction that drives Renée to sin.11The curious insubstantial
ity of modern pleasure is driven home by the stark contrast with the ponderous and “unusable” satisfactions of a relatively static past, conveniently enclosed within the walls of Renée’s ancestral home, the Hôtel Béraud:
Long suites of vast rooms with high ceilings dwarfed the old furniture, which was built low of dark wood. The dusky gloom was peopled solely by the figures in the tapestries, whose large, colorless bodies could barely be made out. All the luxury of the old Paris bourgeoisie was represented here, a luxury as unusable as it was unyielding: chairs whose oak seats were barely covered by a cushion of hemp, beds with stiff sheets, linen chests whose rough boards were singularly hard on frail modern finery.
Although Zola makes a half-hearted attempt at the end of his book to depict this sepulchral solitude as a moral order that would have yielded Renée, his latter-day Phèdre, a happy life had she only bent herself to it, one feels through his pen the libidinal pull of the modern spectacle. He was the son, after all, of a civil engineer, a builder of bridges and canals, a proto-Haussmann possessed of heroic, visionary energy yet caught in the toils of stealthy financiers, who join with death to frustrate him of his prize.12Hence the heroic myth of modernity—Enlightenment made flesh—is one that the son can wholeheartedly embrace. Light indeed becomes a physical and palpable presence in the novel of modern life. Everywhere in Zola’s capital light is the ethereal creator of the new:
All the crystal on the table was as thin and light as muslin, devoid of engraving, and so transparent that it cast no shadow. The centerpiece and other large items looked like fountains of fire. Lightning flashed from the burnished flanks of the warming ovens. The forks, spoons, and knives with their handles of pearl could have been mistaken for flaming ingots. Rainbows illuminated the glassware. And amid this shower of sparks, this incandescent mass, the decanters of wine added a ruby tinge to table linen as radiant as white-hot metal.
Or, again:
It was not yet midnight. Down below, on the boulevard, Paris went rumbling on, prolonging the blaze of daylight before making up its mind to turn in for the night. Wavering lines of trees separated the whiteness of the sidewalks from the murky blackness of the roadway with its thunder of speeding carriages and flash of headlights. At intervals on either side of this dark strip newsdealers’ kiosks blazed forth like huge Venetian lanterns, tall and strangely gaudy, as if they had been set down in these precise places for some colossal illumination. At this time of night, however, their muffled glow was lost in the glare of nearby storefronts.
Similar passages could be multiplied at will. If this light—this very physical light, this blazing gaslight, so different from the notional, metaphorical light of “enlightened” eighteenth-century thought— was to dispel the funereal gloom of the old order, mountains had to be moved: again, mountains real and not metaphorical, mountains of fill and debris, and to mobilize the army of laborers needed to accomplish this, mounds of cash had to be accumulated.13Therein, for Zola, lay the rub. Heroism, noble when visionary and selfless, was obliged to consort with vulgar money men of contemptible ethics, or so Zola imagined them when he placed Saccard’s vulturine sister Mme Sidonie outside the Bourse every afternoon at three o’clock, holding “court for characters as suspect and dubious as herself.” Zola, himself a clerk at Hachette earning 600 francs a month at a time when his heroine was racking up a clothing bill of 257,000 francs, could have known this milieu only at second hand, and he gave in to stereotypes that left no room for the Saint-Simonian social vision that put the brothers Jacob and Isaac Pereire at odds with their coreligionist Baron Rothschild as to the best means of stoking the engines of progress.14Zola’s grasping capitalists are not Jews—Jewish blood does not figure among the hereditary determinants of the Rougon line—yet they partake of the characteristics of the Jew as set forth in anti-Semitic journalism and literature. Indeed, Mme Sidonie in her inevitable black dress would have taken up her station outside the Bourse just a stone’s throw from “the apartment occupied by the anti-Semitic journalist Edouard Drumont of La Libre parole, who shook his fist at it every morning.”15Ironically for the man who was ultimately to be celebrated as the champion of Capt. Dreyfus, “certain Russian papers” would claim that he was not only an admirer of Drumont, like his friends Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, but that he had actually collaborated with Drumont on his notorious anti-Semitic screed La France juive. Zola vehemently denied the charge—“the statement is quite simply imbecilic”—yet his agents of Haussmannization are, like Drumont’s Jews, outsiders masked as insiders and manipulating the rules of the game from within.16
Still, if Saccard is the hidden face of empire, its cash nexus, he also stands for a boldness of vision, a will to conquer, that Zola, student of heredity that he was, would have seen as his own father’s legacy.17 Standing above the capital on the Buttes Montmartre like a general on the eve of battle, Saccard explains the broad outlines of his superior’s strategy to a woman who, to his subsequent relief, will carry the secret with her to an early grave, for this is a war that can be won at far less cost if its victims are unaware that it is being waged: “[E]xtending his open hand and wielding it like the sharp edge of a cutlass, he made as if to slice the city into four parts.” Then he speaks to his doomed first wife:
Look, follow my hand. From the boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, one cut; then, over this way, from the Madeleine to the Monceau plain, another cut; and a third cut in this direction, a fourth in that direction, a cut here, another farther out. Cuts everywhere. Paris slashed to pieces with a saber, its veins laid open to provide nourishment for a hundred thousand excavators and masons . . .
Saccard’s “cutlass” lifts the action from the Bourse, which for Zola belongs to the register of the base, the ignoble, to the battlefield, the arena of nobility par excellence. The character of Saccard thus succinctly embodies the ambivalence that always attends what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” We warm ourselves at Prometheus’ fire and complain of liver troubles attendant on the sedentary ways we adopt in order to remain close to the hearth.
AMBIVALENCE AND ANDROGYNY
“Ennui is the enemy,” a guide to the French capital observed in 1867, “and I confess that I cannot understand how anyone can feel bored in Paris.” Yet Renée Saccard, riding in her carriage in the Bois de Boulogne circa 1861, is heard to exclaim, “Oh, I’m bored! I’m bored to death.” The contradiction is more apparent than real, however: variety of sensation not only cannot ward off ennui but is likely to induce it— such is the perversity of the laws of pleasure. Paris, for Henry James, was “the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes . . . such a beauty of light.”18Yet lust, whether of the eyes or the flesh, leads to lassitude: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple,” Maxime tells his stepmother, but when he asks her what she dreams of, she has no answer other than to say, “I want something different.” Don Juan himself could not have expressed more succinctly the insatiability of mere appetite, as distinct from the more profound desire whose aim is not to fill a recurring void in the desiring subject but to effect an inner metamorphosis. Metamorphosis, however, calls for roundness of character, and Zola’s individuals are, as James accurately lamented, “simple and shallow,” so that “our author’s dealings with [them] . . . maintain their resemblance to those of the lusty bee who succeeds in plumping for an instant . . . into every flower-cup of the garden.” James concedes, however, that “we see enough of the superficial among novelists at large . . . without deriving from it, as we derive from Zola at his best, the concomitant impression of the solid.”19
Zola in The Kill does indeed flit among flowers. Renée in her flouncy finery resembles the flowers of the conservatory in which she makes love to her stepson. Her lips are said to beckon like the petals of the Chinese hibiscus covering the wall of the Saccard mansion. Maxime appears as a flower in the tableau vivant that casts him as Narcissus and Renée as Echo:
He was
changing into a flower. His limbs seemed to turn green and grow longer inside his green satin tights. His supple trunk and slightly curved legs seemed to sink into the ground and take root, while the upper part of his body, festooned with wide strips of white satin, opened out into a marvelous corolla. Maxime’s blond hair completed the illusion, as his long curls could be taken for yellow pistils with white petals all around.
Yet if Zola permits himself to mock the bathos of the feckless prefect’s attempt to modernize the myth of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he is quite content on his own account to derive whatever ironic profit he can from the conceit that what is tragic about Renée’s love for Maxime—if love is not too grand a word—is precisely that it lacks the tragic dimension of Phèdre’s for Hippolyte. Zola cannot sustain the note of ambivalence between ancient and modern that he strikes repeatedly throughout the novel: he must, time and again, resolve the issue in favor of a tradition, a status quo ante, in which he no longer believes, and in so doing he falls short of tragedy as surely as the prefect whose pretentiousness he ridicules falls short of sublimity. Instead of tragedy, Zola settles for moral satire.
Nevertheless, Renée is not an insignificant creation. Unconvincingly and rather matter-of-factly Zola does provide her with justification for her defiance of convention by portraying her as the victim of a rape. But this violation merely incites and exacerbates a preexisting will to acquire forbidden knowledge—a will whose origin the author, half a generation older than Freud, locates squarely in the prelapsarian paradise of the “children’s room,” from which lofty height Renée is free to indulge her curiosity about the male bodies on display at the swimming school below. Even her vanity is a response to the cruelty of other children, who mock her untutored adherence to outmoded preferences in schoolgirl attire. It is curiosity about the meretricious glamour of the demimonde that lures her out of the cosseted cocoon of her fabulous dressing room, at once womb and lair. If Renée’s author succumbs at times to the conventions of la belle dame sans merci, painting her as huntress, nymph, or sphinx, he inflects mercilessness by inflicting it primarily upon the merciless beauty herself. So great is her narcissism that she cannot imagine another victim worthy of her cruelty. If she is vapid, it is because she willfully starves her imagination.