Germinal

The spine is compelled: hunger forces the strike, the strike forces the march, the march forces the troops, the shooting forces the sabotage, and the flood forces the last descent. The subtractive test finds the joints. Remove the Grégoires and the chain loses its other end: their brioche at breakfast in the second part against the Maheus’ empty bread box is the argument in two rooms, and Cécile strangled by old Bonnemort in the sixth is the chain closing. Remove Souvarine and the flood has no cause. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the Hennebeau household is given more than the argument needs, Deneulin’s ruin is told at a length its function does not require, and the beast, the wind and the red vision repeat past the point where the image is fixed. A tenth or so of the book is permitted, not compelled.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: wage labour under industrial capital is a structure no one inside it controls. The masters are as bound as the men. Hennebeau is a salaried servant of shareholders he never sees, and the god of the system sits in its tabernacle in Paris. Hunger makes politics before ideas do. Beside it stands a harder disclosure, the leader’s corruption by the crowd he leads. Étienne reads half-digested Darwin and Lassalle, enjoys his rising, comes to despise the Maheus’ crowding and smell, and is stoned by the same people after the shooting. The crowd is shown as both saint and beast, and the women’s mutilation of Maigrat’s corpse is told without a softening word. Held off the top because the determinism sometimes states its law rather than lets it show, and its science of heredity has dated as truth, though not as observation.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Elevation is frequent and mostly dreadful. The Voreux at night in the opening, a red glow and a panting engine on the plain; the first descent in the cage, the water falling, the seam where Catherine and Étienne work on their sides; the march across the plain at sunset, the women in front and the men with axes, seen by the bourgeois through a barn door; the shooting, Maheu dead and la Maheude silent; the Voreux collapsing into itself and the canal pouring into the pit; the horse Bataille, who has not seen daylight in ten years and remembers a mill, drowning in the galleries; Catherine dying in Étienne’s arms in the dark. Then a spring morning, the earth heaving with seed. The register is grand and sometimes forced; the heights are real and they come often.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The pit is a beast that eats men, named and renamed, and its name says it: vorer, to devour. The action is that beast swallowing, the Maheus’ forebears, then Catherine, and at last swallowing itself, so that the myth is load-bearing: its fall is the climax. Tartaret burning underground is the inferno beside it; the descent to the underworld is literal and recurring; Bonnemort spitting black, with eighty years of his family in the pit, is a genealogy of the damned. The title builds the counter-myth: Germinal, the month of seed in the revolutionary calendar, and the close turns the men under the earth into a crop. The myth stays particular, a family, a coron, a grocer’s debts. Held off the top because the seasonal myth of the last page is asserted more than earned by an action that ends in defeat.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The inheritance is the French realist novel, Balzac and Flaubert, and Zola’s own naturalism, whose larger swerve was L’Assommoir (1877): the working class in its own language. Germinal’s turn is to make the collective the protagonist, the crowd a character with its own motion and mind, the strike the plot and capital an agent without a face, and to give labour underground the full apparatus of the novel. The stake was political as well as literary: a novel of a miners’ strike, with the shooting of strikers at its centre, published the year after the strike at Anzin, which Zola had visited. Held at the gate because the method was already Zola’s and proven; the swerve is in the subject and the collective hero more than in the form.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The seven parts are a descent and a rising: the book begins at night going down and ends in morning sun going up, and that shape is what it knows about the year’s hope and its loss. The alternation between the corons and La Piolaine is the instrument of the class argument. The crowd chapters, the meeting in the forest and the march, are built as mass scenes in which the point of view moves through bodies rather than minds, and that is how the book can say what a crowd is. Charged: the point of view is largely Étienne’s or the narrator’s, and the free indirect method does not reach the Maheus’ interiors as it reaches his; la Maheude, the book’s moral centre, is seen more than entered.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: a hundred and forty years of reading that keeps dividing. Is the book revolutionary, or a warning against revolution? Does the close promise the future, or merely state a law of nature? Is Souvarine the novel’s horror or its logic, Étienne its hero or its satire of the intellectual, the crowd dignified or pathological? The socialist and the conservative readings of 1885 have both survived, and neither has closed the other. The questions are real and the book does not answer them. Held a step down because it yields less on return at the level of the sentence and the inner life than the deepest novels; its depth is in its argument and its images.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, by its reach, the European novel of industrial society. The force is a real reorganisation of what a novel could hold: Germinal set the model for the novel of labour and of the strike, and for the crowd as protagonist. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: broad and lasting, a book read in France as the Zola novel, translated into most written languages and filmed by Capellani (1913), Allégret (1963) and Berri (1993); its reach outside France is plain in general and is not argued here in particulars. Held below the top because the form it set was a method more than a revolution of the novel’s means, and the larger change in the field was naturalism as a whole.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and forty years. Form first: the text is whole and has been in print without a break since 1885. Presence: it is read in French schools as the Zola novel, translated many times into English and into most written languages, and filmed in three eras. It has outlived its conditions. The Second Empire, the coal pits of the Nord (the last closed in 1990) and the science of heredity are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon. Charged: it is less read outside France than Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, so it is not the widest presence of its span, and its surface is partly fixed to a science that has dated. At the top of the usual figure for its age, not above it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Zola’s French as far as this reading carries it; the music of the long periodic sentence is neither credited nor charged beyond what can be heard here. The construction is the book’s strongest craft: seven parts timed to the season; the strike’s economics, the new payment for timbering that starts it, the provident fund, the credit at Maigrat’s, accurate and dramatic; crowd scenes managed with a command few novelists have matched; the cross-cutting of the march with the Grégoires and the Hennebeaus’ dinner exact. Charged: the leitmotif becomes a tic at times; some of the melodrama is machinery, Chaval’s return in the flooded gallery and the timing of the rescue; minor characters are typed rather than drawn, the Grégoires’ complacency, Pierronne’s coquetry; and adjectives of the bestial and the enormous sometimes do the work the scene should.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Cécile Grégoire’s brioche at breakfast and Catherine dying of hunger and cold under the earth; or Souvarine’s tender love for his tame rabbit Pologne and the same man sawing through the Voreux’s tubbing to drown a pit. One law governs them: bodies under need, and a system that feeds some on the hunger of others without anyone’s will. Cécile dies under Bonnemort’s hands because the chain runs both ways, and Souvarine’s nihilism is the same law carried out by a man without appetites. The range is wide and held: comedy at La Piolaine, the bestial in the corons, the political debate at the Avantage, the tomb underground. Charged: the close turns the law of fact into a law of promise that the rest of the book does not entirely support.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Held, not listed. Labour: the seam, the tubs, the horses, the payment by the tub and by the timbering, the work of women and children underground. The family: the Maheus’ household, three generations in the pit, la Maheude’s arithmetic of bread, Catherine and Chaval. Capital and the state: the Company, the shareholders, the independent owner crushed by it, the gendarmes and the soldiers. Ideas: the International and Pluchart, Rasseneur’s reformism, Étienne’s reading, Souvarine’s anarchism. The body: hunger, sex, drink and heredity. The natural order: the plain, the wind, the canal, the seasons, the earth at the close. The sacred is present by its absence, in the abbé Ranvier’s late Christian socialism and in the Company as the god that has replaced God. The narrowness is of place, not of orders of reality. Short of the top on the inner life only.

Score: 9.0 / 10