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“I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.��- Emile Zola

Let me draw a scene for you. I appreciate your patience as I am going to write it as vividly as possible.

The lady on the chair is well past her prime- 40 maybe- with her youthful rosiness and smooth, taut skin beginning to give away under the suffocating reality in which she and her family are haplessly ensconced. The room in which she sits is tiny, but has a peculiar nordic cleanness about it which shows that this woman is scrupulous over cleanliness though persecuted perpetually and mercilessly by poverty, which is evident from her overused frayed dress, narrow room, rickety oak furniture and drab posters that adorned the murky walls. The lady on the chair sits pensively at the table, with her chin propped by her scrawny hands, worn by constant toiling. Minutes before, she had turned all the drawers longingly inside-out in half-fury half-despair but couldn’t find a crumb of bread or a handful of vermicelli, not even a farthing. Her husband and her 3 elder children-she has seven- are bound to come soon from their 10 hours-work down the mine; her other children- who have to wait several years before going under the mine- are too little to work which augments the agony of feeding five extra mouths including herself, the mother (her doctor advised her not to go down the mine anymore because of her bad lung). In her befuddled head, which is swarming with multiplicity of half-formed, incongruous thoughts, she condemned herself for not having borne the non-working kids much earlier, so that they too could have worked and earned bread for the family; she still condemned the stars for not giving her triplet-sons instead of the triplet-girls which god had bestowed on her with a sardonic grin. She envied her neighbor who has all her six sons working, “how lucky she is!�� .Suddenly, as if she was back to her senses, she shuddered convulsively, as her mind, which has been brimming with harrowing thoughts and disturbing reminiscences, proffered her another bit of memory to chew on: she remembered when the grocer next street asked her to send her eldest daughter to collect the groceries when she asked credit. “That abominable vile old man, who might as well be her grandpa’s age��, she lamented. She herself was willing to go to the grocer as payment, but the years of impoverishment, drudgery and misery have drained away her youthful vigor and form, as she looked herself at the cracked mirror hung on the opposite wall. As the woman sat in limp despair-unable to cry or beat her breasts- stunned by her immense agony, and as the dastardly thoughts about tomorrow and future revolved around her buzzing head like a vulture hovering over a carcass, Emile Zola kept writing��

“Wage earning is a new form of slavery. The mine should belong to the miner,
as the sea does to the fisherman,
and as the land does to the farmer�� Make no mistake!
The mine is your property, it belongs to all of you,
for you have paidfor it for over a century with blood and starvation��

While the family of this symbolic lady on the chair drudged in the bowels of earth, hacking away at coal seam, choked by coal dust and unbearable heat, coughing up black phlegm and plagued by hunger and poverty; and while the bourgeois pit owners luxuriously enjoyed their idle life off miners�� sweat and blood, stuffing up their bellies with everything the earth has to offer and ostentatiously traveling in beautiful carriages, Emile Zola kept writing..

“The miners are waking from their slumbers in the depths of the
earth and starting to germinate like seeds sown in the soil; and one
morning you would how they would spring up from the earth
in the middle of the fields in broad daylight; yes, they would grow up to be real men,
an army of men fighting to restore justice.��

When Emile Zola passed away in 1902, a throng of several thousand workers lined the streets, chanting ��Germinal, Germinal��, with their heads held high up, eyes brimming with emotion, bidding farewell to their great hero- the defender of justice and equality. Zola, the founder of naturalist movement, had written a score of novels in his series Les Rougon-Macquart, which tells the story of a family and its socio-economic impact in the era under Napoleon III.

Germinal is not entirely a political novel or a polemic aimed at defenestrating capitalism though it gives such an impression, nor is it an exaggerated melodrama aimed at hacking away at the hearts of the readers, nor is it a protracted tale of the 19th century miners during the epoch of economic slump. Germinal, in my opinion, is life as close as it gets; it is a book that proffers the vision of poverty, hunger, despair, life & soul through the magnifying lens of Zola’s writing. But germinal isn’t entirely apolitical as well; it has all the revolutionary reverberations that are bound to cascade in a community where ‘Justice�� isn’t served, and where persecuted people raise their voice against the depredations of the iniquitous system in which they are inextricably enmeshed. For the miners, ’Justice��, which is the sperm of the whole theme of this novel, is the word or epiphany, as it seems, that cracks open the dark vaults of subjugation and oppression, to reveal the dazzling, blinding vision of an angelic land, where everyone earns equal and are treated equal, where everything belongs to everyone, and where there are no poverty or hunger or misery. Germinal, the book, its theme, is a living soul, which has a heart that beats synchronically with the beats of the downtrodden people, which has a mouth that speaks for them, which has an arm with an uplifted index finger that guides them and admonishes them, and which showers them a benevolent gaze and a protective smile. According to Zola, the poverty and destitution of the miners are bestowed upon them by nature- they cannot do anything about it- and they are all invariably born into this slump, as their fathers and forefathers were all miners, whose impoverished life was the only inheritance they bequeath to their offspring. Generations of subjugation and unwavering circumstance of their harrowing milieu and life, the constant persecution of the capitalist mine-owners who constantly encumber their life by chiseling off their paltry salary on petty terms, thereby filling their own coffers at the expense of the blood, sweat and tears of the miners, who toil away their inane lives inorder to satiate, partially atleast, the growling cries of hunger.

”Why should some people be so wretched and others so rich?
Why should the former be trampled underfoot by the latter,
with no hope of ever taking their places?��

A painting of the colliers by De Neuville:



Emile Zola had taken 10 months to finish this seminal work of naturalism, taking a trip down the working mine at Denain in Valenciennes, and when the novel was finally published under the title ‘Germinal��, which was the seventh month in the revolutionary calendar that France followed from 1793 to 1805, it was immensely received and eventually became a towering work in the realm of literature and naturalism. Zola’s prose has a deep, sensational tone immured in it, and each word and each sentence has an aroma of living warmth, the psyche of the miners and the pathos of their harrowing milieu are nestled snuggly in the lulling clasps of the prose, but when their psyche is agitated by injustice, it quickly changes, without a forewarning, into a threatening serpent ready to spew venom with unrelenting vehemence at the first start.

“There’s only one thing that warms my heart,
and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.��

Etienne Lantier- the symbolic protagonist of the novel- reaches Montsou after weeks of aimless wandering and unyielding hunger, and takes up the work as a collier, not out of choice but due to the exigency of the hunger pang. In his initial days as a miner, Etienne’s mind and conscience began to ache seeing his fellow wretched miners, who all invariably became resigned to their fate of living & dying like cattle, and his indignation accrued gradually upon witnessing the grave injustice and inhumane ignorance the rich cast on them; and, Etienne, who considers himself learned, begins to feel an upper-hand over these miners, and gradually find in himself the pre-ordained power to fight for Justice. Energized by the journals on Socialism and other political books, Etienne, in whose psyche the first seeds of revolution were sown, convinces the crowd to rise above the traditional resignation of miners, and goads them to the flower-strewn world of ‘justice and equality��.( Etienne, moreover, is a symbol of nonchalance in the face of despair and defeat, finding optimism even in the darkest of hours). Now the germination of these seeds of revolution is just a matter of time: a disturbance or a unanimous outcry against an unjustifiable act can arouse the slumbering beast in the hearts of these docile, resigned creatures who have until now suppressed their innermost turmoil in the catacombs of their vacuous souls . All they needed was a voice, firm with conviction and direction, to guide them to a path of revolution, where their debilitating lives are purged of misery, and a new realm of happiness precipitated in front of their weary,dreamy eyes. Etienne, as if pre-ordained by the high-heavens, gives the cogwheels a push to set it moving, and the machinery of revolution slowly revved to a full life.

“Since they had been shown the promised land of justice,
they were ready to suffer on the road to universal happiness.
Hunger went to their heads, and, in their
wretched hallucinating eyes, the flat, dull horizon
had never seemed to open up to such a vast and infinite perspective.
When their eyes blurred with fatigue, they could see their ideal city
of their dreams beyond the horizon, but now somehow close and real;
there all men were brothers, in a golden age where
meals and labors were shared equal��

A picture of the 1906 miners�� strike which came in a magazine:


One of my well-read friends had once said that though this Novel is a powerful one, the characterization fell flat, and this notion was embedded in my mind as I started reading. As pages rolled by, I was immersed into the ebb and flow of the story, dissolved in the luscious prose, my breathing pace naturally attuning itself to the crest and trough of the novel, and as I turned the last page of the novel, I closed the book and slumped into my bed, as I always do, to meditate upon what I have gone through. See, what my friend said was true. But what he said was also wrong. The characters-Etienne Lantier, Souvarine, Rassenneur, Maheu, La Maheude, the pit owners, Catherine, Chaval etc- they were all symbolic instruments used by Zola as a means to write this story of miners and the inhumane conditions they were in, and concomitantly, he was not telling the story of these people, he was telling the tale of everyone who hacked away their lives in the suffocating mines, which according to Zola is a�� ravenous monster�� who engulfs the poor miners as they go inside. So while you read this novel, the characters may appear like silhouettes against the blinding, dazzling light of the storyline, but that doesn’t mean the novel is short of emotions: there is love, bestial sex, betrayal, snobbery, egoism, optimism, adrenalin-surge and what not.

Zola had depicted the life of these common-place miners in an extraordinarily moving way: for instance, the eldest daughter of La Maheude, Catherine, who is 15, but her sexual maturity is getting delayed due to the burdening work at mines; the bestiality of the youths who find solace only in laying girls on their arse and making them mothers at a very early age; the harrowing account of a horse named Bataille, who was dragged down to the mine when it was still a jaunty baby colt and its irrepressible longing for basking in the radiant sunshine and taking in the scent of fresh verdure; the cattle-like promiscuity of people who were huddled together in a small room, like Catherine and her lodger Etienne who were forced to sleep side by side; the catastrophic prospects like fire-damp explosion and rock falls in mines; miners extinguishing their fury over diminishing salary, which was already paltry, through unrestrained inebriation leaving their families to starve.

“Ofcourse, you got your daily bread, you did eat,
but so little that it was only just enough to keep you
alive so you could enjoy being half starved, piling up
debts and hounded remorselessly as if you had stolen
every mouthful you ate. When Sunday came round you
were so tired that you slept all day. Life’s only pleasures
were getting drunk or giving your wife a baby; and even
then the booze gave you a beer belly and the baby would
grow up and wouldn’t give a damn for you.
No, too true, life was not a bowl of cherries.��

“Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.��- Germinal

I never knew why I read Zola; maybe its because the book had drawn me to it by some force which my humble mind cannot comprehend. I had been absent in GR for long, and it might have a taken a book like this to finally absorb me back to the place I know I cherish the most. I assert that there are some books that can shake you off torpidity and pull you again into the magical world of words and thoughts, and it is only a matter of time before you will find the book according to your taste that can impart you once again, the elixir of happiness and contentment.

“Nothing is ever final, you only need a bit of happiness
to be able to start all over again��- Emile Zola, Germinal.



I’m glad I’m back.

5 stars on 5!
-gautam