germinal (zola)

So many thoughts go through one’s mind reading Zola’s seminal text for the first time.

I thought about the Miner’s Strike, which was reaching its finale when I arrived at York University. The North versus the South. Zola’s mining community is also in the north.

I thought about Jäger’s Hyperpolitics and how Zola depicted the origins of a trade union movement that might defend the rights of workers being mercilessly abused by a mercantile system. Thinking on Jäger’s text, I thought about how the unions and political interaction per se has declined in the course of the 21st century. Battles won and battles lost.

I thought about the overlap with the novels of Hardy, the way in which these novelists confronted social injustices with rigour, using the strength of narrative as a weapon to exculpate, reveal, unveil.

I thought about the astonishing dexterity of the novelist. Our era’s watchword is ‘authenticity’ and the demand that the seed of the narrative emerges from personal experience. Zola’s prolific genius lambasts this concept of the novelist. The novelist is someone who examines all elements of society, from top to bottom, from east to west. His or her domain stretches beyond their known experience, towards the requirements of their calling. Because Germinal feels like the novel written as an act of social conscience and, hence, activism.