thérèse raquin (zola)

Thérèse Raquin is a kind of blockbuster novel, possessing many of the hallmarks of contemporary crime/horror. There is only one real moment of dramatic action in its thirty something chapters, which is sufficient to drive the motor of the book’s narrative. This moment is a gruesome murder, conducted by Laurent, Thérèse’s lover. Zola describes the murder and its subsequent effect on the couple in lurid detail. It’s the extreme psychological examination of the event which raises if above being a mere potboiler. Its sister novel is surely Crime and Punishment, both novels examining, through the incidence of a murder, the structure of late nineteenth century social society. Perhaps it could even be said to have something in common with a contemporary novel such as Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais. Crime as a surgical tool, with all the mystery removed, unlike say, the work of Conan Doyle, designed to strip bare the bride of social mores. Perhaps when the murder mystery started to become a genre, it signified a moment when the social divisions that so often underpin criminality were being swept under the carpet. Zola roots the actions of the protagonists in their hopeless social environment, a space where dreams have no currency and just knuckling down and surviving is all there is to aim for. Curiously, when Thérèse starts to go off the rails in the latter stages of the book, she goes and hangs out with those Parisian bohemians who would later become so fetishised within popular culture, as a kind of ersatz role model for the modern hipster. But she rejects this, suppurated with an unatoneable guilt. The existential weight of karma eventually does for the couple, suggesting a religious dimension at work, over and above everything else.

the kill/ la curée (zola, tr. brian nelson)

There is a strange irony about Zola’s novel, which is situated during the time that Baron Haussmann was redeveloping Paris. The novel recounts the way in which Aristide Saccard acquires a fortune by manipulating a corrupt system, buying up houses condemned to be demolished in order for the redevelopment to occur, and obtaining outlandish compensation as a result of having allies in the city government who will wave through his fraudulent claims. The corruption on display feels eminently contemporary at a time when old cities are gutted in order for rich consortiums to put up unnecessary towers, something which is happening on a global scale, from London to Beijing to Montevideo.

However, the Haussmann development is retrospectively viewed as something of a triumph, a part of the reason why Paris is held in such esteem as one of the most stunning cities in the world. (eg Buenos Aires likes to be referred to at the Paris of the Southern Hemisphere). Does that mean that Zola, in questioning the process, was out of step with his times? Or merely documenting the inevitable realpolitik of massive socio-cultural changes as they are effected?

The lateral thought which occurs is that the nineteenth century French novel contains similar grandiose elements to the Haussmann’s aspirations. The Kill is one novel in a vast series. Hugo has a similar grand perspective, not to mention the works of Proust. These were writers contemplating their world on a grand scale. Zola prefigured Proust, whose prose could be seen as an extension and elaboration of the quest for descriptive perfection which Zola articulates in The Kill. The novel also has hints of Bovary, in its account of the demise of Saccard’s beautiful and liberated wife, Renée, a tragic heroine who is the agent of her own destruction. It’s a cruel world which Zola depicts, and these characters feel like collateral damage in the seismic recalibration of the mores and morals of the city they inhabit.