Epic L'Assommoir

Zola's 1876 novel and epic antecedence

I just read L'Assommoir (1876/1877), the seventh novel of Émile Zola's twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series. It is characteristically excellent fiction, of course, and a good book to read for one who plans, as I do, to give up drink for the rest of the year. But here’s the thing: reading it, enjoying the story, I found myself assuming something about it, and when I finished it I thought to myself: ‘of course, there will be a great deal of critical discussion of this aspect of the novel’. But checking online, searching assiduously on JSTOR, rummaging through Google Scholar and so on, I can find nobody who has said anything about this. So either I have noticed something about the novel that nobody else has noticed, or else what I thought I noticed isn’t there at all. Let’s be honest: the latter is more likely than the former. L’Assommoir is one of the most critically discussed novels in the canon of Western literature.

The rest of this substack consists of, 1, an account of Zola’s novel—which you can skip, if you are familiar with it, as I’m sure you are (I’m a little ashamed it’s taken me so long to get round to reading it: a masterpiece, no question)—and, 2, a brief summary of my theory, which you can also skip, if you know what’s good for you. Go make a cup of tea. Do the ironing. Stretch your legs. Or don’t! I’m not the boss of you.

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All of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels trace the descendants of Adelaïde Fouque, a woman from the fictional Provençal town of Plassans (based on Aix-en-Provence where Zola grew up). She has children by two different men, a son with her husband, the steady and respectable Rougon, and, after his premature death, a daughter and a son with the wild smuggler Macquart. Adelaïde is herself somewhat touched, mentally: passionate but unstable, prone to hysteria.

Zola believed in a rigid, rather clockwork working-out of consequences where hereditary descent was concerned, and he mapped out the family tree that sprouts from these three offspring of Adelaïde with little pie-charts showing how far each of his very many characters had inherited the steady respectable sensibilities of Rougon (in which case they generally occupy the higher echelons of society, like Eugene Rougon who becomes a government minister, or Pascal, who is the titular physician in Le Docteur Pascal) or the shiftless delinquency of Macquart, mixed to whatever degree with Adelaïde’s mental disturbance. The inheritors of Macquart tend to be peasants (as in La Terre), regular soldiers (La Débâcle) or the urban working-class—as in L'Assommoir. A third branch of the family mixes the two qualities, and are mostly bourgeois characters, who succeed in life although they have their struggles and difficulties.

L'Assommoir, the seventh published of the Rougon-Macquart novels, was Zola’s first really big commercial success, earning him a fortune, and set him up as the leading literary figure of his generation. Its popular success might surprise us, since it is in many ways a very downbeat novel, mired in the poorer regions of northern Paris telling the grim and mostly doomed life-stories of struggling workers. Many of the characters are self-destructive alcoholics, and the novel ends in misery and death. Then again, as a novel, it has enormous scope, variety, life, and—that key ingredient for bestsellerdom—lashings of sex: fornication, adultery, incest, prostitution, often lubriciously described, as well as a great number of swear-words (Zola collected these words and phrases, imprecations and profanities, writing them down in a little book as he went about the side streets and amongst the laundresses, for authenticity). It’s altogether a racy read. When it was published in English in 1884 the translator Henry Vizetelly cut some of the more explicit sex, and toned down the profanity, to render the book suitable for the more prudish sensibilities of British audiences. He still got prosecuted for obscenity. An, as Browning might say, scrofulous French novel.

The novel’s title is a piece of Parisian argot, referring to an unpretentious bar or watering-hole, a place without fineries in which cheap booze was sold for ordinary working people to come in and get blind drunk at minimum expense. The word assommoir also means club or cudgel, from the verb assommer meaning to stun, to slaughter an animal, to knock out, to poleaxe—literally to put to sleep (‘somme’). That’s what these establishments are for: places in which customers can get totaled, blasted, slammed, hammered, passed-out. A colleague of mine, a Joseph Conrad specialist, used to travel to Poland for conferences. He described a long, low bar in Warsaw to which he had been taken by one conference organiser committe, where the proprietor had laid out a mattress at the end of the counter: his customers would come in, drink at the bar, shuffle along to allow more people in, and eventually reach the end of the bar so drunk they would fall over. Wikipedia says that ‘English translators have rendered the book’s title as The Dram Shop, The Gin Palace, Drunkard, The Drinking Den or simply The Assommoir.’ Over on Bluesky I suggested we could translate it nowadays as Weatherspoons.

L'Assommoir is divided into thirteen chapters. In the first we meet the main character, Gervaise Macquart, who has come up from Provence to Paris with her boyfriend, the shiftless and unfaithful Lantier, and their two kids. She makes a living as a washerwoman, taking in dirty laundry, washing it at the communal facilities and earning small sums. As the novel opens Lantier, who keeps stealing her money, pawning her stuff to get drunk and staying out all night with other women, finally runs off with one of his girlfriends. Another laundress, Virginie, mocks Gervaise for her faithless man, and the two have a huge fight, with Gervaise winning: ripping her adversary’s clothes off and thrashing her naked bottom, as the other laundresses laugh and Charles, the attendant, watches in amazement (‘“Oo!” murmured Charles the attendant, thrilled to bits and goggle eyed.’)

In chapter 2, Gervaise continues working, managing to save a little money since the dreadful Lantier is no longer around to steal it, and continuing to raise her two kids. She is courted by Coupeau, a roofer, a sober-headed young man. The two marry, and Gervaise has another child: Nana (she will grow up to be the main character in Nana [1880] which, if you know that novel, tells you something about her). The first half of L'Assommoir shows Gervaise on an upward trajectory. Her husband is faithful and hard-working, who swears only to drink healthful wine, not the terrible spirits, brandy, rum, schnapps, that so wreck a person—shades of the Hogarth ‘Beer Street’/‘Gin Lane’ dynamic here. Some years pass, and Gervaise is able to save up enough money not only to move out of the slums into a decent, if still cheap, apartment in a block in Montmartre, but also to start her own laundry business, employing others. At this stage in the story she is consistently hard-working, polite, generous to others, pays her debts: her and her family’s life improves. It’s not all roses: her new in-laws dislike her—they make fun of her disabled leg, nicknaming her ‘la Banban’, ‘Clip Clop’, and generally resenting her for marrying Coupeau. Since they live in the same apartment block as Gervaise, this leads to tension and some arguments. A handsome but shy young metalworker called Goujet falls in love with Gervase: an unconsummated longing on his part, as she is a married woman.

Chapter 3 concerns Gervaise and Coupeau’s wedding feast, which turns into a drunken blow-out followed by the whole party, intoxicated, staggering around the Louvre and admiring or deploring the pictures. Chapter 4 opens: ‘there followed four years of hard work’, Gervaise establishes her own laundry and it is a success. Coupeau continues working. Things are going well. Then Coupeau has an accident, falling to the street during a job and badly breaking his leg (Zola manages to blame this on baby Nana, who, down below, distracted Coupeau at a crucial moment on the roof: thereby setting up the plot of the novel Nana, where she is consistently and rather splendidly fatal to all the men who fall for her). Coupeau is hors de combat for several months, and when he is well enough to return to work he, mostly, doesn’t, preferring to take money from his wife and spend it in the local bars getting drunk. At first Gervaise is complaisant where her husband’s behaviour is concerned, but as it goes on and Coupeau breaks his vow never to drink spirits, his behaviour grows worse and worse.

Although Gervaise doesn’t encourage the metalworker Goujet in his love for her, she likes being admired, and is kind to him. As her finances wobble, she borrows money from Goujet and from his mother, promising to pay them back, although smitten Goujet insists he doesn’t want repayment.

Central chapters in the novel mark the high-point of Gervaise’s life: in chapter 6 she visits Goujet’s forge, a large-scale industrial enterprise employing many people:

Suddenly the whole scene was lit up. The bellows roared and a jet of white flame leaped up, revealing the great shed, closed in by wood partitions with roughly plastered gaps and corners reinforced by brickwork. Flying coal dust had daubed the shed with greyish soot. Cobwebs hung from the beams like washing put up there to dry, heavy with years of accumulated dirt. Round the walls, on shelves, hanging from nails or just lying about in dark corners, was every kind of old iron - battered implements, huge tools standing about in jagged, dull, hard outlines. The white flame shot up still further, lighting up the beaten earth floor as brightly as the sun and bringing out reflections of silver flecked with gold from the four polished steel anvils firmly set in their blocks. [ch 6]

Goujet shows off his skills as a blacksmith. Then in chapter 7 Gervaise organises a name-day feast for her family, friends and in-laws. Everyone gorges, gets drunk, Gervaise spends a fortune.

From here, into the remainder of the novel, Gervaise’s trajectory takes a downward turn. In chapter 8 Lantier, her first love and the father of her first two kids, having been abandoned by the woman he left Gervaise for, inveigles himself back into her life, befriending Coupeau as a drinking buddy—Coupeau is increasingly a mean drunk, vindictive and violent, flirting with other women and abusing Gervase—and then managing to persuade the couple to let him live in their apartment. He does not work, but because he dresses like a gentleman and is lordly around the block everyone likes him. Gervaise is discombobulated by the return of her formerly abusive partner, but accepts the situation, in the first instance because she reasons he is entitled to see his children (though Etienne, his son, is soon packed off to Lille to work the railways: he ends up as an adult a miner, and becomes a key player in Germinal [1885]).

By now the household is increasingly in debt, Coupeau promises to resume working, but doesn’t. Setting out one day with his tools to take a roofing job he is diverted by friends, or ‘friends’, into various Parisian bars, ending up on an epic bender with Lantier, amongst others. He is gone for days. When Gervaise comes back to their apartment one evening she finds him, in a strikingly revolting scene, passed out on the floor of their bedroom in a great mass of his own vomit. Lantier, persuading her that she can’t sleep in a room in such a state, offers her his bed in the next room, and so the two resume their sexual relationship.

This adulterous double-life become widely known in the apartment block—including to Coupier, though it seems he is now too drunk to care—and Gervaise’s reputation is destroyed, something that makes her growing financial indebtedness to Goujet, and others, increasingly burdensome. She is herself drinking now, and becoming slovenly at her laundry business, which loses her customers. The blond-bearded metalworker Goujet, who had previously suggested that he and Gervase run away together to start a new life in Belgium (she turned him down), is now heartbroken that she has started sleeping with the vile Lantier, and withdraws from her. In chapter 9 Coupier’s elderly mother, who had been living with them, dies, and Coupier is heartbroken. In chapter 10 Coupier and Gervaise, now on the road to Rouen, sorry, road to ruin, move to a smaller, cheaper flat in the same block. Debt means that Gervaise has had to give up her laundry-shop:

For the first few days she just sat there and cried. It seemed too hard not to be able to move about in her own home after always having had lots of elbow room. She couldn't breathe, and stayed at the window for hours and hours, wedged between the wall and the chest and giving herself a stiff neck. That was the only place where she could get any air. But the courtyard almost always gave her the miseries. … Oh no, life wasn't turning out all that good, it wasn't at all the existence she had hoped for.

In chapter 10 Nana is thirteen and has her first communion, in a new white communion dress her mother buys her, which event her father attempts to spoil: ‘“I want some food!' he bellowed. “Gimme some soup, you couple of sluts! Look at these females with their rags! I'll shit on your finery if I don't get something to eat!”’

Drink is destroying Coupier. He gets the screaming abdabs: ‘“the rats! The rats! … Oh Christ, they're digging holes in my skin! Oh, the filthy beasts! Look out, pull your skirt round you. Mind that bleeder behind you ! God, they've knocked her over and those brutes are laughing at her! You brutes, you blackguards, you swine!”’ Hospitalised, he stops drinking for a while, but then inevitably starts again.

Her mother tries to set Nana up as a flower girl, but in chapter 11, she, now aged 15, has her first affair, with a wealthy old man who gifts her money and buys her things. She is on the road to the life of prostitution that defines her in Nana. When her parents drunkenly berate her for this behaviour she walks out of their tiny flat and starts her own life. Lantier has now abandoned Gervase, who is drunk all the time, and is living with Virginie.

Most of the novel’s chapters are lengthy, but the final two, 12 and 13, are short—for reasons that will become clear below I will treat them as two halves of the same episode. In the desolate twelfth chapter, Gervase and Coupeau are living in squalor, sleeping on straw (having pawned their bed and all their belongings for drink money). In chapter 13 Coupeau dies of drink in a pauper’s hospital, and Gervase retreats to her miserable flat.

She lasted out like this for months, sinking lower and lower, swallowing the vilest insults, drawing a little nearer to starvation each day. As soon as she had a few coppers she drank them and banged against the walls. People made her do the dirty jobs round the place. One evening somebody bet she wouldn't eat something disgusting; but she did, to earn ten sous. Monsieur Marescot decided to turn her out of her room on the sixth, but as old Bru had been found dead in his niche under the stairs the landlord was kind enough to let her occupy it. So now she was in old Bru's kennel. And it was there, on some straw, empty and frozen to the bone, that she starved to death. Apparently the earth was in no hurry to have her. She went quite dotty and didn't even think of throwing herself from a window on the sixth to the pavement of the yard so as to have done with it. Death meant to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her to the end along the wretched path she had made for herself. It wasn't even quite clear what she did die of. People mentioned the cold and the heat, but the truth was that she died of poverty, from the filth and exhaustion of her wasted life. As the Lorilleux [her hostile in-laws] put it, she died of slatternliness. One morning, as there was a nasty smell in the passage, people recollected that she hadn't been seen for two days, and she was discovered in her hole, turning green already.

Hélas, as I believe they say.

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That’s L’Assommoir: not a bag of laughs.

So my theory: as I was reading it I found myself recognising epic elements in the realism. It is the realism that the novel is known for of course: the blizzard of specific detail with which Zola assembles, textually-pointillist, his canvas, to render the whole believable, vivid, to give his readers a sense of ‘yes, I can believe this is how it must actually have been’. It’s what Fredric Jameson calls Zola’s rich tangibility of affect, the many precise and evocative descriptions of things and locations and people, the piling-up of specificity: ‘Zola imagined himself to be documenting the multiplicity of destinies played out on his immense social stage, each destiny with a specific and unique content of its own,’ Jameson says. In Zola’s scenic descriptions ‘individual destinies [are] transformed into the abstract fever-charts of affects and intensities rising and falling; and Zola’s narratives are what happen to individuals and their destinies when their récits fall into the force-field of affect and submit to its dynamic” [Fredric Jameson, Antimonies of Reaism, 76]. Jameson is (though he doesn’t spell this out) reworking Georg Lukács’s 1936 essay ‘Narrate or Describe?’ Lukács critiques the preponderance of scenic and particularised description in Émile Zola novels, and other examples of late century naturalisme. 1848 looms large for Lukács in the cultural history of the nineteenth-century (as it did, in a different way, for Raymond Williams): essentially Lukács argues that before 1848, bourgeois novels mostly narrate; and after the middle-class reaction to that year of revolutions they mostly describe. He prefers the former (recit, for Lukács, gives characters the chance to be active participants in the unfolding of historical events). The latter ‘descriptive’ novelistic logic, that Jameson pegs as affect, renders characters passive, ‘mere spectators of historical events’. To quote Joe Shapiro:

The shift from narration to description is for Lukács owing to the development of capitalism (“the continuous dehumanization of human life”), and it reflects a fundamental pessimism in novelists about the emergence of an agent capable of contesting capitalism. Zola’s description, Lukács writes, “debases characters to the level of inanimate objects”. For Jameson, Zola is “the novelist who offers some of the richest and most tangible deployments of affect in nineteenth-century realism.”

Not that ‘realism’ in an absolute sense is entirely the Zola gambit. The whole plot-movement of Lantier not only returning to Gervaise’s life—in itself plausible, given that they have children in common—shades into the bizarre and unbelievable when he literally moves into the same flat as her and her husband, resuming his sexual relationship. Why would Coupier, otherwhere shown to be touchy, proud, prone to anger, eager for a fight, put up with it?

And there are gaps in what we in SF call the ‘worldbuilding’. For instance: Zola is careful to put on the page a wide variety of sexual engagement and activity, licit and illicit, but nobody in the world of 1860s Paris is, it seems, gay. Unlikely. And it’s notably improbable that Gervaise would be so hyper-fertile as a youngster (two kids in her teens—Zola later retrofitted her family tree to say that she actually had three children with Lantier as a teenager in the South, in order to supply an appropriately alcoholic-crazy character for La Bete Humaine) and another as soon as she married Coupeau and then—no more, ever again? She would surely have had more kids, especially after Lantier moves back into her life when, it seems, she spends each night Sundays-Wednesdays having sex with him and Thursdays-Saturdays having sex with her husband. How does she not have more children? The answer is presumably: because Zola had supplied his narrative engine with enough Gervaise offspring, and didn’t need any more. That’s not ‘Realism’, though.

But, as I say, reading this novel I was struck by something else. Taking, as I suggest above, the last two briefer chapters of the novel (12 and 13) as one account of the final downfall and death of Coupeau and Gervaise, I would say we are looking at an ‘epic’ narrative divided, as epics often are, into twelve ‘books’. Each book contains multitudes, but also tends to aggregate itself around one particular, elongated episode.

Consider the Aeneid. Vergil’s 12-book epic is about heroic characters on the world-stage, escaping the downfall of Troy and establishing Rome, the greatest empire the world would ever see. A long way from a bunch of working-class Parisians skiving off work, getting blotto, shagging one another and dying.

But wait: Book 6 of the Aeneid is, famously, a visit to the underworld. And in chapter 6 of L’Assommoir, Gervaise enters the infernally-coded locale of Goujet’s dim, fiery furnace world. Zola goes to town in this episode: really layering the details of fire and darkness.

[Goujet] took her into another shed to the right where the boss was installing quite an elaborate plant. She paused at the doorway, overcome by an instinctive dread. The huge shed was throbbing with the vibration of the machines, and lurking shadows were streaked with red flames. But he smiled reassuringly and swore there was nothing to be scared of so long as she took great care not to let her skirt drag too near any cogwheels. He went first and she followed through the deafening row in which all sorts of noises combined their hissing and roaring, amidst clouds of smoke peopled with weird shapes—black humans rushing about, machines waving their arms, she couldn't tell t'other from which. … You couldn't hear yourself speak. She couldn't see anything yet, it was all dancing about. Then, feeling a sensation like a great rustling of wings above her head, she raised her eyes and stopped to look at belts like long ribbons forming a giant cobweb all over the ceiling, a cobweb each thread of which was being endlessly spun out. The steam engine was in one corner, concealed behind a low brick wall, and the belts seemed to be travelling on their own, deriving their motive power from the depths of darkness, with their continuous regular gliding, soft as the flight of some nightbird. But then she nearly fell over as she kicked against one of the ventilation pipes which ramified all over the floor, distributing their breaths of cold wind to the little furnaces by the machines. So he began by showing her that. He opened the draught to one of the fires, and big flames spread fanlike from the four sides, a collar of serrated fire, dazzling and just faintly tinged with red, and the glare was so strong that the little lamps of the men looked like patches of shade in the sun. He raised his voice to shout explanations, then went on to the machines : mechanical shears which devoured bars of iron, taking off a length with each bite and passing them out behind one by one; bolt and rivet machines, lofty and complicated, making a bolt-head in one turn of their powerful screws; trimming machines with cast-iron flywheels and an iron ball that struck the air furiously with each piece the machine trimmed; the threadcutters, worked by women, threading the bolts and their nuts. [ch 6]

In the Aeneid the journey to the underworld (more darkly-satanic milled in Dante and Paradise Lost of course, as in Zola) ends up with Anchises showing Aeneas the future of Rome. L’Assommoir 6 is presenting a more ironic version of this: Goujet is the happy future Gervaise could have, if only she were able to break away from her Parisian life and go live it with him. But, for all that she admires him, she is unable to do so.

Chapter 5 of L’Assommoir is a giant wedding feast. Book 5 of the Aeneid contains the funeral games and feasting that marks the death of Aeneas’s father.

As I was reading through Zola’s novel, I found the parallels slotting into place, unforced, a mythic underpinning of the ‘realist’ textual dynamic. In Aeneid 1, Aeneas has fled the ruin of his former life, taking as much of his family with him as he could; and he comes to the shore of a possible future spouse—Dido. In Zola’s novel Gervaise has left behind the ruin of her relationship with Lantier, taking her family with her, and is considering a new marriage to Coupier. This is followed-through in chapters 2-4, as Aeneas and Dido romance one another in Aeneid 2-4. But although Gervaise and Coupier do marry (as Aeneas and Dido, despite having sex, do not) their relationship is not fated to succeed. Or more specifically: L’Assommoir chapter 4 shows the happy relationship of Gervaise and Coupeau—as Aeneid 4 shows Dido and Aeneas happy together for a while, until that point where the relationship is severed, breaks-down: in Aeneid with Aeneas leaving Dido in the lurch, in L’Assommoir with Coupeau’s unfortunate fall and the physical breakage of his body, which leads to his moral and alcoholic collapse.

In Aeneid 3, Aeneas and his crew sail all around the Mediterranean: the Harpy Celaeno taunts them that, as they leave her island searching for Italy, they will not find it until hunger forces them to eat their table. In L’Assommoir 3 the wedding feast spills food all over the cafe tables, and the wedding party, stuffed with food and drink, wander (like the characters in Ulysses wandering Dublin) all across Paris, going into the Louvre and wandering from room to room, visiting the highlights of European culture.

Critics talk about how the first half of the Aeneid is Vergil’s ‘Odyssey’ and the second half Vergil’s ‘Iliad’: the war between the Trojans and the Latins, Aeneas and Turnus fighting over who will get Lavinia. Something of this is true of chapters 7-13 (in my schema: chapters 7-12) of L’Assommoir, with Coupier and Lantier not so much fighting over Gervaise as adulterously sharing her, in a haze of drink, and noble, hero-bearded Goujet despairs from the sidelines. But the second half of Zola’s novel is a process of pseudo-bellicose attrition of all the characters, and the death of many.

The Aeneid is a story about how a second empire rises from the ashes of a first. Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels are, of course, stories about a Second Empire. In the Aeneid, the fates are implacable, unavoidable, liable to lead to death (as with Dido) to those who try to deny them. In L’Assommoir, the place of ‘the fates’ is taken by alcoholism, or more broadly by Zola’s deterministic belief in hereditary. The Aeneid is an epic of travel, from Troy to Italy; L’Assommoir is a stationary novel, the characters stuck physically in Paris (the novel at no point leaves the city) and metaphorically in their relative poverty and alcoholic heredity: an ironic inversion of Vergil’s peripatetism, haunted in Zola’s telling by the offer Goujet makes to Gervaise—precise to travel, to leave their lives in Paris and go to Belgium—which would, we know, have saved her from her tragic fate, but which is unactualised.

As I say, reading the novel I thought to myself: I’ll check out what the critics have to say about this—as I thought—very obvious piece of intertextual formalism on Zola’s part: anticipating what Joyce does in Ulysses by half a century! And when I put the book down and did a search of Zola scholarship and criticism I found: nothing, nada, zilch, not even aeneid, noneid whatsoever.

On reflection I have to wonder if this isn’t a kind of textual pareidolia on my part: because I love the Aeneid I see it everywhere, even in places where it isn’t. But I’m not sure. Could I have stumbled upon something? Would it make sense to work-up a more detailed scheme of parallels between this novel and Vergil’s poem, as Joyce did for Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey?