Pot Luck

  Oxford World’S Classics

  POT LUCK

  Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette, which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series with the subtitle Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieux. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.

  Brian Nelson is Emeritus Professor of French Studies and Translation Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies and President of AALITRA (the Australian Association for Literary Translation). His publications include Zola and the Bourgeoisie and The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola. He has translated and edited Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, The Kill, The Belly of Paris and The Fortune of the Rougons for Oxford World’s Classics. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  ÉMILE ZOLA

  Pot Luck

  (Pot-Bouille)

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  BRIAN NELSON

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1999

  Reissued 2009

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Zola, Émile, 1840–1902.

  [Pot-bouille. English]

  Pot luck / Émile Zola : translated with an introduction and notes by Bryan Nelson.

  (Oxford world’s classics)

  I. Nelson, Brian, 1946– . II. Title.

  PQ2514.P6E5 1999 843′.8—dc21 98–19514

  ISBN 978–0–19–953870–6

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–259319–1

  9

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd, Lymington, hants

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Contents

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Émile Zola

  POT LUCK

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  Pot Luck is the story of an apartment building and of the juxtaposed lives of its bourgeois tenants and their servants—a simmering, bubbling melting-pot of public and private life, class and gender relations. The novel’s French title, Pot-Bouille, is virtually untranslatable. ‘Restless House’, the title chosen for a previous edition of the novel, captures something of the mood of the building’s tenants and the metaphoric importance of the building itself, though ‘Stew’ or ‘Stewpot’, with their associations with the ordinary meal, household routine, and everyday bourgeois life, are the closest literal equivalents in English. However, there is no term in English which conveys so concisely Zola’s idea of a melting-pot of sexual promiscuity, while at the same time incorporating the culinary notion of a stew, as well as a swill of fetid household waste, which is the author’s metaphor for the confusions and contradictions of bourgeois society and the messy mishmash of moral and physical corruption concealed beneath the veneer of bourgeois respectability.

  Pot Luck is the tenth in Zola’s great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, on which he began work in 1870 at the age of 30, and to which he devoted the next quarter of a century. The subtitle of the cycle, The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire, suggests the way that at one level Zola gives us a documentary account of French society in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the result of dedicated first-hand observation and research—in the Halles, the department stores, the mines, the French countryside—combining a novelist’s skills with those of the investigative journalist in a way that only Balzac can match. In his representation of various milieux Zola always combined the vision of a painter with that of a sociologist, attentive to the patterns and rituals that govern the daily life of a given community. From the vantage-point of the fortunes of one family, Zola examined the political, moral, and above all, sexual landscape of the late nineteenth century, in a way that scandalized the grossly materialistic and hypocritical bourgeois society of France both before and after the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War.

  Zola’s basic themes include nature, the body, and the working class. His representation of the natural and material world is often more expressionist than impressionist; he animates it with extraordinary anthropomorphic life, giving it a heightened, hallucinatory quality, so that in Pot Luck, for example, the apartment house itself, with its sham façade and filthy inner courtyard, becomes one of the characters of the novel. His symbolic world is deeply marked by patterns of ambivalence, an inversion of signs: the nourishing
earth becomes deadly, Eros becomes Thanatos, catastrophe is followed by regeneration. Zola’s representation of the body and its affects is similarly ambivalent. Although his vision was puritanical, he broke the mould of Victorian moral cant in his representation of sexual appetites, frustrations, and inhibitions; the most innovative aspect of Zola’s Naturalism was its discovery of the body. There is a striking recurrence in his fiction of Oedipal situations and of situations that portray women in ambivalent patterns of attraction/repulsion. In psychoanalytic terms, his fiction describes a painful evolution from an experience of sexuality in terms of nauseous anxiety (reflected in Pot Luck in his fascination with ‘filth’) to the attainment of salvation in the idealized possession, in the later works, of a woman who is simultaneously wife, sister, and servant.1 Zola’s new vision of the body is matched by a new vision of the working class, combining the carnivalesque images of the Rabelais/Molière tradition (reflected in the name-day feast in L’Assommoir and the miners’ fair in Germinal, for instance) with serious analysis of its socio-political condition. For Zola the power of mass working-class movements is a radically new, and frightening, element in human history, whose presence is felt to underlie the cynical but frightened discussions of politics in Pot Luck. And yet (especially as described in Germinal) the people lose their struggle for self-determination: the motor of revolution, like all machines, real and metaphorical, in Les Rougon-Macquart, cannot avoid the laws of entropy.2

  In Pot Luck, as in other novels of the series, Zola reveals his fascination with moral and physical degeneracy within the individual, the family, and society. The novel is the most acerbic expression in the Rougon-Macquart cycle of the themes adumbrated in The Fortune of the Rougons: bourgeois hypocrisy and corruption. The Kill had shown the moral corruption behind social glitter, The Belly of Paris the brutality behind lower-middle-class respectability, L’Assommoir the misery of the working-class slums behind the public splendour of the Empire. Pot Luck continues the sexual denunciation of Nana, which immediately preceded it in the cycle, but on a different level and in a different register. Sexuality is now viewed in a more sharply satirical framework. While Nana had revealed the sexual dissipation of the upper classes through the mythical figure of the prostitute, Pot Luck shows that the bourgeoisie are no less squalid in their sexual habits, just more dissimulating. Pot Luck was also intended to complement L’Assommoir, and bourgeois applause at what it saw as the representation of working-class degeneracy in the latter novel was to become howls of rage at the unflinching portrayal of its own debasement. Adultery is one manifestation of a diseased civilization, frustrated by a moral code so dehumanizing that it is unworkable, all normal biological impulses transformed into tawdry exercises in lust and debauchery. Bourgeois promiscuity has the effect of sterilizing the family and contaminating the environment. This is a society that oozes with the excretions of lust, where unwanted babies are murdered by their mothers, and where those that survive grow up to be pitiable individuals stricken with nervous disorders, mental instability, skin diseases, and other maladies. The bourgeoisie is in danger, Zola suggests, of sinking under the weight of its own corruption, its pretended virtue merely a façade concealing the degradation within.

  Tony Tanner observes, in his study of adultery in the novel,3 that the ability to mark out boundaries for human activity is what distinguishes the human from the pre-human, and is intimately linked to the institution of marriage, just as promiscuity is linked to barbarity. The marriage contract gives form to society and identity to individuals, families, and in turn, nations. The ability to identify one’s father and one’s offspring is intrinsic to family lineage where property can be bequeathed and inherited, citizenship established, societies and nations founded. In short, marriage has been the catalyst of modern man, and the alternative—which is what adultery signifies—could be envisaged as a return to chaos. The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie accorded the greatest importance to the stability of marriage as an institution, for marriage was what guaranteed the stability and permanence of bourgeois society. By means of the ownership of land, property, and capital, safeguarded and transmitted by means of the family, the bourgeoisie had mastered the lower orders of society; in other words, it had appropriated from the former nobility the customs and laws which regulated society, and through this appropriation it had not only won control of the nation’s workers but had also sought to reaffirm its ascendancy over women. Adultery on the part of a wife was denounced because it usurped the laws men used to determine the social role of women—to bring into the world only the offspring of their husbands, thereby ensuring the purity of their husbands’ lineage. The infidelities of the bourgeoisie were much more significant than those of the working class because, as transgressors of their own law, the bourgeoisie put at risk an order of civilization structured precisely to sustain their own privileged position. Nineteenth-century novelists were obsessively drawn to the theme of adultery, and the more searchingly and explicitly they investigated it, the more they risked uncovering the arbitrariness and fragility of the whole bourgeois social order: ‘If society depends for its existence on certain rules governing what may be combined and what should be kept separate, then adultery, by bringing the wrong things together in the wrong places (or the wrong people in the wrong beds), offers an attack on those rules, revealing them to be arbitrary rather than absolute.’4 Written at a time when divorce was generally inconceivable as a viable alternative to an unhappy marriage, the nineteenth-century novel of adultery hints at impending doom for bourgeois civilization once marriage has been displaced, throwing into question the stability of other institutions, such as religion and the law, which sustain the marriage contract.

  Adultery in the nineteenth century was most likely, of course, to be that of the husband. While husbands cheated on their wives with near impunity, female infidelity was considered a most reprehensible crime, for it jeopardized what was most prized in bourgeois society: legitimacy of descent. The crime of female adultery was considered so grievous that an adulterous woman could be imprisoned for up to two years,5 or at the very least expelled from the family home. Female sexuality was thus a constant source of concern for the family and for society as a whole. Piety was impressed upon women in general, and the Church and the bourgeois family combined forces to protect the chastity of adolescent girls. In Catholic France the convent took on the role of moral instructor. Convent instruction was infused with a sense of ‘forbidden knowledge’—things carnal were equated with sin, an inquisitive mind with disobedience, and ignorance with purity and innocence.

  In Pot Luck, the container of the stew of sexual decadence, the apartment building in the Rue de Choiseul, itself provides us with clues as to what lies behind the façade. The beginning of the novel, coinciding with the arrival of Octave Mouret, a young salesman from the provinces come to make his fortune in Paris, describes in great detail the physical appearance of the building. Octave is shown round by the architect Campardon, and is initially overawed by the new building and its extravagant decoration—its gilt carvings, red carpet, and heated main staircase, typical in its gaudy splendour of the new bourgeois constructions of the time. The grand main entrance, with its imitation marble panelling and the cast-iron banisters which were meant to look like old silver, suggests falseness and deceptive appearances. This impression is reinforced by the grotesque image of the imitation windows painted on the blank walls of the courtyard. Octave soon learns, indeed, that structurally the building is far from sound. After twelve years there are enormous cracks and the paint is beginning to peel. The house is a symbol of the society and lifestyles of the bourgeois tenants: everything is for show, the keeping up of appearances, while the foundations are weak. What seems to be a place of prosperity and harmony, in accordance with accepted standards and conventions, is in fact home to a population riddled with defects: hypocrisy, snobbery, tacit sexual permissiveness, and other forms of immorality. The result is instability and tension: in architectural term
s, major structural problems.

  The social relations between the two types of occupants of the building, the bourgeois tenants and the working-class servants, are at first, and outwardly, presented as rigidly separate—in manners, morals, hygiene, language, education, and wealth. Once again, the structure and décor of the building give symbolic expression to this need for distance and separation: the main staircase is red-carpeted and heated, spacious and brightly lit, while the service stairs are dark, narrow, dirty, and freezing cold; the bourgeois tenants live in the heated apartments at the front of the house, while the servants live in cold, partitioned cubicles under the roof and work in the filthy kitchens overlooking the courtyard; and the neat, paved, well-scrubbed outer courtyard, with its fountain, reserved exclusively for the use of the bourgeois tenants, contrasts with the filthy, foul-smelling inner courtyard onto which face the kitchens and the servants’ quarters. The inner courtyard acts as a literal and figurative rubbish dump for the building, and is frequently described in the text as a sewer or cesspool. During the guided tour by Campardon, Octave is introduced to the kitchens and finds the servants exchanging raucous gossip from window to window, with the courtyard below: ‘It was as if a sewer had brimmed over’ (p. 9). The courtyard becomes a symbolic image of the sordid reality of bourgeois domestic life, and the unwholesome smells become the true essence of the house’s moral filth: ‘from the depths of the dark, narrow courtyard only the stench of drains came up, like the smell of the hidden filth of the various families, stirred up by the servants’ rancour’ (p. 105). These physical details reinforce on a symbolic level the enormous disparity and the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the two classes. As Janet Beizer puts it: ‘Manifest physical segregation of the lower classes becomes increasingly necessary to the bourgeoisie after 1789, as rigid moral barriers are eroded. In a paradoxical sense … the imposing presence of material barriers speaks to the disappearance of more effective if less tangible social barriers.’6 The bourgeois go to extreme lengths to maintain this segregation, insistently portraying the lower classes as dirty, immoral, promiscuous, stupid—at best a lesser type of human, at worst some kind of wild beast. The bourgeois themselves wish to be seen as respectable, honest, law-abiding citizens, with culture and education on their side—in short, a superior class.