Marksizam Kao Mit U Zerminalu.pdf

Marxism as Myth in Zola's "Germinal" Author(s): N. R. Cirillo Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1977), pp. 244-255 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40245921 . Accessed: 11/05/2014 18:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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Marxism as Myth In Zola's Germinal N.R. CIRILLO Emile Zola's Germinalis a national epic which locates the center of its heroic encounter in the class struggle. It is, moreover, a national epic neither nationalist, elitist, nor rightist, written at a time when such a feat might reasonably be thought to have been impossible, particularlyin France. This national epic which is not elitist has, furthermore, a hero who, despite his powerful identification with the working class, is largely defined by certain traditional literary archetypes. Zola's concept of the class struggle is largely Marxian1despite the fact that, to the despair of many, he was by no means a Marxist,2 although he created in Germinalthe only major proletarian novel of the nineteenth century. As will be demonstrated in this paper, his use of Marxisttheory within the novel is purely literary: he transforms historic dialectic into historic myth and resolves three major western literary archetypes by means of it. In Germinal, Marxismas myth is inextricably bound to western myth and is its culmination. Germinalremains nonetheless a national epic. Without destroying the essential integrity of Marxismas an international movement, and, in fact, reinforcing this by wedding it indissolubly to western tradition, he particularizesit as the available solution to the national French economic and social crisis and represents it metaphorically as if it were as purely and appropriately Gallic as The Song of Roland. Epic was the scale on which Zola best conceived the novel, and it is the epic in its older and more traditional forms which shapes both the action of Germinaland its weight of technical detail. Germinalevokes three major older epics: La commedia of Dante; La Gerusalemmeliberata of Tasso, both with their Virgiliansource intact; and The Song of Roland. Of all the epics, the Dantean is dominant, and even the most casual reader of Germinal must feel its presence. It provides the structure of the entire work, beginning with the descent of Part I, renderingthe mine and all life associated with the mine through the essential metaphor of damnation, and orders the conclusion of the novel through the action

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of ascent and the idea of resurrection. The pervasiveDantean presence, along with the evocation of the other two epics, argues the universalityof Zola's case by investing the miners of Montsou with the symbolic authority to represent not only the nineteenthcentury worker but the fulfillment of man's historic fate in the West. Unexpectedly classical for Emile Zola, self-proclaimed naturalist and sometime journalist, Part I of the novel provides all the essential narrativeand rhetorical elements of the work. The first of the six chapters which comprise this part most powerfully expresses the organic mythic conception that is the basic metaphor of the novel, largely through Zola's lyric evocation of archetype as a function of character, setting and action. The very first line of the novel calls forth the Dantean universe, even echoing that familiar iambic triad of prepositional phrases, although Zola's involvement with the material world is, of course, much more direct than Dante's. Dante's opening, "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. . ."3 instantaneously identifies a metaphysical geography, his road to be measured thereafter through imagery, abstract number and geometric axiom. This is the road which has led the poet into the "selva oscura," in which "la diritta via era smarrita,"4into that forest of powerful images of darknessand loss of faith. The demands of the novel notwithstanding, the unmarked darkness of the opening passage of Germinalevokes immediately Dante's world: "Dans la plaine rase, sous la nuit sans étoiles. . ."5 in which the undifferentiated "we" implicit in the "nostra" of Dante's first line becomes the "homme" unnamed who ". . . suivait seul la grande route de Marchiennes à Montsou."6 The universalgeography of Dante becomes, necessarily, the particularizedlandscape of the nineteenth century. If one of the primary features of Zola's landscape is fact - the road is, materially, that from Marchiennesto Montsou - it omits neither magic nor mystery. Zola's naturalism,unlike that of, for instance, the Goncourts, was a true cosmology. Born of traditional religious and cultural myth and the science of Zola's day, it is clearly germinativeof modern ideological myth. One factor which accounts for the potency of its expression in Germinalis the constant evocation of the magical and mysterious as organically part of the real and factual. This expression, however, is shaped by the literary archetypes, most notably the Dantean. From the landscape "sans étoiles," the unnamed man immediately begins to distinguish structures which appear to him first as manifest reality, as fact: ". . . d'une vision de village aux toitures basses et uniformes."7 He walks forward precisely "deux cents pas."

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But as he approaches, the hard reality of what he sees begins to dissipate and becomes ultimately ". . . cette apparition fantastique, noyée de nuit et de fumée," from which ". . . une seule voix montait, la respiration grosse et longue d'un échappement de vapeur, qu'on ne voyait point."8 "Alors l'homme reconnut une fosse."9 "Une fosse," not "une mine." The two hundred paces the man has walked for a closer look have moved him from the world of fact to the world of truth, from gables and roofs to fantastic apparitions. What the man recognizes ("l'homme reconnut") is the truth: it is a "fosse," not just a phenomenon identified by the neutral and technical word "mine." The word "mine" was the obvious, most commonly used word Zola could have selected,10 but surely does not evoke, as "fosse" does, the first meaning of "grave,"the second "pit." It is, of course, Dante's word as well. "Che fai tu in questa fossa?"11will ring, if implicitly , just as solemnly for "l'homme" of Germinal, the flawed hero Etienne Lantier, on his way to political, historical and, needless to say, temporal resurrection as it does for the poet in search of grace. Etienne moves two hundred paces closer, and, like the pits of Acheron across which the poet sights "un vecchio bianco per antico pelo,"12 Charonthe ferryman, Etienne discovers that the pit of Le Voreux is served by "un veillard vêtu d'un tricot de laine violette, coiffé d'une casquette en poil de lapin,"13 the haulier known as Bonnemort. In two senses, Bonnemort will ferry Etienne into the pit: first, by being the agent of his introduction to a working team of colliers, and, second, by imparting to him at length his personal history, one that will represent at the outset the collective tragedy of the Montsou miners. In this last capacity, Bonnemort is, also, the bard of the oral tradition, the illiterate singer of the chronicles of a place and a people. He has earned the name Bonnemort by defeating death three times, and the accidents are reminiscent of the more bizarre punishments of the Dantean pit: ". . . une fois avec tout le poil roussi, une autre avec de la terre jusque dans le gésier, la troisième avec le ventre gonflé d'eau comme une grenouille."14 Bardic singer and Étienne's ferryman, or, in the broader sense, guide, Bonnemort is also a magician, having returned three times from the dead. He is, then, in all functions, a work-coarsened Virgil as well, the familiar Virgil the magician of medieval iconography and the Virgil of Dante. Furthermore, Bonnemort's climactic murderof the fat and blooming Cécile has its Virgilian implication: Dante is strongly admonished by the Poet15 to quell his feelings of compassion for the creaturesof the pit, for they are nothing but embodiments of the sins they represent. As a result of

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this stern lecture, Dante's behavior becomes more aggressive,and he stamps, at one point, on the head of one of them. Damned finally to total silence and incomprehension by the ravagesof fifty years in the pit, Bonnemort will complete his song with the apparently senseless murderof Cécile, committed with all the insouciance of the senile and the damaged. Cécile, introduced into the novel immediately following the descent of the first six chapters, is indeed the ripe embodiment of all the sins of the bourgeoisie. Her murderby Bonnemort later in the novel parallels structurallythe murderby the mine of Catherine, the starving counterpart to Cécile, who cannot be saved either by Etienne's words or actions, colored as they often were by hesitation and reservation. It is also through Bonnemort in this opening chapter that the other two literary archetypes, La Gerusalemmeliberata and The Song of Roland, are introduced, although these will never be fully realized and will function only within the major Dantean structuring. Both Village 240 and Montsou are metaphorically conceived as captive of a foreign power, economically captive, that is, by the absentee Parisianownership, and this is briefly shadowed forth by Bonnemort in this first chapter. In doing so, he fulfills his bardic function by revealingthe source of religious awe, and there is no irony in what Zola does here. When asked by Etienne who owns the mine, Bonnemort hesitates and answers vaguely in broken sentences. Narrativereplaces dialogue in the only interruption of Bonnemort's song, and it is the quality of his response which becomes significant: "Sa voix avait pris une sorte de peur religieuse, c'était comme s'il eût parlé d'un tabernacle inaccessible, où se cachait le dieu repu et accroupi, auquel ils donnaient tous leur chair, et qu'ils n'avaientjamais vu."*6 For Bonnemort, Parisian capitalism is a malevolent and ultimately even a foreign god who sends armies to maintain its hold on the captive mining towns. The metaphor expressed here and firmly developed later in the novel belongs more to Tasso and The Song of Roland than to Dante, for, despite the powerful national plea that shapes so much of the Commedia, Dante's Italian state remains ever an abstraction structured - and occasionally jerry-built - by his version of God's ordinances. Zola's sense of place, like Tasso's, is especially concrete, and, from this first religious evocation onwards, the developing correspondences work to deeply ironic effect throughout the novel as Holy Sepulchre becomes sacred soil and Christian works become manual labor. Thus early is Zola's version of Marxistprinciple expressed, bonded, however, to older traditions: work legitimatizes ownership and the means of production is the workers' rightful property;

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capital interests are therefore foreign, and any attempt to enforce these interests must necessarily take the form of invasion. Like Disraeli's idea of rich and poor as two nations,17 Zola's version of the economic conflict between worker and capitalist is transcendent: they are two armies at war. Zola fulfills this theme later in the novel in powerful evocation of The Song of Roland. The "foreign" Parisianowners send national troops to break the strike, and they come, like the Saracens, fearfully armed, to defeat the ragged, starvingminers who defend that soil into which - and Zola makes much of this image - they have for generations poured their blood. The strike is, in reality, broken by the traitorous Chavalwho, like Ganelon, greedily succumbs to the flattering offers of the enemy and leads a small group back to work. Structurally and dramatically, then, Chapter 1 makes the epic statement: the cosmic proportions of the work itself are revealed, and the concrete circumstances and situations of the narrativeare identified. No loose and baggy monster, Germinal preservesan unwanted harmony and economy throughout. This is largely so because the work hews mainly to the development of two elements: that of Etienne Lantier in the familiar and traditional epic mode as the hero who achieves grace by successfully overcoming tests of insuperable difficulty in a universe which is absolute, despite the fact that it is only history which has preempted God;18 and, second, the development of the centrality of the mine itself as a physical setting and as the symbolic embodiment of both those tests which Etienne must overcome and of the fallen world to which he must help bring order. It is therefore with great economy that the novel moves from the components of Chapter 1, from Bonnemort, bard and patriarch, to the family in which he occupies this latter role and which will be, quite immediately, the agents of Etienne's encounter with the pit. By introducing the women of the Maheu family, Chapter 2 continues, subvocally, the epic theme, strongly evoking Tasso and his Virgilian source. Unusual in Zola's customary characterizations of women,19 both Maheude, fecund, maternal, and fierce protector of home and family, who is ewiges Weibturned warrior at the end, and Catherine,the epicene and nubile child whose sacrificial death is simultaneous with her initiation into womanhood, are immensely positive creations. In the case of Catherine, the archetype of the female warrior is expressed in more than just a general way. At the end of Chapter 3 of Part I, Etienne, havingjust overcome his first test in the mine, those grotesque, subterraneantortures of the galleries, discovers that his companion is merely dressed in the ordinary uniform of the collier and is in fact a female. Like Tasso's Clorinda

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(and her source, Virgil's Camilla), Catherinewears her masculine garb with grace. Her collier's clothes are battle dress, both metaphorically, in that they are her daily work clothes, and literally, in that they clothe her during the pitched battle with the troops sent by the owners of the mine: ". . . on aperput Catherine, les poings en l'air, brandissantelle aussi des moitie'sde brique. . . elle crevait d'une envie de massacrerle monde."20 In the widest sense, then, the six chapters of Part I provide the essential metaphor of descent into the pit. All of Germinalis cette fosse: the fate of the mine equals not only the economic survival but the survivalin every sense of the characters,all of whom are damned by its fortunes. Consequently, Montsou and Village 240 are the cities of Hell on earth. The descent of Part I is followed immediately by the breathless luxury chez Grégoire, which opens Part II. Food and physical comfort dominate the dialogue and narrative of the opening of Chapter 7. If the obvious sins represented are greed and gluttony, it becomes increasingly clear as the chapter develops that all this exists upon the tenuous economic power of the typical nineteenth-century bourgeois. The Grégoiresare not mastersbut have simply mortgaged some power from the "insatiable" masters, the foreigners from Paris. La Piolaine, the Grégoires' substantial home is, like Armida's garden of delights, an illusion, which can as readily be destroyed by the power of truth. Truth, however, for La Piolaine is the force of nature and history: a mine disaster or a revolution can instantly dispell its magic. The resident sins of La Piolaine are greed and gluttony, as those chez Hennebeau are greed and lust, both in their practice and in their frustration. To these traditional sins, Zola adds one unique to the industrial nineteenth century and common to all the bourgeoisie of the novel: economic exploitation. It is the cardinal sin, but only in the sense that it is the sin of a system and a whole society. All the practitioners depicted in this novel are themselves venial. There are no bloated capitalists here, engorged with the blood of workers;only, as d'Annunzio would so pithily put it, the worms in our daily bread,21 mindless of the corruption of their way of life. Locked into their class and its historical development, the sinners of Germinal,the bourgeoisie, are victims as well. Because of this, the dramaof salvation, consistently evoked by the Dantean structure and imagery, is located not in the interior arena of the soul but in the exterior arena of history. But the sin of exploitation must be punished, however tepid the atmosphere in which it is practised. The thoroughly impersonal murder of Cécile by the innocent Bonnemort is but one metaphorical representation of the underlying thesis of class war and class revolution. Its logic lies

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there and not in the action of the novel, because it presagesthe historic theme realized at the conclusion. The heroic role, therefore, of such a social and historic epic is shaped largely by the older forms of national epic, finding its archetypes in Aeneas, Roland, Boiardo and Rinaldo. The personal salvation of Dante's work>so reliant upon free will and reason, is not so much superseded in Zola's world as made dependent for its realization upon the historic process. Étienne's personal survivalfrom the mine disaster at the end of the novel is amplified into resurrection only after his talk with the oracular Maheude, which confirms his final course as he leaves Montsou forever, in step with the hammer blows of revolution he imagines he hears beneath him in the mine. Etienne's development throughout the novel consistently confirms the national hero as model. Measuredagainst any ordinary set of standards, Etienne's temptations are no temptations at all. His love for Catherine (and it is love, not lust) and his desire to better himself are, after all, the very stuff of the middle class dream and the art it often generated in the nineteenth century. But Zola early established through the structural metaphor of descent in Part I that this middle-class society is a fallen world and its values corrupt. The vision of either a clean white shirt or domesticity with Catherinehas the power to lull Etienne's drive toward action. Measuredagainst the revolutionary standardor the older one of national duty, these are indeed temptations, as love and comfort have always been for the national hero. In Zola's world, revolution fulfills but does not supersede the older version of a national and historic purpose which defined the traditional hero, for Zola anneals it to both the historic and the national. More from the title and its function within the structure than from any other component of the novel can one argue Zola's adherence to the principle of the historic necessity of the revolution. The thirteen month time span provides amplitude for the complex events of the novel, but, more richly, a symbolic chronology as well, one which exploits the Dantean structure in order to transcend it. The descent of Part I takes place in Marchwhich, if evocative of the dying commemorated by the Good Friday of Dante's work, reaches beyond it to its own naturalistic origins. The resurrection of Part VI, thirteen months later, once again exploits the Dantean in order to transcend it. Dante's ascent on the dawn of Easter morning is simultaneously action and symbol. There is no such simultaneity in Zola's handling of Étienne's ascent. The rescue from the mine is treated as just that, with no resonances. Its symbolic meaningsrequire a separate chapter for their development, one in which Étienne's return from the dead is rendered its

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full and logical significance by its re-expression through Zola's unique use of Marxianteleology. This is the concluding chapter of the novel, and it is only in its last line, in the concluding line of the work itself, that the title is explained. Etienne's personal resurrection is measurableonly by the collective resurrection of that exploited nation of workers, and Zola ties their moment to the inevitability of nature, to the eternal rebirth of the springtime. The revolution is historically necessary. It will "éclater la terre." It is naturalistic, not mechanistic; inevitable, not pre-determined. As he walks toward the city, toward his newly committed life as an activist, Etienne imagines he hears the hammer blows of the miners hundreds of feet below him in the mines: the historic course of revolution must be shaped by men, by the hands of the workers, by, in this final image, workers quite literally in the womb of the earth. As much Hegel as Marx here in this concluding image of earth and time, Zola's version of the cosmic will is that it works itself out both in space, that is, in nature, as well as in history. His characterizationof Etienne, flawed hero that he is, with his archetypal evocations, draws heavily from Hegelian thought as well, seminal at any rate in the formulation of modern mythicism and the concept of the archetypal. Thus, Zola welds historic purpose indissolubly to national purpose, this latter expressed as the loosest sense of community, as locale. He is, essentially, a poet; like all poets before or after him who would conjure with the politics of others, Zola is finally his own man; his politics, mythopoesis. He uses Marxianthought as he used the Dantean, as a formal structure to be exploited, and in continuity with western tradition. Tradition and the unique experience of a people, a loose but intelligible notion of nationality, is both the expressed^ideaof the final chapter, that which defines the significance of Etienne's resurrection,as well as the form of Zola's modification of Marx's internationalism.The conclusive social and political vision belongs to Maheude in this final chapter. Fecund still, she is ". . . lamentable dans ses vêtements d'homme, la gorge et le ventre comme enflés encore de l'humidité des tailles. . . ,"22 What begins here as dialogue becomes almost immediately indirect discourse, its authority therefore unmistakable. But it is nonetheless attributed to Maheude, to a French female miner. The exploited nation of workers is represented by the citizen who has suffered most cruelly, who is defined by that place and by that long and unique tradition germinated in that place. Zola would generalize only in this way: people before doctrine. The Armée noire, the dragon's teeth of the concluding image, is bred in that soil and is not only a matter of history but of place.

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This idea of nationhood, of community, is expressed throughout the novel always as a primal, autochthonous quality. Distinctly Hegelian, it may have only come to Zola as an infection, "la malattia egeliana"23having achieved epidemic proportions by the Eighties. Germanic, then, in its way, Zola's idea of nationhood lies closer to Volkstum than to Staat. The sense of place and its conventions have magic, ritual qualities in Germinal.The sense of place as a determinant is, of course, a truism in the general critical definition of naturalism. It is Zola's distillation of this idea to its essentials, to the ritualistic and magical, to, finally, its mythic origins, which is unique. The structuralimportance of the mine imagery in the development of the sense of place has been much noted elsewhere and mentioned here in the specific context of the Dantean. The imagery itself, furthermore, is a type of personification which, of course, justifies the Jungian reading of the text. The personification functions otherwise as well in its symbolic, that is, adumbrative, expression in that the mines become an animistic presence. Congruent with this, the work of the miner and often his feelings about his work are ritualistic, for he views himself as wresting substance from a living creature, as having to subdue or propitiate it. These gods of place are countered, ironically, by a resident trinity of human agents, Etienne, Souvarineand Rasseneur, themselves endowed with certain magical or symbolic qualities. A fourth character, Pluchart, the communist organizer, is similarly conceived, although he remains external to the community. This mythicization of setting and characteris not only congruent with the essential conception of the entire novel but provides the basis for^Zola'sdamning critique of contemporary political ideology. Etienne, the hero whose resurrection has already been discussed, returns from his grave physically transformed into an old man, white-haired and bent, embodying the magic of his experience. His antagonist is not Rasseneurthe Publican, the minimalist who, like Matthew, bears witness and whose socialism, however humane, is compromised, tepid and ineffective, but Souvarine the anarchist. Transfixed by the undigested experience of horror and guilt at the execution of his mistress, Souvarineis characterized by implacable heartlessness, courting universalcataclysm as narcotic against his pain. The Russian, satanic in his promotion of the principle of disorder, apparently feels affection for only one fellow creature, the rabbit named, no doubt in vicious witticism, Poland. The leitmotif of Souvarineobsessively stroking his rabbit and spinning his soulless theories of total destruction evokes the image

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of the anarchist as diabolist, the warlock with his familiar, whose skill as an engineer will become the technology of meaningless destruction. Zola dramatizes the suffering of the miners as the only salient result of Souvarine'sskillful, camouflaged weakening of the mineshaft. None of the other promised effects of Souvarine's theories materializes,as he watches the collapse of the mine, emotionless, from the side of the hill. In no way can Souvarine'sact be construed as anything but total, pointless calamity. Its pointlessness is clear in light of the fact that Souvarine is not determined upon such a course of action, although the theme of destruction has provided a consistent litany in his anarchist musings, until after the killing of Poland has served him with a dinner he unknowingly eats in an act, given his perverseaffection for the animal, close to cannibalism.24The effect upon him is clearly tumultuous, and the implication unavoidable that he becomes totally unhinged by the experience. The anarchist becomes, in his representation here, the lunatic as Luddite, and technology in the hands of a madman, considering the overtones of Zola's portrait of the soulless, obsessed Souvarine, the practice of the black arts. Thus represented, the ideological struggle of the nineteenth century becomes but a mask for the primal conflict. Consequently, the characterizationof Souvarineand his instrumental role in the mine disaster expresses an implicitly damning critique of anarchismas an ideology. Certainly, the fundamentally romantic nature of anarchismis in no way appropriate to Zola's unrelentingly realistic portraits of human nature, nor, on the other hand, do its murderoustactics accord with his ultimately compassionate view of men and their vices. The man who can coolly murder and destroy and do so as an article of belief is for Zola in his representation here both an incarnation of the Old Evil or, in its contemporary expression, a psychopath. The portrait of Souvarine, coupled with that of Pluchart, the Communist organizer, raises a generalized critique of the intellectual instruments of social and political change: that of ideology as isolated system. With sly wit, Zola renders Pluchartas a dandy; although Pluchartis not ineffective, his hyperkinetic activity does not yield a commensurate effect. By definition, Pluchart is an itinerant, and his contacts, as made abundantly clear in his meeting with the Montsou miners, are sparse and fleeting. He works according to systematic ideological principle and formulates strategies and tactics. A cerebralman, he is something of a decadent, not a vast leap for a French writer of the Eighties to make. If this is a mildly wicked joke, it is a meaningful one in the context of this novel in particularand Zola's work in general, which argues the compelling power of the experience of the community in the affairs of men.

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It is, then, significant that the trinity which confronts the gods of place contains two foreigners, Souvarineand Etienne; Pluchart, as has been mentioned before, is an itinerant and therefore a foreigner as well. Rasseneur is the only one native to the community, which fact in large part clears him on the charge of political compromise: he can no longer stomach the violence where even the faces of his antagonists are familiar. Unfortunately, this familiarity, which keeps his humanity alive, neutralizes his political effectiveness. Souvarine, however, aside from being a foreigner, is also educated and an engineer. like the company man Négrel, he is managerial class. Isolated from the workers by both class and communal differences, as are both Négrel and Pluchart, Souvarine sees but does not (and in his case cannot) experience. Only the other foreigner, Etienne, literally and figuratively becomes immersed in being a miner in that place. It is this experience, this having been there that, at the same time it cannot change the simple and necessary fact of his foreignness, anoints him as revolutionary hero while his foreignness frees him to act. His decision to join Pluchartis the only possible or even plausible resolution of what he now knows. Pluchart and the movement he represents are plausible, but that is really all. Locale and characterization, thus mythicized, provide the consistent formal expression of the power of that community through which will finally emerge the historic will. The argument presented through this novel is that the power of community is transcendent, that wealth and the means of producing it are the appropriate patrimony of the worker and, finally, that all other interests are foreign, even those supportive of these principles. Consequently, Zola handles the Internationale as unflinchingly as he handles any other human institution. As the only apparent embodiment of historic truth, of that truth expressed through Zola's forceful vision here, it is only an approximation. Too remote from the soil in which the workers' experience is rooted and out of which their traditions have grown in time, the movement, like Pluçhart'sdandyism, is finally an artifact, the only possible tool at Etienne's hand. Etienne, in his last, shattering vision of "Des hommes poussaient, une armée noire, vengeresse, qui germait lentement dans les sillons, grandissantpour les récoltes du siècle futur, et dont la germination allait faire bientôt éclater la terre,"25 transcends both the community of miners and the movement which might deliver them. He becomes, at the end of the novel, the fateful man of history in a world in which he can no longer act alone. N.R. CIRILLO• Universityof Illinois, ChicagoCircle

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NOTES l.The most comprehensive view of the various Socialist theoreticians Zola read is offered by Richard Zakarian in his Zola *sGerminal: A Critical Study of its Primary Sources (Geneve, Droz). 2.This fact was noted most influentially, of course, by Georg Lukacs. 3. Dante Alighieri, "Inferno," La commedia (Firenze, R. Bemporad e figlio, Editori: 1921), I. 4. Dante, I. 5.Emile Zola, Germinal (Paris, Gallimard: 1964), p. 1133. 6. Zola, p. 1133. 7. Zola, p. 1134. 8. Zola, p. 1134. 9. Zola, p. 1134. lO.Cassell's French Dictionary, 1903. 11. Dante, XVII, 1.66. 12. Dante, III, 1.80. 13. Zola, p. 1134. 14. Zola, p. 1138. 15.Dante,VI,11.94-115. 16. Zola, p. 1141. 1 7. An idea important enough to provide Disraeli with a title for a novel. 18.Rachelle Rosenberg's "The Slaying of the Dragon: An Archetypal Study of Zola's Germinal (Symposium, 26: 1972) is an interesting reading of the novel on the Jungian level, although it fetches its dragon somewhat from afar and leaves Zola bereft of a more recent and intelligible literary past. 19.0ne ought not forget, in this context, to what Nana was hymn. 20. Zola, p. 1507. 21 . From Piu che Vamore. 22.Zola,p. 1585. 23.Attributed to Benedetto Croce. 24. Curiously reminiscent of the revenge motif in the legend of Atreus. 25.Zola,p. 1591.

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