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ladyeremite 's review for:
La Bête Humaine
by Émile Zola
"But wild animals remain wild animals. You can invent better and better machines, but there will still be wild animals running them." It would be easy to think that having said that, one had completely summarized Zola's La bête humaine , the seventeenth in the Rougon-Macquart series which explored numerous aspects of Second Empire society from the standpoint of two branches of one family. The book is suffused with references to blood curses, wild beasts and bestial behavior. However, Zola's point is not merely that man's technological advances will never overcome his inherently barbaric nature but that they in fact share in and magnify this brutality. The title itself -- la bête humaine-- captures this fact by indicating man and beast as opposites and yet implying that man is a beast among others. Similarly, man's inventions and his civilization are both opposed to his brute animal instincts and a means of furthering them. The future demands violent, barbaric force. This theme is evoked not merely in the actions of the characters, but in the depiction of the railroad itself, and of the supposedly civilized French court system (and here Zola was truly at his best as a satirist).
While the narrative, which centers around the murder of the despicable but powerful Grandmorin by the vengeful Roubaud and his wife's subsequent and ultimately fatal affair with Jacques Lantier, certainly holds the reader's attention, murder, perhaps the most central theme, is also the one least well-handled. The fact that almost every single main or secondary character-- with the exception of Aunt Phasie--- exhibits some form of homicidal mania could easily render the entire plot rather ridiculous. While this general clumsiness is slightly mitigated by the very advanced and complex intimations of the eros-thanatos connection that underlies the relationship of Séverine to both her husband and her lover, on the whole Zola overreaches himself in a somewhat embarrassing way here.
Much more convincing, however, is Zola's biography of the true hero/anti-hero of the show: the train itself. The incredible backwardness of Second Empire France has been vividly evoked by Eugen Weber in his Peasants into Frenchmen , and it is easy to imagine just how terrifying the mighty force of the locomotive must have seemed to such a society. With a far better sociological than psychological eye, Zola revealed the paradoxical effects brought on by the railroads that zigzagged a country still largely agricultural -- bringing people together (even if for sordid trysts or gruesome murders) but also making anonymity and indifference ever so much easier, appearing so rational and so controlled, yet at bottom driven by apparently endless consumption of earthy materials, liable to dramatic and terrible ruin and carnage. There is, Zola suggests, something biological in the railroad's unstoppable and terrible forward thrust, just as man's barbarity seems propelled by certain ineluctable laws of his own nature.
Indeed, in the end Zola can even be forgiven his psychological clumsiness for the overall violence of his images. There are some scenes-- the eviscerated horse dying near the mangled wreck of the engine Lison, the doomed soldiers on their runaway train without a driver speeding through the French hills, the disturbingly erotic final encounter of Séverine and Jacques-- that seem to brand themselves on the memory, in the way that Nietzsche described, a kind of bodily pain that allows mankind to move forward in its ineluctable development, towards an ever more complicated form of torture called "civilization."
While the narrative, which centers around the murder of the despicable but powerful Grandmorin by the vengeful Roubaud and his wife's subsequent and ultimately fatal affair with Jacques Lantier, certainly holds the reader's attention, murder, perhaps the most central theme, is also the one least well-handled. The fact that almost every single main or secondary character-- with the exception of Aunt Phasie--- exhibits some form of homicidal mania could easily render the entire plot rather ridiculous. While this general clumsiness is slightly mitigated by the very advanced and complex intimations of the eros-thanatos connection that underlies the relationship of Séverine to both her husband and her lover, on the whole Zola overreaches himself in a somewhat embarrassing way here.
Much more convincing, however, is Zola's biography of the true hero/anti-hero of the show: the train itself. The incredible backwardness of Second Empire France has been vividly evoked by Eugen Weber in his Peasants into Frenchmen , and it is easy to imagine just how terrifying the mighty force of the locomotive must have seemed to such a society. With a far better sociological than psychological eye, Zola revealed the paradoxical effects brought on by the railroads that zigzagged a country still largely agricultural -- bringing people together (even if for sordid trysts or gruesome murders) but also making anonymity and indifference ever so much easier, appearing so rational and so controlled, yet at bottom driven by apparently endless consumption of earthy materials, liable to dramatic and terrible ruin and carnage. There is, Zola suggests, something biological in the railroad's unstoppable and terrible forward thrust, just as man's barbarity seems propelled by certain ineluctable laws of his own nature.
Indeed, in the end Zola can even be forgiven his psychological clumsiness for the overall violence of his images. There are some scenes-- the eviscerated horse dying near the mangled wreck of the engine Lison, the doomed soldiers on their runaway train without a driver speeding through the French hills, the disturbingly erotic final encounter of Séverine and Jacques-- that seem to brand themselves on the memory, in the way that Nietzsche described, a kind of bodily pain that allows mankind to move forward in its ineluctable development, towards an ever more complicated form of torture called "civilization."