The Miner Prophets

Such is the fickle nature of fame. In the late 19^th century, he was one of the most well-known novelists in the world. In addition to multiple other books, he wrote a series of twenty (yes, 20!) loosely connected novels in an attempt to detail every aspect of French life. He was the sort of novelist who treated the form as something on the border of fiction and journalism; the details are real but the story is fictional.

I first learned of Zola decades ago when reading Tom Wolfe. Wolfe loved Zola. It’s not hard to see why: Wolfe fancied himself a modern day incarnation. From an article in The Guardian:

He is “proud,” he says, “that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not—and was not interested in—telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.”

I spent some time trying to figure out which Wolfe essay it was that I read that prompted me to get a copy of Zola’s Germinal decades ago. I have no idea—he wrote about Zola in lots of places. But, the best description of the book is in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” a 1989 Harper’s Magazine article.

In 1884 Zola went down into the mines at Anzin to do the documentation for what was to become the novel Germinal. Posing as a secretary for a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, he descended into the pits wearing his city clothes, his frock coat, high stiff collar, and high stiff hat (this appeals to me for reasons I won’t delay you with), and carrying a notebook and pen. One day Zola and the miners who were serving as his guides were 150 feet below the ground when Zola noticed an enormous workhorse, a Percheron, pulling a sled piled with coal through a tunnel. Zola asked, “How do you get that animal in and out of the mine every day?” At first the miners thought he was joking. Then they realized he was serious, and one of them said, “Mr. Zola, don’t you understand? That horse comes down here once, when he’s a colt, barely more than a foal, and still able to fit into the buckets that bring us down here. That horse grows up down here. He grows blind down here after a year or two, from the lack of light. He hauls coal down here until he can’t haul it anymore, and then he dies down here, and his bones are buried down here.” When Zola transfers this revelation from the pages of his documentation notebook to the pages of Germinal, it makes the hair on your arms stand on end. You realize, without the need of amplification, that the horse is the miners themselves, who descend below the face of the earth as children and dig coal down in the pit until they can dig no more and then are buried, often literally, down there.

Wolfe isn’t exaggerating at all. This is a novel about miners, and I think it would be impossible to read the book and not viscerally feel what it would be like to be a miner in the late 19^th century in France. It is not hard to figure out why there are no theme parks replicating the experience.

The story in the novel revolves around whether the miners should organize a strike in an attempt to get better payment. The novel clearly sympathizers with the miners; indeed, it would be hard not to sympathize with the miners. The owners and managers are surprisingly cartoonish when compared to the miners. The novel would have been a lot stronger if the wealthy had as much depth as the poor, but that would have blunted the impact. Maybe the other 19 novels in the larger series have more detailed portrayals of that class; it is fascinating to think of a 20 part story and this is just the part that delves into the lives of the miners.

Now I know that you, Dear Reader, are wondering why you should care about a novel about 19^th century miners. The answer is in the title of the book. When the French Revolutionaries were busy making all the world new, one of the things they did was create a new calendar—obviously a new political order needs a new set of names for the months! Germinal was the first month in Spring, when things, you know, germinate.

Now, ask this: if there is a novel with the title Germinal that is part of a massive project detailing all the assorted parts of French society, which profession is that novel about? Farming, right? Isn’t that obvious? So, now you pick up this novel which is obviously going to be about farmers, and you slowly realize there ae no farmers here. Just miners.

What is going on? Zola is a clever one. You find out in the last paragraph of the book:

And beneath his feet, the deep blows, those obstinate blows of the pick, continued. The mates were all there; he heard them following him at every stride. Was not that Maheude beneath the beetroots, with bent back and hoarse respiration accompanying the rumble of the ventilator? To left, to right, farther on, he seemed to recognize others beneath the wheatfields, the hedges, the young trees. Now the April sun, in the open sky, was shining in his glory, and warming the pregnant earth. From its fertile flanks life was leaping out, buds were bursting into green leaves, and the fields were quivering with the growth of the grass. On every side seeds were swelling, stretching out, cracking the plain, filled by the need of heat and light. An overflow of sap was mixed with whispering voices, the sound of the germs expanding in a great kiss. Again and again, more and more distinctly, as though they were approaching the soil, the mates were hammering. In the fiery rays of the sun on this youthful morning the country seemed full of that sound. Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth. (Ellis translation)

A rather chilling image. Here are these miners, buried away out of sight and out of mind, but they are there, everywhere beneath your feet, waiting to burst forth one day. Maybe you ought to think about those miners. Maybe you ought to think about the work they are doing. Maybe you ought to think about the fact that without coal, the entire society will shut down.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to realize that Zola is right. These were horrific working conditions. Of course the workers didn’t have to go down into the mines. They could always have just starved to death. But, even still, even the slightest degree of humanity makes you think that the mangers and owners could have done at least a little bit better. (This is where, however, the fact that all the managers and owners are such cartoon figures does not help the novel.)

But, on the other hand, it is well worth noting that the job of mining is a lot different now than it was in the late 19^th century. All too often people act as if nothing has changed in the last 150 years. Economic growth is an amazing thing.

There is the central problem, the problem Zola wants you to realize. You actually don’t think much about the actual working conditions and the actual lives of actual people outside your immediate orbit. You have lots of caricatures in your mind. Zola’s project was to fix that; Zola was there to say, “this is how it actually is.” To do that meant going down into those mines, actually going down into the dark and seeing what was there. You want to know what mining is like today? You want to know what it is like to work in a modern factory? Someone needs to go there, notebook in hand, and find the stories equivalent to the horses who spend their whole lives living underground.