Real Dreams
[Émile Zola]
THE NAME ÉMILE Zola raises certain expectations. So central and well established is his position in the history of the novel that we cannot open a work of his without bracing ourselves for the shock of grim and sordid reality, be it the brothels of Paris or the coal-mining communities of Valenciennes. This, after all, is the author who insisted on the application of two ‘scientific’ principles to narrative art: the notion that character is entirely determined by inherited traits and environment; and that description should proceed by the objective recording of precise detail, preferably witnessed at first hand. The result would be ‘naturalism’, an even more meticulous and comprehensive representation of reality than Stendhal or Balzac had achieved. How strange then to find a work of his entitled The Dream.
It must be a provocation, the reader decides, all the more so because the novel is the sixteenth in the great twenty-tome cycle Les Rougon-Macquart, in which Zola narrated the fortunes of two families with quite distinct hereditary traits over five generations throughout the life of the Second Empire. The novel that immediately precedes The Dream, The Soil, offered such a harsh picture of peasant life that some of Zola’s warmest admirers drew up a manifesto repudiating him and had it published in Le Figaro. In this author’s world view, we tell ourselves, the dream will always be brushed aside by brutal reality, ironised, crushed. Be prepared for a surprise.
There are few novels in which I have had so much difficulty getting my bearings as The Dream. It is only when you are some way into the book that you appreciate that this disorientation is exactly the effect Zola is after. Yet the story opens in absolutely standard nineteenth-century fashion: a date – Christmas Day 1860 – a place – Lower Picardy – and above all an orphan girl freezing to death in deep snow at the locked door of an ancient cathedral. In fact, so conventional is the image that you can’t help suspecting a touch of parody. The dying girl looks up to see that around the arch above the lintel are depicted the sufferings and miracles of the child martyr St Agnes, culminating in the representation of a little girl being raised into heaven in a halo of glory and receiving a kiss of eternal happiness from her saviour and betrothed, Jesus Christ himself. This is laughable.
Yes, but Zola wants us to take it seriously. Inevitably the girl is rescued. One fears some cruel exploiter of childhood innocence, the kind of selfish monster that inhabits The Soil, but Hubert and Hubertine are professional embroiderers, the kindest and most honest of people, who live in a house incongruously attached to the cathedral and spend their lives embroidering religious images on church vestments. Needless to say, they are childless. They believe they are cursed by Hubert’s dead mother who didn’t consent to their marriage. They decide to bring up the girl, predictably named Angelique, as an apprentice. Okay, it’s a fable, you decide.
Utterly uninterested in any form of learning, Angelique falls in love with a book called The Golden Legend, a compendium of fantastic accounts of the saints’ lives. Zola seems to be having almost too much fun here as he lists the mortifications and miracles that fascinate the young Angelique: ‘A virgin ties her sash around the neck of a statue of Venus, who falls into dust. The earth quakes … executioners ask to be baptised … kings kneel at the feet of saints, who, dressed in rags have married poverty … St Germanus sprinkles ashes over his meals … St Bernard cares not to eat but delights only in the taste of fresh water … St Agathon keeps a stone in his mouth for three years … Molten lead is swallowed as if it were ice-water …’1 This goes on for quite a few pages until we hear that, in response to these tales, Angelique was eager to convert men to Christ and be arrested for it so that she could be ‘fed in prison by a dove before having her head cut off’.2
Yet precisely the mad abundance of these stories, their grotesque and wayward fantasy, reminds us that Zola didn’t invent them. Written in the thirteenth century, hugely popular by-product of a delirious Christianity, The Golden Legend is as much part of the real world as the mineshafts so meticulously described in the author’s great novel Germinal of some years before. Zola has done his research. Like the gothic cathedral where Angelique was found and the wonderful embroideries that the young girl is learning to create, these stories are part of Christian culture and have a powerful hold on the mind. The most lush and lyrical descriptions of angels and saints lovingly recreated in green and gold tapestries are accompanied by detailed accounts of how such images are actually produced, of Angelique’s mastery of this or that technique, the needles she uses, the different threads, the way the fabric is tensed. Fantasy is bodied forth in art by a mixture of practical skill and an individual imagination that taps into collective archetypes. Realism, even naturalism, must take note.
Not too far into the book, Zola contrives to let the reader know that the mother who cruelly abandoned Angelique is a member of the Rougon family who appeared earlier on in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. The girl has thus inherited a capricious, headstrong character. In combination with the religious environment she grows up in, the saints’ legends and the embroideries, this streak in her nature gives birth to a dream. It is the dream of all young girls in all fables: she will meet a fabulously wealthy prince; they will fall in love at first sight; they will marry.
Precisely at this point, when you feel you have got a handle on the book – fantasy framed by realism – when you begin to fear that, whether fable or parody of fable, the story is going to be nothing more than a depressing account of the ingenuous girl’s inevitable disappointment as she engages with reality, The Dream surprises us. In some remarkable scenes Angelique, by sheer force of will it seems, conjures her prince into being. There are footsteps outside her window. She listens. There is a shadow moving in among the trees. The girl’s mind, like her needle, works and works. She creates. The shadows gather substance. There is a man, young and handsome, her prince no less, Felicien. It is as if the hierarchy of categories one had expected from Zola – dreams circumscribed by reality – were inverted. Reality is generated from dreams. Quite suddenly, we are reading the work of a mystic. There are lines in these descriptions that might be taken from the Vedic texts.
At the same time, the dream itself takes on a deeper seriousness. Behind the story of the orphan girl who marries the prince lies the tale of St Agnes who marries her maker, and, more generally, the radically egalitarian vision of Christian idealism in which God accepts the church as his bride and every believer is equal before the Almighty. What we are talking about, in short, in the girl’s dreaming, is an immense act of will to cancel out the distance between the ideal and the real. It is the same act of will that drives all Christian humanism. When she and Felicien have married, Angelique decides, they will use his wealth to eliminate poverty in the world, once and for all. And now we remember that, as well as being an apparently pessimistic purveyor of determinism, Zola was also, rather paradoxically, a passionate defender of human rights and social justice: a dreamer, no less. He is on the girl’s side. And so are we.
But can it happen? Can a poor little orphan marry her prince in a recognisably real world where Zola will never forget to tell us that the roof tiles of the cathedral date from the reign of Louis XIV and that Angelique is only two hours from Paris by rail? The Dream is a story full of twists and turns. A far greater writer than his theories would lead us to suppose, Zola overwhelms us with an abundance of description that oscillates between fantastical lyricism and meticulous realism, with plenty of rather wry psychological analysis to hold the two extremes together. Occasionally all these elements fuse, as when the young lovers meet for the first time in a field by a stream where the girl is trying to stretch out wet laundry to dry on the grass in a strong wind. Felicien offers to help, putting stones on the corners of sheets and underclothes that won’t stay still. Thus, as the lovers exchange their first words and glances, the whole world seems to be blown about in a beautiful scene, simultaneously real and surreal, and open to all kinds of interpretations.
But the place where the ideal and the real, the fantastical and the prosaic, most convincingly overlap is in the church, the great cathedral that occupies such a huge space in the book. It is here, in tapestries, paintings and sculptures, that the collective imagination, inspired by the Christian message, has depicted a world made perfect in miracles. Readers should keep an eye, in particular, on the imposing door to the church. It is across that threshold that one passes from an imperfect world of contingency into a sacred space where dream and reality are reconciled. It is in that doorway that Zola’s story begins, with the little girl freezing to death in the snow, and it is there, in a more remarkable and dramatic scene, that it ends.