“I Am Here to Live Out Loud”

 

In defense of the social novel: an essay on Emile Zola

by Colum McCann

 

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud." Emile Zola

 

W.H Auden once wrote that a writer’s politics are of more danger to him than his cupidity or greed. If a story is formed by ideas exterior to it, if there is some sort of socially engaged intention, he suggest, the work produced is not art, but polemics.

While Auden may have been reacting to the plethora of socially engaged novels produced by his generation, it seems that here, now, in the early part of the 21 st century, that there is an acute crisis of disengagement. We want our novels, our plays, our paintings untainted by politics. We don’t want to be lectured on history or social activism. We don’t need somebody else telling us how to live, since yet another politician -- especially one in a writer’s coat -- is more than we can stomach. There is the air of the impure about the social novel. It is nearly always seen as ideological, or political, and therefore acutely limited.

Contemporary fiction suffers from a reduced power, certainly in the minds and hearts of its readers. It is also the easiest, critical punchbag – it is so much easier to take a social novel to task than to dissect a well-mannered book about the suburbs. But what is even more acutely damning is that fiction also seems to be suffering a reduced moral muscle in the minds of its practitioners also – the writers themselves. There is a general disposition – if you walk along any number of bookshop shelves, be they in New York or Paris or Dublin – to come inside, draw the blinds, lock the doors, and hide.

In other words, the contemporary novelist is called upon -- or perhaps calls upon himself or herself -- to dilute, or to back away from engagement. It is a strange assessment in such a globalised world when all the issues are at our fingertips. Perhaps it has something to do with the technology of today – writers rendered useless under the ton of information that comes across our computer screens, or the sheer volume of the non-fiction being written – but I believe it is more likely a failure of the imagination on the part of so many of our fiction writers. The novel is increasingly diseased with talk of traffic jams and mortgages.

It is interesting to ponder how the socially-engaged writers of the past would look at their contemporaries today. The silence they might find themselves in might be a little too much to bear: Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, Guantanomo, the current financial collapse, all seem to hover at the edges of novels, but very seldom rest at the absolute core. So many 9/11 novels, for instance, are 9/11 novels by accident, with a writer shoving a convenient line in the text in order to make it seem profoundly engaged when the fact of the matter is these novels are nearly always perfect specimens in the argument of avoidance. Our literature rests much easier on the notion that the novel should avoid ideology – it is far better to write a novel about a private school, or a messy divorce, or God forbid another novel about a creative writing program, than to confront the major issues of our time.

And as regards navel-gazing – the novel of the self – we should realise that if we keep looking in our belly-buttons the lint won’t become any more or less than what it already is: lint.

I am aware that there is the air of the clarion call about this. But the social novel is so seriously devalued in contemporary discourse that sometimes it is not a bad thing to risk ridicule. There are of course plenty of worthy contemporary exceptions to my argument – take Don deLillo, for instance, or Dave Eggers, or Alexander Hemon, or John Berger, or Chimamanda Aidiche for instance – but despite these exceptions, the overwhelming truth is that the contemporary novelist and the contemporary reader have together shied away from engagement, and most of us continue to shy away, and the vast majority of books (even books that are praised) are tepid, housebroken, even meaningless exercises in entertainment. (Entertainment is fine, of course, but I personally don’t want my novels to become TV shows, or second-rate Hollywood films). There is of course the argument that the “mannered novel” is in fact a radical take on things, that it really is getting in under the skin, that it is truly engaging by disengaging, and in this way is a mirror to our times, but this is an argument that ought to be refuted by using the lesson of the past.

“The past is not dead,” says William Faulkner, “it’s not even past.”

All writers relish the work of the masters. There is a sort of literary mitosis that trails down through the generations. We gets our voices from the voices of others. There are certain writers that come along and make the claim that nobody should forget and – even more appropriately – that nobody should be forgotten. These voices remind us that life is not yet written down: there is more left to happen. They are led by delight that the world is ongoing. The true value of literature is that there’s always another story to tell.

Still, we make a mistake to condescend to the past as if its only function was in preparation for our own time, or in making sense of our modern-day stories. Writing must get to the pulse of the wounds that are apparent in the now, as they were manifested yesterday, yet they must also make sense of what is yet to come. There are lengths of web within a web. Great writers, in this sense, live in two, even three times -- their immediate time, the past, and that time that they cannot yet fathom.

Emile Zola was, and is, a master storyteller who not only found himself swimming in the deeply-churned waters of 19 th century France, but has also managed to survive down through the succeeding decades with a relevance that still rings current today. Of course Zola’s consequence is not the same as it was then, but he, of all people, would embrace this idea of his own shifting relevance – he would, in fact, almost certainly refute the prospect of stasis. He does not need to be the same writer at the beginning of the 21 st century as he was 125 years ago. We cannot use him to solve the quandaries of today, but he is most certainly an example of how literature can engage on the most profound and relevant level. If some of the conclusions that he and his generation came to (re. social Darwinism, the interpretation of Marxism, the limited scientific formulas of naturalism) seem slick and old-fashioned now, it is not just the benefit of hindsight, but also a nostalgia on our part. Nothing is simpler than to ridicule the past.

One of the primary lessons of Zola’s work – the rage which he brought to the page – is a factor often ignored by present-day novelists. We seem to live in a tamer world than the one Zola inhabited, where we seem to have given up the presumption of the social power of our work. Literary life today is far more decorous and certainly less likely to exhibit a nod towards social conscience than the one Zola inhabited, and certainly not since the period between the 1930’s and 50’s (Dreiser, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Orwell etc) has the social novelist engaged on an equally significant level in necessary public debate.

So many of today’s writers are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it is not ours, as if we are only visiting, whereas Zola and other writers of his generation went headfirst into life, consumed it, critiqued, and were truculently at odds with it.

The bare facts. He was born in Paris, 1840. Brought up in poverty in Aix-en-Provence. He failed his baccalaureate, but managed to find work in publishing. In 1865 he published his first novel and, from the following year on, he made a living from writing. In his 35-year writing career he embraced scandal; laid claim to being a “naturalist”; published more than thirty novels; was seen as France’s leading writer; became a figurehead in the country’s political liberalisation; mustered the courage to fight the nationalists and anti-Semites during the Dreyfus affair; fled to England; died, or more probably was murdered, in Paris in 1902, after which 50,000 people thronged the streets of Paris for his funeral.

He died as he had lived most of his life, celebrated and controversial, a wealthy author beloved of the working classes – during his funeral a large group of miners from the Denain coalfield chanted “Germinal!” as the procession wend its way through the streets.

Zola knew how and where to brawl, but he also knew the value of protecting his corner. Moreover, he liked the fight. He was prepared to risk himself for it. As one of the finest purveyors of the social novel, he put himself at a danger with critics, fellow writers, readers. He also was willing to put himself in public danger as witnessed by the Dreyfuss affair and other public pronouncements. He was a writer who had an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty in the immense furnace of the 19 th century. He was aware of his voice coming from, and merging with, others -- Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Gongcourt, and Daudet amongst them – and yet he knew his own value also. He was, in his words, “here to live out loud.” There was a raw electricity to the life. He believed that literature – even as a form of entertainment – truly mattered and that the novelist had to live in, and critique, the world around him.

He wanted to be there when the bread emerged from the oven – and to a great extent he was and, therefore, still is.

“ Imagination is no longer the predominant quality of the novelist,” said Zola in his essay The Novel, where he triumphs his idea of naturalism. His primary focus was to chase away the ghosts of the romantics and the idealists, to put the novel on the ground, in the muck and the mire, and to find a value there, not just in the brothels and the mines and the markets, but in the rooms of commerce and so-called high society too.

One of the base requirements of writing is that the reader must be engaged, but this will only happen if the writer engages first. If the writer is going to treat his reader well, he must make a sustained acquaintance with an imagined world an absolute necessity. The burden of proof is, at first, on the novelist. If he cannot create a world, the book itself cannot exist. Then, this world he creates must matter. It must – at least on some elemental level – be real. By this I mean it must engage on a level of human emotion. The reader must be moved, or startled, even angered. And, then, the reader must be convinced that everything inside the book is as interesting as what he could be doing outside the book, outside his own window. The words must glue us, trap us, sustain us.

A writer must believe in his own contrivances and persuade others along the way. To do this it helps for the writer to know what lies just outside his room. He must know the world and the various emotions it contains – the ones that Faulkner, for example, would list as love, pride, pity, compassion and sacrifice.

One of Zola’s great strengths is his ability to engage, and his concern for the moral consequence of life, the gamut of human emotion. He hits the scale on all sorts of levels. Apart from a few overly-sentimental moments in some of his essays, Zola seldom mediated his vision with piety. He was driven a conviction that was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him.

The ruling quality of naturalism was a sense of reality, or, simply put, that the novel would live in the real world. The idea that the “real world” would not rely on the imaginative act may sound slightly disingenuous to a 21 st century ear – how could “imagination” not be the predominant quality of a novelist, even a social novelist? But Zola needed to step away from the word “imagination” for a while, and the overtones it carried. He needed breathing room and distance from the Romantics and the Idealists. But essentially what he was doing was finding a new basis for the imaginative leap. He did not dismiss the imagination, but he relegated its power as a word, to put the focus elsewhere.

But the life of the imagination was never more apparent. Literature, Zola knew, is not always rational. It gives to the reader something more than facts and figures. A ritual transaction occurs between reader and writer -- the reader is given an illusion which he or she suffers, or enjoys. It is a life that is not his/her own, but we step inside it for a moment. We become alive in another body, or soul, or time. We are forced, in literature, to make the empathetic leap into the realm of the “other.” Zola understood that a sentence spun from the imagination has more power than that spun from fact, since imagination is bedrocked by fact. He knew the release of making up a story in the “real world” – that it could become more true than the truth itself. He saw that the job of the social novelist was to rewrite history as life, to create experience from the bare facts. In this way he was able to restore the possibility of decency for the “ordinary” man or woman. In the end he was in fact making a huge imaginative leap, only this time the imagination carried issues of broad social importance.

A part of Zola’s brilliance lies in the fact that he was aware that one of the functions of the social novel is to find a purpose even in the supposed nullity of things. Even when it expresses the most terrible despair, or when it looks at the anonymous, or finds life ground down to dust, or even when it becomes discouraged with itself, the novel must also serve as a consolation, rekindling our enthusiasm, our capability of belief in an other, and restoring the possibility that life must make a certain sense. And it must make sense, otherwise why bear it? Why bear the pulp and the grime and the lies and the wars and the thousand other everyday torments?

Zola understood that it is not enough to become a secretary, or listmaker, of death. The novel must embrace life and all its shades. It must be narrated with equanimity, empathy, and without hatred. In this way, it becomes part of the most lived experience, which is in itself a form of hope, since it is ongoing. There a far end, a horizon, to be discovered in the story. It just very well may be – as happened with Zola and “Germinal” for instance – that the novel will raise public consciousness to such a degree that the actual working conditions will change, and that life will become a little better, more tolerant. But even if nothing changes it does not mean the novel is a failure. Sometimes a book is only a bulwark, or a little brick in the dam. Still, it matters. It is connected to the whole.

The work of any writer is concerned with the actions of his fellow men and women with whom he shares some territory, some rage, and maybe even some faith. He doesn’t speak for them, but with them. The social novel has the ability to restore, at least for a while, the life which has been devalued by others. The deeper the experience of a moment, the greater the possibility of making that moment longer, or more durable. Writing gives us another chance. Its essence is the dream of redemption.

“Our virtue does not consist of words, but of acts,” Zola said in The Republic’s Influence in Literature. “We are the active laborers who examine the building, point out the rotten girders, the interior crevices, the loosened stones, all the ravages which are not seen from the outside, and which can, at any moment, undermine the entire edifice. Is not this a work more truly useful, more serious, and more worthy than that of placing one’s self on a rock, a lyre in one’s hand, and striving to encourage men by a hullabaloo of deep-sounding words?”

Zola’s rage against the “lyre” and the “hullabaloo” is, of course, a little ironic, given the fact that he made a lot of hullabaloo with his own sometimes high-pitched lyre, but what interested him the most was the meaning in the music. So Zola threw down the gauntlet whenever he could. Observation and analysis became the clarion calls. The novel dipped into the scientific realm. He was not interested in writers being ornaments. The prospect of the novelist becoming a luxury item was anathema to him, even when he grew older and was, himself quite wealthy.

At its deepest core the naturalist movement was about conscience. Says Zola in his essay, To the Young People of France: “Will you not pardon some audacities to novelists of the naturalistic school who, for the love of the truth, follow with delight the derangements produced by a passion in a person bad to the marrow of his bones? Will you reproach us with out horrible charnel houses, the blood which we cause to flow, the sobs which we force on our readers? Nevertheless we hope that our gloomy rooms may send forth some truths which will dazzle those who appreciate them.” For the love of truth. Send forth some truths. In a 21 st century context this almost sounds absurd. How can a novelist – that small voice tucked away in the back sections of our stores – own such a rage of hope?

A book is never separate from the events in which it is read. Reading the work of Zola now – in the light of what has happened in the years since 9/11, in the course of the flagrant disregard of human rights, during the flagrant crimes committed by corporate culture and the modern day robber barons – is to read, once again, the deep need for the social novel to re-emerge and re-engage.

We live in a society where the repeated lie becomes the truth. If a government says that another country has chemical weapons, therefore we are supposed to believe that they have, indeed, chemical weapons. We are shown photographs, as if they are proof. Believe the lie … and it becomes the truth. More than ever, it seems, we need the writer in opposition, bucking against power, writing against the corporation or the government. If the writer – whether he or she be poet, playwright, journalist or fiction writer – does not take a whiff of the foul air around us, it is quite possible that the large part of what ends up on our bookshelves will smell of cheap perfume, or the “chic-lit” or “lad-lit” that has so captivated the imagination of our 21 st century publishers. There are picket lines the serious novelist has to cross. There are new territories to inhabit. We must find worth in what others leave as useless. We must believe that there is a value in literature – it reminds us that life is not already written exhausted or final. It is there to be lived. It is ongoing. Even if literature is just a mirror to reflect reality – rather than being a hammer with which to shape it – that is enough.

This is not say that the social novel will radically change things and that things will therefore be changed forever. It is probably naïve in contemporary society to think that a novel will even be cared about by an administration or by corporate officials. (The Bush administration didn’t even care enough about books to want to burn them). Still, writers must work from a reckless inner need. It is not enough to entertain ourselves. We must believe in the possibility of change. We must engage, if only to survive just a little longer.

Nowadays books die more rapidly than fireflies. Whose fault is this? Is it because we are no longer relevant? Is it because we have become the literary equivalent of elevator music? Is it because we are prepared to chill ourselves to death with cool, clean suburban stories? Is it because we can only look as far as our own navels? Is it because we, as writers, and readers too, have failed to acknowledge that stories need to be told over and over again, that truth – like lies – need repetition in order for them to survive? Why are we so scared? And what is it we are scared of – irrelevance or mockery? Why aren’t we prepared to tell the story that might get us in trouble?

The problem with so much contemporary writing is that it operates from a flat surface, a page, and it does not address itself to the contoured world we live in. It must get itself up off the table and make itself many-dimensional.

In all this we need a little rage, or as Zola put it, the fearlessness to live out loud. "The action I am taking is no more than a radical measure to hasten the explosion of truth and justice,” he said in his “J’accuse!” essay in 1898. “I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight!"

The words are 111 years old – it does not mean that they cannot be heard again. The cynic might say that Zola, and others of his ilk, failed, that all he did was send up a flare, and the flare came down again and was extinguished. Well and good. The fact is that flares need to be sent up over and over again.

That he, or we, fail is not the point.

That we try is the true courage.