Dream

Émile Zola

Description

Finding the young Angelique on their doorstep one Christmas Eve, the pious Hubert couple decide to bring her up as their own. As the girl grows up in the vicinity of the town's towering cathedral and learns her parents' trade of embroidery, she becomes increasingly fascinated by the lives of the saints, fuelled by her reading of the Golden Legend and other mystical Christian writings. One day love, in the shape of Felicien HautecA ur, enters the dream world she has constructed around herself, bringing about upheaval and distress. With a foreword by Tim Parks

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714546605
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Dream
Émile Zola
Translated by Andrew Brown

ALMA CLASSICS




Alma Classics an imprint of alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW 10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Dream first published in French in 1888 This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2005 This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2013. Reprinted 2016
Introduction and Translation © Andrew Brown, 2005 Foreword © Tim Parks, 2005 Extra Material © Larry Duffy, 2008
Cover image © Mary-Anne McNeney
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-311-8
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Foreword
Introduction
The Dream
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Émile Zola’s Life
Émile Zola’s Works
Select Bibliography


Foreword
The name Émile Zola raises certain expectations. So central and well established is the position he occupies 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 the idea 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 presents itself as 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, ironized, crushed. Be prepared for a surprise.
There are few novels in which I have had so much difficulty getting my bearings as in The Dream . It is only when you are some way into the book that you appreciate that this 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, a girl – an orphan girl freezing to death in deep snow at the frozen portal 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 door’s 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 serious of people, who live in a house incongruously attached to the cathedral and spend their lives embroidering religious images for the church’s 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 Angélique, as an apprentice. Okay, it’s a fable, you decide.
Utterly uninterested in any form of learning, Angélique 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 Angélique : “A virgin tied her sash around the neck of a statue of Venus, which at once collapsed into powder. The earth trembled… executioners asked to be baptized; kings knelt at the feet of saints in rags who had devoted themselves to poverty… St Germanus covers his food with ashes. St Bernard cares not to eat but delights only in the taste of fresh water… St Agatha keeps a pebble in her mouth for three years… Molten lead is swallowed as if it were ice water…” This goes on for quite a few pages until we hear that, in response to these tales, Angélique 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.”
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, a hugely popular by-product of a delirious Christianity, The Golden Legend is as real 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 Angélique was found and the wonderful embroideries that the young girl is learning to create, these stories are part of the everyday world 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 Angélique’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 Angélique is a member of the Rougon family who appeared earlier on in the Rougon-Maquart 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 Angélique, 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 there, young and handsome, her prince no less, Félicien. 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 Félicien marry, Angélique 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 recognizably 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 Angélique is only two hours from Paris by rail? 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 poles 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 on the grass in a