The Kill - Emile Zola [0]
Title Page
INTRODUCTION - Arthur Goldhammer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
NOTES
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
About the Author
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
Arthur Goldhammer
Several years after Emile Zola’s novel The Kill 1 had run afoul of the Republic’s censor for its outrage to public morals and “gross materialism,” a poet for whom the words of literary language were but the pulsating ghosts of a material world annihilated in the service of the sublime offered him consolation in the form of a letter. Stéphane Mallarmé, whom posterity would assign to an altogether different slope of the literary Olympus from Zola, had just finished reading the sixth novel in the twenty-volume series of which The Kill is the second: the “Rougon-Macquart” saga, in which Zola had set himself the goal of working out the combinatorics of heredity and history that in his mind made orderly taxonomic sense of the profusion of the human jungle. His Excellency Eugène Rougon was in fact devoted to the brother of the hero of The Kill, and while the temporal and geographical locus remained the Paris of the Second Empire (1852–70), the focus of the action had shifted from the world of finance and speculation to that of politics. Yet Mallarmé’s appreciative eye, penetrating beyond the superficialities of plots that can fairly be described in both cases as creaky, remarked the quality that would make the novelist’s work impossible to ignore, even for readers like Henry James, who thought, at this early stage of Zola’s career, prior to the master stroke of L’Assommoir, that it stood out chiefly for its “brutal indecency”2and who found themselves put off by its minute attention to “misery, vice, and uncleanness.”3( James would later revise his judgment substantially, as we shall see.) The quality that appealed to Mallarmé was a certain novelty in the experience of reading: “I read it straight through,” he wrote to Zola of His Excellency, “then read it again piece by piece over several days. [The novel] lends itself to both ways of savoring a work—the old way, which is how it was when novels unfolded like plays, and the new way, which reflects the intermittence of modern life.”4
“The intermittence of modern life”: the phrase is especially apposite of The Kill, whose style, in its best passages, is “swift and transparent, like the glance of a contemporary, of your reader,”5and whose subject, more than the incestuous relationship between Renée Saccard and her stepson Maxime or the frenetic speculations of Aristide Saccard—husband of the one and father of the other—is in fact “the capital of modern life,” the city of Paris itself. For neither the speculation nor the incest would be conceivable without the modernity that is Paris, and that, far more than the “brutal indecency” of illicit sex, is the true object of Zola’s meditation. And at the heart of that Parisian modernity is ambivalence, for the modern has no fixed identity. It is never anything but the antagonist in a perpetual “quarrel of ancient and modern,” a quarrel in which the ancient, the world we are perpetually losing, provides the only beacons in relation to which the identity of its ineluctably if ephemerally triumphant opponent can be located.
THE CAPITAL OF MODERN LIFE
In The Kill we gaze upon Paris as if attempting to get a fix on our precise location from a variety of angles: from the window of a restaurant high above the city on the Buttes Montmartre; from the children’s aerie atop the Hôtel Béraud on the Ile Saint-Louis; from a carriage ambling through the scenic trumpery and social snobbery of the Bois de Boulogne or racing along new boulevards that paved the gas-lit way to perdition; from a mansion built in obedience to the dictates of “the style Napoléon III, that opulent hybrid of every style that ever existed”;6from across the dinner table at a banquet of the rich and powerful; from the muddy ruts of a vast construction site; from inside the studio of an illustrious couturier;