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TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)Q Which of the senses does Zola engage
in this description of coal mining?READING 30. 10
90 CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style90
their stomachs and thighs. When these pieces, caught by the
planks, had heaped up beneath them, the cutters disappeared,
walled up in the narrow crevice.
Maheu was the one who suffered most. The temperature at the
top climbed as high as ninety-five degrees; the air did not circulate,
and the suffocating heat eventually became unbearable. In order to
see clearly, he had had to hang his lamp on a nail right next to his
head, and this additional heat beating down on his skull made his
blood sing in his ears. But the worst was the dampness. Water was
continually dripping down from the rock only a few inches above
his face, and there was a never-ending stream of drops falling, with
a maddening rhythm, always on the same spot. It was no use
twisting his neck or turning his head: the drops kept beating against
his face, splattering and spreading without stop. At the end of a
quarter of an hour he was soaked through, coated with his own
sweat, and steaming like a tub of laundry. That morning a drop
ceaselessly trickling into his eye made him swear, but he wouldn’t
stop cutting, and his mighty blows jolted him so violently between
the two layers of rock that he was like a plant-louse caught
between two pages of a book—in constant danger of being
completely crushed.
Not a word was said. They were all hammering away, and
nothing could be heard except these irregular blows, muffled and
seemingly far away. The sounds were harsh in the echoless, dead
air, and it seemed as though the shadows had a strange blackness,
thickened by the flying coal dust and made heavier by the gases
that weighed down on their eyes. Behind metal screens, the wicks
of their lamps gave off only reddish points of light, and it was hard
to see anything. The stall opened out like a large, flat, oblique
chimney in which the soot of ten winters had built up an unrelieved
darkness. Phantom forms moved about, dull beams of light giving
glimpses of a rounded haunch, a brawny arm, a distorted face
blackened as if in preparation for a crime. Occasionally, as blocks
of coal came loose, they would catch the light and shoot off crystal-
like glitters from their suddenly illuminated facets. Then it would be
dark again, the picks would beat out heavy dull blows, and there
was nothing but the sound of panting breaths, grunts of discomfort
and fatigue in the stifling air, and the dripping water from the
underground streams.scathing portrayal of a beautiful but unscrupulous prosti-
tute. The most scandalous of his novels, it inspired charges
of pornography and “gutter-sweeping.”
A later novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, Germinal
(1885), exposes the bitter lives of coal miners in northern
France. The excerpt that follows, which relates the hellish
experience of the miner Maheu, reflects Zola’s talent for
detailed description that transforms his writing from mere
social history to powerful fiction.From Zola’s Germinal(1885)
The four cutters [miners] had stretched themselves out, head to
toe, over the whole surface of the sloping face. Separated by
hooked planks that caught the loosened coal, each of them
occupied about fifteen feet of the vein, which was so narrow—
scarcely twenty inches at this point—that they were squashed in
between the roof and the wall. They had to drag themselves along
on their knees and elbows, and were unable to turn without
bruising their shoulders. To get at the coal, they had to lie sideways,
their necks twisted and their raised arms wielding the short-
handled picks at an angle.
Zacharie was at the bottom. Levaque and Chaval above him, and
Maheu at the very top. Each one was hacking away at the bed of
shale with his pick, cutting two vertical grooves in the vein, then
driving an iron wedge into the top of the block and freeing it. The
coal was soft, and the block crumbled into pieces and rolled downFigure 30.7 EDOUARD MANET,Zola, exhibited 1868. Oil on canvas, 57 45 in.
Manet’s portrait has the quality of a snapshot. The writer is seen at his desk,
which holds a copy of his short biography of the artist. Above the desk, he has
posted a black-and-white reproduction of Manet’s Olympia, a Japanese print of a
sumo wrestler, and Goya’s etching of a painting by Velázquez, favorite artists of
both Manet and Zola.