Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Sometimes in one’s literary life one simply wants to suffer, and when this urge hits, I know where to turn: Émile Zola, the 19th century French naturalist writer who paints brutally frank pictures of people in extremis.

This time around I read Thérèse Raquin, Zola’s breakout hit which was anathemized in French literary journals as “putrid,” a “sewer.” If you’ve read any nineteenth century English or American novels, which tend to portray the entire field of French literature as a putrid sewer, you know that Théresè Raquin must be something really special.

Actually I thought Thérèse Raquin ends up pulling its punches in a way that Zola’s later novels don’t. Yes, the main characters behave abominably, but in the end they also suffer terribly for it, which has a moral neatness that you don’t necessarily find in, say, Germinal.

At the beginning of the novel, Thérèse Raquin is living a life of quiet desperation. Married to her sickly cousin Camille, she works all day in her aunt’s haberdashery, and her life seems likely to continue in exactly this dull routine for fifty years until she dies. Until one day when Camille shows up with a friend in tow: the healthy, vibrant Laurent…

Thérèse and Laurent begin a passionate affair. But when it becomes logistically impossible for the affair to continue, they hatch a plan: they’ll kill Camille! Then, after a suitable amount of time has elapsed, they’ll get married. (This is one of the great scenes of the book. They never entirely spell out that they have a plan, only comment wistfully that, after all, accidents do happen… but gazing meaningfully at each other the whole time, both knowing that accidents can be orchestrated.)

So they drown Camille on a boating expedition. No one suspects them, they wait for a year and a half, all is well.

But then they wed. And once they’re together… well… they discover that they’ve accidentally orchestrated the world’s most horrible OT3: Théresè, Laurent, and the ghost/hallucination of Camille’s drowned corpse, always with them whenever they’re alone together.

This book was apparently viewed as a horror novel in the 19th century and it retains that horrifying power: the inescapable waterlogged green corpse of Camille, which lies between Thérèse and Laurent in bed at night and floats in the corners of their bedroom and sits at the table with them whenever they’re alone.

However, this does make the novel in some ways less brutal than Zola’s later fiction. Even though Thérèse and Laurent are never arrested, they suffer unceasingly for their crime, tormented by their own minds. Zola is at pains to assure us that Théresè and Laurent definitely don’t feel remorse for their killing, that they wouldn’t care at ALL if it weren’t for the fact that they were suffering continual visions of the man they killed, but since they are suffering these continual visions and in fact kill themselves in the end in order to escape this continual torment… I mean, does it really matter if you don’t call it remorse if it works pretty much exactly like extreme remorse?

On the other hand, Zola is cruel enough to give Thérèse’s aunt a paralyzing stroke, and after she’s paralyzed and unable to speak, she realizes that her beloved niece and her niece’s equally beloved new husband in fact killed her son. Once they know that she knows, they give up all pretense and start screaming at each other about the murder every evening, and the paralyzed aunt has no choice but to sit there and listen. Nightmare fuel.

Amazing psychological horror. What a claustrophobic book. I wouldn’t call it a good time precisely, but it’s exactly the time you want if you feel like experiencing the literary equivalent of trying to claw through the wall with your bare hands.