Octave Mirbeau’s eloquent review of Zola’s Work unveils a visionary literary project—championing the abolition of wage labour, celebrating a utopia of love and productivity, and redefining work as joy rather than suffering.
Émile Zola has just published Work, the second volume of the series called the Four Gospels… With that feeling of anxiety that remains in the depths of the greatest minds and which is, in sum, merely the human being’s aspiration towards ever greater perfection, he said to me recently:
“I fear I’ve given too much space to theory in this book. It seems to me that theories encumber it, weigh it down, rob it somewhat of that impression of lived life with which I seek to mark all my works.”
Let him be reassured!
Work is an admirable book, one of the best constructed, most profound… most alive… one of the most moving too that has emerged from his generous imagination, from his fertile and powerful genius. Moving, not only through the dramatic qualities with which it is filled, through the ardent, passionate, ceaselessly creative life that animates it from first to last page, but also — and this is, to my mind, the new beauty of this extraordinary book — through the implementation, through the strong and logical construction of a social ideal: human happiness in reorganised work, in work finally become what it should be, a free man’s joy, instead of remaining what it always was, more or less, a slave’s suffering and abjection… Sublime glorification, magnificent epic of conquering work, gradually overcoming, along with all human resistance, all the forces and riches of nature, to make them no longer the privilege of the few, but the enjoyment and property of all!…
They are few in number, in any literature, those who within a dramatic action that grips your guts, by means of characters who are not fairy-tale figures or philosophical abstractions but who truly live in our humanity — they are few who were capable of concretising such a dream, and of giving this dream the form of a possible and living realisation… For such a gigantic work — since it’s nothing less than melting down an entire social system and directing its new flow towards new moulds — to make such a work perceptible to all eyes, to make it live, finally, with a plausible life, required a brain of which we no longer have much habit, a brain where the conception of science and philosophy allied itself to all the inventive resources, to all the emotions of a superior art. And I say it with tranquillity. Alone among the writers of our time, Émile Zola, immense poet and audacious sociologist, could assume such an enormous, such a prodigious labour…
The work stands there, upright, before us. It’s a work of love and pacification… And it radiates light. And it lives not only with the glorious life of art’s masterpieces… but with the harmonious, immortal life of the idea… Be sure that it will do more for the advent of future society, for the conquest of imminent justice, than all the dry demonstrations and quarrelsome arguments of professional revolutionaries have managed thus far… And it’s our pride, we for whom this name of Zola is like the heroic synthesis of all we love, of all we hope for, that he has succeeded where so many others — and I speak of the strongest — would have broken their backs…
Some will say, have already said of this marvellous and prophetic book, that it’s a utopia… A utopia… That’s quickly said… And it’s easy to say because it dispenses with reflection and thought… In general, we call utopias things that are not yet realised and of which our poor and feeble mind cannot even conceive the future realisation. Nothing satisfies our laziness and mental torpor, nothing lulls our terrors as men who hate change and fear improvement, like this word utopia!… Utopia!… Magic word that seems to guard us forever from revolutions!… Before it functioned, universal suffrage was also a utopia… And how the Cornélys of the time must have snorted with laughter at the idea of this ridiculous and inapplicable thing!… What admirable material for exercising their irony and common sense!… Railways, all the enchantments of electricity, all the conquests of modern life… utopias, likewise!… Everything that forms part today of our social mechanism and which we judge, nevertheless, quite insufficient for our new needs… all that was once a utopia… Poor beings who don’t like to be disturbed in the prison of habit, who never want to be washed of the accumulated filth of routine, we employ what remains of our faculties in not remembering yesterday, and always denying tomorrow… And yet, life’s forward march is such, and the slow but deep thrusts of evolution are so irresistible, that despite ourselves, in spite of the heavy passivities of our inertia, progress advances without stop, and yesterday’s utopias often arrive at being merely the timid realities of today, or tomorrow…
“Who will sweep the streets of your happy City?” asks M. Cornély of Émile Zola, in that tone of protective irony that suits him so well.
“What!… no more commerce!… But who will sell your books?” cries M. Yves Guyot, economist scandalised at the idea of a society where economists of his type would no longer have the slightest employment… a society cured of that atrocious canker, deprived of that abominable and legal theft that is commerce, which makes you pay ten sous for what’s worth barely two centimes… Miraculous operation to which the role of economists is limited in a good social organisation!…
And there are the poor objections made to Zola; invariable objections, eternal objections, each time someone rises from the crowd of the satisfied and privileged to dream of something better than what is… Let’s leave them… They are not even worth refuting.
The subject of Work is simple, like all great things.
Émile Zola takes, at the beginning of his book, a small industrial town, Beauclair, subject to the current regime of wage labour… that is to say, to the regime of hatred… With reason, Zola sees in wage labour the great modern evil, from which everyone suffers by repercussion, workers, bosses, consumers… And he gives tragic examples that make one shudder… All that wage labour entails of bad struggles, exhausting hatreds, shame, degradation, human decline, misery and sterility, he translates through the painting of this small town, with an unforgettable and gripping force of truth. Wage labour is moreover a condemned regime, and it’s because it’s condemned that unease increases, grows, that strikes break out everywhere, whose demands, under the various forms they take and the pretexts they claim, have but one goal, still obscure in the hearts of the crowds that unleash them, but fatal, like a historical necessity: the abolition of wage labour, the reorganisation of work on entirely new, more just, more human bases, where the worker would finally have his share of the riches he creates and of which he has never had anything.
And, in an admirable drama, in an action that concentrates all life within itself, and where interest grows from line to line, Émile Zola imagines substituting for this regime of wage labour and hatred a new regime of liberty and love, that is, the association, for the common work, of capital, labour and genius… the union of all creative forces that were so badly utilised separately, and which, through their intimate, loyal fusion, must conquer all nature and, with all nature conquered, all happiness!… It’s somewhat, one sees, the application of collectivist doctrines, with this essential difference, however, that Émile Zola gives the individual a less diminished, less enslaved role… more creative, and that he leaves the human being a broader expansion of his personality…
Naturally, this doesn’t happen without resistance, without upheavals, without struggles… And Work is the history of these struggles and efforts… An infinitely moving story where, little by little, through a thousand twists, one sees the new spirit prevail over the spirit of routine, where, before the acquired results, the slow and successive transformations, through skilfully managed gradations, in scenes by turns terrible and delicious, we witness this spectacle of love triumphing over hatred… until the final victory, until the apotheosis of the small town transformed by joy, reconciled in wealth, with nothing that can henceforth divide men, since all have the same interest… and they can draw, with full hands and full mouths, from the springs of life!…
There is among the book’s characters a strange figure who enchants me by the irony of his symbolism. This character is Ragu. A bad worker, lazy, drunk, debauched, he is also someone who has a fundamental hatred of utopia. He doesn’t accept the happy transformations that occur each day in Beauclair; he even detests them, better still, like M. Cornély and M. Yves Guyot, he doesn’t believe in them… After a crime he is obliged to leave the country and, for twenty-five years, miserable, rebellious, frenzied, he drags his painful carcass across the world. One fine evening, he returns to Beauclair, in a dreadful state of ruin and decline, led there by that fatal curiosity that always brings the criminal back to the very place of his crime. He can’t believe his eyes. The town is spacious, all white, all flowered. Happiness dwells there in pretty houses, provided with all modern comfort. Everywhere, he encounters only joy, wealth, abundance, love… Around the town the countryside is covered with splendid harvests, the trees crack under the red cascade of fruit… the air carries the scent of roses. They welcome Ragu with kindness, they lodge him, clothe him in fine garments, seat him before a table laden with wholesome meats and fruits. It’s up to him to end his days in rest and happiness. But his soul — an old economist’s soul — protests against this change. This happiness, he execrates it, and he flees, with more hatred in his heart, towards his familiar darkness, crying out, no doubt, he too: “Utopia… utopia… all is utopia!…”
It’s not in L’Aurore, where this admirable book, all trembling with love of justice, first appeared, and where it found so many passionate readers, that I have the pretension to follow all its twists, to extract all its master ideas, to show all its immense artistic effort, all its high philosophy… Moreover, to summarise all that’s in Work, even in a quite insufficient way, would require pages and pages… My ambition is lesser, but it’s sweet to me… it’s to echo all the admirations and all the gratitudes that cannot be expressed, towards a man whose ever-young genius we claim as our own, and who was, in the infamous hours, our conscience.
1901.
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Léon Hennique Novel 