Even as I was indulging in my bit of a moan yesterday about the stresses of home ownership I was experiencing a deeply nagging sense of guilt at doing so. This had its considerable roots in the fact that I'd been reading the opening chapters of Zola's Germinal and couldn't help but be aware of the deep disconnect between the luxury of my life here and the utter misery of that of the workers in and around the Mountsou mine that the novelist painstakingly itemises in Part One of his novel.
Zola takes his readers so fully inside the mine in terms of everyday agonising detail as to engender a painful claustrophobia. And does so in what seems to me an almost flat style, a kind of journalistic recording of the facts as they are: The mine never lay idle; night and day human insects were always down there burrowing into the rock six hundred metres beneath the fields of beet. You are forced to witness that burrowing in inescapable close-up, right next to one of the insects involved. And it's painful. In fact, more than one; making it relentless also.
Should the suffering of those working down French mines in 1866 impinge upon a twenty-first century consciousness? Well, Zola leaves the reader in no doubt of the reality of that suffering and the fact that it called for some kind of attention. And it doesn't take much to draw parallels with the equally real experiences in our time of those whose lot is similar exploitation. So I suppose I can take some solace in the fact that I have at least some awareness of my own inadequacies as a citizen of the world.
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