Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Zola's musical cheeses - They all seemed to stink together, in a foul cacophony

For the next three or four days, I am writing about Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873), the third of the twenty Rougon-Macquart novels and coincidentally the third Zola novel I have read.  There is enough that I am tempted to begin generalizing about Zola, and I am sure that would lead to some entertaining and bizarre errors, but instead I will jump straight to the good stuff, the cheese, the musical cheese:

As they were all rather short of breath by this time, it was the camembert they could smell.  This cheese, with its gamy odour, had overpowered the milder smells of the marolles and the limbourg; its power was remarkable.  (213)

Actually, that is not the good stuff, just set up – here it comes:

Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flute-like note, came from the parmesan, while the bries came into play with their soft, musty smell, the gentle sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine.  The livarot launched into an overwhelming reprise, and the géromé kept up the symphony with a sustained high note.

A couple of pages earlier there is a long paragraph that simply lists the cheeses in the market stall, like “some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood and hard as skull” and roqueforts that “had a princely air, their fat faces veined in blue and yellow, like the victims of some shameful disease common to rich people who have eaten too many truffles” (211), and though some of the cheeses add “its own shrill note” none of them are otherwise described as musical.  They just stink.

But as the sun and wind change, the cheeses begins to sing:

They all seemed to stink together, in a foul cacophony: from the oppressiveness of the heavy Dutch cheeses and the gruyères to the sharp alkaline note of the olivet.  From the cantal, Cheshire, and goat’s milk came the sound of a bassoon, punctuated by the sudden, sharp notes of the neufchâtels, the troyes, and the mont-d’ors.  Then the smells went wild and became completely jumbled, the port-salut, limbourg, géromé, marolles, livarot, and pont-l'évèque combining into a great explosion of smells.  The stench rose and spread, no longer a collection of individual smells, but a huge, sickening mixture.  It seemed for a moment that it was the vile words of Madame Lecoeur and Mademoiselle Saget that had produced this dreadful odour.  (215-6)

Readers not distracted by the cheese may have noticed that the last metaphor is actually related to characters and thus potentially to some sort of story.  The novel also has those, but I may just devote the rest of the week to descriptions of food.

Sometimes I see people say that food writing makes them hungry, but I am a well-fed fellow, so it just makes me gluttonous.  Zola’s scene reminded me of La Maison Jean d’Alos, a cheese shop of genius in Bordeaux (thankfully climate-controlled).  You cannot tell, but my copying of those passages was interrupted several times so I could look at cheese.

Maybe tomorrow I should write about the blood pudding.  It is less seductive.

I have returned to Zola as part of the Zoladdiction event.

25 comments:

  1. A nice glimpse into The Belly of Paris, I always like how Zola work vividly with the setting of his novels. Can't wait to read this one!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, thanks for hosting the event. You have been making good progress at your Zola Blog.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fantatsic. This will be my third Zola in due course, having read Fortune of the Rougons and The Kill.

    At times in both of those I've thought - Zola is mad! Look at what he's writing about plants, or graves! (or cheese). How he's going on! Crazy!

    It's hard to adjust back to plainer (lesser) writing afterwards.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ha, that is actually how I began the first version of this post, as kind of a follow-up to my post about the narrator of The Kill, who sometimes sounds like a lunatic.

    But that's all right, it is all in the name of science.

    Maybe I will still write that post. This time the narrator's craziness is really concentrated right on the food. His descriptions escape whatever world the characters live in. No one is "hearing" the cheeses except the omniscient narrator.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is absolutely brilliant stuff. Also crazy. But brilliant. It goes the other way, too: I can't help but attempt imagining a symphonic concert as a visit to a cheese shop. I wonder what Zola's friends thought of this book.

    Does the belly in the novel's title refer to the stomach, then? I always assumed it just meant "underside," like the belly of a snake, say. But all the food radically changes the meaning. I've not read it, no.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ...then the violins cut in densely, like a crisp Beaufort d'Alpage, the cellos and viols supporting them like well-aged Tomme de Savoie or perhaps a complex Comté from the Jura. Suddenly great gusts of brass, like racks of tart, freshly-unveiled chèvre, blasted out over the strings, while a glutinous bass note, like Epoisses poured over the thick, fractured slice of Vielle Mimolette kept up by the percussion section, anchored the brighter notes now curdling from a thin fromage blanc into something that would need a rind, or at least a few dried feuilles de marron, to stand on its own.

      What fun. Stop me or I'll do this all day.

      Delete
    2. No need to stop. Tonight I am definitely eating some of that morbier I have been saving.

      Delete
    3. That's fabulous stuff! Not enough about the smells, though.

      Delete
    4. Le ventre de Paris really means the belly in the sense of stomach.

      The Halles, were the novel takes place, were the big food market of Paris until the 1970s when a Pompidolian project destroyed it to build Beaubourg.

      Emma

      Delete
  6. Ha! Maybe that's where the saying "A real cheese offends at least four of the five senses" got it's start.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "simply lists the cheeses", indeed!

    A modern writer would simply list the cheeses. Zola, as you have evidenced above, uses all kinds of thoughtful variations and linguistic effects. (Though, I admit, I'm still suffocating from the all those flowers in Abbe Mouret).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh, you're reading Satantango! - I'm secretly reading Satantango too.

      Delete
  8. That's a good point - simple in the narrow sense that the cheeses mostly do not sing or sound like musical instruments. Otherwise, not so simple - one day this week will be nothing but Zola metaphors, amazing Zola metaphors.

    Mookse Gripes finally somehow kicked satantango off the shelf and into my hands.

    Dwight, Zola's attention to non-visual description is one of the delights of this novel. This book stinks!

    Scott, yeah, the belly is a big gut. The setting is the giant Paris food market, Les Halles. A good part of the book is nothing but characters walking around looking at it and its contents, and Zola writing big show-off descriptions of fish and carrots and so on. Les Halles would be my favorite place in Paris if it still existed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Have you been to the Halles in Lyon, Tom?

      Delete
  9. So this is the famous cheese scene I've often heard about? There's something very synesthetic in those descriptions that mix sounds with odours, it's extraordinary.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Yes, the Symphony of Cheeses! I thought I might as well start with the big one. It is some kind of synesthesia, fanciful or otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
  11. This is hilarious. Was Zola intending to be funny? I don't generally associate naturalism, etc with hilarity. Clearly, I need to think bigger. And also read this book.

    Also, I think you should probably do the Brain/Food interview at Jam and Idleness. Say yes!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Yes, meant to be funny, I think. Naturalism is more or less a con job.

    Sure, an interview,you bet, I have enjoyed the ones you have done, although I will be trouble - no photo, no sincere answers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Excellent. No photo is fine--I have a portrait of Sam the Eagle I've been meaning to use somewhere. But NO sincere answers?

      Delete
    2. Some sincerity might slip in accidentally.

      Delete
    3. Excellent. I'll email you this week.

      Delete
  13. Sorry to ask and be a bit finicky but does your translation really misspell the names of the cheeses or there are typos in the quotes? Pont-l'évêque, Mont d'Or, maroilles, Port-Salut...

    This is a wonderful passage. (all these cheeses are very good. Some stinck some don't)

    ReplyDelete
  14. Some stink, some don't - exactly, exactly! Zola makes things up. Naturalism is a scam.

    Have I been to Les Halles in Lyon? Yes. See here.

    As for misspellings, let's see:

    1. The absence of an apostrophe in "pont-l'évêque" is my typo (which I will fix).

    2. The switch from a caret to l'accent grève in "pont-l'évêque" is in the translated text, an error of the translator or editor.

    3. As for the rest, take it up with Zola! At least if I go by the French Gutenberg text. Search for "marolles" - the relevant passage is the fourth occurrence.

    Also see this French discussion of the "port-salut" - Robert has it lowercase, Larousse has it upper-case! Guess which author and text are used to authorize the lower-case usage.

    This is all very interesting!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sure about the maroilles, I've lived in Lille for three years. Perhaps the spelling has changed, it must be a chtimi word. (patois of the North of France)

      For the rest, I just refer to the tags on the cheeses when I see them in stores...But what can we do if Robert and Larousse disagree...Let's call the Académie!

      Delete