The Blackjack (Zola)

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Title page from 1877

The Blackjack (French: L'Assommoir , the name of a pub frequented in the novel) is the seventh volume of the twenty-volume series of novels Rougon-Macquart by Émile Zola . It was published in 1877. The edition of Kindler's Literature Lexicon published by Deutsches Taschenbuch Verlag 1974–1986 carries the novel under the title Die Schnapsbude .

action

The protagonist of the novel is the young laundress Gervaise Macquart, who is abandoned by her lover Auguste Lantier at the beginning of the plot. He takes all her money with him and leaves her two sons Claude and Etienne as the only souvenir. Gervaise, a virtuous and hardworking, but now beggarly laundress, then marries the respectable, but very fun-loving zinc worker Coupeau. At first everything seems to be turning out for the better: The two of them work hard to earn money with which Gervaise would like to buy their own laundry , and they have a daughter who is called “ Nana ”. Then, however, Coupeau suffers an accident at work that ties him to bed for several months. Part of the money saved is used for its care. By the time his injury healed, he was so used to doing nothing that he couldn't find his way back to work. Gervaise borrows money and rents a shop where she sets up a laundry. She now has to earn the money on her own - not an easy task, especially since Coupeau soon begins to drink and she is openly hostile to her business success out of envy from the "married" Lorilleux family. But for a few years she actually manages to be a housewife, mother and money-earner at the same time. Etienne is apprenticed to Goujet, a nail smith friend, and leaves Paris as a journeyman.

Coupeau's character, however, is changing for the worse more and more rapidly; From a drinker to a drunkard, he becomes a friend with Gervaise's former lover Lantier, who, being completely broke, soon settles in the coupeaus. Meanwhile, the neglected daughter, who is now working as a flower maker , develops more and more into a cheeky brat and then into a prostitute . But Gervaise is not without contradictions either. At the zenith of the action, just before the decline sets in, the little money she spends on extensive gourmet delicacies. The good-hearted woman also bears the cost of her mother-in-law's funeral. At some point Gervaise herself is exhausted from her difficult life, the fruits of which are drunk by her husband evening after evening, and begins to let herself go. She does her work more and more sloppily and loses customers until, to the delight of Lorilleux, she finally has to give up the shop and work as a wage worker again. When he felt the warmth of his nest evaporate, Lantier arranged the sale of the business to a lady he knew, who became his next stop as a parasite .

Gervaise also begins to drink, and her life gradually goes off the rails, since she loses her respectability and becomes more and more like a lotter woman. Nana leaves home and lets men bear her; Coupeau, completely corroded inwardly by the alcohol, has long since ceased to be sane and dies, seriously deranged, in an asylum of delirium tremens . Gervaise herself finally sinks to the status of a street whore, and some time after Coupeau's death she starves to death in a cold winter in a hole in the stairwell of an apartment building.

reception

Poster of an American theater production of Augustin Daly's The Blackjack from 1879

criticism

During Zola's lifetime, the novel was the target of intense criticism for a long time. Although the bourgeoisie was delighted with the "negative" portrayal of the lower class, the author was accused of dragging the genre of the novel in the dirt and inflating facts by dramatizing the situation. Zola replied that he was only treating the actual situation in a realistic way in order to draw the bourgeoisie's attention to the misery of the poorer sections of the population. But even these poor, namely the working class, criticized the work: Through the very clearly outlined change in behavior of the Gervaise Coupeau, it degraded the worker to an animal, vulgar creature. Far more bitter by this reaction, Zola justified himself by reproducing the living conditions true to the facts in order to open the eyes of the rich bourgeoisie and to tear them out of their indifferent lethargy towards poverty. The idea of ​​the novel found its continuation in Germinal , in which Etienne Lantier is the protagonist.

Film adaptations

The novel was filmed several times, u. a. 1909 by Albert Capellani . The best-known film adaptation is Gervaise (1956) by René Clément .

literature

  • Willi Hirdt: Alcohol in French Naturalism. The context of the “Assommoir”. Bouvier, Bonn 1991 (= treatises on art, music and literary studies, 391), ISBN 3-416-02286-6 .

Web links

Wikisource: L'Assommoir  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Some translators gave the work the title Gervaise ; Translated by Hertha Lorenz. Cf. Eduard Kaiser, Klagenfurt o. J. (1962) for book community Alpenland; and Josef Primas & Louis Erlacher, at the Gutenberg Book Guild , Zurich 1961.