Cavemen Among Us: Genealogies of Atavism from Zola's La Bête Humaine to Chabrol's Le Boucher Bell, Dorian. French Studies: A Quarterly Review, Volume 62, Number 1, January 2008, pp. 39-52 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/frs/summary/v062/62.1bell.html

Access Provided by University of California @ Santa Cruz at 06/29/11 2:58AM GMT

French Studies, Vol. LXII, No. 1, 39–52 doi:10.1093/fs/knm235

CAVEMEN AMONG US: GENEALOGIES OF ATAVISM FROM ZOLA’S LA BEˆTE HUMAINE TO CHABROL’S LE BOUCHER DORIAN BELL Abstract Although critics have rightly linked Claude Chabrol’s film Le Boucher (1969) to Zola’s novel La Beˆte humaine (1890), the two have yet to be considered in the context of the century-long tradition of thought about atavism that informs them both. This article reconstructs that tradition, examining how Le Boucher’s modern-day caveman suggests twentieth-century cultural continuities with nineteenth-century notions of man’s relation to his evolutionary forebears. Noting Le Boucher’s debt to a Freudian conception of atavism — a conception heavily influenced by the very same scientific paradigm that shaped Zola’s fascination with man’s prehistoric self — I argue that Chabrol’s film revives a nineteenth-century European anxiety of proximity whereby technological and scientific advances prompted unease about ever closer contact with the distant reaches of humanity. Chabrol achieves this by building on Zola’s protocinematic vision, refracting it through a Freudian lens in which atavism and the cinema occupy common psychological space, and updating the thematics of atavism for a twentieth century chastised by the colonial experiment.

In a 1979 interview, French director Claude Chabrol contrasts the subjective narrative perspective in Alfred Hitchcock’s storytelling with the more objective perspective of Chabrol’s avowed cinematic master, Fritz Lang. To the ‘personal psychology’ suggested by the very titles of Hitchcock films like Suspicion and Psycho, Chabrol opposes Lang’s more categorical tendency. ‘In Lang’, maintains Chabrol, ‘it’s Human Desire — it’s never individual’.1 Chabrol identifies with this latter tendency, and it is significant that he chooses to illustrate it with Lang’s Human Desire, a minor 1954 remake itself inscribed within another cinematic descent: that of its model, Renoir’s La Beˆte humaine, the excellent 1938 film adaptation of the 1890 Zola novel by the same name. Chabrol admiringly notes this remake by ‘a great film-maker’ (Lang) of a film by ‘another great film-maker’ (Renoir), submitting it not only as evidence of these two directors’ shared sensibility, but also, by way of his affinity with Lang, as implicit testimony to Chabrol’s own Zolian debt. Following as it does a mention of his self-professedly ‘Langian’ film Que la beˆte meure (1969), Chabrol’s invocation of Human Desire completes a concatenated renvoi to another beˆte, Zola’s, a reference corroborated by Que la beˆte meure’s nods to Zola’s novel and the Renoir 1 Claude Chabrol, ‘The Magical Mystery World of Claude Chabrol: An Interview’, interview with Dan Yakir, Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Spring 1979), 2 –14 (p. 3).

# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

DORIAN BELL

40 2

film. Chabrol seems aware of the footprints of a literary precursor who, like Lang and Chabrol after him, conceived of human passions in their capitalized, species-wide dimension. Critics have alluded to this artistic filiation, particularly in the case of Chabrol’s 1969 Le Boucher.3 Robin Buss rightly dubs La Beˆte humaine’s Jacques Lantier the ‘ancestor’ of Le Boucher’s Popaul,4 linking the two most famous latter-day cavemen in the French tradition: Lantier, whose nineteenth-century murderous obsession he inherits from the ‘fond des cavernes’,5 and Popaul, whose twentieth-century killings Chabrol sets against a backdrop of caves once inhabited by Cro-Magnon man. However, Buss draws the line at suggesting that Chabrol, like Zola, might entertain the possibility of a true atavism — that is, of an evolutionary holdover materially visiting the civilized present from a bestial past. If for Chabrol Cro-Magnon man provides a convenient metaphorical vehicle for exploring modern-day violence, Le Boucher eschews La Beˆte humaine’s more literal turn, in which Zola provides pseudoscientific evidence (an overdeveloped jaw) of Lantier’s tangible, somatic connection to brutish forbears. So suggests Buss when he argues that Le Boucher overtly refuses anything like La Beˆte humaine’s neat, hereditary explanation of a Lantier driven to murder by his atavistically ‘tainted blood’.6 After all, who today could reasonably accept that artefacts like this walk among us? Irreducible to nineteenth-century determinist notions, then, what Buss considers the ‘impenetrable mystery’ of Popaul’s actions remains intact, and although La Beˆte humaine constitutes an essential reference for Le Boucher, the implication follows that Zola’s outmoded scientific pretensions necessarily reduce his influence to the level of simple thematic inspiration. Yet such an approach underestimates the extent to which the persistent fascination with human atavism conceals more scientific and cultural continuities with the nineteenth century than might immediately seem apparent. This article will argue that certain assumptions of the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that posited atavistic man died hard, carried deep into the twentieth century by, among other discourses, a Freudian psychoanalysis that would even more deeply entrench notions of atavism in man’s understanding of himself. Chabrol’s Le Boucher manifests this reformulation in 2 The heroes of Chabrol’s Que la beˆte meure and Zola’s La Beˆte humaine share an obsession with murder and, temporarily at least, an inability to commit it. And in a visual reference to Renoir’s Zola adaptation, Que la beˆte meure’s Michel Duchaussoy briefly strangles his female companion, only to snap out of his murderous rage with a distant look — exactly as Jean Gabin had done thirty years before in the Renoir film. 3 See Robin Buss, French film noir (London, Boyars, 1994), p. 83, and Joe¨ l Magny, Claude Chabrol (Paris, Seuil, 1987), p. 125. Magny merely groups his discussion of Le Boucher and other mid-period, murder-themed Chabrol films under the rubric ‘La Beˆte humaine’, without further referencing Zola. 4 Buss, French film noir, p. 83. 5 ´ Emile Zola, La Beˆte humaine, in Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. by Henri Mitterand, 5 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1960– 67), IV, 995 – 1331 (p. 1044). Subsequent references are to this edition and will be made in the text. 6 Buss, French film noir, pp. 83– 4.

CAVEMEN AMONG US

41

spectacular fashion. In its very cinematic quality, the film intensifies an already proto-cinematic Zolian outlook, one refracted over the years through a Freudian lens in which atavism and the cinema, as we shall see, occupy common psychological space. By tracing this century-long arc, I hope to properly excavate the correspondences between two works at different ends of the lasting, distinctly modern concern with the inextricability of man’s progressive and regressive natures. 

Readers familiar with La Beˆte humaine will remember its hero Jacques Lantier’s hereditary predisposition for murder. A member of the RougonMacquart family, whose history Zola recounts in the twenty-novel RougonMacquart cycle containing La Beˆte humaine, Jacques suffers from the inherited feˆlure afflicting numerous members of his family tree. Traceable to the alcoholism of his great-grandfather Macquart and the neurosis of his great-grandmother Ade´laı¨ de, the feˆlure manifests itself differently in each victim from generation to generation. In Jacques, the feˆlure takes the form of a murderous compulsion haunting him since youth. After witnessing with fascination a murder on the railroad line that employs him as a locomotive engineer, Jacques protects the murderer’s wife and accomplice, Se´verine, before becoming her lover and ultimately killing her. In the end, Jacques himself is thrown onto the rails of the line along which so many others in the novel have found their deaths. In a perceptive introduction to La Beˆte humaine, Gilles Deleuze parses the Zolian feˆlure into two distinct elements: a ‘petite he´re´dite´’, as he calls it, which explains each individual’s disorder and its particular genetic and personal circumstances, and a ‘grande he´re´dite´’, that of the feˆlure or heredity itself, which designates the overall means by which the various disorders are passed on throughout the lineage.7 The distinction is especially useful for La Beˆte humaine, accounting for the novel’s conflation of the tare, or family-specific genetic stain, and the inheritance of more generalized atavistic traits. As an example of this conflation, witness these famous lines early in the novel, in which Jacques ruminates on his condition: Et il en venait a` penser qu’il payait pour les autres, les pe`res, les grands-pe`res, qui avaient bu, les ge´ne´rations d’ivrognes dont il e´tait le sang gaˆte´, un lent empoisonnement, une sauvagerie qui le ramenait avec les loups mangeurs de femmes, au fond des bois. (p. 1043)

The passage explains the impulses tormenting Jacques with a proximate cause — his immediate ancestry, its blood degraded by alcohol — as well as a more distal one: a savagery inherited from the animals themselves. Although here this animal savagery might appear simply figurative, the novel elsewhere provides clear indications of actual, physical atavism, like 7 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Introduction’, in Œuvres comple`tes, VI, La Beˆte humaine, by E´mile Zola, ed. by Henri Mitterand (Paris, Cercle du Livre Pre´cieux, 1967), pp. 13 – 21 (p. 14).

42

DORIAN BELL

the ‘maˆchoires trop fortes’ ruining Jacques’s otherwise regular features (p. 1026). One can detect in the resultant causal duality the combined influence of different nineteenth-century hereditary explanations for deviance. Jacques’s ‘spoiled blood’ reflects the degeneration theory of B.A. Morel, whose 1857 Traite´ des de´ge´ne´rescences detailed how external agents harmful to parents (alcohol, drugs, etc.) could have cumulative deleterious effects on subsequent generations of offspring. Reading the Traite´ in preparation for his earlier novel La Faute de l’abbe´ Mouret, Zola noted the idea for ‘un homme qui a besoin de tuer’,8 and Jacques’s proclivity for murder would echo Morel’s claim that ‘exce`s alcooliques’ in the first generation of a family could produce ‘tendances homicides’ in the third.9 The other, atavistic half of the passage’s causal explanation stems from the theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose widely influential L’Uomo deliquente, translated into French in 1887 as L’Homme criminel, Zola read during preliminary research for La Beˆte humaine. Jacques’s atavistic stigmata conform to Lombroso’s description of the ‘born criminal’, whose criminality is in part ascribed to the resurgence of hereditary material from a distant prehistoric, even pre-human, past. ‘Voila` l’he´re´dite´ de la beˆte’, Zola wrote in preparatory notes, describing how Jacques will kill ‘par atavisme’ to satisfy ‘le lointain homme primitif chez lui’.10 Zola had previously entertained the consequences of the reverse evolution produced by Morelian degeneration — five years earlier, Germinal described the chilling murder of a soldier by young Jeanlin, whose family ‘de´ge´ne´rescence’ caused him to be ‘lentement repris par l’animalite´ ancienne’11 — and Jacques’s wolfish primitivity certainly retains something of this degenerative evolutionary slide. But Morel had balked at providing phrenological rules for recognizing degeneration,12 depriving Zola of a scientific basis for the colourful devolutionary imagery used to such effect in Jeanlin’s feline ‘museau’, green eyes and large ears.13 Degeneration was also only a matter of a few generations, over which the hands of evolutionary time could not realistically be rewound very far. In Lombroso’s anthropometric comparisons of criminals’ morphological characteristics with those of primitive man, however, Zola finally possessed ‘hard’ physiognomic evidence of the ways in which nature could truly re-summon ancient forms from the depths of the past. 8 Quoted in Henri Mitterand, ‘E´tude’, in Les Rougon-Macquart, by E´mile Zola, ed. by Henri Mitterand, 5 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1960– 67), IV, 1705– 57 (p. 1711). 9 B.A. Morel, Traite´ des de´ge´ne´rescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espe`ce humaine (Paris, Baillie` re, 1857), p. 125. 10 Quoted in Mitterand, ‘E´tude’, p. 1727. 11 Emile Zola, Germinal, in Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. by Henri Mitterand, 5 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1960– 67), III, 1131 –591 (p. 1370). 12 Morel, Traite´ des de´ge´ne´rescences, pp. 67 – 70. 13 Zola, Germinal, p. 1370.

CAVEMEN AMONG US

43

Indeed, it was one of the more unsettling implications of nineteenthcentury evolutionary thought that the principle of heredity opened a genetic causeway between man and his forbears’ less desirable qualities. For Morel, this left the individual vulnerable to the aberrances of the preceding several generations. For Lombroso, inheritance meant that, on a more unpredictable scale, nature could at any time redeploy even the most archaic of phenotypes. Man, it seemed, was at the mercy of his accumulated genetic heritage — in essence, of heredity itself. This is what Deleuze understands by ‘grande he´re´dite´’. Beyond the ‘petite he´re´dite´’ of Jacques’s murderous obsession or his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s alcoholism, Zola’s feˆlure is the long arm of heredity that tethers civilized man to his violent, animal origins. Deleuze suggests that, in this dimension, the feˆlure represents what Freud would in the twentieth century call the death drive. Like the death drive, which Freud proposed as that side of life striving for quiescence rather than self-perpetuation, the feˆlure exerts a regressive biological force, pulling the human organism back towards earlier states of violence and, ultimately, death. Jacques’s obsession with murdering those around him is the external cathexis of a drive that can ultimately only turn in on itself with Jacques’s own death. ‘C’e´tait fini de vivre’ (p. 1327), despairs Jacques in a passage cited by Deleuze as evidence that, although Jacques will shortly die at the hands of his fellow employee Pecqueux, something about his death is resignedly self-imposed.14 Deleuze’s twentieth-century Freudian reading maps so interestingly onto the novel in part because Zola’s oft-discussed vitalism, evident in the epic struggle between Life and Death in novels from Germinal to L’Argent and La Beˆte humaine, dovetails with Freud’s own conclusion by the time of Civilization and Its Discontents that the life instinct and death instinct are locked in conflict at the civilizational level. However, past this superficial similarity lies an even deeper continuity, one rooted in a common scientific paradigm informing both Zola’s treatment of atavism and Freud’s invention of the death drive: the highly influential nineteenth-century biological theory of recapitulation. The identity that Deleuze intuits between the feˆlure and the death drive works at the circumstantial level because, on an epistemological level, the two are of a piece. Starting from the same basic tenets of recapitulation theory that produced Lombrosian atavism, Freud hypothesized an atavistic model for psychological development. In the process, he not only rendered strictly internal an atavism that had been thought verifiable by external stigmata, but also universalized a phenomenon previously considered anomalous. Whereas Zola’s Jacques could 14 Renoir apparently agreed. In the last scene of Renoir’s film adaptation of La Beˆte humaine, Jacques throws himself from the train. This is different from the novel, in which Jacques topples from the train in a struggle with the stoker Pecqueux.

44

DORIAN BELL

still be construed as relatively aberrant, Freud’s death drive constituted an atavistic hurdle to be surmounted, but at best only repressed, by every single human being. Man’s link to his violent past had become subtler but more profound than ever, creating the blueprint for a twentieth-century conception of human savagery drawing man more intimately close to his Cro-Magnon ancestors than even the most deterministic nineteenth-century criminologists had envisioned. I turn now to the recapitulation theory that announced this return of the caveman. 

Although recapitulation became an important idea in biology around the turn of the eighteenth century, and its antecedents can be traced as far back as ancient Greece, recapitulation theory reached its apogee late in the nineteenth century with the work of the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel.15 In 1866 Haeckel formulated what he dubbed the ‘biogenetic law’, which famously held that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. According to the law, the development of the embryo, or ontogeny, recapitulates in condensed form the species’ entire evolutionary history, or phylogeny. Haeckel understood the gill slits present in the human embryo, for instance, as the embryo’s literal passage through an ancestral ‘fish stage’ in human evolutionary development. Although later discredited, recapitulation theory for a time enjoyed tremendous popularity, impacting a host of disciplines as it came to include the ways in which an individual organism’s post-embryonic development into adulthood also repeated historical evolutionary stages. Among the most socially noteworthy of the disciplines influenced was the nascent field of criminal anthropology. Stephen Jay Gould has detailed how Lombroso’s L’Homme criminel structures itself along firmly recapitulationist lines.16 As one might guess, the atavistic stigmata of Lombroso’s born criminal represent individual-level manifestations of a phylogenic past. These stigmata can reflect man’s apish roots, as in the protruding jaw Zola would borrow for his description of Jacques Lantier, or an even further removed animal heritage, such as that suggested by some born criminals’ overdeveloped canine teeth. L’Homme criminel also adheres to what Gould calls the ‘threefold parallelism of classical recapitulation theory’: the notion that an individual’s development recapitulates not only its species’ evolutionary past, but also the features of living, less evolved forms as well.17 Thus, in Lombroso, the natural criminality of civilized children reprises both an ancestral, animal violence and the dispositions of supposedly uncivilized ‘savage’ races in the present, and he dedicates the first part of the book — fittingly on the ‘embryology of 15

Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 13. For my discussion of this and other aspects of the biogenetic legacy, I am indebted to chapter 5 of Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny. 17 Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 123. 16

CAVEMEN AMONG US

45

crime’ — to analysing the innate criminality of children, savages and animals (the latter serving as stand-ins for the evolutionary record). Most individuals pass through this childhood stage of evolutionarily conditioned criminality, but born criminals prolong it indefinitely, exhibiting as adults the primitive and savage resemblances recorded by Lombroso in meticulous anthropometric detail. Zola, who had already explored with Germinal’s Jeanlin the brutish potential of the young, was probably only too prepared to accept, via Lombroso, recapitulation theory’s privileging of childhood as a locus for phylogenic expression. Zola’s next novel after La Beˆte humaine, L’Argent, would offer perhaps the most recapitulatory of the Rougon-Macquart family’s long line of degenerates: twelve-year old Victor, the stooped, already hirsute ‘beˆte pre´coce’ who, unleashed on Paris like a ‘loup de´vorateur’, epitomizes in his disproportioned body the three-fold parallelism of child, primitive ancestor and inferior present-day adult.18 To Zola and many others at the end of the century, children quite literally provided a conduit into the deepest regions of man’s descent. Freud was no exception. Seeking to explain the compulsion to repeat — the unpleasant re-living of repressed childhood experiences, which contravened his pain-minimizing ‘pleasure principle’ — Freud invoked the biogenetic law, noting how ‘the germ of a living animal is obliged in the course of its development to recapitulate (even if only in a transient and abbreviated fashion) the structures of all the forms from which it is sprung’.19 A devout recapitulationist, as Gould has called him,20 Freud surmised that the compulsion to repeat arose from life’s underlying tendency to repeat phylogeny at the level of individual development. For him, neuroses and dreams took their place as a fourth parallel alongside the threefold parallelism of children, primitive ancestors and present-day savages. The neurosis or the dream was a repetition of childhood, itself already a repetition of the past.21 In time, Freud would come to see the repetition compulsion as a manifestation of the death drive pulling every human organism destructively back towards non-existence. In those most in thrall to the death drive, a behavioural atavism would set in, like that suffered by Jacques. Freud understood such a behavioural atavism to occur only at the level of mental processes. Gone were the external stigmata of Lombroso, no matter 18 Emile Zola, L’Argent, in Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. by Henri Mitterand, 5 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1960– 67), V, 9– 398 (pp. 151, 373). 19 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London, Hogarth, 1955), p. 37. On the importance of recapitulation theory to Freud’s understanding of the compulsion to repeat and the death drive, see also Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York, Basic, 1979), pp. 404 – 409. 20 Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 156. 21 Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 158.

46

DORIAN BELL

how literally primitive a phenomenon the death drive might represent. Unlike Lombroso’s heavy-featured, modern-day caveman, Freud’s atavist was different from other men only in his particularly acute compulsion to repeat childhood stages. Lombroso’s healthy civilized man surmounted his childhood criminality, permanently leaving it behind along his biogenetic development into the most highly evolved human form. Yet Freud’s similarly recapitulatory conception of mental architecture proffered a critical twist: instead of disappearing, the mind’s primitive childhood stages continued to exist alongside all successive stages, even in healthy adults.22 Rather than replace our primitive selves, most of us only successfully repressed it. And the return of this primitive repressed — of the bestial, the apelike, the Cro-Magnon — was, for anyone, only a dream or a neurosis away. ‘Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we could have imagined possible’, wrote Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, after explaining that dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it . . . Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood — a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual’s development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation. 23

Like Zola’s atavistic man, Freudian man was prey to his entire, accumulated phylogenic inheritance. Only now, one could never know in whom, or when, that inheritance might surface. 

Le Boucher illustrates this twentieth-century wrinkle on an enduring nineteenthcentury evolutionary idea. If Popaul’s murderous compulsion descends from Jacques’s own bestial instincts, his genial innocuousness reminds us that, after Freud, such atavism became the albatross of every man. Discussing the film, Chabrol remarks that ‘dans chaque individu existe une part de violence qui vient de la nuit des temps’, reflecting the ever finer line between the normative and pathological since Zola.24 Le Boucher engages this intensifying imbrication of the modern and the primitive, reprising certain Zolian themes and revising them in accordance with new cultural realities. Showing a certain recapitulatory inclination himself, Chabrol has summarized Le Boucher as an attempt to tell ‘l’histoire de l’esprit humain des origines a` nos jours’.25 Popaul is a butcher returned to a small village from the French colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina. He meets the 22

Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, p. 157. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, V, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London, Hogarth, 1953), p. 548. 24 Quoted in Richard Raskin, ‘On the Challenge and Compromises of Chabrol’s “Le Boucher” ’, (Pre)publications 15, no. 115 (January 1989), 36– 47 (p. 40). 25 ‘Je me suis demande´ si l’homme e´tait toujours “cromagnonesque” ’, interview with Yvonne Baby, Le Monde, 3 March 1970, 17. 23

CAVEMEN AMONG US

47

town headmistress, He´le`ne, and the two quickly form an attachment. To Popaul’s chagrin, He´le`ne rebuffs his shy physical advances, citing an earlier heartbreak. Meanwhile, the village is shocked by the grisly murders of several local women. He´le`ne discovers one of them herself near the Cro-Magnon caves she is visiting with her class, finding at the scene of the crime a lighter she has given Popaul. Despite her suspicions, He´le`ne keeps her knowledge of the lighter from the police. After briefly allaying her fears, Popaul ultimately reveals his guilt to He´le`ne in a climactic scene, stabbing himself to avoid killing her and dying after an emotionally charged confession of love to her on the way to the hospital. As the movie ends, He´le`ne’s blank silence and isolation from the village suggest a continued allegiance to the murderer she has protected and loved. Popaul commits his second murder at approximately the same moment as one of He´le`ne’s students, emerging from the prehistoric cave dwellings the class has visited just a short walk away, asks ‘Et s’il revenait maintenant Cro-Magnon, qu’est-ce qu’il ferait?’ The answer proves Zolian: he would (and does) kill women. Just as Jacques satisfies ‘cette rancune amasse´e de maˆle en maˆle, depuis la premie`re tromperie au fond des cavernes’ (p. 1152), Popaul acts out his disappointed desire for He´le`ne in deadly bursts of caveman misogyny.26 But Popaul shares more with Jacques than a prehistorically frustrated relationship with the opposite sex. ‘Je ne peux pas respirer jusqu’a` ce que je l’aie fait’, Popaul tells He´le`ne of his murderous episodes, calling to mind how murdering Se´verine similarly allows Jacques to ‘respirer largement’ after ‘il e´touffait’ and felt ‘e´trangle´’ during the act (pp. 1301, 1296). The two resemble each other as well in the oneiric dimension common to their moments of primitive regression. ‘C¸a me vient comme un cauchemar’, confides Popaul to He´le`ne, evoking a waking dream state like that experienced by Jacques, for whom the things around him ‘n’e´taient plus que dans un reˆve’ when he is gripped by his instinctual thirst (p. 1209). In this dream-like quality of the return of the primitive, Zola anticipates the fourth parallel of Freud’s recapitulatory argument (dreams and neuroses), and Chabrol affirms it. Dying from blood loss as He´le`ne drives him to the hospital, Popaul recounts how as a small child the sight of blood once caused him to fall unconscious. The anecdote suggests a psychoanalytic explanation for the blood-soaked ‘cauchemars’ of Popaul’s adult frenzies, which appear as Freudian regressions to a primordial childhood experience. The childhood experience points in turn, by the principle of 26 For both Zola and Chabrol, violence against women is clearly a privileged signifier of primitivity. Somewhat disturbingly, women do not enjoy an altogether innocent role in this association: Zola attributes Jacques’s tendencies to an original feminine betrayal ‘au fond des cavernes’, and Chabrol, as some have noted, leaves open the possibility that He´le`ne’s sexual refusal might have contributed to Popaul’s crimes.

48

DORIAN BELL

recapitulation, to a phylogenic past — a past Popaul duly evokes with his observation in the same scene that the blood of animals and of humans ‘ont la meˆme odeur’. With this animal reference (recall how Lombroso used animals as stand-ins for the evolutionary record), Chabrol completes, in a few short lines of dialogue, the recapitulatory association of man, child and ancestor inherited from the nineteenth century and refined by Freud to explain how someone as outwardly sympathique as Popaul could conceal an inner caveman. Traces of recapitulatory parallelism quite permeate Le Boucher, in fact. The film’s numerous children particularly contribute to this motif, populating the film in subtle but meaningful ways despite their relative anonymity. In one echo of the classical recapitulatory correspondence between childhood and our primitive ancestry, the film’s children exhibit a distinct affinity for Cro-Magnon man. Answering her student’s question about Cro-Magnon’s likely fate in today’s world, He´le`ne speculates that he might die, prompting a concerned response from the girl: ‘Je ne veux pas qu’il meure. Je suis certaine qu’il e´tait tre`s gentil’. And nice he is, at least in his modern-day guise as Popaul, with whom the film’s children enjoy a special rapport. Interrupting He´le`ne’s school lesson to offer her a cut of meat, Popaul is a hit with the class. Popaul gets along especially well with Charles, the teacher’s pet, whose stocky physique suggests Popaul’s and whose difficulty with mathematical word problems (‘des proble`mes de trains — c¸a et les robinets’) Popaul remembers from his own childhood. Popaul himself affects a certain childishness, both in his fondness for dressing up and playing the clown (‘j’adore me de´guiser’) and in his schoolchild’s insistence on calling his friend ‘Mademoiselle He´le`ne’. If children respond to Popaul, it is because in many ways he is one of them. We might reasonably object that, rather than suggest a parallel with Popaul, the children’s presence instead marks the progressively uneasy contrast between the village’s pastoral innocence and the terrifying violence occurring off-screen. Chabrol most memorably exploits this contrast in the famous scene in which blood spattering onto a little girl’s tartine reveals the presence above of a freshly murdered corpse. One could hardly imagine a more visually arresting juxtaposition of quotidian innocence and its opposite, and that is exactly the effect Chabrol claims to have intended.27 However, it is worth noting that Freud attributed the unheimlich effect of such an image to its ability to conjure repressed childhood experiences, experiences that according to him, by a now-familiar recapitulatory logic, carried the doubly eerie weight of a surmounted phylogenic past.28 27 Claude Chabrol, Claude Chabrol: un jardin bien a` moi, interviews with Franc¸ois Gue´rif (Paris, Denoe¨ l, 1999), p. 114. 28 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVII, The Uncanny, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London, Hogarth, 1955), p. 249.

CAVEMEN AMONG US

49

In keeping with this, the blood-spattered tartine and the children’s panicked reaction to it mirror the later story of Popaul’s own blood-induced childhood malaise, transforming contrast into association and closing the recapitulatory loop between traumatized child and atavistic adult. The bloodied tartine is not the only over-determined element in Le Boucher. As part of the film’s Zolian inheritance, the trains that make a cameo appearance as the object of Popaul’s and Charles’s academic consternation also come loaded with signification. In La Beˆte humaine, the train reveals glimpses of Zola’s Saint-Simonian faith in technological advancement. ‘C¸a, c’e´tait le progre`s, tous fre`res, roulant tous ensemble, la`-bas, vers un pays de cocagne’, muses Jacques’s aunt Phasie about the trains that pass her rural home. Phasie’s optimistic assessment quickly turns disquieting, however, as she remembers the unsettling blurring together of passengers streaming by (p. 1032). The fantastic progress made possible by technological gains comes at a price, and Zola spends much of La Beˆte humaine assessing the costs of this bargain. As Phasie’s perceptual distortion demonstrates, and as cultural historians have noted, the nineteenth century regarded trains’ high speed with particular hesitation. Shedding light on Zola’s decision to combine his ‘train novel’ and ‘murder novel’ into one, David F. Bell has explored the intrinsic connection in La Beˆte humaine between ‘perceptive troubles provoked by excessive speed’ and murderprovoking madness.29 The ‘vertigo of velocity’ (Bell’s phrase) primes the derangement of the senses, a phenomenon already anticipated in the speed-inflected language Zola employs in early notes to describe the portentous ‘e´lan’ of a Rougon-Macquart family ‘lance´e a` travers le monde moderne’.30 Add to this passengers’ early fearful association of trains with the violence of high-speed collisions,31 and one can easily understand how the railways represented a natural choice in which to set Zola’s novelistic reflection on murder. Yet I would submit that the train’s nineteenth-century signifying field extended beyond the simple connotation of violence to embrace the specifically atavistic nature of La Beˆte humaine’s railway murders. Both recapitulation theory and the growing national railroad network yielded ways time and space could contract. The biogenetic law revealed how the entire history of the species could be inscribed on even the smallest body; trains, for their part, produced a conceptual condensation of their own, evident in Constantin Pecqueur’s 1839 exclamation that ‘on the map of the imagination’, the new railway system promised to preserve ‘each bit of terrain’ in France 29 David F. Bell, Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 131 –41. 30 David F. Bell, ‘Notes ge´ne´rales sur la marche de l’œuvre’, in Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. by Henri Mitterand, 5 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1960 –67), V, 1738 – 41 (p. 1739). 31 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1986), p. 129.

50

DORIAN BELL

even as it reduced the whole down to the ‘infinitely small’.32 Suddenly modern man seemed less far removed from both his ancestors and his lesscivilized counterparts around the globe, raising, among other things, the spectre of the species’ past and present capacity for savagery. Evolutionary and railroad worries appear in this light as different valences of what might be termed an anxiety of proximity, a nineteenthcentury concern not only with the capitalist mingling of classes, as realism has often been considered to document, but also with a temporal and spatial emergence of the barbaric. When Jacques comments that ‘on aura beau inventer des me´caniques meilleures encore, il y aura quand meˆme des beˆtes sauvages dessous’ (p. 1032), what seems like a commonplace about the inability of technological progress to redress our most archaic tendencies in fact belies a more fundamental critique of technology’s active role as vector of that archaism. In its familiar political configuration, such a critique links dehumanizing regression with techno-economic repression — think of the proletarian Jeanlin’s atavistic transformation in Germinal after the crippling accident he suffers mining the coal necessary for a mechanized society. In La Beˆte humaine, however, trains and murder represent twin expressions of a more generalized atavistic challenge. Speeding across the periphery ‘vers un pays de cocagne’, the new locomotive civilization risks colliding with a resurgent past, as when Jacques’s train runs headlong into the horse-drawn, stone-laden cart manoeuvred onto the tracks by his spurned lover Flore, a vestigial ‘beˆte’ herself (p. 1257) who lives in the pre-technological no-man’s-land between two stops. The train is the feˆlure, not only as a conveniently epic metaphorization — as Deleuze and others have suggested — but because, like heredity, it opens a channel to heretofore safely distant parts of ourselves.33 By the time of Le Boucher, trains are more seamlessly integrated into the mental landscape of everyday life, surfacing in the grade school ‘proble`mes de trains’ that stump Charles and Popaul. As cinema, Le Boucher echoes this assimilation on a formal level. In penetrating the social fabric, the train parallels the camera’s own ‘permeation of reality with mechanical equipment’ that for Walter Benjamin characterizes the filmic endeavour.34 The parallel takes on significance when one considers that in La Beˆte 32

Quoted in Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, p. 35. Rae Beth Gordon has identified in La Beˆte humaine’s train an apt metaphor for the ‘automatisme psychologique’, theorized by contemporaries of Zola like Pierre Janet, that was thought to produce unconscious, ‘mechanical’ behaviour like that displayed by Jacques. Though I find Gordon’s argument convincing, her privileging of Zola’s psychological exploration — which she deems ‘bien plus subtile’ than his interest in atavistic regression — comes at the expense of overlooking how, as I have argued, the train also vividly figures the ability of the unconscious to bring the past crashing (literally, in the case of Flore’s cart) into the present. See ‘La me´canique de l’inconscient et la me´canique de l’e´criture’, in Zola a` l’oeuvre: hommage a` Auguste Dezalay, ed. by Gise` le Se´ginger (Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2003), pp. 73 – 86. 34 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, tr. by Harry Zohn (New York, Schocken, 1968), p. 234. 33

CAVEMEN AMONG US

51

humaine, the train itself functions as cinematic apparatus. Bell has shown how, during the scene in which Jacques witnesses a murder aboard a passing train, Zola employs the train to decidedly proto-cinematic effect. In the night-time succession of back-lit train windows, Bell sees ‘a series of frames, lit up in cadence’, like those of a projected film: ‘les wagons se succe´de`rent, les petites vitres carre´es des portie`res, violemment e´claire´es, firent de´filer les compartiments pleins de voyageurs’ (p. 1047).35 Taken to its conclusion in Le Boucher, this cinematic function requires that, like the camera, the train virtually disappear even as it suffuses everything around it.36 Along with its peaceful facade, then, the village’s rustic absence of technology proves an illusion. Behind every bucolic scene remains the director’s — and the butcher’s — cut. Jacques’s glimpse of murder in La Beˆte humaine points in another way towards Le Boucher’s cinematic intersection of form and content. Crucially, Jacques sees the passing train while in the dream-state of one of his early atavistic crises. Because the fleeting images he witnesses provoke in turn a secondary confusion, ‘comme en un reˆve’, Jacques attributes what he sees to a ‘hallucination’ born of his initial, agitated state (p. 1047). Here Zola links the phenomenological experience of an essentially cinematic spectatorship with a dream-instance of phylogenic regression. Nearly a century later, Jean-Louis Baudry would make a remarkably similar connection. In ‘Le dispositif’, Baudry argues for an association between the dream experience, that Freudian ‘survivance du passe´ phyloge´ne´tique’, and cinema, its intentional reproduction.37 In terms that recall Jacques’s confusion by the tracks, Baudry likens the ‘hallucination’ that cinema approximates to the ‘simulation du mouvement re´gre´dient qui caracte´rise le reˆve’.38 Although he does not insist on it, Baudry’s invocation of Freud’s recapitulatory schema suggests a certain primordiality about the cinematic experience. For Baudry, as for Zola, the cinematic experience is lived as regression and has the potential to crystallize deep phylogenic truths. Le Boucher epitomizes this crystallization. Thematized early on in Popaul’s aversion for the war movies that remind him of an unpleasant past, cinema’s regressive dimension particularly infuses the film’s emotional final act. With Popaul’s knife inches away from her, He´le`ne closes her eyes, and the screen fades to black. She opens her eyes to a shot of Popaul’s face after he has stabbed himself. From this moment on, events occur as in a dream, with 35 Real Time, p. 135. Susan Blood makes essentially the same observation: ‘In cinematic fashion, the image of the murder is perceived as one frame in a swift succession of windows’. See ‘The Precinematic Novel: Zola’s La Beˆte humaine’, Representations 93:1 (February 2006), 49 – 75 (p. 62). 36 One might consider Renoir’s decision to have Jacques witness the murder while on the train, a mystery for Deleuze (p. 19), as an intermediary step along this deceptive modern recession of technology from foreground to background to transparency. 37 Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Le dispositif: approches me´tapsychologiques de l’impression de re´alite´’, Communications, 23 (1975), 56– 72 (p. 70). 38 Baudry, ‘Le dispositif’, pp. 70– 71.

52

DORIAN BELL

long shots of Popaul and of the night-time road setting a hypnotic tone as He´le`ne drives her bleeding companion to the hospital. The audience experiences Popaul’s dying monologue as oneiric event, in a formal approximation by the camera of the very sort of trance in which Popaul feverishly confesses his obsessions and in which, one can imagine, he committed his crimes. To the fourth recapitulatory parallel that is Popaul’s adult regression, the camera thus adds a fifth: the cinematic experience itself. Like Jacques watching the train rush by, the audience sees the grainy, surreal blur of the dimly lit road unwinding at twenty-four frames per second, straining perception. But now it is we who, like Jacques, cannot distinguish between the atavist onscreen and the atavist within, our perception blurred by the road and by our own sympathy for the serial killer whose regression we have been made to share. With this transference, Le Boucher introduces the nineteenth century’s anxiety of proximity to a twentieth-century audience. To the Cro-Magnon caves long sanitized for schoolhouse consumption and the distant colonial wars officially whitewashed of their savagery, Chabrol reattaches the Freudian legacy of each man’s encounter with the ancestral and the savage inside him. This time, however, Chabrol reminds us that history has proven the West victim and aggressor in the encounter. Not just turned inward as private neurosis, as Freud imagined it, modernity’s lasting primitive streak has turned outward in the conquest of Africa and Asia, where Popaul served in colonial wars. Popaul’s violence seems extreme in part because it was successfully consigned to the periphery for so long. Now it is back, borne by a returning colonial soldier whose crimes He´le`ne, the picture of purity, cannot bring herself to reveal. Remember that in the years leading up to Le Boucher, the state-sanctioned torture employed by France in the Algerian war had been met by many with similar silence. Complicity, like Freudian atavism, spares no one, and in the guilty figure of He´le`ne, Chabrol updates the thematics of atavism for the postcolonial era. Dictating at one point from Balzac’s La Femme de trente ans, He´le`ne reads a passage about the noblewoman He´le`ne d’Aiglemont, a character after her own heart who loves a murderer, flees civilization for the pirate life, and captures her own father on the colonial seas — no doubt a strange outcome to a nineteenth-century reader, but perhaps not to a citizen of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries who understands that the savagery feared by the West lurks as much within as without, and that Europeans have long been their own barbarians at the gate.39 STANFORD UNIVERSITY 39 I am grateful to Maurice Samuels, Philippe Met and Mayanthi Fernando for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this text.