Nelson Brian - Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille)

Pot Luck is the story of an apartment building and of the juxtaposed lives of its bourgeois tenants and their servantsa simmering, bubbling melting-pot of public and private life, class and gender relations. The novels French title, Pot-Bouille, is virtually untranslatable. Restless House, the title chosen for a previous edition of the novel, captures something of the mood of the buildings tenants and the metaphoric importance of the building itself, though Stew or Stewpot, with their associations with the ordinary meal, household routine, and everyday bourgeois life, are the closest literal equivalents in English. However, there is no term in English which conveys so concisely Zolas idea of a melting-pot of sexual promiscuity, while at the same time incorporating the culinary notion of a stew, as well as a swill of fetid household waste, which is the authors metaphor for the confusions and contradictions of bourgeois society and the messy mishmash of moral and physical corruption concealed beneath the veneer of bourgeois respectability.

Pot Luck is the tenth in Zolas great cycle of twenty novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, on which he began work in 1870 at the age of 30, and to which he devoted the next quarter of a century. The subtitle of the cycle, The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire, suggests the way that at one level Zola gives us a documentary account of French society in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the result of dedicated first-hand observation and researchin the Halles, the department stores, the mines, the French countrysidecombining a novelists skills with those of the investigative journalist in a way that only Balzac can match. In his representation of various milieux Zola always combined the vision of a painter with that of a sociologist, attentive to the patterns and rituals that govern the daily life of a given community. From the vantage-point of the fortunes of one family, Zola examined the political, moral, and above all, sexual landscape of the late nineteenth century, in a way that scandalized the grossly materialistic and hypocritical bourgeois society of France both before and after the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War.

Zolas basic themes include nature, the body, and the working class. His representation of the natural and material world is often more expressionist than impressionist; he animates it with extraordinary anthropomorphic life, giving it a heightened, hallucinatory quality, so that in Pot Luck, for example, the apartment house itself, with its sham faade and filthy inner courtyard, becomes one of the characters of the novel. His symbolic world is deeply marked by patterns of ambivalence, an inversion of signs: the nourishing earth becomes deadly, Eros becomes Thanatos, catastrophe is followed by regeneration. Zolas representation of the body and its affects is similarly ambivalent. Although his vision was puritanical, he broke the mould of Victorian moral cant in his representation of sexual appetites, frustrations, and inhibitions; the most innovative aspect of Zolas Naturalism was its discovery of the body. There is a striking recurrence in his fiction of Oedipal situations and of situations that portray women in ambivalent patterns of attraction/repulsion. In psychoanalytic terms, his fiction describes a painful evolution from an experience of sexuality in terms of nauseous anxiety (reflected in