La Bête humaine (English: The Beast Within or The Beast in Man or The Monomaniac) is an 1890 novel by Émile Zola. It is the seventeenth book in Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series. The story focuses on the lives and violent passions of railway workers who operate the line between Paris and Le Havre in the late 1860s. The novel is a tense psychological thriller and has been adapted multiple times for radio, television, and film.
Contents
Characters
Jacques Lantier: an engine driver who is the family link to the Les Rougon-Macquart series. He is the son of Gervaise Macquart (L'Assommoir), brother of Étienne Lantier (Germinal) and Claude Lantier (L'Œuvre), and half-brother of the eponymous Nana.
Roubaud: deputy stationmaster at Le Havre
Séverine: Roubaud's wife
Judge Grandmorin: a prominent wealthy man – former director of the railway company and judge in the French judicial system – and a notorious womanizer
Phasie: Lantier's sickly aunt who lives in an isolated house by the railway line outside Paris
Flore: a railway employee, and Phasie's daughter, who is infatuated with Lantier
Cabuche: a forestry worker who lives near Phasie
Pecqueux: the fireman on Lantier's train
Plot summary
During a layover in Paris, Roubaud comes to suspect that Séverine had an affair years ago with Grandmorin, her patron when she was an orphaned teenager. Roubaud forces a confession from her about being seduced by Grandmorin. In a jealous rage, Roubaud makes her write a note to the judge, asking for a rendezvous on that evening's express train from Paris. It is the same train Roubaud and Séverine are taking back to Le Havre.
Lantier is afflicted with hereditary madness that causes his sexual desires to turn into fits of violence against women. His relationship to his engine, which he affectionately dubs "La Lison", provides him some relief. While staying in Paris to have "Lison" repaired, he visits his Aunt Phasie. When he encounters Flore, his passions are inflamed and trigger his homicidal mania. He feels on the verge of stabbing her, but restrains himself and runs away. Standing near the railway line, Lantier observes the express from Paris go by. Through a passing window, he glimpses a man holding a knife, bent over another man. Lantier later finds Grandmorin's body beside the track with his throat cut.
Roubaud and Séverine are suspects since they were on the train with Grandmorin and will inherit some of his property. Lantier sees Roubaud at the police station and thinks he resembles the murderer he glimpsed, but when questioned says he cannot be sure. The magistrate, pursuing a false lead against Cabuche, dismisses Roubaud and Séverine. Even though they are cleared, the marriage of Roubaud and Séverine becomes strained. The cash and watch they stole from Grandmorin are hidden under a floorboard in their apartment. As "insurance" against a change in Lantier's testimony, Roubaud cultivates a friendship with the engine driver and encourages his wife to do so.
Séverine and Lantier begin an affair, at first clandestinely but then more openly until they are caught by Roubaud. Despite his previous jealousy, Roubaud seems unmoved; he spends less time at home and turns to gambling.
One night, Séverine admits to Lantier that Roubaud murdered Grandmorin, and she assisted. Lantier feels the return of his own urge to kill. The next morning, he leaves the apartment to kill the first woman he meets. After choosing a victim, he is seen by someone he knows and abandons the idea. He is relieved and hopes his murderous inclinations will plague him no longer.
Themes and criticism
Zola translator Leonard Tancock wrote that La Bête humaine is one of the author's most violent and pessimistic novels:haunted by the theory he held at this stage of his career that "love and death, possessing and killing, are the dark foundations of the human soul".... [the novel] is a curious hybrid of two quite different themes. The first theme is...a study of homicide but also of the French judicial system, its corruption and inherent weakness; and the second is an interesting tale of the world of the railways, the organization and running of a main line and the life of its employees.
Carl Dahlstrom took issue with Zola scholars, such as biographer Matthew Josephson, who suggested that the "beast" in the title referred to the locomotive engine. Dahlstrom noted that "Zola deliberately selected a human beast to carry the leading role in the novel.... He is the sadist Jacques Lantier, a member of the Rougon-Macquart family, who reverts to the brutal caveman under certain conditions of emotional stress. Finally, no argument remains when we read in Zola's plans for the novel that Jacques Lantier is 'une variété de la bête humaine.'"
In an article in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Robert Viti pointed out that Zola often manipulated temporal rhythm in his novels, never more so than in La Bête humaine:[Zola] alternates the orderly succession of linear time, most often represented by the uninterrupted ticking of a clock, with the intermittent disruption of this flow by violent and chaotic temporal eruptions, breaks, fissures. At such break points, time slows down or stops or, conversely, speeds up recklessly. Accompanying the disruption of ordinary time is the realization during such moments that experiences are richer and deeper; the emotional pitch is sharper, feelings are more intense. Viti interpreted these breaks in the novel as eruptions of unpredictability from ordinariness, of disorder from order: "Underlying everyday, orderly life is another world, another Life, at once psychological and primitive, one of passion, crime and risk." When recounting to Lantier the details of the murder of Grandmorin, Séverine says, "I lived more in that minute than in the whole of my previous life."
Publication history
14 November 1889, first three chapters appear in the weekly magazine La Vie populaire; the rest of the book is also serialized, with the final installments published on 2 March 1890.
March 1890, La Bête humaine published in book form in Paris by Bibliothèque-Charpentier.
English Translations
Expurgated
c. 1891, The Human Beast (tr. G. D. Cox, T. B. Peterson)
1901, The Monomaniac, translated and edited with a preface by Edward Vizetelly, London: Hutchinson & Co.
1937: The Human Beast (tr. Louis Colman, Julien Press)
Unexpurgated
1956: The Beast in Man, translated by Alec Brown (Elek)
1968, The Beast in Man (translated by Robert Godfrey Goodyear and P.J.R. Wright), London: Signet Classic
1977, La Bête humaine (translated by Leonard Tancock), London: Penguin, ISBN 978-0-140-44327-1
1996, La Bête humaine (translated by Roger Pearson), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-199-53866-9
2007, The Beast Within (translated by Roger Whitehouse), London: Penguin, ISBN 978-0-140-44963-1
Adaptations
Die Bestie im Menschen, 1921 German silent film, directed by Ludwig Wolff
La Bête humaine, 1938 movie directed by Jean Renoir, starring Jean Gabin
Human Desire, 1954 movie based on the novel, and directed by Fritz Lang, starring Glenn Ford
La Bestia humana, 1957 Argentine movie, directed by Daniel Tinayre
La Bête Humaine, 1993 BBC radio adaptation in three parts
Cruel Train, 1995 British TV movie, directed by Malcolm McKay