It is customary to say that naturalist novels strive to decipher the world. An iconoclastic thesis supports the opposite: Zola would have felt unease with reality, projecting his fantasies onto the opaque screen of his texts. Would he be, in the romantic order, the equivalent of Mallarmé or Kandinsky? ?
Zola or the condemned window is a book of criticism and literary theory that renews our way of reading the novels of the great naturalist novelist. Although this large volume gives the full text of a doctoral thesis, supported by Émilie Piton-Foucault at the University of Rennes 2, its interest goes beyond the academic circle.
Because Zola (1840-1902) is a novelist who is still widely read. His novels are long-sellers. Certainly, at the start of XXIe century, we are aware of everything that separates us from the end of the XIXe. Today we are talking about “ third » industrial revolution, and that Zola certainly could not describe. But, by reading it, we go to the origins, where our world began. There are even places on the planet where the working condition is still that of Germinaland it is no less revolting today than yesterday. The struggle between Capital and Labor has lost none of its ferocity.
Represent the world
Since Balzac and Flaubert, the novel has continued to document the real world. As an artistically elaborate textual machine, the novel provides an intuitive and indirect understanding of the complexity of the world in all the nuances of its conflicts and contradictions, and it sometimes succeeds in doing so more effectively than a study. historical or sociological.
Zola’s project was in this vein: the Rougon-Macquart cycle wanted to account, through the history of a family under the Second Empire, of collective dynamics inscribed in a historical time period, while confronting the protagonists with different environments and places, and by integrating the current state of knowledge into the management of his fiction.
It is therefore the real world that we seek when we open a Zola. And now Émilie Piton-Foucault comes to tell us the opposite: not at all, Zola felt an ontological discomfort with reality, to the point that he conceived his novels as so many screens to be placed between reality and him. Screens on which he projected his own images. The author even detects in the novelist’s project a fetishistic structure, underlying a voyeuristic aesthetic: if he shows the objects of the world, it is only insofar as they are hidden, but he shows them compulsively.
This is why the famous Zolian window, this “ window open to creation ” of which critics have long taken transparency for granted, this window which has been said to function like an operator of “ transitivity » – this window is actually a boarded up window. Thus, all these characters who, in the novels, are posted at the window, or who walk in a landscape whose description is justified by their presence as observers, all these characters “ gaze door » have only an illusory function. The window was there, but the screen was opaque, and the viewer saw nothing. The description stumbles upon its own impossibility.
Drawing on an impressive stock of extracts from novels, the author shows in all aspects and in all contexts what she calls “the malfunctions » of the representation and the “ flaws » in Zola’s relationship to reality. It also draws on the theoretical writings of the novelist, in particular his letter on windows and screens. In 1864, it was a letter with a programmatic aim. Émilie Piton-Foucault repeatedly puts the most important formulations under her analytical scalpel.
For her demonstration, which she conducts with perseverance, intelligence and thoroughness, she combines her analyzes of the Zolian text with a number of theoretical approaches from diverse horizons, whose interdisciplinary dimension must be saluted. These are all critical views often cast sideways or coming from elsewhere (in particular from the Anglo-Saxon and German sphere), and it is from these unexpected connections that another Zola emerges.
Zola and the visual arts
Among the most interesting of these approaches are the history of art, the history of science and technology and media theory. Jonathan Crary’s contribution is of specific importance. THE XIXe century saw the emergence of new theories on perception and images, and we saw the invention of many new optical devices throughout the century (among others, the stereoscope). These devices helped to autonomize the images they produced, that is to say, they made them independent of the real referent.
From there a dissociation between perception and its object, which leads the author to slide the reading grid of the novels from the box “ representation » (or reproduction of reality) in the box « presentation “. It brings the novelist closer to the poet Mallarmé and certain visual artists who were their contemporaries, notably Manet. It goes further, since it summons (particularly in the last chapter, the most breathtaking) the artistic avant-gardes which followed and even artists of the second XXe century. In other words, Émilie Piton-Foucault takes into account the most current research on the recent evolution of the visual arts and uses it to shed light on the writing practices of novelist Zola and his experiments on vision, such as we can find them in his novels.
These modern artists have shaken up the perception of reality. Their mediation makes us discover this other Zola, a Zola who placed emphasis on the flat surface rather than on the depth of perspective, on the fragment and the periphery rather than on the whole, on the support and on the frame rather than on the pattern shown.
This does not mean that the novelist had completely renounced his referential message. We can always continue to read Zola’s novels for “ learn the world » (at least that of XIXe century). But Émilie Piton-Foucault offers us, at the same time, an offbeat and exciting reading. It makes us look at the Zolian text a bit as if it were one of those Vasarely paintings with optical effects – what was in the hollow takes on relief, because we look at the painting differently. It moves the referential message to the background to bring out the materiality of the text and its formal issues.
Calling on Kandinsky or Bacon to read Zola may be shocking. However, this is what helps us to see, in all their strangeness, the display of meats in The Belly of Paris and the umbrella display in To the Ladies’ Happiness. Like plays of colors and materials, spots and lines. The first pages of Germinal are a black monochrome just accented with a few lights. And, when we refer to a handwritten page of a novel by Zola, we can be struck (independently of what the page says) by the rectangle or rather the square that the writing has inscribed in the space of this page .
Émilie Piton-Foucault not only deals with the images given to see in the novels, she also closely analyzes the words and sentences. By showing how the novelist works his style “ artist » in order to counter the expected narrative discourse, she comes to propose a “ grammar of the Zolian abstract “.
A bold but dense book
Zola or the condemned window is a rich, disturbing, inventive, free, slightly provocative, sometimes dazzling book. Unfortunately, it is also an extremely dense and overloaded book, because it respects all the codes of the thesis. A thesis must confront previous criticism. Émilie Piton-Foucault’s approach necessarily arouses controversy among Zolians and specialists in naturalism. The author sets herself apart from the readings that have been authoritative to date and draws on critical texts that prepared the ground for her.
As a result, any idea put forward must be excessively supported, and the thread of the argument repeatedly emphasized. An absence is felt: that of the indexes, which would make it easy to find a passage. Fortunately, there is the bibliography which will be of service to researchers. This audacious book lacked one last audacity: that of contracting the text. We would have had a 300-page essay, a powerful book, maybe even a bestseller.