La démesure et l’indocilité du vivant. Intermittences de la botanique dans deux romans du cycle des Rougon-Macquart de Zola

Emile Zola's 1886 novel of the art world, L'Œuvre, has for some time been understood as a fairly fractured account of one of the most famous historical narratives of Western art: the challenge pose...

Theorizing the Scapegoat in Maupassant and Zola Roderick Cooke Et Claude . . . serra sa ceinture, en grondant d’une voix fâchée: “Quels gredins que les honnêtes gens!”1 —Emile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris Elle se sentait noyée dans le mépris de ces gredins honnêtes qui l’avaient sacrifiée d’abord, rejetée ensuite, comme une chose malpropre et inutile.2 —Guy de Maupassant, Boule de Suif Although much has been written about Maupassant’s links to Zola and his judgments of the older man’s novels,3 the above intertext between his Boule de Suif (1880) and Le Ventre de Paris (1873), the third volume in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, appears to date to have gone unnoticed. I will argue here that this connection helps to reveal a much deeper kinship between the two narratives, which can both be read as accounts of the protagonist’s scapegoating. Using René Girard and Jacques Derrida’s substantively different theoretical accounts of the scapegoat, I suggest that Derrida’s model ultimately describes both narratives more effectively. Reading the two works in this manner reveals the importance of political critique to the shared structures of the naturalist text. Any discussion of Le Ventre de Paris as a scapegoating narrative must begin with Naomi Schor’s Zola’s Crowds (1978), which first used Girard’s ideas to analyze it and numerous other Zola novels (including La Conquête de Plassans, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon and Germinal) as accounts of the protagonist’s victimization by their community. Of Le Ventre de Paris itself, Schor says that it is “Zola’s ‘sacrificial novel’ par excellence, in that the sacrificial ritual is coextensive with the main plot, saturates (which is not to say exhausts) the text” (22). In Zola’s account of a small-time political agitator who is met with antagonism and, finally, denunciation to the [End Page 177] police by his neighbors in the Les Halles of the Second Empire, Schor saw a model that would be replicated and modified in later entries to the Rougon-Macquart cycle. But how exactly does Girard’s theory inform the discussion? On his account, any scapegoating is the product of internal tensions within the community that carries out the act. Girard’s central concept—mimetic desire—underpins the claim that the group’s desires become reflective of each other and focused onto the same object, creating tensions and rivalry between individual members. A crisis is born as the mimetic process ablates distinctions between individuals, and can only be resolved through the choice of an innocent victim whom the group members combine to eliminate, reestablishing difference and allowing non-conflictual social relationships to be restored: Il y a pourtant un dénominateur commun de l’efficacité sacrificielle, d’autant plus visible et prépondérant que l’institution demeure plus vivante. Ce dénominateur c’est la violence intestine; ce sont les dissensions, les rivalités, les jalousies, les querelles entre proches que le sacrifice prétend d’abord éliminer, c’est l’harmonie de la communauté qu’il restaure, c’est l’unité sociale qu’il renforce. Tout le reste découle de cela. (Girard, La Violence et le Sacré 22) It is this process that Schor identified in Le Ventre de Paris. We meet the protagonist, Florent, as he returns to Paris following his escape from Devil’s Island, where he had been deported following a politically-motivated arrest in the wake of Napoleon III’s coup d’état in December 1851. Florent quickly finds his beloved brother (known simply as Quenu), and the sister-in-law he did not know he had, Lisa, née Macquart. Over the course of novel, he takes a position as food inspector at Les Halles, at the time newly built and symbolic of the Second Empire’s will to remake Paris into a modern capital. In so doing, he becomes drawn into the plots and rivalries of the mainly female food traders (notably Louise Méhudin, aka “la belle Normande,” and her family), while simultaneously pursuing his own amateurish political plots in a nearby bar. These parallel plots will combine in Florent...

This research aims to describe the formal correspondence in the novel Le Ventre de Paris in French and The Belly of Paris in Indonesian. This is qualitative descriptive research. The theory used to analyze the data is the formal correspondence theory proposed by Catford. The data sources for this research are the novels “Le Ventre de Paris” in French and “The Belly of Paris” in Indonesian. The data are all propositions that have a formal correspondence in the novels “Le Ventre de Paris” and “The Belly of Paris.” The results show that 93 propositions are the subject of a formal match. Thirty-five propositions have formal correspondence based on word classes. Nine propositions have formal correspondence based on linguistic structures.

This article analyses imbricated discourses of nutrition, hunger and fasting in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and Huysmans's A Vau-l'eau (1882), A Rebours (1884) and Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901). In particular, it argues that Zola's neo-physiological Naturalism, as eventually theorized in Le Roman expérimental (1880), actually produces a rhetoric of hunger and fasting, most notably in Le Ventre de Paris. This rhetoric, it is argued, was taken up and developed by Huysmans, finally becoming central to his Spiritual Naturalism, ostensibly formulated to counter the materialism of Zola's Naturalism. The article begins by looking at physiological and materialist discourses of nutrition – as encapsulated by slogans to the effect that ‘you are what you eat’ – and their impact on literary debates that, in the 1870s, opposed Zola and Barbey d'Aurevilly. It then shows how these discourses of nutrition are supplanted in the fiction of Zola and Huysmans by a rhetoric of hunger and fasting typically associated with Catholic conceptions of sanctity.

Le Ventre de Paris is usually regarded as « the novel of the flesh » : fat women, pulpy fruit, food in abundance... the novel however doesn't describe an erotic but a political flesh. Far from being a rabelaisian story where food and flesh are closely connected, Le Ventre de Paris excludes all desire and considers the flesh only as the expression of what is in the shopkeeper's unconscious : desire is nothing more than desire for castration, even the flesh turns into an object of sacrifice, that is essential for the life of the city. Le Ventre de Paris has been too often regarded as a novel describing a lavish flesh, whereas it seems to be a novel describing a « sarcastic flesh » in the double meaning of the word : as a synonym of « satirical » on the one hand, but above all, in the etymological meaning of « what is able too tear the face to pieces », sign of a sacrified flesh that is a constant theme in Zola's novel.

OF THE TITLES THAT ZOLA IMAGINED for his novel of the artist's life, L'ÂŒuvre (1886), several recall the birthing process, including Faire un Enfant, ProcrA©er, Engrosser la Nature, Enfantement, Accouchement, Parturition, Conception, Enfanter and Les Couches saignantes (IV, 1338).2 Many readings of L'ÂŒuvre have focused on Claude Lantier's failed attempt at sustaining a new movement in art. Although some of these readings cite the painter's indictment of the model's body as a factor in this failure, my own reading positions that failure of the female body at center stage.31 will propose that L'ÂŒuvre inscribes the deformations of gestation onto the female belly and then presents the ventre, poses it, before the artist (and reader) as unrepresentable, even as the very sign of unrepresentability. Indeed, one way that Zola works through the problem of the nude is to ask the question Can the postpartum model pose?—this in a novel that repeatedly, even compulsively, stages the pre- and post-partum belly as problem for the artist and metaphor of artistic production. This essay reads naturalism's posers in terms of the relationship between modeling and motherhood and, to a lesser extent, modeling and aging, for both motherhood and aging mark the body of the model in such a way that her posing potential becomes questionable. After the model's youth in Balzac's Le Chef-d'Âœuvre inconnu (1832), she reaches motherhood and middle age in L'ÂŒuvre and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon (1867); her death is then staged in Guy de Maupassant's Fort comme la mort (1889). The evolution of realist literature in France follows this life span of the model (i.e., of her body) from youth to maternity, to decline and death.4 As the terms artist, woman, mother and model took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, the pregnant and postpartum model emerged as the worrisome site of conflicts posed by the intersection of the body, art and gender. It is useful, therefore, to first inquire of these terms. Then, after a brief reading of Octave Mirbeau's tale of the aged model, L'OctogA©naire, and references to Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, the strategies centering on the postpartum belly in L'ÂŒuvre can be untangled. I will argue that in L'ÂŒuvre the female ventre inhibits the successful passage from the problem of the model (the real woman) to the problem of the nude

‘Naturalism’ was the dominant mode of the French novel in the late nineteenth century. The writer who played the pre-eminent role in its development was Emile Zola. At the heart of Zola's naturalism is a concern with integrity of representation. For Zola, this meant a commitment to the idea that literature has a social function: to engage with the ‘order of the day’ through a representation of the sorts of things that concerned people on a daily basis in their social and individual lives. Industrialisation, the growth of the cities, the birth of consumer culture, the condition of the working class, crime, prostitution, the follies and misdeeds of government – these were the issues that concerned Zola. And he wrote about them not simply forensically, as a would-be scientist, but subversively, ironically, satirically. As a body of literature, naturalist fiction represents a major assault on bourgeois morality and institutions. It takes an unmitigated delight – while also seeing the process as a serious duty – in revealing the vice and corruption behind the respectable facade. The last line of his novel Le Ventre de Paris ( The Belly of Paris ) is: ‘Respectable people … What bastards!’ The shock factor of naturalist texts can be measured by the vehemence of Establishment critics' attacks on Zola and his work. These attacks were usually made on moral and aesthetic grounds. Zola was accused of sensationalism, immorality and intellectual and stylistic crudity. But in reality, the accusations reveal a political dimension: Zola’s work provoked a great deal of reactionary fear among his bourgeois readers and critics.

Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906

This contribution discusses Knut Hamsun's Sult (1890) from a transnational perspective, referring to the history of hunger and the depiction of hunger in French Naturalism. It takes Timothy Wientzen's (2015) argument about the politics of hunger in Sult as the starting point for a critical discussion, and reflects on the relationship between hunger strikes and political collectives. Furthermore, it points to parallels between Sult and Zola's Le ventre de Paris (1873) in the problematization of political organization and, finally, compares the narrative structures of both texts.

This chapter starts from Émile Zola’s ‘The Experimental Novel’, which in attempting to locate a scientific basis for the novel relies problematically on the ideas of the vivisectionist Claude Bernard. The chapter argues that this scientific cutting open and penetrating of the novel is part of an anthropocentric and reductive process, but that this is countered by features of the novelistic practice of Zola, such as the descriptions of the market in Le Ventre de Paris (1873), which register a sickness in bourgeois assumptions about the human and the treatment of animals that accompanies them. The chapter traces the influence of this tension within Zola to two late-nineteenth century writers who responded to him: George Moore and Vernon Lee. Moore imitated but also rejected Zola, while Lee wrote ‘On The Moral Teachings of Zola’ (1893) as part of her critical aesthetic project, but also published articles against vivisection. These ambivalent relationships to Zola, the chapter argues, reproduce a fundamental ambiguity within Zola’s own writing regarding the relationship between human life, animal life, food, disgust and the realist novel as a form.

This essay revisits the relationship between Zola’s descriptive techniques and painting by taking a detailed look at Le Ventre de Paris , and at one particular genre of painting, still life. The argument involves dissolving the easy identification between the painter Claude Lantier and the narrator in order to reveal the presence of visions of Les Halles other than Claude’s quasi-Impressionist one, to which much critical attention has been devoted. In a series of close readings of the visual descriptions, this essay reveals the presence of a Rococo aesthetic, implying parallels between the Second Empire and the eighteenth century; by exploring Florent's perspective on Les Halles in particular, it uncovers vanitas imagery and memento mori in which ‘nourriture’ is ‘pourriture’. To read Le Ventre de Paris is thus to be placed in a position analogous to that of the spectator in Holbein’s The Ambassadors , with its notorious anamorphosis; for, as the narrative perspective shifts between Claude and Florent, and as the descriptions evoke Impressionist, Rococo and early modern aesthetics, so the death's head flickers disconcertingly in and out of view.

The settings or milieux of Zola’s novels are far more than a simple background to the action of his novels; at every level they shape the way characters think and behave and the likely events that may happen. For each novel Zola produced, the specific social milieu was the object of thorough research and planning before the writing began. This chapter examines one richly varied milieu in Zola’s work, which is that of shops, the ‘middle’ par excellence. Zola studied a multiplicity of shops, from the small and local to the grandest new. Many appear in meticulous, modern detail—not just in the case of the famous fictional department store (Au Bonheur des Dames) but also in L’Assommoir and Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), in both of which having a shop of one’s own is the dream achieved for determined working-class women.

I'd like to take off from a famous pronouncement, the This will kill that, not as declared by Claude Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris, but instead as restated by Claude Lantier in Le ventre de Paris. Zola has his painter utter it, not very far from Beaubourg, at the point where he passes in front of Baltard's recently constructed pavilions for Les Halles. Claude has just noticed the rose window of Saint-Eustache, framed by the arcades of a passageway. It's then he repeats Victor Hugo's prophecy. Or rather he subverts it. For while Hugo's pedagogical idealism announced the book would sound the death knell of the cathedral, so once the scholar replaced the priest, democratic knowledge would replace hierarchical learning, Zola's message has nothing to do with secular freedom of thought; what he proclaims is a future of materialist satiety: at the same time iron replaces stone, Les Halles supplants the church and consumption displaces redemption; it's earthly nourishment will sweep away the opiate of the people. Zola was wrong, of course. This, in fact, didn't kill that. Contrary to what the naturalist manifesto prophesied, Baltard lost on all fronts-that of form and of content. His pavilions have disappeared. And, dominating a newly opened esplanade, the church's massive volume holds sway as it would never before have done, even during the most religious epochs. Zola was wrong. But that's not the point. The difference between Hugo's This will kill that and Zola's is for the former death is-like the book

The 1923 publication of Albert Londres’ Au bagne signalled a watershed moment in the history of grand reportage in Third-Republic France. Following this investigation, each newspaper editor wanted his own investigation of the overseas penal colonies on his front page. This chapter argues that the investigations of the penal colonies in Guyane were a nodal point both in the history of grand reportage and in the broader history of the territory. The chapter first refers to early appearances of the Cayenne bagne in literature—such as Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris—and to the predecessors of Londres in Guyane. It then explains Londres’ identity as justicier, enacting a moral intervention whilst at the same time purporting to be an intellectual nomad, along with the function of reportage, between literature and journalism. Within this, it discusses the role of the reader, whom the journalist brings along on his travels. From there, by contrast, the chapter considers the role of the Guyanais, who become side characters in a French drama (‘ne faisant rien, n’ont pas d’histoire’). The chapter concludes by positing that the interwar investigations of the colony and its prisons cemented Guyane as a borderland, at once distinctly French and other.

Behind the scenes of fiction: Zola’s planning notes Zola left to posterity a substantial collection of texts linked to the genesis of his novels. Commonly called the 'dossiers preparatoires' ['planning notes'], they provide direct insight into the creative process. It is highly likely that the novelist intended these files to be an exemplary illustration of the naturalist method. There was no desire on his part to keep the notes secret; on the contrary, he revealed the existence of some of them during his lifetime, so that some of his admirers, including Edmondo de Amicis and Jan Van Santen Kolff, found themselves in possession of the notes for L'Assommoir and Le Docteur Pascal . Zola no doubt intended to bolster his image as a serious novelist with little use for improvisation or imaginative invention. Beginning with Le Ventre de Paris , all the planning notes are composed in the same way, in four large sections. In a section entitled 'Outline' ['Ebauche'], the novelist gives a broad-brush indication of the setting, the plot, and the principal characters. In a section entitled 'Characters' he draws up a file on each of his characters, giving their main biographical, physical and psychological particulars. A section entitled 'Plans' usually includes a brief summary and two series of detailed plans in which Zola organises the narrative and descriptive material chapter by chapter. Finally, there is a section containing documentation based either on his reading-notes or the results of his fieldwork. This homogeneous set of documents gives the impression of a perfectly controlled process of creation founded on genuine knowledge. The planning notes seem to illustrate to perfection the two great principles of naturalist fiction enunciated in Le Roman experimental : observation (as in the Notes) and experimentation (as in the Outline, in which the story is invented). The development of the work seems to coincide with the substance of the theory. This provided the basis for the legend of the naturalist writer.