Zola à l’Œuvre. Hommage à Auguste Dezalay

Abstract

Zola a l'AEeuvre. Hommage a Auguste Dezalay. Actes du colloque Zola-Genetique et poetique du roman (9 et 10 decembre 2002). Textes reunis par Gisele Seginger. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2003. Pp. 246. Fans of genetic criticism will find a feast in this collection of essays devoted to Zola's work and edited by Gisele Seginger. The articles collected here all stem from a colloquium held in 2002 at the Universite Marc Bloch-Strasbourg II on the topic Zola--Genetique et poetique du roman, which included contributions by a number of leading Zola specialists, such as Henri Mitterand, Colette Becker, Auguste Dezalay, David Baguley, and Jacques Noiray. The essays all share a common interest in genetic criticism, and together propose a fascinating picture of Zola at work, a portrait of the artist wielding his tools in the chaos of the workshop, preparing the dossiers, plans, rough drafts, and character sketches that as a rule preceded the final product. Here we learn hOt only how the overall project of the Rougon-Macquart series took shape in Zola's mind, but also how a large number of the individual novels grew and changed in the stages between the initial idea, the first plan, the detailed plan, and the final execution. We also see bow Zola's method itself evolved in the process, from the rigorous naturalist documentation of the Rougon-Macquart to the city monographs of Les Trois Villes to the utopian forecasts of Les Quatre Evangiles. There is no doubt that Zola's work lends itself especially well to this branch of criticism, since he so meticulously prepared every novel, and his drafts and notes have in large part been preserved in the dossiers preparatoires kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Zola is, in this sense, the perfect showcase for the ambitions of genetic criticism, and the articles gathered here provide a good overview of the state of the field as well as of what can be achieved using this approach. A skeptic might wonder at the need for a type of criticism concerned almost exclusively with preparatory materials, especially when, as in Zola's case, there exists such a large volume of published, finished, definitive texts--a body of work one would have to be very unimaginative to think exhausted by criticism. But whether or not an unacknowledged fear of this type secretly fuels the genetic project, Gisele Seginger defends its autonomy and legitimacy in an introduction that credits it for breaking defiantly with le fetichisme du texte--that is, with the arbitrary privilege most readers still insist on according to the published work. The larger ambition of la critique genetique has been to justify I'etude du travail and le refus de la teleologie, and it bas thereby succeeded in setting up Zola's dossiers as objects worthy of study in their own right. This perspective has arguably led to a renewed conception of poetics, one based no longer on the art of the finished text, but on the process of writing itself, on the labor of planning, outlining, sketching, adding, developing, and editing. The first part of Zola a l'aeuvre focuses on this mobile vision of poetics, and includes two short but incisive studies by Henri Mitterand and Auguste Dezalay which discuss the original form and subsequent evolution of Zola's overall plan for the Rougon-Macquart. Dezalay makes the interesting point that despite the programmatic character of Zola's creative method (to which we owe the dossiers), the final text often differs widely from the forecasted one, revealing a large margin of creative initiative in the execution. Many of the articles illustrate the same point. Colette Becker, for exampie, concludes that tout se joue au moment de l'ecriture qui metamorphose ce dont [Zola] se sert, [et] subvertit les projets qu'il a faits. But in thus deemphasizing Zola's rigorous method, and revalorizing the mystery of creation, one might say that these findings also inadvertently undermine the genetic approach itself. …