It was clear from the beginning of this massive publication venture (see FS, LXII (2008), 221) that, even at some 300 Euros for each volume, every academic library would have to invest in such an instrument de travail. In obviating the necessity of scholarly visits to Paris in order to scrutinize Zola's manuscripts, such an outlay might almost be seen as an institutional economy! For it has long been recognized that serious work on Les Rougon-Macquart is invariably enriched by recourse to the novelist's work-notes. And this is by no means limited to genetic studies, as historically conceived, of individual texts. For the notes can be read in their own right, rather than simply allowing us to track creative indirections and definitive fictional choices. This is borne out by much modern work on Zola, whether at the level of discourse, descriptive technique or (as in Olivier Lumbroso's recent explorations of drawings, floor-plans and location-maps) the graphic texture of the writer's imagination. In these perspectives, the dossiers constitute less an anticipatory than a complementary, and sometimes alternative, œuvre. The very size of the latter is indicative. The specific imperatives of a particular novel dictate the scope of the writer's preliminary work. Whereas La Débâcle, for example, is prefaced by a dossier of over 1200 pages, the contrasting lack of research needed for Une page d'amour allowed Zola to proceed to the drafting stage on the basis of a mere hundred. On the other hand, a short novel like Le Rêve has a more substantial set of work-notes than those for a number of texts almost twice as long. Such disproportions inevitably shape the organisation of this edition's successive volumes: the first contained the notes for the opening three novels of Les Rougon-Macquart; volume II accommodates those for La Conquête de Plassans, La Faute de l'abbé Mouret, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon and L'Assommoir; volume III covers Une page d'amour, Nana and Pot-Bouille; volume IV, the biggest to date, is devoted just to Au Bonheur des dames and La Joie de vivre. The editorial principles of facsimile and transcription remain consistent throughout, as admirable and as open to debate as when they were initially elaborated. It is only in volume IV, however, that the habitual brief avant-propos adumbrating these is overlaid, indeed replaced, by an extended essay (pp. 9–43) on Zola's drafting and corrective labours, from original manuscript to the proofs of both the serialised version of his texts and those for publication in volume-form. And these insights and reflections, on the part of Colette Becker herself, range far wider than the two novels it supposedly introduces. Whether in its references back to La Curée or forward to Germinal, this penetrating study both gives the lie to Zola's own declarations that ‘j’écris mes livres sans me recopier et sans trop de ratures' and yet sits somewhat oddly within an edition of work-notes rather than a comprehensively critical one making accessible all the textual variants of Les Rougon-Macquart themselves. That, of course, would be another research project of equally gigantic dimensions, but less urgent (one might argue) than a new Pléiade, updating Henri Mitterand's seminal edition of 1960–67. That is a minor cavil in the midst of a magnificent achievement of which Zola scholars have dreamt for decades. Mitterand and the late F.W.J. Hemmings once nostalgically recalled the pioneering excitement of handling the leather-bound green volumes of Zola's dossiers préparatoires in the Cabinet des Manuscrits of the old B.N. where they also first met. If those deciphering pleasures did not long survive the advent of microfilm, their scholarly successors now owe a phenomenal debt to Colette Becker and her team (and not forgetting the boldness of their publishers) for pushing on with this ambitious edition.
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May 4, 2023
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