La Bete Humaine Research Articles

Forging the Passage In and Out: Zola and Deleuze on the Edge of the World

By adopting an experimental approach to observe his society in mutation, Zola seeks to conceptualize the status of ＂homme modern＂ by enquiring into an inner motive (milieu interieur) that puts into question critical analysis. This inner motive involves an alterity in the dynamic construction of modern subjectivity. We take La Bete humaine as an example by which to approach Zola's concept of an inner motive, and we enquire into the notion of ＂limit＂ in Deleuze's interpretation of Zola. In his preface entitled ＂Zola et la felure＂ (Logique 373), which is dedicated to Zola's La Bete humaine, Deleuze explains that the term ＂instinct＂ actually refers to the immobility that perpetuates a given way of life, or a given mode of being that combines desire, life, labor and language. Deleuze then describes the fracture of modernity as a ＂cerebral void＂ that functions as a transmitter between the modes of seeing and speaking. We consider how Deleuze's reading alters our understanding of Zola's view of modern man in the 19th century in regard to his ethical relation with himself and with others. We argue that for Zola, the fracture is actually a passage leading to force in the matter (la puissance dans la matiere), which is the very structuring force of Life. This fracture should be conceived more in terms of a limit, in which modern man is pushed to confront the alterity (or unknown nature) within himself.

The Legacy of the Beast: Patrilinearity and Rupture in Zola's La Bete humaine and Freud's Totem and Taboo

This article explores the legacy of primitive violence evoked by Zola and Freud in La Bete humaine (1890) and Totem and Taboo (1913) respectively, and attempts to show how Zola's and Freud's use of a paradigm of primitive aggression might be ideologically complicit with a violent inclination in their contemporaneous societies. This issue will be considered in its relations with the notions of patrilinearity and rupture, concepts which are integral to both texts, and which, it shall be argued, constitute in some sense the essence of patriarchy. Reading both writers through the prism of Deleuze's theory, patrilinearity itself will begin to appear as a series of ruptures rather than a continuous genealogy, a history of struggle which both perpetuates and conceals the dominance of violence. The ambivalence of Freud's and Zola's rendering of that violence will ultimately appear as an ethical challenge to the reader.

Cavemen Among Us: Genealogies of Atavism from Zola's La Bete humaine to Chabrol's Le Boucher

Although critics have rightly linked Claude Chabrol's film Le Boucher (1969) to Zola's novel La Bete humaine (1890), the two have yet to be considered in the context of the century-long tradition of thought about atavism that informs them both. This article reconstructs that tradition, examining how Le Boucher's modern-day caveman suggests twentieth-century cultural continuities with nineteenth-century notions of man's relation to his evolutionary forebears. Noting Le Boucher's debt to a Freudian conception of atavism — a conception heavily influenced by the very same scientific paradigm that shaped Zola's fascination with man's prehistoric self — I argue that Chabrol's film revives a nineteenth-century European anxiety of proximity whereby technological and scientific advances prompted unease about ever closer contact with the distant reaches of humanity. Chabrol achieves this by building on Zola's protocinematic vision, refracting it through a Freudian lens in which atavism and the cinema occupy common psychological space, and updating the thematics of atavism for a twentieth century chastised by the colonial experiment.

Flower Poetics in the Works of Gustave Flaubert by Gustave Flaubert , Paul Andrew Tipper (review)

252 Reviews his treatment of Un debut dans la vie. It was Balzac who warned that the arrival of the locomotive would threaten many traditional businesses, 'et surtout celles qui concernent les differentsmodes de transport en usage pour les environs de Paris' (La Comedie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976-81), 1, 731). This threat was yet to materialize in the 1820s and 1830s, however, when the fictional Pierrotin rises from being a simple driver to become the owner of a stagecoach company. Ostensibly his success can be attributed to the acquisition of a faster coach. What underpins this achievement, though, is his willingness to protect another instrument of communication, a sales contract with which the shrewd comte de Serisy hopes to purchase a piece of farmland. The re? maining chapters explore the role of the English thoroughbred horse and the optical telegraph in Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen, and the skill for overland and water travel displayed by Edmond Dantes, in Le Comte de Monte-Christo. The concluding sec? tion steams onwards to the depiction of railway travel in Zola's La Bete humaine, in which the speed of a train so disturbs the character Jacques Lantier that he is left to wonder whether the murder he witnesses from outside the onrushing carriages is real or imaginary. A short bibliography and index complete a volume that is cogently argued and well presented throughout, despite a slight imbalance of material created by Bell's obvious, and perhaps unavoidable, affection for the Balzacian texts. The technical background has also been carefully researched, furtherenhancing the value of a book that both private scholars and university libraries will wish to acquire. University of Bristol Andrew Watts Flower Poetics in the Works of Gustave Flaubert. By Paul Andrew Tipper. (Stu? dies in French Literature, 63) Lampeter, Lewiston, NY, and Queenston, Ont.: Mellen. 2003. vi + 37ipp. ?74.95; $119.95. ISBN 0-7734-6728-9. In this patient work Paul Tipper brings together his knowledge of nineteenth-century flower lore, his love of Flaubert's stylistic artistry,and his familiarity with Flaubert scholarship ofthe past century,reachingback to Demorest's 1931 L'Expression figuree et symbolique dans I'oeuvre de Flaubert, to analyse chronologically Flaubert's use of floral imagery in his prose fiction. He begins with the youthful writing and takes us through Bouvard et Pecuchet, lingering longest with Madame Bovary. The method of his study is partly a quantitative taxonomy and partly a qualitative evaluation. Quantitatively, Tipper counts the number of flower references in each work, calculates a per-page average, considers whether the flowers are generic or typed, what the significant variables are, such as the flowers' colour, scent, season, and finally,whether the flowers' references are literal, figurative,artificial,or fantasized. Their absence in certain parts of a text is considered to be as motivated as their presence in other parts. In all of the works that he studies, Tipper counts an aggregate of six hundred flower references and ninety types of flowers,with roses and violets being the most frequent types, and red and blue the most frequent floral colours. The qualitative aspect of Tipper's method concerns the contexts of the floral im? agery. In close readings, he evaluates flowerimagery's contribution to the construction of character, to the meta-commentary on character, to the thematic dialectic of the work, and hence to its philosophical coherence. Where helpful or merely pleasurable, Tipper includes forthe reader the extra-textual, conventional connotations of various flowers as documented in flower-language dictionaries popular in Flaubert's time. The chronological approach enables Tipper to trace in Flaubert's writing craftever greater use of flower references over time and an increasingly large repertory of kinds of flower. In addition he finds increasingly private over conventional connotations MLR, 101.1, 2006 253 given to the flowers, and for increasingly ironic and deflationary as opposed to senti? mental, romantic purposes. While itis a well-known feature of Flaubert's writing style that authorial voice gives way to the language of objects, and that Flaubert uses these objects both mimetically, to produce the effectofthe real, and symbolically, to provide...

The Birth of the Beast: Death-Driven Masculinity in Monneret, Zola and Freud

"The Birth of the Beast: Death-Driven Masculinity in Monneret, Zola and Freud." Dix-Neuf, 5(1), pp. 28–46

The Dilemma of Naturalistic Tragedy: Strindberg's Miss Julie

Until the time of Strindberg in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the dilemma of tragedy had been shaped by the divided heritage of the neoclassical view of Greek tragedy, on the one hand, and on the other, by its Elizabethan past in the open Shakespearean form of tragedy. The question whether it was possible for a modern dramatist to write tragedy had been debated at length, especially by Lessing and the Romantics who advocated new forms freed from the tyranny of the past. When Strindberg had finished Miss Julie in the first week of August 1888, he promptly mailed it to his publisher, to whom he presented the contents of his play as a modern psychological drama and defined its form as a tragedy that fulfilled the ideals of the classical tradition: this I take the liberty to offer the first Naturalistic Tragedy in Swedish Drama, and I ask you not to refuse it rashly so that you may regret it later, for ... this play will be recorded in the annals. (1) The play was refused, but his prophecy proved to be true. Its plot, a count's daughter who goes to bed with her servant and then commits suicide, is a banal story of the woman from nobility and the man from the people. The kitchen below, the place for Jean and Julie's meeting, is connected to the servants' sleeping quarters but with no access to the rooms above where the count and his daughter, Lady Julie, live in the stately manor house. The dialectic of class conflict is built into the set, a kitchen with its only exit opening onto the feudal park with its Cupid fountain and Lombardy poplars. The only connecting link between the classes is through a big old-fashioned bell and speaking tube by which the orders of the master are communicated to their servants. Even the giving of the French name, Jean (originally Johan), originates from above, and at one heated point Julie even asks: What is your name? I've never heard how you are addressed. (2) Her taunting but revealing remarks lay bare the subtext of class in their power struggle. The intoxication of the Midsummer night, the music, and dance are the treacherous means that unite the two worlds during the fleeting hours from evening to morning, but this only underscores the tragic impossibility of the two doomed lovers. In the play's preface, an important document in theater history that defines the aesthetic precepts of naturalism from the perspective of the theatrical staging, Strindberg attempts to position Miss Julie in the avant-garde of Emile Zola's movement and to counter his earlier criticism of The Father as a naturalistic tragedy. (3) The drawing of modern characters and their representation on the stage are set within the context of contemporary science, which is seen as the key to replacing the study of abstract, metaphysical man by the study of natural man, subject to physiochemical laws and determined by the effects of his milieu. La bete humaine as the helpless victim of heredity, social and animal instinct, locked in a battle of life and death, is discussed from the perspective of scientific causality as the only means to grasp the multiplicity of physical and psychic events that determine his psychological characterization: As modern characters, living in a time of transition, more hectic and hysterical than the preceding period at any rate, I have drawn my characters vacillating, disintegrated, a blend of old and new.... My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, pieces of human beings, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together like the human soul. By absorbing this plural viewpoint of the human consciousness as splintered in a multiplicity of complexes, Strindberg also rejects classical humanism's view of man as a unity of self in its health and validity. This is a radically modern conception of character in conflict with that of classical tragedy, in which the dramatist had affirmed his belief in human dignity and worth, giving the hero the opportunity to exert his free will, make a moral choice, and thus gain redemption. …

The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530-1880 (review)

Mweze Ngangura’s Pieces d’identite (Congo/Belgium, 1998), whereas Sheila Petty teases out the relationship landscape and alienation in Clando (Cameroon, 1996) by Jean-Marie Teno. Other essays include articles on Montaigne’s Essais (Colin Dixon), Aristotle and Renaissance travel narratives (Todd Reeser), Le sopha by Crebillion Fils (Sharon Diane Nell), La bete humaine by Zola (Michael Lastinger) La petite Fadette by George Sand (James Hamilton), the writer as nomad in Le Clezio’s works (Isa Van Acker), a well-argued essay on Merimee’s Carmen (David Ellison), and a thorough exploration of Perec’s urban Parisian geography by Derek Schilling. Jacqueline Dutton documents representations of Australia in French texts and Thomas Vauterin on the representation of the forest in French-Canadian novels of the 1930s; Annie Jouan-Westlund analyzes Doubrovsky’s writings as a Frenchman living in the US, while Claire Keith examines a French textbook’s use of cartographic imagery to teach primary school children language and literature.

The Sex of Science: Medicine, Naturalism, and Feminism in Lucie Delarue-Mardrus's Marie, fille-mere

Throughout the late nineteenth century in France, intellectuals from a variety of disciplines took part in what Foucault has referred to as la mise en discours du sexe--the process by which writers, doctors and scientists sought to discern the truth of sexuality. (1) Women constituted a privileged object of analysis in this scientific discourse of sex--Foucault's scientia sexualis--written largely by and for men. (2) Even as a growing feminist movement emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century and educational reforms made it possible for women to pursue professional degrees for the first time, female voices remained virtually excluded from scientific fields. (3) The science of sex and its moral implications were determined almost entirely by men. In what follows I would like to consider Lucie Delarue-Mardrus's Marie, fille-mere (1908) as the exception that proves the rule regarding the gendering of the scientific discourse of sex at the turn of the nineteenth century, Fiction-writing was among the most accessible discursive domains open to women during this period, although few women writers are linked to the dominant literary movements of the time. With her remarkable first novel, Delarue-Mardrus takes the unusual step of adopting the male-authorized, positivistic tropes of naturalism in order to construct a female counter-discourse of sexuality. Delarue-Mardrue's novel constitutes a counter-discourse in the sense that Richard Terdiman uses this term: as an adoption of the dominant discourse in order to gain power over it. Her novel is both a rewriting of Zola's La Bete humaine from a female perspective--that is, a naturalist novel ultimately determined by the forces of female sexual desire--and a feminist science of sex. (4) Delarue-Mardrus first entered literary circles with the aid of her husband, Joseph-Charles Mardrus, who was known for having translated 1001 Arabian Nights into French. She began publishing poetry in the Revue Blanche, a radical journal that included Leon Blum and Alfred Jarry as contributing editors, and in which Mirbeau published his Journal d'une femme de chambre. Her first collections of poetry enjoyed only a limited success, despite her connections to Renee Vivien, Colette, Anna de Noailles, and Jean Lorrain. Delarue-Mardrus was far more successful in her fiction writing, and by 1914 was one of the most highly paid and highly sought after female novelists. By the time of her death at age seventy-one she had published twelve collections of poetry and over forty novels, two of which were adapted for film. Marie, fille-mere first appeared in serial form in Le Journal in 1908, and despite rather poor critical reception (Apollinaire and Rachilde accused her of trying to imitate Charles-Henry Hirsch's pastoral fiction) enjoyed great popular success, especially with female readers. (5) Unfortunately, Delarue-Mardrus's originality has eluded modern critics, and current recognition of her work has been almost entirely limited to anthological mention rather than scholarly analysis. (6) Marie, fille-mere recounts how the life of seventeen-year-old Marie, une fille des campagnes normandes, nee de paysans assez pauvres, is disrupted by her brutal sexual initiation at the hands of a rich neighbor, le fils Budin (10). The novel is in some sense a sexual coming of age story, tracing Marie's life from before her first sexual encounter and the initial awakening of her libido, through her rape, pregnancy, marriage, eventual discovery of sexual pleasure, and the sexual rivalry that leads to her death. Although naturalism as a literary movement had fallen out of use by the time of Delarue-Mardrus's writing, links to it and to Zola's corpus in particular are evident throughout her text, from her depiction of the peasant class to her attention to dialect. In addition, Marie is thought to be based on Delarue-Mardrus's childhood maid, suggesting a relationship with another naturalist text, the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux, also modeled upon a family servant. …

Writing the Train: Imperial Visions, Masculinity and Nationalism in the Work of French writers in the Last Third of the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the responses of the Medan group of French writers – adherents to the aesthetics of the naturalist novel centered around Gustave Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Guyde Maupassant, and Emile Zola – to railway construction as a component of the project of nationalism. Existing scholarship, and Eugen Weber in particular, have emphasized how the French educated elite welcomed the creation of a united railway network, considering it essential for the spread of Republican and modern values. However, in defining railway construction as a Republican project, the intellectuals had to compete with the legacy of the Second Empire, which itself had sought to turn the modernization of transport into a sacred symbol of its civilizing mission. Because of the attachment of imperial symbolism to the railway, Flaubert, Goncourt, Maupassant and Zola doubted the benefits of railroads as the agent of civilizing mission. In his Labete humaine (1890), which portrays the life of railway station employees in Le Havre during the late 1860s, Zola underlined that economic modernization and fast transportation did not succeed in disseminating refined culture and civility among the French. The positive aspects of modern technology had failed to compete with the corruption of morality provoked by the politicians of the Second Empire. These same authors, however, recognized that detailed knowledge of modern technological phenomena would become the essence of a modern masculinity, and redefined an emotional attachment to the symbols of this technology (including the railway) as a part of the subjectivities of the modern Frenchman.

Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives

Part 1 Poetics: the nature of naturalism, David Baguley the naturalist text and the problem of reference, Philippe Hamon towards an aesthetic of the naturalist novel, Yves Chevrel the genesis of novelistic space: Zola's La Bete Humaine, Henri Mitterand writing history as temporality: Zola's Rougon-Macquart, James H. Reid. Part 2 Reception: the reception of naturalism in Germany, Joseph Jurt the reception of naturalism in Spain, Eamonn Rodgers Emilio Pardo Bazan - narrative strategies and the critique of naturalism, Maurice Hemingway naturalism and anti-naturalism in Italy, Jonathan Smith representing the real - the English debate about naturalism 1884-1900, Lyn Pykett. Part 3 Texts: on monstrous birth - Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta, Noel Valis in the factory - description in Galdos, Peter A. Bly Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks - the first and only naturalist novel in Germany, Lilian Furst James's lady and Zola's whore - the inscription of the heroine in the text in The Portrait of a Lady and Nana, Valerie Minogue.