La Fabrique des 'Rougon-Macquart' : Édition des dossiers préparatoires (review)

In Zola studies, at least, recourse to intentionality (whether fallacious or not) has survived the entire critical renewal of the post-war period. Indeed, as Guy Robert's 1952 study of the genesis of La Terre was arguably of seminal importance in the modern reassessment of the writer, access to the preparatory notes for all the Rougon Macquart has continued to enrich our understanding of Zola's achievements as a novelist. Nor has this been limited to the kind of historical scholarship undertaken in Robert's footsteps which has resulted in genetic studies of virtually every major text in the series, often enhancing the apparatus which made Henri Mitterand's Pléiade edition (1960-66) such an invaluable instrument de travail. Mitterand's later Carnets d'enquête: Une ethnographie de la France (1986), for example and as his title suggests, offered readers of Zola's notebooks a set of potential interdisciplinary perspectives rather than merely further illuminations of the writer's habits of composition. Colette Becker has devoted to the latter a significant part of her career, and it is thus not by chance that the author of La Fabrique de 'Germinal' (1986) should be responsible for the monumental project of publishing the dossiers préparatoires as a whole. This first volume contains those for La Fortune des Rougon, La Curée and Le Ventre de Paris, providing transcription opposite facsimile reproduction of Zola's manuscript pages. It would be difficult to do justice to the labours this has entailed, the deciphering challenges overcome and the integrity which never substitutes for the genuinely illisible more than a question-mark. There has been virtually no attempt to annotate this primary material, nor to exploit research which has established the internal chronology of the dossiers. They are reproduced here in the disorder of the original BN binding ('la pagination n'est ni zolienne ni génétique' (p. 9 )), including blank feuillets, abandoned drafts au verso, Zola's own scribbled calculations and drawings, press-cuttings and prints, and even notes which have migrated from other dossiers or are written in other helping hands. All the real work, it is claimed, remains to be done: 'au lecteur de s'essayer a' rétablir la gene' se des oeuvres' (p. 9 ). That task, specialists will be tempted to interpose, would be facilitated by more systematic footnoting and less arbitrary bibliographical referencing, not least in respect of accommodating the work that has been done. Zola scholars will also find numerous points of detail at odds with their own earlier scrutiny of the writer's notes and will quibble that it is misleading to equate his preliminary reading-lists (many of the items in which were left unread) with what are listed here as 'sources écrites'. That does not alter the fact that, when this massive edition is finally complete, we will have in accessible form a quite exceptional corpus of material, obviating the pleasures of the Cabinet des Manuscrits and the pain of microfilm-readers. It comes at an equally exceptional price. Every library should invest in it.