Zola, The Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (review)

Susan Harrow’s elegant and erudite study represents a daring departure from traditional readings of Zola’s work. In this initially surprising book Harrow breaks with traditional conceptions of Zola-as-Naturalist and instead offers an illuminating account of Zola as a proto-modern, even postmodern, writer. Her analysis, which is grounded in a scrupulously detailed reading of non-erotic corporeality in the Rougon-Macquart, eschews engagement with all but the most canonical examples of Zola scholarship — thus emphasizing the extent of her conceptual leap — in favour of a strategy of reading that privileges the insights of postmodern critics like Barthes, de Certeau, and Deleuze. The resulting redefinition of Zola is as beguiling and engaging as the prose in which it is written. Zola’s enthusiasm for modernity is well known. Where Harrow’s study becomes agenda-setting is in her insistence that Zola’s writing exhibits ‘the practice of literary modernism’ (p. 5) which critics thus far have refused to identify in the Rougon-Macquart novels. In Parts 1 and 2 Harrow engages in a series of close readings, entwined with deft theoretical insights, to show that the Zolian text possesses the multivalency of the Barthesian texte scriptible. Persuasive analyses of the intermeshing of metaphor and subjectivity, the prevalence and function of visualization, and the form and uses of self-reflexivity in the novels are the most successful aspect of the work, not only demonstrating a rare ability to select the most apt examples from a vast corpus, but also revealing a side to Zola not hitherto exposed. Harrow’s enthusiasm for the postmodern, most in evidence in these parts, is reflected in her penchant for lists and bullet points, her playful approach to language, and, above all, the inventive way she finds evidence of post-modernism’s fascination with ‘enfolded writing, elision, transformation, and the metafictional “troubling” of transparency’ (p. 140) in the Zolian text. In Part 3 her love of wordplay both encourages and explains the apparently unmotivated shift from analysis of the body of representation to the representation of the body. While undoubtedly providing a significant rereading of the Zolian corpus, this part feels at times tangential to the concerns so eloquently voiced in Parts 1 and 2. Through more close reading, Harrow argues that ‘Zola’s pluralist visualization of the social body’ (p. 149) demonstrates a recurrent and unresolved tension between the individual and society that manifests itself in scenes where the body is placed under pressure. This part enacts its own postmodern reversal of hierarchies by showing how the mundane bodies of workers in La Terre, Germinal, Le Ventre de Paris, Au bonheur des dames, L’Assommoir, and La Débâcle, bodies traditionally neglected by readers and critics, are in fact central to the modernist Zolian project throughout their unresolved and unresolvable relationship to discourse. In a sometimes defensive Conclusion, Harrow carefully distances herself from the strand of Zola criticism concerned with the erotic body, and it is perhaps this omission that undermines the cohesiveness of the book’s third part. Nonetheless, this is a genuinely ground-breaking study that promises to trigger a seismic shift in the way Zola is read.