The Body in Question: Anatomy, Textuality, and Fetishism in Zola

The Body in Question: Anatomy, Textuality, and Fetishism in Zola Janet Beizer A nous de savoir quel anneau merveilleux confère . . . une pareille puissance, au doigt de quel maître il a été placé; quel jeu de pouvoir il permet ou suppose. Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir I F WE WERE TO COMPILE the multifarious anatomical theories of textual origin—ranging from those forming part of an implicit literary tradition to those explicitly promulgated in literature and criticism of the last decade—we could well produce a companion piece to Freud’s paper “ On the Sexual Theories of Children.” 1In answer to the question “ where do babies come from?” Freud, as we know, reports a series of juvenile hypotheses, and stresses that those formed prior to the knowledge of sexual difference are not gender specific. Responses to the question “ where do stories come from?,” however, apparently are predi­ cated upon sexual difference. Texts are either sired—and textual produc­ tion is described by metaphors of penetration, insemination, and dis­ semination—or they are given birth to, and their production is likened to gestation, labor, and delivery.2 In addition, the female paradigm con­ tinues, texts may be woven from a woman’s pubic hair, bled, lactated, or urinated into being. (This last, Theodore Reik explains, because women “ have a wider bladder.” 3 ) Thus theories of textuality, while scarcely less phantasmatic than infantile sexual theories, are distinguished by their gender specificity. Or so an overview would have it. What happens, however, when we choose a text, read a given metaphor contextually, explore its thematic, structural, narratological implications? Does the metaphor in the text remain constant—that is, gender specific? I will suggest that it does not, and that the problem of difference may be no better resolved in the textual domain than within the confines of infantile sexual theory. My text will be Zola’s Rougon-Macquart epic, and my metaphor, following Zola, the female body. Let me begin with a cautionary digression. Although I will focus here on female figures of generation, I want first to locate these figures within 50 S p r i n g 1989 B eizer the general narrative pattern. At roughly the same time Freud was grap­ pling with issues of bisexuality, Zola was using sexual figures to represent what we might call tendencies toward bitextuality: that is, fantasies of hermaphroditic authorship. We might think of his narrative discourse as divided into two categories—or, more pertinently, into two genres. This division is analogous to the Zolien dualism Flaubert was referring to when he remarked on the concatenation of realism and myth in Nana.4 What Flaubert names “ realism” is, of course, the dominant voice of Zola’s narrative: in brief, it is a pseudoscientific mimetic discourse whose insistence on representation has been traced (notably, by Aristotle, in the Poetics, and Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) to children’s attempts to master their environment through imitative play.5As D. A. Miller has argued in stronger terms, the practice of “ classical” novelistic representation, which “ assumes a fully panoptic view of the world it places under surveillance,” is in fact a reinvention of nineteenth-century policing power.6 Zola explicitly articulates this fantasy of control staged by the tech­ niques of realism. Both in the novels and in the theoretical texts, Zola’s master-voice speaks a language of conquest and mastery whose claims are plenipotentiary. “ Tout dire pour tout connaître, pour tout guérir,” proclaims Docteur Pascal, assimilating, by way of the verbs in his triple formula, Zola’s three preferred master-figures: the author, the scientist, and the doctor.7“ Tous nos efforts aboutissent au besoin de nous rendre maîtres de la vérité,” says Zola in Le Roman expérimental, speaking of the goal he ascribes to the naturalist novelists—a goal he alternatively describes as “ la conquête lente de cet inconnu qui nous entoure.” 8 I have thus far sketched a paradigm of discourse whose elements are realism, naturalism, observation, science, and mastery. Following Zola, who almost systematically affixed the adjective “ virile” to naturalist techniques, I will call this paradigm “ male” and begin to consider its counterpart. The...