AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

2. Gender Indecision and Cultural Anxiety: Outing Zola

31 2 S Gender Indecision and Cultural Anxiety Outing Zola Do Zola’s novels have any scientific value at all?1 More specifically, can the theses propounded in Le roman expérimental give us any particular insight in our reading of La débâcle, Zola’s novelization of the French defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870? While Zola’s science remains largely dubious, his claims to cure social ills through the art of the novel do deserve attention for, among other things, the role of narratives in the production of a national identity. The point of this chapter , then, is not to determine whether Zola’s novels are scientifically valid, but rather to examine La débâcle in its performative aspect. What follows attempts to show how Zola’s text sways between the cultural (and textual) production of metaphors and the metaphorical production of culture (and the text), and specifically how disease metaphors are both ideological and generative.2 For Zola the disease metaphor, and specifically the metaphor of degeneration, or dégénérescence, is a generative one. Dégénérescence, a metaphorical construct supposed to signify (the fear of) the annihilation of the great bourgeois narrative , becomes in fact the source of the author’s narrative. Indeed, in Zola’s text degeneration is generation. La débâcle articulates itself along the underlying pathological figure of the “homosexual” and, in that respect, the novel exemplifies universalist ideals. Yet Zola does not and cannot adhere unequivocally to his ideological framework. Ultimately, the text confers a large degree of narrative au- thority upon a degenerate character, destabilizing both the scientific discourse supposed to authenticate the literary discourse and the healthy/unhealthy dichotomy in which such a discourse attempts to ground and naturalize its hegemonic claims. In so doing, Zola unwittingly reveals the metaphorical nature of a certain medical discourse that was on its way to acquiring an increased structural role in French society during the second half of the nineteenth century. Theory and Practice of the Experimental Novel At first glance, La débâcle appears to fit perfectly with the project of Le roman exp érimental. Literary and scientific discourses seem to match even in the structure of the book as a whole. Critics have noted how Zola’s focus, like that of a microscope, narrows itself from the large to the small, from France to the French, from the emperor to the foot soldier.3 Such a narrative movement corresponds to that of biomedical science: Zola seeks the causes of a national catastrophe in the individuals who make up the nation, just as medicine looks for the microscopic agents of a larger pathology. In addition, the discourse of dégénérescence , so influential on Zola’s work, reads the individual as signifier for the entire species, thus legitimating further the novelist’s narrative strategy. The collapse of the community is almost entirely told in and by the individual pathological characters used simultaneously as metaphors and synecdoches. With La débâcle, Zola was nearing the end of the twenty-volume RougonMacquart cycle, in which he told of life under the Second Empire through the history of a family. In this penultimate novel, Zola follows two main characters, two soldiers, from the last days of the Franco-Prussian War to the Paris Commune . Jean Macquart is the simple carpenter turned peasant, already introduced in an earlier novel, La terre, and Maurice Levasseur is a deracinated and psychologically weaker city-dweller. The two men soon become friends before being repeatedly separated and reunited during the chaotic aftermath of the defeat . Eventually, Maurice sides with the Communards, and as French troops enter Paris to crush the uprising Jean, still a soldier in the regular army, kills him without realizing who it was at first. Around the double nucleus of Jean and Maurice, representing the fracture of the national community, circulates an ensemble of secondary characters, equally symbolic of various social ills and their potential cures. To describe the men in Jean’s squad, Zola uses a language of truth, that of physiological descriptions. Empirical observations and the neutral 32 S Gender Indecision and Cultural Anxiety language that transcribes them uncover the deeper truth of the object being observed , that is, a moral pathology which never fails to leave its marks on the body. Tropes are not adornments but rather tools for a better...