Le Grand Transit moderne: Mobility, Modernity, and French Naturalist Fiction (review)

Le Grande Transit moderne is a stimulating study, one of the most original works on French Naturalism that I have read in a long time. The title of the volume refers to Zola's preparatory notes for La Bête humaine. In the author's words, "'Le grand transit moderne' is the late-nineteenth-century social body in movement. And the infrastructure is indeed perceived organically, as a body" (13). Larry Duffy maintains that French Naturalist fiction is the ideal ground to study how the technological changes which took place during the nineteenth century impacted the way in which individuals and societies perceived and conceptualized the world. The French transportation network, on which the developing capitalist system was based, appeared as a body, with Paris at its center. Commodities had to circulate freely and rapidly through the arteries of an increasingly complex network, and any minimal dysfunctions in the circulatory system had to be promptly removed. Bourgeois society, Duffy argues, perceived itself as immortal, self-sufficient and self-sustainable." In other words, it was based on an "anti-entropic vision" (33), which did not take into account the second law of thermodynamics, according to which "in a closed system with constant energy transfer, entropy will always increase, causing the system to degrade towards equilibrium" (221).

In a thought-provoking reading of Zola's La Bête humaine (one of the book's best chapters), the author assimilates the "entropic principle," which is ultimately responsible for the destruction of Lantier's machine, to the Freudian Death Instinct displayed by the protagonist. The thermodynamic and hereditary explanations reinforce each other, showing that bourgeois ideology refused to see its own economic system as essentially problematic, and blamed any dysfunctions on external, contingent agents.

A perfect example of an idealized system of late nineteenth century 'mobility' is the department store depicted in Au bonheur des dames, which Duffy explores in chapter three. Mouret's "creation" is a perfectly functioning machine in which, despite the superficial chaos that dominates it, there is no sign of profound dysfunctions. As Duffy observes, it "is in many respects a disorderly house (. . .) founded on order" (147). Throughout the text, Zola compares the store to a city, a machine and a battlefield, among other things. However, its labyrinthic structure, which seems to go on forever, in "ponts de fer, jetés sur le vide," the "escaliers suspendus" (146), brings to mind Piranesi's famous prisons. Indeed, one of the most striking paradoxes of the mobility brought about by capitalist modernization is the sense of imprisonment that human beings experience when they move "freely" through the modern network of transportation. Duffy could have explored in more depth the paradoxical connection between mobility and imprisonment – one of the implicit themes of chapter two, whose main focus is the "traffic jam," as represented in La Curée. Nevertheless, even in this case, the author does not fully exploit the text's suggestions for a reflection on (im)mobility and modernization. His observation on the impossibility of distinguishing, in the novel, between the outside world and the Parisian interiors inhabited by the two protagonists does not add any significant insight to what other critics already said about this extraordinary text. Duffy's reading of Zola's traffic jam reminded me of the opening scenes in Fellini's 8 ½, where the sense of suffocation caused by modern metropolitan traffic congestion is beautifully visualized. As the author remarks, "there is no 'natural' interaction or communication between individuals: they merely stare at each other." He adds: "Movement manages to alienate the individual from the environment, as well as from other individuals" (107). However, the reader is left to wonder about the complex dynamics of "movement" in capitalist societies, where a convulsive mobility ironically results in paralysis and imprisonment, as the image of the traffic jam exemplifies.

In his reading of Nana in chapter three the author discusses how the scientists, writers, and...