Abstracts

Voisin-Fougère, Marie-Ange. L'Ironie naturaliste: Zola et les paradoxes du sérieux. Paris: Honoré Champion Editeur, 2001. Pp. 274. ISBN: 2-7453-0378-3

In this brilliant, informative, fiercely scholarly study, Marie-Ange Voisin-Fougère treats systematically, comprehensively, and with considerable insight a side of Zola that has, heretofore, been relatively neglected: his ironic, satirical side. In Part I, in answer to the question "M. Zola, aimait-il rire?" she reminds those of us who may still tend to exaggerate his melancholic traits or serious naturalistic qualities that indeed he did. She catalogues and analyzes the different kinds of "joies zoliennes," including, among others, not only "le rire du satiriste," but also "la vieille gaieté française."

Turning in Parts II and III from the man to his fictional works, she focuses on the multiple specific forms of "ironic distance," that she has observed in Les Rougon-Macquart, especially those novels that lend themselves most readily to her chief concerns. (These include La Curée, La Conquête de Plassans, Nana, Pot-Bouille, Une Page d'amour, L'Argent, and La Débâcle.) In the process, she identifies and illustrates with many interesting examples the characteristic traits of Zola's satirical irony - e.g., his infrequent use of antiphrasis, one of the most common ironical devices; or his eloquent employment of ironic silences. She confirms what most of us would sus-pect: that his satire is aimed primarily at the immorality of Second Empire society. She also shows us to what a great extent "la métaphore théatrale constitue, dans l'arsenal satirique de Zola, une arme de choix dès que la bataille s'engage sur le terrain de la morale" (191).

She must be commended, moreover, for her succinct definition of Zola's essential irony; i.e., what she refers to as "l'ironie naturaliste" (11) or "l'ironie réaliste' (257). This consists, as she puts it, "à utiliser comme masque, c'est-à-dire à titre d'élément inessentiel, la transparence de l'énoncé, qui est pourtant l'un des fondements mêmes de la théorie naturaliste" (11).

I wish that she could at least have alerted us in this book to the existence of the many other-than-satirical ways in which the Rougon-Macquart novels manifest this fundamental Zolian irony. I have in mind all those things in the series which, in addition to satire, are, ironically, the reverse of what Zola's best known theories and superficial stylistic traits lead us to expect. Behind Zola's naturalist mask, we discover not only the predominantly satirical Zola she dissects, but all the other Zolas that "Le Roman expérimental" would seem to ban from the naturalist novel. I hope that she will go on to help her generation rediscover, as it seems each generation must, these other non-naturalistic or supra-naturalistic Zolas - the poet, the philosopher, the prophet, the master of ambiguity, the protean Zola who could write, as in Germinal, novels whose messages lend themselves to multiple clashing, yet equally possible, glosses. Meanwhile, she has written what should long be the definitive presentation of those aspects of Zola's irony that this term perhaps most readily evokes.