Zola et la littérature naturaliste en parodies (review)

This book deals with two distinct corpuses, and adopts two lines of study: on the one hand, the author collects and examines expressly parodic responses to Naturalism and the writing of Zola; on the other, she attempts to uncover an “autoparodic” dimension in a variety of later Naturalist texts, including works by Hennique, Huysmans, Bonnetain and Mirbeau.

The first approach will be of significant interest not only to Zola scholars, but also to those interested in the literary and journalistic culture of the fin-de-siècle more broadly. Parody, as Dousteyssier-Khoze makes clear, was a powerful and ubiquitous genre in the period, and a consideration of parodic responses to any individual work can yield invaluable insights into the status and reputation that the work enjoyed, in addition to the inherent interest of parodies as expressions of a particular humoristic and literary-critical tradition. After a somewhat fastidious, though doubtless necessary, historical account of theories of parody, this book brings together numerous parodic texts (plays, novels, stories, and fragments), a number of which are included in a useful appendix (some may indeed already be peripherally familiar to specialists), and attempts a serious and theoretically-informed interrogation of these typically neglected or trivialized works. The constant aim of this section of the book is to bring out the implications of such documents for contemporary readers’ – and our own – understanding of the “genericity” of Naturalism. At issue is the ability of even the least perspicacious parody to disrupt the scientific and mimetic pretensions of Naturalism as a dominant literary æsthetic, by identifying and aping the concrete textual procedures whereby those pretensions were indulged. Such an exposé is crucial, not least because it reminds modern-day critics once more that the flaws, blind-spots and aporias in Zola’s own theories (and, equally, in the trends of nineteenth-century thought upon which he drew so heavily) have not quite been “discovered” by the heroism of contemporary criticism, but had already been denounced in the nineteenth century by various resistant discourses, parody amongst them.

The book’s second thread, concerning autoparody, is more tendentious. Most successful is the section dealing with mises en abyme, where important ideas are raised concerning the thematization of the Naturalist author and his method in ostensibly Naturalist fiction. Dousteyssier-Khoze rightly emphasizes that this is a highly un-Zolian and, ultimately, un-Naturalist practice (since the discourse of the Naturalist author is assumed to possess a kind of fabulous metalinguistic exteriority), and suggests that such a procedure necessarily troubles the distinction between what is and is not a “Naturalist text”; indeed, her analysis hints tantalizingly at a greater continuity between Naturalism and its ultimate “other,” Decadence, than has previously been appreciated. To take an extreme example, not cited by Dousteyssier-Khoze, we might wonder how we are to understand the assertion by the narrator of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that Lord Henry Wotton “had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science,” and “had ended by vivisecting others” since “human life . . . appeared to him the one thing worth investigating” (ch. 4). Is this obvious reference to Naturalism parodic? What tells us that it is so, beyond the fact that it appears in a novel aligned with Decadence, and thus in a literary-historical sense opposed to the work of Zola? These ambiguities are fruitfully explored by Dousteyssier-Khoze, especially in reference to Huysmans and J.-H. Rosny, whose eventual prise de position against Naturalism neither erased their debt to it, nor ended their involvement with its literary techniques.

Less successful is a section in which Dousteyssier-Khoze sets out to illustrate how the excesses that have previously been attributed to a decline in the quality of “second-generation” Naturalist writing may in fact have been the result of a (conscious or unconscious) parodic impulse animating texts such as Bonnetain’s Charlot s’amuse and (then-Naturalist) Huysmans’s À vau l’eau (both 1883). The author...