Explosive Narratives: Terrorism and Anarchy in the Works of Émile Zola (review)

Eduardo Febles's study centrally discusses the nineteenth-century concepts of anarchy and entropy as they relate to plot development and description in Zola's Germinal, Paris and Travail, showing that before modernism, in these works "the depiction of the real was already threatened by dissolution into the fragmentary." His well-argued thesis builds on Uri Eisenzweig's crisis of representation, showing that the threat of anarchist violence breaks the narrative and strains description in naturalist texts. As the author puts it, in Zola anarchy "stands for the unthinkable" or the "uncompromising destruction of all social institutions." Its political message and any appeal for reform are lost, and as such it takes on the aspect of another nineteenth-century terror, entropy, the measure of disorder in the material world. Though this scientific concept was already associated to naturalism by David Baguley's Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (1990), Febles' contribution is to show that as the works grow less naturalist, they are more successful in conquering entropy, both in the machines they imagine and in their descriptive practices.

Chapter I, "Souvarine's Vanishing Act: The Effacement of Anarchy in Germinal" argues that Zola's text reproduces bourgeois attitudes toward anarchist workers, despite the novelist's presentation of the novel as a treatment of "the political question of the workers." Souvarine, Germinal's anarchist, only repeats slogans, without engaging with political theory, the defining trait of his characterization remaining his identification as a social type. In Febles's reading, this is associated to Zola's narrator lacking neutrality, and not being on the workers' side as one might expect. Instead, this voice makes the workers appear as "objects to be examined and studied" by espousing bourgeois tastes in the description of their milieu. The same prejudice is revealed by an analysis of the description of the strike, in which the critic shows that the narrator fails to achieve ironic distance. Febles demonstrates that the workers' revolt is presented as an inevitable and terror-inspiring cataclysm, an image which mirrors the entropic breakdown of their machines. Such ideas echo Jacques Noiray's work in Le Romancier et la machine, but here the focus is on the terror of entropy as "an upper class phantasm," decay being a limiting factor for industrial productivity. Fittingly, the destruction of the Voreux mine is read as a consequence of entropic decay, but Febles shows that Zola's description of the event is itself entropic in its accumulation of detail. The limits of naturalist description as replica of reality are revealed as the narrator finds the event "impossible to seize by a single point of view."

The second chapter, "Anarchy as Narrative Capital: the Emplotment of Terrorism in Paris" posits the third Ville novel as a suitable successor to Germinal both because Zola sees it as a discussion of the socialist movement, and because despite this, as in the earlier novel, anarchy is the central political issue. Febles argues that this focus, like the urban setting, which is more commonly addressed by critics, tests the "naturalist genre's capacity of assimilation." Pushing further than in Germinal, he argues that Zola's description of proletarian and bourgeois milieus reveals their inter-dependency: workers are anarchist as a consequence of the harsh labor practices they endure. From this point of view he finds that "anarchy infiltrates the book's political message without passing through the more didactic scenes of the novel." However, the workers' political aims are lost once again as Zola makes anarchy disappear under an image of violence, which marks all institutions and interactions in the fictional universe. Violence against the workers produces anarchist violence, which the government punishes through executions, which it claims will prevent future upheavals, but Febles shows this is, in fact, a distraction from its own wrongdoing. As he puts it, "hegemonic power recuperates anarchy . . . leaving only its violent potential." The author pursues his study at the narrative level, showing that not only do...