Zola autodidacte: genèse des œuvres et apprentissages de l’écrivain en régime naturaliste by Olivier Lumbroso (review)

Since the defence of his first thesis in 2001, Olivier Lumbroso, now in post at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, has emerged as one of the leading lights among a new generation of Zola scholars who have built on the work of those French critics who did so much to construct the field in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Anglophone readers will be particularly conscious of his subsequent volume, Zola: la plume et le compas. La construction de l’espace dans ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’ d’Émile Zola (Paris: Champion, 2004). This new book revisits the cliché of Zola as the autodidact who failed the baccalauréat, and Lumbroso hereby maps out Zola’s career afresh as a perpetual ‘dépassement de soi’ (p. 69) through patterns of formal and generic reinvention often understood in terms of ‘négation’ and ‘transgression’ (p. 400). Making considerable use of Zola’s correspondence and the contemporary reception of his fiction, as well as of his manuscripts (some still unpublished), Lumbroso charts ‘une génétique culturelle du cycle […] selon la logique des autodéveloppements poétiques de l’écrivain’ (p. 42) that speaks both to and beyond the major tradition of Zolian genetic criticism. What emerges from this rereading of Zola’s manuscripts is the development of a metalanguage, which is seen to craft Zola’s own fiction-making. In a persistent and perverse project to ‘se confronter à ce qui nous résiste’ (p. 399), Zola’s dispositio moves from the ‘en travail’ of rhetoric to the ‘au travail’ of poetics in the second and third chapters of this study. These are framed by a first chapter that characterizes the 1858–67 period as one of ‘apprentissage, rupture et libération’, and a fourth that brings into focus the necessarily reflexive figuration of the artist within the fictions’ protagonistic fantasies of ‘le taxonomiste logicien’, ‘l’illusioniste magicien’, and ‘le visionnaire délirant’. Furthermore, if one were to see in that most evocative of modern anglophone critical terms, namely ‘self-fashioning’, a synonym for the contemporary Littré definition of autodidaxie as ‘[a]ction d’apprendre sans maître’ (Dictionnaire de la langue française, 2nd edn (1873)), the potential for such scholarship would become yet more compelling. Lumbroso’s is a volume to which future Zola scholars will insistently and fruitfully return.