Lectures de Zola: 'La Fortune des Rougon' by d'Émilie Piton-Foucault, Henri Mitterand (review)

One way of measuring Zola's fortunes within the academy is to track those of his novels prescribed for the agrégation, starting with Germinal in 1952 (marking the half-century since his death) and followed, thirty-five years later, by La Curée. Overcoming their mild surprise that La Fortune des Rougon is a set text for 2015–16, publishers and specialists have not been slow to provide candidates with unprecedented illumination of this opening novel of the Rougon-Macquart series, in the shape of colloquia, special issues of journals, and bibliographical guides. This collective volume, however, signals a pedagogic context only in its ubiquitous referencing of the officially sanctioned 2007 Folio version of the text rather than David Baguley's more recent, and expensive, edition (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015; see French Studies, 70 (2016), 121–22). For its fourteen essays open up critical perspectives that are both original, in relation to a novel seldom read other than as the introductory frame of the series, and with implications for approaches to Zola's work as a whole. Corinne Saminadayar-Perrin, in highlighting Pierre Rougon's role as quasi-surrogate novelist, concludes that 'l'épopée burlesque des Rougoléon prouve la puissance intrinsèque de la fiction dans la fabrique de l'histoire' (p. 27). Françoise Gaillard overlays the exhumed corpses of Zola's Saint-Mittre on the 1786 relocation of those in the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents to detect behind the somewhat curious topography of La Fortune des Rougon the originating parricide of the French Revolution. Adeline Wrona offers a penetrating study of the role of the press within the novel, enhanced by cross references to Zola's own newspaper articles of 1869. Éléonore Reverzy's focus is that of the 'discours-image' (p. 65) of contemporary caricature, which informs the text's own 'ménagerie impériale' (the title of Paul Hadol's 1870 development of Grandville's famous template). Marie-Ange Fougère's essay demonstrates how dramatic irony works at the level of the characters' knowing smiles as well as that of author and reader endowed with the wisdom of historical hindsight. Grounded in a familiarity with socio-linguistic analyses of everyday speech, François-Marie Mourad's study of whispers, gossip, indistinct utterances, and telling silences argues that 'ce roman de la loquèle' (p. 91) is presciently modern. Véronique Cnockaert and Marie Scarpa look, respectively, at Silvère and Miette in the light of psychoanalytical and ethno-critical criteria. In the section of the volume devoted to mythical scenarios, Clélia Anfray's focus is that of Pyramus and Thisbe (as visible in Madeleine Férat as in the writer's domestic decorations), and Émilie Piton-Foucault adds Millais's Ophelia to Romeo and Juliet in the mirroring surfaces in which Zola's young lovers play out their tragic idyll. While Olivier Got details the symbolic value of spatial transgressions, his exploration of doors and thresholds can be juxtaposed with Philippe Hamon's brilliant consideration of the novel's incipit and the literal and metaphorical frames initiating the 'pacte de lecture générique' (p. 190). Sophie Guermès's equally incisive reflections on 'les caprices de la Fortune' (p. 199), in its emphasis on luck, chance, and accident, liberate Zola from deterministic cliché. And Patricia Carles and Béatrice Desgranges, in their characteristically two-handed piece, evoke the visual dynamics of theatrical loges and pictorial viewing to conjure up the spectral outlines of paintings far less well known than Delacroix's oft-cited La Liberté guidant le peuple. This intelligent collection of essays is not for agrégation hopefuls alone.