The Journalist in the French Fin-de-siècle Novel: Enfants de la presse by Kate Rees (review)

Proposing as its fundamental objective an "interrogation of what 'literature' itself might mean" (7), this study examines fictional works from 1871 to 1914 that depict the changing role of the press in French culture and society, while highlighting the ways in which literary writing of this period both influences news reporting and ultimately is transformed by the rise of journalism. Tracing the figure of the reporter, as well as storylines, narrative voices, organizational strategies, and writing styles in these romans de journalisme (many by writers previously employed as reporters), Rees shows that novels and newspapers often come to adopt each other's practices and perspectives, which frequently results in a blend of fact and fiction, real and representation. For example, although Maupassant's Bel-Ami seems initially to underscore the adversarial relationship between literature and the press, it eventually draws attention instead to the many similarities these genres share, especially with regard to the manner in which they collect information and recount events. For Rees, the sham duel in Bel-Ami epitomizes this clichéd illusion of conflict between literature and journalism. The evolution of Zola's attitudes toward the press emerges clearly in a comparison of his early novel, La fortune des Rougon-Macquart, to one of his last books, Vérité. Whereas the former incorporates a Naturalist style more aligned with the patterns of journalistic writing, Vérité depicts written accounts as increasingly unreliable and finds greater truth and knowledge in oral forms of communication, even though, paradoxically, it features a number of stylistic elements of the very newspaper reporting that it critiques. The difficulty in distinguishing journalism from literature is also reflected in the development of detective fiction, where characters imitate the process of news reporting. This genre blurs differences between real-life, heroic reporters who outsmart police officers and characters who accomplish similarly noble feats in fiction. Shifting focus, Rees investigates the role of sensory perception in novels and newspapers, analyzing fictional texts such as Verne's Michel Strogoff, where reporters depend almost exclusively on vision and hearing to gather and confirm knowledge. Mirroring the burgeoning field of psychology, these literary works call into question the dominance of sight and sound in media accounts, thereby suggesting the need for a more comprehensive "multi-sensorial approach" (102) in both journalism and literature. Rees also explores the phenomenon of female journalists in fiction whose career conundrums exemplify the difficulties of working women at the time and, with the exception of Madeleine Forestier in Bel-Ami, showcase the limited professional and personal options available to women. Rees concludes her study with an analysis of a short story by Verne that envisions, in a satirical vein, communication methods in 2889 that resonate eerily with the world today. From our current vantage point in the twenty-first century, at a moment when the problematic distinction between fact and fiction in all types of media has come sharply into focus, this timely book will interest both scholars and general readers interested in exploring the roots of these contemporary issues.