Zola, tel qu’en lui-même by Henri Mitterand (review)

Flaubert’s novel or attitudes, and he portrays Emma with much more sympathy. Rather than the horrendous death Emma experienced by arsenic, Renoir allows her to attain a certain dignity and peace in her death. Minnelli displays technical advances in 1949 over Renoir’s 1934 film, while Donaldson-Evans’s analysis brings out subtler and indeed more important distinctions . She convincingly argues that oppressive American censors had a marked effect on the final product in order to emphasize the moral of the story of Emma’s destruction. Chabrol’s attempt to reproduce Flaubert’s prose faithfully in 1991 loses much of the marvelous irony of the original novel, and the film’s voiceovers seem all too professorial. Many of the scenic arrangements repeat, yet somehow fail to live up to the novel, despite Chabrol’s guiding principle of fidelity. Furthermore, by deleting all positive references to religion, he “significantly alters the personal mythology of the heroine” (130). Still, although Chabrol’s relatively faithful version does not communicate the superb subtleties of the novel, it remains a remarkable achievement. The masterpiece among the adaptations, and clearly the version DonaldsonEvans finds most successful, was produced for BBC by Tim Fywell in 2000. It brings out the best of Donaldson-Evans’s talent for textual analysis. The basic story of Flaubert’s young woman searching for soul-searing love provides the film’s framework. Fywell’s suggestive exploration of the age-old relationship of religion and passion, his sophisticated allusions to previous versions, his suggestive wordplay, and his reworking of such figures as the organ grinder produce an intense experience on the small screen. Donaldson-Evans ends with a suggestive essay about the stature of filmic adaptations and the revival of certain characters within given cultures and periods. While controversy about such issues may continue without definitive answers, it is certain that Donaldson-Evans’s provocative, well-written book is an excellent contribution to the debate. University of Kansas Allan H. Pasco MITTERAND, HENRI. Zola, tel qu’en lui-même. Paris: PUF, 2009. ISBN 978-2-13-057082-0. Pp. 240. 25 a. Henri Mitterand’s impressive editorial and critical work on Emile Zola has indelibly marked our modern understanding of the French naturalist writer. This new collection of essays represents an important addition to his already monumental œuvre, one that opens new and surprising perspectives on an author about whom so much has already been written. Indeed, Mitterand’s intentions, as stated in the introduction, is to “casser la coquille doctrinaire du discours naturaliste (celui du Roman expérimental), pour restituer à Zola sa vérité de romancier” (vi). Twelve essays partitioned among four sections thus draw out a complex va et vient between Zola’s explicit theoretical formulations and his literary compositions. In the aptly named section “Genèses,” Mitterand explores the origins of Zola’s works. The opening essay, “Trios tragiques,” compares Thérèse Raquin to the much neglected romans de jeunesse—La Confession de Claude, Le Vœu d’une morte, and Madeleine Férat to uncover a triangular schema of desire that subtends these early works. In the other pieces, Mitterand leads his readers in an archeological Reviews 389 dig to the literary crypt of the Rougon-Macquart: “Il existe toujours, sous les grandes œuvres littéraires […] une œuvre de fondation(s) [...] qui est à l’œuvre publiée et visible ce qu’est la crypte à la cathédrale” (27). His genealogy entails a reading of the avant-textes informing the theoretical framework of Zola’s project, and an analysis of “la mémoire mythique,” mythical echoes that resonate through the novels, such as the Girardian theme of sacrificial violence in Germinal. The next section, “Les lieux et le sens,” provides theoretical musings on the concept of space as it applies to the novels of Zola. Drawing on contemporary urban and architectural critics, such as Anthony Vidler, Mitterand studies the way in which Zola’s works juxtapose a rational, “modern” space to a whimsical, postmodern one. In Le Ventre de Paris, for instance, Florent’s view of Les Halles as a Maigre muddles an otherwise pristine urban logic by engaging in an antiHaussmannian counter-discourse and thereby paradoxically...