Le Langage des sources dans 'Les Trois Villes' d'Émile Zola: la dialectique de la foi et de la raison by Marie Lapière (review)

Between late March and early June 1891, the journalist Jules Huret published a series of interviews with contemporary writers, as part of his 'Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire'. To these he posed the same leading questions: Was naturalism ill? Or dead, even? What, then, would replace it? While many bemoaned naturalism's dogged positivism, looking instead to the rise of symbolism and the psychological novel, Zola himself responded to Huret by suggesting that naturalism might be opened up, its theories loosened, so as to provide 'une peinture de la vérité plus large, plus complexe' (p. 18). Just one month after Huret's survey had appeared in book form (Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire (Paris: Charpentier, 1891)), Zola set down his first notes on what was to be his second novel cycle: Les Trois Villes, comprising Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898). In these, Zola took up the task he had set himself, confronting head on the Catholic revival at the fin de siècle, and the purported 'bankruptcy' of science, declared by the likes of Ferdinand Brunetière. Marie Lapière's book reconstructs these intellectual and ideological struggles with admirable clarity and rigour, her aim being to restore to each novel of Zola's trilogy a precise sense of its engagement with contemporary discourses and debates on matters of belief, socialism, anarchism, the divine, justice, and reason. By foregrounding the sources on which Zola drew in his preparation and writing (Jean-Martin Charcot, Gustave Boissarie, Francesco Nitti, Gabriel Tarde, entre autres), Lapière tracks in close detail—across his reading notes, preparatory dossiers, and finished novels—'le processus d'un Zola lecteur à un Zola créateur' (p. 24), a dynamic which is shown to entail assimilation, reformulation, and often deconstruction. In an extension of the 'roman expérimental' that Zola theorized at the height of naturalism's cultural dominance, Lapière coins the term 'romans-expérience' (p. 365) to describe the author's method—namely, the trilogy's halting tests of dogma and faith, which are centred around Zola's doubting priest Pierre Froment, and the triumph of science over Catholicism that it ultimately rehearses. In turn, one of the significant virtues of this book is the close attention it devotes to the experimental interrogations and hesitations that attenuate the gradual hardening of Zola's own convictions. In this respect, Lapière's study represents a rich and nuanced contribution to what has, in recent years, become a significant corpus of genetic criticism on Zola. At times, however, the reader will feel that this substantial tome would have benefited from some tighter editing. The curious inclusion of article titles and publication details in the body of the text weighs down Lapière's otherwise readable prose; and principal points are relayed with a certain redondance that mimics Zola's own in these later novels. Those readers eager to delve deeper into Zola's penultimate, and relatively understudied, cycle will, however, find much to appreciate in Lapière's detailed, resourceful, and thorough presentation, which includes biographical notes on key contemporary figures, and summaries of the most relevant works and articles in Zola's library.