Zola, tel qu'en lui-même (review)

Over six decades, Henri Mitterand, by dint of erudition and critical acumen, has transformed the field of Zola studies. His is a body of work without parallel, either before or since. one might have imagined that his three-volume biography of the writer (see FS, LIV (2000), 388) represented the triumphant valedictory conclusion of his devotion to the novelist whose greatness he has championed for so long. This latest set of collected essays, however, fits into a series published by PUF, starting with Le Discours du roman (1980) and extended through Le Regard et le signe (1987), Zola, l'histoire et la fiction (1990) (see FS, XLVII (1993), 92), L'lllusion réaliste (1994) and Le Roman á l'œuvre (1998). Those volumes explicitly acknowledged earlier versions of their chapters in article form. The present one does not, though specialists will recognize original provenance in a number of cases. Yet they mostly retain their freshness and insight, prefaced by an introductory essay which seeks less to give coherence to the collection than to elaborate a set of illuminating perspectives from which future research might approach Zola anew. Under the sub-heading of 'Genèses', Mitterand reflects on the dynamic geometry of Madeleine Férat, and on both a creative process in general and, in particular, on the preliminary notes for Les Rougon-Macquart, as an embryonic series, with the wisdom of hindsight allowing him to reconfigure the sequences he had suggested half a century ago in his Pléiade edition. A second set of essays are themed as 'Le lieu et le sens': the first is primarily on the spatial coordinates of Germinal; the next on Le Ventre de Paris, building on Marie Scarpas's recent Le Carnaval des Halles (2000) to explore the ambiguities of its urban fabric; and, in 'L'Envers de la Belle Époque', he suggests the potential interest of Les Trois Villes, not least in the intertextual inversions of Paris in relation to nineteenth-century fictional practice. 'Dépassements' returns to the insufficiencies of mimetic constraints, whether declared or interpretative: in the mythical scenarios underlying the most material of realities; in L'Ouragan, Zola's drame lyrique of 1901; and in the surprising self-reflexive dimensions of novels amenable to re-reading in the light of Lucien Dällenbach's Le Récit spéculaire. A final section, under the heading of 'Vérités', seems less innovative: one essay reads J'accuse back against the writer's earlier political incursions; the other defensively reasserts the 'très belle histoire' (p. 203) of Zola and Cézanne. The volume is rounded off by 'Conclure?', with Mitterand questioning the categories to which the novelist is still too often condemned by pedagogic definitions, as well as invoking the (French) critical voices more alert to the compelling rhythms and fertile indirections of Zola's multifaceted writing – modestly failing, of course, to give pre-eminent place to his own.