Explosive Narratives: Terrorism and Anarchy in the Works of Émile Zola (review)

Eduardo Febles’s Explosive Narratives explores the literary function of the anarchist figure in three of Émile Zola’s works: Germinal, Paris, and Travail. While critics have explored the links between the impact of anarchism and modernist/symbolist aesthetics, they have failed, the author argues, to give fair treatment to the relationship between naturalism and anarchy, since they deem, incorrectly, the doctrines to be incompatible. This monograph seeks to underline that not only did Zola make considered use of divergent anarchist figures in his plots, but that, in stylistic terms, anarchy was already a necessary component of naturalism as Zola practised it before the modernist turn. Zola’s explosive narratives contain textual moments that vaporize the sign, fragmenting and threatening the foundations of the movement’s narrative coherence. It is in such moments that Febles locates the potential anarchy of naturalism. The monograph moves chronologically from Germinal to Travail. Chapter 1 explores the intricacies of Zola’s use of the anarchist figure in his now canonical Germinal. While Zola generates much of his text from the terrorist Souvarine, ultimately his narrative excises him. Yet, although the final political message apparently favours a peaceful resolution to class warfare, the anarchist consciousness lingers through to the end, Febles suggests, providing a radical questioning of the bourgeois order. Chapter 2 turns to consider one of Zola’s less frequently studied works, Paris, and its depiction of the anarchist attentats of the 1890s. It does so in order to explore anarchism’s co-option by hegemonic power as a means of shoring itself up, a co-option Zola’s narrative itself imitates. The narrative, Febles argues, fears its own decomposition as the coherence of the cityscape held together through the lens of the protagonist falls apart into myriad fragments. The plot comes together in a literal moment of anarchy as bodies and buildings fall apart. Chapter 3, focusing on Zola’s Travail, underlines the way in which the revolutionary anarchist of Zola’s earlier work Germinal has been domesticated by the time of Travail, his subversive practices neutralized into an innocuous force in the person of the utopian Luc Froment. This political shift is, Febles maintains, paralleled by major shifts in Zola’s aesthetic practices as the naturalist depiction of reality is progressively abandoned for a utopian mode of writing. The strengths of the volume are clear. It is a cogently written piece that both informs the reader by means of historical charts/timelines and carves a defined space for itself amidst the extensive critical literature on this novelist. While Zola’s later work is often overshadowed by the enduring popularity of the Rougon-Macquart, Febles unpicks the compelling dialogue between the diverse sections of the novelist’s output. And, perhaps most importantly of all, as he considers both the textual power and impossibility of representing terror, Febles underlines the continued resonances of both the content and style of this novelist’s prose in the contemporary world.