The Kill - Emile Zola [4]
Zola in The Kill does indeed flit among flowers. Renée in her flouncy finery resembles the flowers of the conservatory in which she makes love to her stepson. Her lips are said to beckon like the petals of the Chinese hibiscus covering the wall of the Saccard mansion. Maxime appears as a flower in the tableau vivant that casts him as Narcissus and Renée as Echo:
He was changing into a flower. His limbs seemed to turn green and grow longer inside his green satin tights. His supple trunk and slightly curved legs seemed to sink into the ground and take root, while the upper part of his body, festooned with wide strips of white satin, opened out into a marvelous corolla. Maxime’s blond hair completed the illusion, as his long curls could be taken for yellow pistils with white petals all around.
Yet if Zola permits himself to mock the bathos of the feckless prefect’s attempt to modernize the myth of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he is quite content on his own account to derive whatever ironic profit he can from the conceit that what is tragic about Renée’s love for Maxime—if love is not too grand a word—is precisely that it lacks the tragic dimension of Phèdre’s for Hippolyte. Zola cannot sustain the note of ambivalence between ancient and modern that he strikes repeatedly throughout the novel: he must, time and again, resolve the issue in favor of a tradition, a status quo ante, in which he no longer believes, and in so doing he falls short of tragedy as surely as the prefect whose pretentiousness he ridicules falls short of sublimity. Instead of tragedy, Zola settles for moral satire.
Nevertheless, Renée is not an insignificant creation. Unconvincingly and rather matter-of-factly Zola does provide her with justification for her defiance of convention by portraying her as the victim of a rape. But this violation merely incites and exacerbates a preexisting will to acquire forbidden knowledge—a will whose origin the author, half a generation older than Freud, locates squarely in the prelapsarian paradise of the “children’s room,” from which lofty height Renée is free to indulge her curiosity about the male bodies on display at the swimming school below. Even her vanity is a response to the cruelty of other children, who mock her untutored adherence to outmoded preferences in schoolgirl attire. It is curiosity about the meretricious glamour of the demimonde that lures her out of the cosseted cocoon of her fabulous dressing room, at once womb and lair. If Renée’s author succumbs at times to the conventions of la belle dame sans merci, painting her as huntress, nymph, or sphinx, he inflects mercilessness by inflicting it primarily upon the merciless beauty herself. So great is her narcissism that she cannot imagine another victim worthy of her cruelty. If she is vapid, it is because she willfully starves her imagination.
For this starvation Henry James sees no excuse. Renée possesses by default the wherewithal that James’s huntresses spend so much of themselves in acquiring. Think of Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl, which, like The Kill, is set under the sign of “flesh and gold.” Indeed, James wrote The Golden Bowl in 1903, the same year in which he produced his retrospective essay on Zola, whom he congratulates on his “bold free linguistic reach—completely genial” yet castigates for “his unequipped and delusive pursuit of the life of the spirit and the tone of culture.”20The “tone of culture” James certainly supplied in abundance, almost as if correcting the heavy touch of Zola’s earlier portrait of a lady as manfully unabashed in her pursuit of her prey as Charlotte. Yet in order to bring out the “tone of culture” James is obliged to banish from his text precisely what Zola wishes above all to bring in. “What we quarrel with,” James wrote, is Zola’s “decoction of ‘nature’ in a vessel unfit for the purpose, a receptacle—in need of scouring.” Zola might have replied that the golden bowl into which James poured his