Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [10]
In one respect, in particular, the language fails him: he is obliged to speak of ‘remorse’ in relation to Laurent and Thérèse; yet, as an atheist engaged in an essentially materialistic project, he has been at pains to insist that what the two murderers feel has nothing to do with the Christian idea of conscience: it is a purely nervous and physiological reaction. When Thérèse does pray for forgiveness (Chapter XXIX), Zola makes it clear that her ‘dramas of repentance’ are acted out for the sole benefit of Mme Raquin, and that they are calculating, selfish and hypocritical — all the more so since this play-acting imposes ‘the most unspeakable agony’ on her aunt. But, despite this, it is hard for the reader not to interpret her feelings of remorse and those of Laurent as indications of guilt brought about by a sense of sin. Regardless of where the remorse comes from, most readers now see this as a very moral tale.
Despite having sometimes been obliged to have recourse to the language of melodrama, Thérèse Raquin is a novel of considerable power, which it owes partly to its compression, its structure and the simplicity of its plot. It has the urgency and inevitability of a classical tragedy. It stands, too, as a bridge between the Gothic novel and the modern psychological thriller, using the vocabulary of sensationalist horror in an earnest attempt to get inside the minds of the perpetrators of a crime and to study the repercussions of their act. One should be careful about taking too literally Zola’s own claims for his method in writing the novel: there is something slightly disingenuous about his protestations, in the Preface to the second edition, that he is doing nothing more than a doctor examining a patient or a painter studying a model. In any case, however much Zola claimed throughout his career that his enterprise was essentially scientific, he never believed that the novelist was engaged in a purely mechanical exercise, any more than he thought that an artist like Manet was simply reproducing reality. The proof is here in this novel, in the character of Laurent. If the artist’s work is just to recount what he sees, then how is it that Laurent, who does not have the talent to do this at the start of the book, acquires it as a result of the nervous strain to which he is subjected by the murder? From the start, Zola had a high concept of the writer’s individual contribution to the work and to the art that he brings to it. The careful structure of this novel, its complex links to the art and literature of its age, and its network of symbolic references — not least those represented by that enigmatic presence, François, the cat — make it far more than an outdated exercise in psychological analysis, and justify its enduring popularity in Zola’s work.
NOTES
1 It has been suggested that the critic in question, Louis Ulbach, writing as ‘Ferragus’, may have colluded with Zola in order to create a sensation around the novel. See Armand Lanoux, Bonjour, Monsieur Zola (Paris: Hachette, 1962).
2 Henri Mitterand, Zola. I. Sous le regard d‘Olympia, 1840 — 1871 (Paris: Fayard, 1999), p. 572.
3 The Second Empire: the period of rule by the Emperor Napoleon III (1852-70).
4 See, for example, the three pages that François-Marie Mourad devotes to the cat, François, in his annotated edition of Thérèse Raquin (see Further Reading); and Robert Lethbridge’s article, where he says that ‘the cat ... although at first sight of minor importance, is one of a network of symbols at the heart