Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [6]
His chief concern was the novel, a form that carried less prestige than poetry, but had a much wider appeal to an increasingly literate public. If it was to establish and retain its status as a major literary form, it would have to demonstrate that it was not merely frivolous entertainment, but a literary art, offering at the same time a means to analyse human psychology and human society. The historical novel, popular in the earlier years of the century, had revealed new possibilities for the genre as an analytical tool, and Balzac had shown how fiction could use an imaginative construct to explore the workings of society in the novels of La Comédie humaine.
Zola greatly admired Balzac, whom he discovered only in the mid 1860s: he praised in particular Balzac’s ability ‘to see both the inside and the outside of contemporary society’.7 Eventually, Les Rougon-Macquart would be an enterprise comparable to Balzac’s, doing for the Second Empire what La Comédie humaine had done for the Restoration: the opening of Thérèse Raquin, carefully situating the coming action with its description of the Passage du Pont-Neuf, has a decidedly ‘Balzacian’ feel, recalling the scene-setting first pages of novels such as Le Père Goriot and César Birotteau. The aim is to establish a realistic environment in which the characters can develop, both as individuals and as representatives of their class and time.
The break with the fantastic story-telling of the Romantics and, at the same time, with the popular novel of adventure and melodrama, was most decisively made by the novelist whom Zola would come to admire most among his contemporaries: Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had been published in book form in 1857, but was already the subject of a prosecution for obscenity and blasphemy when it appeared as a serial in the previous year (charges on which Flaubert was acquitted). Zola would soon be able to sympathize with Flaubert’s predicament — and also to appreciate how useful a sensational controversy could be for the sales of a novel and the fame of its author. Throughout his life, he was happy to attract controversy and to exploit his reputation for scandal.
Zola came late to Flaubert’s masterpiece, as he had done to Balzac, not reading Madame Bovary until the mid 1860s; but it made an enormous impression. The story of the adulterous doctor’s wife, who dreams of romance and commits suicide after an unhappy love affair, was important to him on many counts, including as an analysis of the tedium of contemporary provincial society and as an exercise in style. Flaubert’s method was as far removed as one could imagine from that of prolific popular novelists such as Alexandre Dumas or Eugène Sue: he honed every word, he wrote and rewrote tirelessly, he had an almost religious veneration for his art and he aimed as far as possible to remove the artist from his work. The writer was to be a recorder of reality who shrank from nothing: the description of Emma Bovary’s death from poisoning makes no concessions to the sensibilities of the susceptible reader; nor does it, on the other hand, indulge in the horror for its own sake. The writer merely observes and refuses to turn away. Flaubert, for Zola, was ‘the pioneer of the century, the painter and philosopher of our modern world’.8
Flaubert