Books in Brief: Zola

Zola, by Joanna Richardson (St. Martin’s, 283 pp., $14.95). Victor Hugo probably summed up the main trouble with Emile Zola when he said, “There are certain pictures which one should not paint. Don’t tell me it’s all true, don’t tell me that it happens like this. I know, I went down and explored all that misery, but I won’t have people making a spectacle of it. You have no right to strip poverty and misfortune naked.” Zola went yet a step further. In his obsession with a “scientifically” honest depiction of the poor, he often stripped them of their very humanity. With rare exceptions, his victims are not really victims, for innocence was never theirs to lose. The difficulty with la bête humaine, to cite but one example, is not the credibility of his ultimate beastliness, but the scanty evidence that he was ever anything different. Zola was too obsessed with society to focus properly on people. When Nana’s once beautiful body putrefies, it is as if dry rot has set in at a formerly lush bordello—which is at least partially the intended effect, since Nana, although based in part on a real courtesan, Blanche d’Antigny, is not, properly speaking, a person. She is not even the personification of corruption itself in Second Empire France, but merely a material conductor of the current of decadence that, as Zola saw it, caused the death of the Second Empire. (Others might argue that the superior Prussian Army had a great deal more to do with it.) Perhaps the greatest tribute that can be paid to Zola is that, despite the cold pseudoscience of his premise and approach, his descriptive power is often great enough, almost accidentally, to bring feeling to his antiseptic allegories. Joanna Richardson, in this latest addition to her considerable body of workmanlike studies of nineteenth century French literary figures, does more than justice to Zola the individual artist, and gives him deserved credit for his role as a shaper of trends and, in the instance of the Dreyfus case, an outspoken defender of the truth. The result is a knowledgeable, concise one-volume life of a slightly overrated artist. One wishes that Alphonse Daudet, who, in Numa Roumestan, The Nabab, and several other neglected novels, painted a far more balanced human and historical portrait of the period—and of the Southern French character—could attract an equally sound modern biographer.

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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Zola, by Joanna Richardson (St. Martin’s, 283 pp., $14.95). Victor Hugo probably summed up the main trouble with Emile Zola when he said, “There are certain pictures which one should not paint. Don’t tell me it’s all true, don’t tell me that it happens like this. I know, I went down and explored all that misery, but I won’t have people making a spectacle of it. You have no right to strip poverty and misfortune naked.” Zola went yet a step further. In his obsession with a “scientifically” honest depiction of the poor, he often stripped them of their very humanity. With rare exceptions, his victims are not really victims, for innocence was never theirs to lose. The difficulty with la bête humaine, to cite but one example, is not the credibility of his ultimate beastliness, but the scanty evidence that he was ever anything different. Zola was too obsessed with society to focus properly on people. When Nana’s once beautiful body putrefies, it is as if dry rot has set in at a formerly lush bordello—which is at least partially the intended effect, since Nana, although based in part on a real courtesan, Blanche d’Antigny, is not, properly speaking, a person. She is not even the personification of corruption itself in Second Empire France, but merely a material conductor of the current of decadence that, as Zola saw it, caused the death of the Second Empire. (Others might argue that the superior Prussian Army had a great deal more to do with it.) Perhaps the greatest tribute that can be paid to Zola is that, despite the cold pseudoscience of his premise and approach, his descriptive power is often great enough, almost accidentally, to bring feeling to his antiseptic allegories. Joanna Richardson, in this latest addition to her considerable body of workmanlike studies of nineteenth century French literary figures, does more than justice to Zola the individual artist, and gives him deserved credit for his role as a shaper of trends and, in the instance of the Dreyfus case, an outspoken defender of the truth. The result is a knowledgeable, concise one-volume life of a slightly overrated artist. One wishes that Alphonse Daudet, who, in Numa Roumestan, The Nabab, and several other neglected novels, painted a far more balanced human and historical portrait of the period—and of the Southern French character—could attract an equally sound modern biographer.