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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Certain Myths exerted an extraordinary hold on Zola's imagination, as one may see not only in La faute de l'abbé Mouret (1875) but also in at least two of his greatest works, Germinal (1885) and La débâcle (1892). These latter novels were written in a period overshadowed by the idea of decadence—the period described by Mario Praz in the last chapter of The Romantic Agony—when Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Schopenhauer's philosophy were the rage in France and such representative authors as d'Aurevilly, Verlaine, and Huysmans gave voice to a gloomy premonition that the Dies Irae of the West—decadent Latin civilization in particular—was at hand. Zola's La joie de vivre (1884), with its setting suggestive of legendary villes englouties, came out the same year as Elémir Bourges' novel Le crépuscule des dieux and the first volume of d'Aurevilly's La décadence latine; and the next year, the year Germinal was published, saw the foundation of the Revue Wagnérienne. It is not surprising that nearly all the myths appearing in Zola's novels at this time reflected this widespread mood of cosmic catastrophism. Yet even where he used the same mythological themes (for example, Sodom and Gomorrah) as some of the decadents and did so in the same historical frame, the sharp differences in their approaches to history clearly emerge. For where the decadents were almost exclusively obsessed with the theme of decline and fall and a sense of “delicious death agony” (to borrow a phrase from Praz), Zola, without being indifferent to this, was predominantly concerned with the theme of cultural regeneration. Significantly, nearly all the myths evoked in the novels we have mentioned are myths of catastrophe and death but also, at the same time, of redemption and rebirth.
1 “God, the Devil, and the Human Soul,” Atlantic Monthly, cc (Nov. 1957), 63.
2 “La terre” d'Emile Zola: Etude historique el critique (Paris, 1952), pp. 383 ff.
3 Dieu et l'état (originally written ca. 1871; first pub. Geneva, 1882), Nouvelle éd., Carlo Cafiero and Elisée Reclus (Paris: La Brochure Mensuelle, n.d.), pp. 3-4.
4 La faute de l'abbé Mouret, ed. Charpentier (Paris, 1875), p. 418. Unless otherwise indicated, references to Zola's novels will be to the Charpentier edition; subsequent references to La faute, Germinal (1885) and La débâcle (1892) will be found in the text.
5 Correspondance, Les œuvres complètes, ii, ed. Maurice Le Blond (Paris: Bernouard, 1927-29), 634.
6 “God, the Devil, and the Human Soul,” p. 63.
7 20 April 1875; quoted by Alexandre Zévaès, Zola (Paris, 1945), p. 50.
8 Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), MS, Fonds français, Nouvelles acquisitions, 10307, fol. 402. Zola's working notes for Germinal are contained in MSS. 10307, 10308—hereafter cited in the text.
9 Correspondance, ii, 637.
10 Quoted by Le Blond in the appendix of Germinal (Bernouard ed.), p. 576.
11 Zola's fascination with the theme of world destruction and renewal goes back long before the fin de siècle and antedates his own naturalism. His 1869 prospectus of the Rougon-Macquart series for Lacroix indicated that he would study “des lueurs troubles du moment, des convulsions fatales de l'enfantement d'un monde” (see appendix, La fortune des Rougon, Bernouard ed., p. 3S4). This was already a major theme, however, of Zola's youthful projected epic poem “La genèse.”
12 Classical analogy is to be found in at least one of Zola's principal sources (Simonin, La vie souterraine). See I. M. Frandon's Autour de Germinal: La mine et les mineurs (Geneva, 1955), p. 21 where she quotes from Simonin.