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Autobiographical Elements in Zola's La Joie De Vivre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert J. Niess
Robert J. Niess*
Affiliation:
Mundelein College
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Extract

Trop personnel! Bon Dieu! On ne saurait être trop personnel … Ce que nous cherchons dans une œuvre, c'est un homme.“ So, in 1864, did young Émile Zola first justify the intensely personal note that he was later to strike so often in his novels. Many of his characters—Sandoz, Claude, Pascal Rougon, Mathieu Froment—testify that the doctrine of impersonality in art was not for him, that he did not hesitate to call upon his own memories in the composition of his figures. In the present study I shall attempt to show that Lazare Chanteau of La Joie de vivre also may claim a place in this gallery of self-portraits, that Zola consciously formed him in his own image and likeness.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , December 1941 , pp. 1133 - 1149
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941

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References

1 Correspondance, 1858–71, Œuvres complètes d'Émile Zola, ed. M. Le Blond (Paris, Bernouard, 1927–29), xlviii, 245.—All references will be made to this edition, which will be identified in the notes as Œuvres. In the above quotation the italics are mine.

2 Correspondance, 1872–1902, Œuvres, xliv, 605. Italics mine.

3 Œuvres, xiii, 361.

4 Paul Alexis, Émile Zola, Notes d'un ami (Paris: Charpentier, 1882), p. 126.

5 Journal des Goncourt (Paris: Fasquelle, 1887–96), vi, 248–249; E. A. Vizetelly, Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer (London: John Lane, 1904), p. 218; Matthew Josephson, Zola and his Time (London: Gollancz, 1929), p. 290.

6 Nana is a good example of his difficulties with chronology. In three years Nana passes through enough adventures to fill a lifetime because of Zola's desire to have her death coincide exactly with the fall of the Empire.

7 La Joie de vivre, p. 9; see also pp. 18, 97.

8 Ibid., p. 79.

9 Ibid., p. 112; see also pp. 22–23, 61, 138.

10 La Joie de vivre, pp. 361–362 (Notes).

11 D. Le Blond-Zola, Émile Zola raconté par sa fille (Paris: Fasquelle, 1930), pp. 119–120.

12 La Joie de vivre, loc. cit.

13 Dr. Edouard Toulouse, Enquête médico-psychologique sur les rapports de la supériorité intellectuelle avec la névropathie—Introduction générale: Émile Zola (Paris: Société d'Éditions Scientifiques, 1896), p. 112.

14 La Joie de vivre, loc. cit.

15 Corr. 1872–1902, p. 549.

16 La Joie de vivre, loc. cit.

17 D. Le Blond-Zola, op. cit., p. 120; see also Journal des Goncourt, vi, 185; and Josephson, op. cit., pp. 287–288.

18 La Joie de vivre, p. 11. For Zola's iconography see John Rewald, Cézanne et Zola (Paris: Sedrowski, 1936), and Marcel Batilliat, Émile Zola (Paris: Rieder, 1931).

19 Toulouse, op. cit., p. 261.

20 La Joie de vivre, p. 42.

21 Alexis, op. cit., p. 53.

22 La Joie de vivre, p. 45.

23 See my edition of Émile Zola's Letters to J. Van Sanlen Kolff (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1940), p. 28.

24 La Joie de vivre, p. 42.

25 P. Martino, Le Naturalisme français (Paris: Colin, 1923), p. 30.

26 Alexis, op. cit., p. 43.

27 Edmond Lepelletier, Émile Zola, sa vie, son œuvre (Paris: Mercure de France, 1908), 52.

28 Ibid., 54.

29 La Joie de vivre, p. 248.

30 Corr. 1872–1902, p. 662.

31 D. Le Blond-Zola, op. cit., p. 120.

32 La Joie de vivre, pp. 361–362 (Notes).

33 Luke 16:19–31. Zola may have gotten the idea of naming his character Lazare from the poem of that name by Auguste Barbier (1837), which he undoubtedly knew since it was published in the same volume as Barbier's more famous La Curée, some lines of which Zola quoted as epigraph for his novel of the same name. Barbier's Lazare recounts a journey to England in the 1830's; the title is symbolic of the working classes, crushed in the Industrial Revolution. Zola's Lazare reappears in his opera of the same name (1894), but here he shares the character of the other and more famous Biblical Lazarus, the man raised from the dead (John 11:1–45).

34 In 1880 Schopenhauer seems to have enjoyed great popularity in France (Martino, op. cit., pp. 45–46) but Zola is in error in making Lazare Chanteau one of his disciples as early as 1864–65, for there is little evidence that the ‘maniac of Frankfort’ was much known or appreciated in France before the eighties. Zola is in reality writing of and for the public of 1880; the Second Empire is here forgotten.

35 La Joie de vivre, p. 80.

36 Ibid., p. 279; see also pp. 89–90, 153, 203–207.

37 D. Le Blond-Zola, op. cit., p. 13.

38 Contes à Ninon, Œuvres, i, 266.

39 Le Docteur Pascal, Œuvres, xxii, 363. Italics mine.

40 Propos littéraires, (Paris: Société Française d'Imprimerie et de Librairie, 1905), iii, 262–263. See also Alexis, op. cit., 324–330; Journal des Goncourt, ix, 329; René Doumic, Portraits d'écrivains (Paris: Delaplane, s.d.), p. 222; Martino, op. cit., pp. 92–93.

41 La Joie de vivre, p. 210.

42 La Confession de Claude, Œuvres, xxxiii, 96–97.

43 Alexis, op. cit., p. 201.

44 Ibid., p. 280. See also A. Baillot, “La Philosophie d'Émile Zola,” Revue mondiale, 149 (1922), 380–381.

45 Corr. 1858–71, p. 32; see also L'Œuvre, Œuvres, xv, 207; and La Confession de Claude, passim.

46 La Joie de vivre, p. 207.

47 Toulouse, op. cit., p. 248. See also Alexis, op. cit., p. 324.

48 La Joie de vivre, p. 208.

49 Journal des Goncourt, vi, 248.

50 D. Le Blond-Zola, op. cit., p. 120.

51 La Joie de vivre, p. 214; see also pp. 276–277.

52 See especially letters of 5 May 1860; 10 June and 18 July 1861; and 10 December 1866.

53 Toulouse, op. cit., p. vii (letter-preface of Zola).

54 Ibid., p. 165.

55 Ibid., pp. 166, 279–280.

56 For example, entries of 14 December 1868; 3 June 1872; 25 January and 25 April 1875; 1 February, 22 April, and 14 December 1880.

57 Op. cit., p. 209.

58 Op. cit., p. 289. Italics mine.

59 La Joie de vivre, p. 216.

60 Op. cit., pp. 251–252. See also Journal des Goncourt, vii, 37; and F. Doucet, L'Esthétique d'Émile Zola et son application à la critique (The Hague: Nederlandsche Boek- en Steendrukkerij, 1923), p. 12.

61 La Joie de vivre, p. 91.

62 Idem.; see also pp. 46, 136, 214–215.

63 Corr. 1858–71, p. 37. Italics mine.

64 Toulouse, op. cit., p. 260.

65 Journal des Goncourt, vi, 185–186.

66 Published in appendix to La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, Œuvres, vi, 429; see also 433.

67 D. Le Blond-Zola, op. cit., p. 120.

68 La Joie de vivre, pp. 275–276. La Mort d'Olivier Bécaille contains some strikingly similar passages treating of the fear of death.

69 Journal des Goncourt, loc. cit.

70 La Joie de vivre, p. 129.

71 Toulouse, op. cit., pp. 165–166.

72 See Émile Zola, Poèmes lyriques (Paris: Fasquelle, 1921), pp. 299 ff.

73 For this trait in Lazare's makeup, see La Joie de vivre, pp. 42, 51; for similar tendencies in Zola, see his letter of 25 June 1860 (Corr., 1858–71, pp. 107–109), letter of 8 January 1866 (ibid., 270); his preface to Nouveaux Contes à Ninon, Œuvres, i, 275–76; La Confession de Claude, p. 16; Alexis, op. cit., pp. 55, 200; Journal des Concourt, iv, 16.

74 For Lazare, see La Joie de vivre, pp. 210, 233; for Zola, La Confession de Claude, pp. 89, 111; Alexis, op. cit., p. 209.

75 For Lazare, see La Joie de vivre, pp. 143–144, 237, 278; for Zola, Corr. 1858–71, pp. 44–46, 79, 107–109, 199–200.

76 For this characteristic in Zola, see his early correspondence, passim, and E. Seillière, Émile Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1923), passim.