No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Though in his criticism Zola welcomed attempts by his contemporaries to abandon traditional forms of the plot, his novels reveal a constant concern for ordered construction. L’Assommoir demonstrates a particularly rigorous unity of design. In its internal organization one can discern a system of interrelated features deriving from a scheme of three controlling structural oppositions that, throughout the novel, character, action, and description illustrate: work/idleness, cleanliness/filth, abstention/indulgence. The development of the plot is the process by which the two principal characters, Gervaise and Coupeau, progressively abandon the positive values of this scheme and submit to the opposite tendencies. Zola traces this process within a symmetrical framework of measured effects and equivalent phases of development organized around the central chapter of the work to form a rigorously structured rising and falling action which adds to a novel of stark, repelling contingencies an engaging formal dimension of harmonious order.
1 “Plot-Formation in the Modern Novel,” rpt. in Essays in European and Oriental Literature, ed. Albert Mordell (New York: Dodd, 1923), pp. 141–45.
2 See Flaubert's letter to Huysmans of Feb.-March 1879 in Œuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert: Correspondance huitième série (1877–1880) (Paris: Conard, 1930), p. 224.
3 Le Voltaire, 4 March 1879; rpt. in Le Roman expérimental (Paris: Charpentier, 1880).
4 See L'Evénement, 25 Nov. 1884, and Lettres inédites de Louis Desprez à Emile Zola, ed. Guy Robert (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1953), p. 89.
5 Le Voltaire, 9 Dec. 1879; rpt. in Emile Zola: Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mitterand, xii (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1969), 606–09.
6 Notes générales sur la nature de l'oeuvre, n. 11 ; rpt. in vol. v of the Pléiade ed. of Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Henri Mitterand, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–67), pp. 1742–45. All references to Les Rougon-Macquart are hereafter cited by volume and page number.
7 Emile Zola: Notes d'un ami (Paris: Charpentier, 1882), p. 108.
8 The preliminary notes and plans for L'Assommoir are published in Henri Massis, Comment Emile Zola composait ses romans: D'après ses notes personnelles et inédites (Paris: Charpentier, 1906); hereafter cited as Massis.
9 This and all other quotations from the text are from the Pléiade ed. of L'Assommoir in Les Rougon-Macquart, ii.
10 Confessions of a Young Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Carlton House, ca. 1943), p. 77.
11 A notable exception is the chapter on L'Assommoir in F. W. J. Hemmings, Emile Zola, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), where the author briefly traces the “classic simplicity of line” in the novel and demonstrates how it coincides with the fortunes of Gervaise (pp. 114–16). Surprisingly, no full-length study of L'Assommoir appeared until Jacques Dubois recently produced his illuminating monograph L'Assommoir de Zola: Société, discours, idéologie (Paris: Larousse, 1973) which he calls “une approche multiple” rather than a unified study of the novel, but which contains many synthesizing views and is the first work to demonstrate the importance of a nonlinear reading of the novel. The present analysis attempts to develop and complement the studies of Hemmings and Dubois respectively by combining their approaches and to provide a new reading of the novel from the point of view of its organic development. Hereafter, references to Dubois's monograph will be cited as Dubois.
12 The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 207.
13 “The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones” in Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 620, 645.
14 “La Notion de structure en critique littéraire,” in Quatre conférences sur la “nouvelle critique” (Torino: Società Editrice Internationale, 1968), p. 64.
15 Dubois underlines this opposition and presents the 2 characters in a different way as “les deux grands rôles dans le schéma manichéen du drame: le Bon et le Traître” (p. 33).
16 Dubois notes that Gervaise's “voisins de détresse” in the apartment house, Bru, Bazouge, and Lalie Bijard, ail represent a commentary on her fate (p. 36). Ironically, it is père Bru that Gervaise invites to her birthday feast in Ch. vii to avoid the “jinx” of 13 at table and that she later accosts for money in the dark street at the height of her misfortune.
17 This suggestive convergence of Gervaise's past and present circumstances just before and in the central chapter coincides appropriately with the reappearance of Virginie and the introduction of père Bru, 2 characters who, as we have seen, come to reflect the heroine's past and future respectively.
18 It is important to note that, even though the action of L'Assommoir covers a period of several years (from May 1850 to the winter of 1869), Zola maintains a strict control over the passing of the seasons. The first 6 chapters present springtime scenes; the central chapter is set on 19 June; the scenes of Ch. viii occur in the fall; thereafter, in the remainder of the novel, there are exclusively winter scenes.
19 “C'est la fête de Gervaise qui, ici, est prétexte à réunion et à totalisation; c'est à elle que correspond l'apogée de la courbe du récit. … Ici comme chez Flaubert, le tableau rassemble personnages, objets, thèmes et propos” (Dubois, pp. 21–22).
20 Aristotle's Poetics: A Course of Eight Lectures (London : Hart-Davis, 1966), p. 97.
21 As Brian Nicholas nctes in an interesting discussion of this chapter in Ian Gregor and Brian Nicholas, The Moral and the Story (London: Faber, 1962): “She welcomes the physical torpor which deadens her moral response, and her pretexts … are in harmony with the whole fatalistic and indulgent philosophy of the evening” (p. 89). But instead cf illustrating that Gervaise “has no moral ascendancy over her world,” as the same critic argues (p. 92), this scene shews her in the process of losing this moral ascendancy.
22 Brian Nicholas argues that it is above all Gervaise's lack of conscience that deprives her of tragic stature (p. 83). While it is true that Gervaise's plight leaves the reader with a sense of social injustice rather than a sense of tragedy, one of the main functions of this important scene is to bring the heroine to an acute awareness of her fall.
23 In his famous study Der Doppelgänger, Otto Rank relates the double and its variation, the shadow, to the consciousness of guilt, interpreting it as a transference of distressing instincts and desires to a detached personification of the self. He also notes, after Freud, that such an awareness of guilt, of the distance between the ego-ideal and the attained reality, “creates strong tendencies toward self-punishment, which also imply suicide.” See The Double, trans, and ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 76–77. It is significant that straightway after this scene Gervaise rushes to Bazouge to beg him to end her days.
24 Bonjour Monsieur Zola (Paris: Hachette, 1962), p. 402. 25 Emile Zola, p. 114.
26 The Nature of Narrative, p. 234.
27 Mallarmé's letter is quoted in full by Mitterand in Les Rougon-Macquart, ii, 1565–66.
28 La Pensée sauvage (Paris : Pion, 1962), p. 37.