Abstract
Everything about Zola is lengthy: the 15 volumes of his Œuvres complètes (Cercle du livre précieux, 1966–70) are only one compendious example; his letters published to date (Montreal University Press, 1978–2010) fill 11 enormous tomes; Henri Mitterand’s definitive biography (Fayard, 3 vols., 1999–2002) covers 3000 pages. And as for the secondary literature devoted to his work, the 10,000 items registered by 1980 seem like the mere preliminaries to the exponential increase in such studies over the last 40 years. It makes it all the more remarkable that Brian Nelson has successfully risen to the challenge of distilling the various dimensions of Zola’s career and the sheer profusion of his writing into a set of introductory perspectives which explain why he remains one of the giants of nineteenth-century European culture. And Nelson argues that to limit his importance to that particular context is to ignore the extent to which ‘Zola is the quintessential novelist of modernity’ (p. 1), by virtue of the intensity of his focus on the dynamics of an emerging capitalist society. One of the key strands of Nelson’s overview is the subversive nature of Zola’s fiction, not least in the originality of novels bringing the reading public up close to subjects not hitherto considered aesthetically legitimate. If the parallels with the Impressionists are compelling in this respect, it is also true that contemporary painting ‘had a profound influence on his art in terms of visual effects, compositional techniques, and choice of motifs’ (p. 22). Nelson usefully offers a general summary of Zola’s creative processes, underlining (and thereby addressing a popular misconception which cannot be corrected too often) the extent to which documentary validation is subordinate to imaginative elaboration. But, instead of an inevitably superficial synopsis of each of the Rougon-Macquart novels in turn, he has selected for closer attention some of the dominant themes of Le Ventre de Paris, L’Assommoir, Nana, Au Bonheur des Dames and Germinal, exemplifying what Nelson calls the ‘poetry of fact’ (p. 6). His chapter on the late work (Les Trois Villes and Les Quatre Évangiles) makes the point that these novel-cycles are inseparable from the ‘ideological strains of the period’ (p. 108), but is less likely to enthuse potential readers. Zola’s involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, however, is seen as the ‘logical’ (p. 111) extension of his lifelong engagement in public affairs and the polemical thrust of both his early journalism and the fictional representation of his age. Within the constraints of this Oxford University Press series, and as an introduction to Zola’s life and work, Nelson’s little book cannot be faulted: it is grounded in a specialist’s mastery of the field; it is completed by a reliable chronology; and its invitation to read further is supported by a bibliography listing major editions in French as well as critical studies in English which range from the accessible to the scholarly.