Zola’s Sense of Reality: Repetition, Deadtime, and Boredom in La Joie de vivre

ABSTRACT

This essay considers Emile Zola's La Joie de vivre (1884) as a study of boredom which turns into a self-reflexive study of literature itself, highlighting the ways in which the text slows down perceptions of objects, events, and the passage of time. This ‘roman psychologique' stretches the reader's attention, thereby inducing forms of ennui that mirror those experienced by the novel's characters. By examining how Zola's writing warps the ‘reality effect' and how it dissolves the distinction between narration and description, this investigation shows furthermore that Zola’s literary experimentation pushes his naturalism in a modernist direction.

KEYWORDS:

• Ennui
• affect
• l'effet de réel
• Rougon-Macquart
• attention
• naturalism
• modernism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Zola’s notes, the title, “La Joie de vivre,” appears as an outlier in a (rather poetic) list of phrases. Here, the author seems to be contemplating potential titles:

“La vallée des larmesLa joie de vivreL’espoir du néantLe vieux cyniqueLa sombre mortLe tourment de l’existenceLa misère du mondeLe repos sacré du néantLe triste monde.” (Becker 2009, 1072).

2 While writing La Joie de vivre, Zola supposedly consulted Paul Bourget’s 1883 study, Essais de Psychologie contemporaine (Becker 2009, 1235). Bourget’s discussion of literary works (1883, viii) attempted to “[d]éfinir quelques-uns des exemplaires de sentiments que certains écrivains de notre époque proposent à l’imitation des tout jeunes gens” (including pessimism and nihilism), and to “indiquer […] quelques-unes des causes générales qui ont amené ces écrivains à peindre ces sentiments comme elles amènent leur lecteur à les goûter.” The literary text makes its reader taste the portrayed “sentiments”.

3 In Le Plaisir du texte (1973, 21), Barthes admitted that he would skip descriptive passages, notably while reading Zola, in order to establish his own, enjoyable (and faster) reading pace: “nous ne lisons pas tout avec la même intensité de lecture; un rythme s’établit, désinvolte, peu respectueux à l’égard de l’intégrité du texte; […] nous sautons impunément (personne ne nous voit) les descriptions.”

4 Zola’s essay, “Le sens du réel,” was published in 1878 and later included in Le roman expérimental, as the first entry under the heading du roman.

5 While analysing Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Jean Radford (1991, 18) interprets the usage of repeated, lengthy physical descriptions and descriptive details as the intentional production of a resistance to meaning, rather than the presentation of the ‘reality effect.’ Allison Pease (2012, 80–81) has continued this line of thought by showing how boredom in this context shapes the reader’s orientation with the novel. According to Pease, there is a collaborative effort established here between the novelist and the reader.

6 Indeed, Zola wanted to evoke forms of mental and moral émiettement. In his dossiers for the novel, he often articulated this notion of erosion : “la douleur physique et l’émiettement moral” (Becker 2009, 998) ; “effet de l’émiettement, tout s’en va” (1002) ; “Bien appuyer sur l’émiettement de la volonté et de tout chez Lazare – Le drame caché, le drame abominable qui se passe en lui, parallèlement à l’histoire, et dont il ne parle jamais ; son pessimisme en paroles n’en est que le bouillonnement au dehors” (1024) ; “Je veux en lui un émiettement par le pessimisme” (1040).

7 Susan Harrow provides an excellent reading of monochromatic coloring in La Joie de vivre in her article: “Zola Colorist, Abstractionist,” Romanic Review (3-4): 465-484.

8 References to the kinds of nineteenth-century romantic literature Zola is working against are, in fact, found in La Joie de vivre. When Pauline is convalescing, she spends her days reading. But she becomes bored/annoyed by the genre of books at her disposal: “Ses lectures, du reste, l’ennuyaient. Les romans qui traînaient dans la maison, des histoires d’amours aux trahisons poétiques, avaient toujours révolté sa droiture” (177). And yet, affective models derived from this literary genre inform some of Pauline’s choices and actions. When Lazare only mildly protests once Pauline explains that he should marry Louise instead of her, she replies by saying that if he truly loved her, he would have been on his knees crying (meaning, he would have emoted like a character in a romantic novel).

9 Ruth Ronen (1997, 283) has explored how structuralist and semiotic modes of reasoning irrationally detached narrative from more referential aspects of representation, thereby establishing “a theoretical position incompatible with textual experience.” David Baguley (1990, 186–187), in a similar vein, explained that: “Narration and description are equivalent operations, the one developing the temporal delineations of narrative, the other its spatial vectors, but both constituting, not distinct ‘modes’ (to use Genette’s terms) but ‘aspects’ of fictional representation.” See also Mieke Bal “Over-Writing as Un-Writing” and Henry James “The Art of Fiction” for arguments that description cannot be fully separated from narration.

10 For instance, Gérard Genette (1966, 158), while discussing the narration/description divide, wrote that “la narration s’attache à des actions ou des événements considérés comme purs procès, et par là même elle met l’accent sur l’aspect temporelle et dramatique du récit.” Here, Genette considers the way we envision narration as more “active” and description as more “contemplative.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margot Szarke

Dr. Margot Szarke is a lecturer in the Department of French at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines accounts of sense perception in nineteenth-century naturalism and medical discourse. Dr. Szarke's work on Zola through the lens of medical humanities has appeared in French Studies, French Forum, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Her article, ‘Modern Sensitivity: Emile Zola's Synaesthetic Cheeses,’ was awarded the 2021 Society of Dix-Neuviémistes Publication Prize.