Re-forming pleasure: working-class aesthetic experience in Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir

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Notes

1 This reading of the Louvre, and its history, is in keeping with a special issue of L’Ésprit créateur, edited by Patrick M. Bray and Phillip John Usher: “Building the Louvre: Architecture of Politics and Art” (2014). As Bray and Usher note in their introduction, the Louvre’s “very centrality opens a space where the political meets the aesthetic” and is a site marked by “a pattern of constant interaction that collects and legitimizes forms of authority” (2014, 2, 1). Though Bray and Usher do not explicitly cite Rancière, the exploration of the intersection of aesthetic, political, social, and historical forms at the site reinforces my own argument regarding the malleability of the Louvre as a symbolic of political, aesthetic, and social power.

2 This revised definition of literary form contributes to a project of returning to and re-examining literary formalism in nineteenth-century studies. Most prominent among scholars calling for a New Formalism is Caroline Levine, whose recent book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, calls for a “strategic formalism” that reads for the ways in which aesthetic, social, political, and historical forms collide in surprising and peculiar ways. Like Levine, I share an interest in the intersections of aesthetic form, history, and politics, and draw from her vivid imagining of form as inherent to aesthetic, social, and political domains. However, where Levine is primarily intrigued by the political power of “bounded wholes,” I focus less on what allows for coherence than on the force of individual parts – forms – in their shifting arrangements and rearrangements, no matter how ephemeral (2015, 27).

3 Jeanne Gaillard explains, in “Réalités ouvrières et réalisme dans ‘l’Assommoir,’” that the streets of La Chapelle bear little trace of their revolutionary history, as the Haussmannization of Paris sought to efface the traces of the masses from the heart of the city: “En juin 1848, les ouvriers des Ateliers nationaux secondés par les mécaniciens des chemins de fer du Nord ont occupé la rue Poissonnière où trois ans plus tard Gervaise observera le flot des ouvriers qui descendent travailler dans Paris ; il y a eu rue de la Goutte d’Or et rue Jessaint, tout près de la grande maison des Coupeau, des barricades d’où l’on a tiré sur le maire du bourg de la Chapelle et les forces de l’ordre. Il n’en reste aucune trace dans l’Assommoir” (1978, 32). [“In June 1848, workers from the national Workshops assisted by mechanics of the Northern railroad occupied la rue Poissonnière where, three years later, Gervaise will observe the flow of workers descending to work in Paris ; there were, on rue de la Goutte d’Or and rue Jessaint, close to the Coupeau’s large house, barricades from which the mayor of the bourg of La Chapelle and the forces of order were fired upon. No trace of these events remains in l’Assommoir”].

4 Unless otherwise cited, all translations from the French are mine.

5 Zola writes: “On était douze. Ça faisait une jolie queue sur le trottoir” (1990, 98). Mauldon plays on the double meaning of “queue” as both an animal’s tail and a line.

6 Françoise Gaillard discusses the desire of the Third Republic to isolate – to quarantine – the “membre malade” of the “corps social,” the working class: “on tente de contenir le mal en enfermant le peuple dans son cloaque, mais il sort de son ghetto, il s’aventure, il pousse la reconnaissance toujours un peu plus loin, comme la noce des Coupeau, un peu éberluée de son audace d’un jour qui a guidé ses pas jusqu’au Louvre” (1978, 24) [“Despite attempts to contain the problem by enclosing the people in their cesspool, the people leave their ghetto, venture, continually push their reconnaissance a little further, like the Coupeau’s wedding party, a little dumbfounded by its momentary audacity that guided its steps to the Louvre”].

7 For an extensive account of the intersection of politics and the museum in the nineteenth century, see Dominique Poulot’s excellent Une histoire des musées de France, XVIIe-XXe siècle (2005).

8 Zola plays on what Patrick M. Bray, drawing on Baudelaire’s account in Mon Coeur mis à nu of his visit to the Louvre accompanied by a prostitute, identifies as a common trope in the nineteenth century: “The moral outrage of accompanying someone from the lower classes to the Louvre, an act guaranteed to provoke the indignation of the bourgeois while revealing their pretensions of good taste, became something of a trope in the nineteenth century, and here it serves to emphasize the porous boundaries of class and public and private space” (2014, 123). The prostitute’s moral outrage at the display of “indécences” in the public space of the museum inverts the typical class hierarchies of public and private, moral and immoral (Baudelaire, cited in Bray 123).

9 Colette Becker reinforces this reading of the visit to the Louvre in her discussion of the hostile environment surrounding the workers in “La condition ouvrière dans ‘l’Assommoir’: un inéluctable enlisement.” Becker argues that the working class is “toujours enfermée dans un champ clos et labyrinthique, marqué du signe de la mort” and that the Louvre “devient pour elle un piège” (1978, 45,47) [“always imprisoned in a closed and labyrinthine system, marked by the sign of death”; “becomes a trap for them”]. Becker, in part, bases her reading on the observation that “Zola fait s’arrêter les visiteurs éperdus devant un seul tableau, Le radeau de la Méduse, à la symbolique si évidente!” (47) [“Zola makes his distraught visitors stop in front of a single painting, The Raft of the Medusa, of such evident symbolism!”]. However, as I demonstrate above, the characters not only stop in from of Rubens’s Kermesse but their engagement with it offers a moment of escape from the “trap” of alienation the museum might otherwise represent.

10 See for example Denis Diderot, Salons.

11 In “Le discours du travail dans ‘l’Assommoir,’” Sandy Petrey explores an opposite, but closely related phenomenon. By examining the novel’s descriptions of artisanal versus industrial labor, Petrey concludes that “Le paradoxe de la description naturaliste dans l’Assommoir, c’est que c’est précisément l’écriture objective qui se signale comme écriture, comme tissu verbal orienté vers un certain effet . . . Dans ce contexte, la nudité même constitue une parure stylistique d’un éclat extraordinaire, une différence qui annonce qu’il faut des formes verbales qui n’ont rien à voir avec la parole du peuple pour représenter l’activité qui devient la destinée du peuple” (1978, 61) [“The paradox of naturalist description in l’Assommoir is that it is precisely the objective writing that signals itself as writing, as a verbal fabric oriented towards a certain effect . . . In this context, the nudity itself constitutes a stylistic adornment of extraordinary brilliance, a difference that announces that verbal forms that have nothing to do with the speech of the people are required in order to represent the activity that is becoming the destiny of the people”]. If the ‘nudité’ of the description is the means of demonstrating the alienation of the workers – as humans – from their industrial labor, the reinsertion of their voices in the ekphrastic scenes at the Louvre serves to valorize their human and often artisanal connection with the artworks.

12 Lethbridge observes that “the echoes of the episode [at the Louvre] echo back and forth through the novel, reappearing (at whatever level of deliberation)” and notes that, among the other novels of the Rougon-Macquart, L’Assommoir “is exceptional only in its structural reliance, most visible in its original subdivision into twenty-one chapters, on the ‘tableau’ . . . Within what Mitterand calls ‘une narratique exposante’ the visit to the Louvre is sectioned off, framed not only by repeated terms but also by the ‘crotte’ (p. 442) and the ‘tas d’ordures’ (p. 448) on either side of it” (1992, 51).

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Virginia Leclercq

Virginia Leclercq is an Assistant Professor of English and French at High Point University in North Carolina. Her current book project explores a new theory of novel form in nineteenth-century British and French works by Dickens, James, Emily Brontë, Hugo, and Zola.