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Lehman 1 Meredith Lehman 28 January 2013 Ant 394M Writing the Ethnographic Process: the Image of the Family Tree in Emile Zola

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Lehman 1 Meredith Lehman 28 January 2013 Ant 394M Writing the Ethnographic Process: the Image of the Family Tree in Emile Zola Lehman 1 Meredith Lehman 28 January 2013 Ant 394M Writing the Ethnographic Process: The Image of the Family Tree in Emile Zola’s Les Rougon Macquart (1852-1870) Emile Zola defines his monumental project of the Rougon-Macquart series (1852-1870) – a collection of twenty novels – in opposition to his predecessor, Honoré de Balzac’s Comedie Humaine (1799-1850). In his manuscripts, Zola writes under “Les différences entre Balzac et moi” that the scope of his work “will be more restricted” because he “does not want to paint contemporary society, but a single family, by showing the play of race modified by milieu” (cited in White 30). For Zola, the family serves as a point of departure with which to observe and analyze cultural phenomena, or in his words “Natural History and Social History” (La Fortune 28) of France during the Second Empire. Indeed, kinship relationships prove essential for Zola’s espoused Naturalist credo from The Experimental Novel (1880) in which he highlights the importance of race (heredity), milieu, and moment as the psychological and physiological determining factors of an individual. As he states in his preface to the Rougon-Macquart series, by following the lineage of a single family, one can understand the, “feelings, desires and passions—briefly, all the natural and instinctive manifestations peculiar to humanity—whose outcome assumes the conventional name of virtue or vice” (La Fortune 29). It is no coincidence that the five generations of the Rougon-Macquart family that Zola proposes to study, mirror the rise and fall of the Second Empire of Napoléon III, providing a backdrop of sociopolitical instability and turmoil. Indeed, as many scholars have noted, the Lehman 2 Rougon-Macquart family encapsulates France of the Second Empire during which the emergence of the bourgeoisie and capitalism resulted in a period of overwhelming excess, and ultimately of decadence. The Rougon-Macquart family, identified by their “ravenous appetite” and “nervous attacks” (La Fortune 25) echoes the excessive desire and pursuit of pleasure that characterizes the Second Empire. Moreover, it is not surprising that the family unit forms the structuring principle for the Rougon-Macquart series given Zola’s advocacy of the experimental method, based largely on the writings of leading physiologist Claude Bernard, as well as recent studies on heredity by Charles Darwin, Georges Pouchet and most importantly, Propser Lucas. Reacting against the sentimental and romantic aesthetics of the earlier nineteenth century, Zola promotes a scientific paradigm for the novelist that privileges impartial observation and scientific experimentation, thereby legitimizing the genre’s dedication to mimetic representation. Undoubtedly, Zola’s engagement with scientific discourses, specifically the role of heredity, comes at a time when scientific and technological developments, like the camera, threatened the role of the author and the place of the novel. Moreover, his focus on the decline of a particular family during the Second Empire reflects the social disorder during a period of time characterized by numerous revolutions that called into question patriarchal authority. To be sure, the rise of utopian societies in nineteenth-century France, as for example Saint-Simonism and Fourierism, threatened the very structures of power embodied in the family, and by extension the Empire.1 1 For more see Nicholas White (2007). 2 In the preface to La Fortune des Rougon, Zola writes that “L’heredite a ses lois, comme la pesanteur”/”Heredity has its laws, like gravity » (27). 3 See for example Nicholas White’s chapter on the role of family in Zola’s oeuvre (2007) and David Schalk’s article, Lehman 3 As such, Zola conceives of his project not merely as a work of fiction, but as an ethnographic study of the Rougon-Macquart family that adheres to the laws of heredity.2 Indeed, as Henri Mitterand notes in his examination of Zola’s manuscripts, “What we find in this typical preparatory work for the successive novels in the Rougon-Macquart series are the three basic features of the ethnographic method: fieldwork, observation of the characteristics of a particular groups (…), analysis and organization of the phenomena observed in order to produce descriptive documents and syntheses” (cited in Nelson 5). In short, Zola’s writing establishes a narrative synthesis based on his first-hand experience, research and documentation included in his manuscripts. Together, these documents function as an archive through which Zola comes to, “possess knowledge of the man, scientific knowledge of him, in his individual and social relations” (Roman Expérimental 1173). The image of the family tree is not merely a piece of visual evidence attesting to the relationship between the family and the political, as illustrated in numerous studies on the parallel between the Rougon-Macquart family and the Second Empire. To be sure, in Zola’s novels family relations are political and the political is likewise familial. However, I would like to suggest that the image of the family tree is more about the process of writing, rather than what is written. In this paper, I analyze the ways in which Zola’s sketches of the Rougon-Macquart family tree provide insight into his creative process and what it says about the ethnographic process. While the images of the Rougon-Macquart family tree have been understood primarily in their capacity as visual metaphors for a certain epoch of French history, I wish to examine the significance of Zola’s “arbre généalogique” as the structuring principle within his larger work as 2 In the preface to La Fortune des Rougon, Zola writes that “L’heredite a ses lois, comme la pesanteur”/”Heredity has its laws, like gravity » (27). Lehman 4 cultural historian.3 While for White, the images of the family tree operate metaphorically in order to provide “a stock of cultural norms and connotations” (22) for Zola to explore, I suggest that the image of the family tree calls for closer consideration. Although the Rougon-Macquart series is not explicitly a body of literature about the ethnographic process, given the myriad evidence of Zola’s “fieldwork”, and taking into account the scientific underpinnings of his “narrative archive”, we can perhaps understand the genealogical tree as treating Zola’s own writing process.4 By first examining formally the images of the family tree, which serve as a metonymy for the Rougon-Macquart series, I examine the ways in which the tree signifies the very process of writing itself. Moreover, by writing its image as a material object within the diegesis of several of the novels, Zola creates a dialogue between ethnographic writing and the nineteenth-century’s dedication to realism. The image of the family tree therefore establishes a tension among overly determined and hierarchical narratives, quests for points of origin, and what I would like to suggest, Zola’s “rhizomatic”5 construction that paradoxically challenges these very structures. In his preface to La Fortune des Rougon, Zola writes that his project is to explain “how a family, a small group of human beings, conducts itself in a given social system after blossoming forth and giving birth to ten or twenty members, who, though they may appear, at first glance, profoundly dissimilar one from the other, are, as analysis demonstrates, most closely linked together from the point of view of affinity. Heredity, like gravity has its laws” (27 original 3 See for example Nicholas White’s chapter on the role of family in Zola’s oeuvre (2007) and David Schalk’s article, “Tying up Loose Ends of an Epoch: Zola’s Docteur Pascal (1989). 4 For more on Zola’s fieldwork, see Zola’s “Unpublished Field Notes” (1986) as well as Colette Becker’s recent publication of Zola’s manuscripts (2006). 5 Here I am referring to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome from A Thousand Plateaus in which (1980). Similarly, Ulrike Vedder characterizes Zola’s writing on heredity as “rhizomatic” but goes on to continue that Zola’s novels follow the linear and hierarchal structure understood in the image of the family tree. For more, see the conference proceedings from his talk “Writing Heredity: Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks” (2005). Lehman 5 emphasis). Undoubtedly, this passage calls attention to the influence that studies on heredity have in Zola’s writing. Here, heredity – embodied in the figure of the family tree – governs the texts, linking together members of a family that would otherwise lack a visible connection. However, in doing so, Zola likewise links the different novels that make up the series. Indeed, Zola first conceived of his project as a series of ten novels and later that of twenty, recalling the different members of the family as noted above. In this way, the family tree, decorated with the leaves of individual characters, stands in for the whole series. The similarities between Zola and the Docteur Pascal, one of the Rougon descendants, draws another connection between the family tree and the act of writing. In the series, Pascal occupies his time by studying heredity and devotes his studies to collecting data by observing and documenting the peculiarities of his own family. As such, Pascal’s family serves as a case study, thereby recalling Zola’s own role in this project (Schalk 210). Like Zola, Pascal gathers numerous documents and writes a large number of files on his family’s history, including his own rendition of a family tree. The writing of his genealogical history parallels the work of Zola, creating a mise en abyme that mirrors the writing of the series (Veder 157). While Zola’s manuscripts, much like an archive, provide a rich ethnographic source, so too does the work of Pascal within the diegesis.
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