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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 , 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. The information and evidence that Pascal obtains about his family is in fact so true and so damning, that Clotilde , his niece, is asked to destroy them.

The connection between Zola and Pascal blurs the distinction between author and scientist, as well as the written object and the act of its writing. Nicholas White also explains

Zola’s identification with Pascal by examining the similarities between Pascal’s incestuous relationship with his niece Clotilde, and Zola’s adulterous relationship with Jeanne Rozerot.

White refers, for example, to a copy of Le Docteur Pascal (1893), Zola’s last novel of the series Lehman 6 that details the life of Pascal, in which a dedication places Zola in the role of Pascal. It reads,

“To my beloved Jeanne – to my Clotilde” (cited in White 35). Similarly, the tension between the legitimate and illegitimate lines of the Rougon-Macquart family remind us again of Zola’s personal life. Indeed, it was with Jeanne Rozerot that Zola had two children of his own.

The recently published manuscripts of the Rougon-Macquart series contain numerous notes and sketches through which Zola conceptualized the fictive spaces of his narratives. The existing critical literature on these dossiers has argued that they provide documentation of the

Second Empire, and more importantly, call into question Zola’s impartial observation, creating a fissure between what Zola says he does and what he actually does. In other words, although

Zola attempts detachment and neutrality, the “hyper-reality” of his novels challenges his impartiality. Robert Lethbride, for example, notes in his introduction to L’Assommoir (1877) that “The Experimental Novel’s more extreme denial of novelistic arrangement” is “grotesquely misleading” (7). Similarly, Keith Newlin suggests that Rougon-Macquart series’ “over determined sense of narrative order” problematizes Zola’s detachment by calling attention to the artificial nature of his writing (23).

However, as Colette Becker warns, by focusing on Zola’s “temperament de constructeur”

(9), criticism often ignores the role that improvisation and reverie played in the production of

Zola’s oeuvres. In her words, “les dossiers sont aussi le lieu du laisser-aller à ce que Zola appelle sa ‘fantasie’, qu’il peut tenter de canaliser, mais qui est capitale dans sa création et que l’on a trop tendance à occulter pour ne garder que l’image du constructeur » (17). For Becker, the influence of Prosper Lucas’ Traité, made most apparent through the image of the family tree that is first published in Une Page d’Amour (1878) and later in Le Docteur Pascal (1893), undermine and overly determined narrative structure. According to Becker, Zola’s Lehman 7 implementation of the family tree in configuring his oeuvre attests to the role that improvisation played in his writing process – the genealogical tree operates as a closed system that is nevertheless always open – by providing a plurality of narrative possibilities (10).

In both versions of the family tree, Zola has reduced the characters to a single leaf on one of the several branches of a tree. The tree itself is divided between the Rougon line and that of the Macquart lineage. At the base of the tree, firmly rooted in the surrounding ground which thereby stands in for milieu, Zola has placed Adélaide Foque. Adélaide or Tante Dide as she is referred to in the first novel of the series La Fortune des Rougons (1852), seems to serve as a point of origin for not only the family, but as the genesis for the oeuvre. It is through Adélaide’s first marriage to Rougon that she gives birth to Pierre Rougon, and it is through Pierre that the legitimate line of the Rougon family continues. However, following her husband’s sudden death in 1788, in 1789 – the year of the French Revolution – Adelaide meets Macquart who will eventually become her lover and the father of two children: Antoine and Ursule Macquart (White

24). As White aptly notes, the illegitimate lines “are in in this sense children of the Revolution” so that the “life and loves of Tante Dide form a maternal prehistory to this account of the Second

Empire” (24).

Inside each leaf, the character’s name appears along with a brief resume of his/her bibliographic information. Additionally, within each description, Zola has emphasized the role of heredity by writing which behavioral and physiological traits have been passed on and by whom. The reader knows, for example, that Claude Lantier – protagonist in Zola’s L’Oeuvre

(1886) – has inherited the physical resemblance of his mother Jean Macquart. Furthermore, the notes tell the reader that Claude has turned his genetic neuroses into artistic genius as a painter.

Claude’s brother Jacques, however, resembles both mother and father in his physical traits, and Lehman 8 more importantly, although he has similarly inherited neuroses from his ancestors, they have resulted in a criminal disposition rather than artistic. Indeed, Jacques appears in La Bête

Humaine (1890) as a homicidal alcoholic incapable of overcoming his genetic inclinations. The glosses of characters that make up the genealogical tree therefore provide a framework for the series and likewise shape the events that ensue in the novels.

The image of the tree as a structuring model is by no means unique to the work of Zola, but in fact can be traced back to eighteenth century France, specifically the work of the

Encyclopédistes who sought to catalogue and systematize human knowledge and reasoning.

Their arbre des connaissances (tree of knowledge) connects the image of the tree to larger epistemological questions concerning knowledge and power.6 The ideological underpinnings of the tree reflect a preoccupation with points of origin, centeredness and linearity. As such, Zola’s family tree recalls the encyclopedic project, and moreover reflects a desire to convey authorial control and a sense of totality or completeness. However, the rigidity of the family tree and its comprehensiveness is called into question upon closer examination of the different versions and its appearance within the texts.

As mentioned elsewhere, the image of the genealogical tree is at once, according to

Collette Becker, a closed and open system. The tree is itself firmly rooted in the ground with all branches coming from this singular racine in order to trace back the original source – here the psychological and physiological characteristics of the Rougon-Macquart family. On the other hand, the numerous branches produce a web of different connections that only increase in size and complexity as the tree grows. It is clear that Zola exploits this seeming contradiction in his own work as the sketches of the Rougon-Macquart family tree are continually changing – names

6 For more see Daniel Brewer’s chapter “The Encyclopédie: innovation and legacy”(2011). Lehman 9 of characters are replaced, birthdates are changed, and new characters are added – so that the tree’s different branches give birth to new narrative possibilities. Moreover, although the tree suggests both a temporal and narrative linearity, characters in the novels appear and disappear, enter and exit the series, so that each branch does not necessarily constitute a temporal or narrative progression.

Although Adélaide appears as the point of origin for the Rougon-Macquart family/series, the reader never learns of her own lineage. In fact, Zola draws our attention to the lack of knowledge surrounding Adelaide’s origins in one of his preliminary sketches. In one draft of the family tree, Zola writes “l’inconnu hérédité/unkown heredity” under the leaf containing the matriarch’s physiological and psychological description. And in the opening novel, La Fortune des Rougon, the narrator comments that Adélaide was born in 1768 and was an orphan at eighteen (78), suggesting a hole in the integrity of the family tree. This is indeed telling as

Adélaide’s mysterious background undermines frameworks, such as the family tree, that are based on points of origin. As Ulrike Vedder posits, “the genealogical tree, however, has gaps, too, despite Pascal’s efforts to attain its perfect beauty and completeness ‘pas un trou’” (163). In doing so, Zola writes the limitations of ethnographic research, underlining the fragmented and often incomplete nature of fieldwork.

Although her work refers specifically to the Archive, Carolyn Steedman’s assertion that the Archive is always incomplete is indeed relevant. As she writes, “you cannot be shocked at its [the Archive’s] exclusions, its emptinesses, at what is not catalogued” (68). Indeed, although the image of the family tree puts forth a completeness and integrity in its form, by drawing the reader’s attention to the gaps in his own fieldwork, Zola suggests that the roots below the surface, although unseen, nevertheless present challenges. We are made aware that the Rougon- Lehman 10

Macquart family’s point of origin extends well beyond Adélaide, despite its genealogical representation through the tree. Moreover, it is through the juxtaposition of the image of the family tree and how it is written or employed in the novels that destabilizes its very structure.

Similarly, the last child to be born of the Rougon-Macquart line, a result of an incestuous relationship between Pascal and Clotilde, provides an open-ended nature to the closed structure of the family tree.7 This open-endedness is again reflected in Zola’s reference to the different branches in the preface to La Fortune that connects members of a family as “le fil” or the thread, bringing to mind the image of a web. The constellations of different characters and their relations within the novels undermine the conventions of a centered and linear work modeled from the root-tree system. Moreover, the family tree signifies the culmination of archival work, both of Zola and Pascal, this visual document thus illustrates Colette Becker’s assertion that

Zola’s manuscripts reveal a kind of system that stays in put, but that is always evolving up until the final product (11).

It is thus noteworthy to examine the significance of the family tree whose image not only appears as front piece to two of Zola’s novels, but also within the diegesis itself, most prominently in Le Docteur Pascal (1893). At the end of the novel, the eponymous character

Pascal writes in his own death in the family tree and also notes the birth of his hitherto unborn child with Clotilde, anticipating events that have not yet come to fruition. The family tree is therefore continually changing and evolving even within the narrative. At the same time, however, by writing these events in the family tree, they are in turn realized – Pascal eventually dies and Clotilde does indeed give birth to their son – thus connecting the genealogical family

7 In an interview with Edmond Goncourt on April 13, 1893, Zola states that Le Docteur Pascal was the last novel of a series, much like “the circle of the serpent that bites its tail.” See Baguely’s chapter “(D)ébauches zoliennes” (2007). Lehman 11 tree to that of the tree of life. As such, Pascal mirrors Zola as author and creator of the text and draws a parallel between the tree and the novels and characters that comprise the series. This scene is indeed telling because in addition to allegorizing the Second Empire, here, the family tree signifies both narrative possibility and a closed system.

Moreover, the relationship between the documents gathered by Pascal and the image of the family tree is made explicit in the novel, which states that “this genealogical tree (…) of which the volumes of files aren’t but commentary” (32). As Vedder suggests, Pascal’s research is nothing if it is not interpreted to make meaningful (160). Similarly, Carolyn Steedman writes in her analysis of the status of the archive that documents comprising an archive sit “there until it is read, and used, and narrativised” (68). The act of writing is therefore essential in giving life to ethnographic work. The family tree, undoubtedly a structure that has traditionally privileged linearity, points of origin and hierarchal relationships is therefore opened up, offering several interpretations through narrativization.

Although Pascal attempts to keep his documents hidden, placing them under the pillow of his deathbed, members of the Rougon-Macquart family solicit Clotilde to find the dossiers and to destroy its contents. The burning of these documents is by extension, the desire to erase history and family memory (Veder 159). Indeed, the Rougon-Macquart family wishes above all to keep their skeletons in the closet. However, despite their attempt to destroy any evidence, the text tells us that the image of the family tree remains. This detail is certainly significant because although Pascal’s research, this “commentary”, is destroyed, the image of the family tree is untouched, aligning the family tree with a relic. Indeed, if the genealogical tree, as Veder claims, “refers not merely to the function of representing knowledge, but also to that of generating it” (160), then Zola valorizes the role of the author as an epistemic authority. It is Lehman 12 only through narration that the schematic image of the Rougon-Macquart family gains meaning and conveys knowledge. As such, the author is tantamount in the production of knowledge, and moreover, his/her interpretation, as Zola reminds us, is one of many.

If Pascal’s unborn child invites the reader to envision a possible sequel, then the surviving image of the family tree, calls upon its narration. By conceiving of his project as the narrativization of a visual document, that of the family tree, Zola engages in different forms of representation. Moreover, in doing so, Zola aligns himself with the ethnographer who must create a story from a myriad of resources. Undoubtedly, Zola’s implementation of the family tree signals a modern aesthetic whereby events no longer relate through simple cause and effect, or hierarchal relationships, but instead, display a “rhizomatic” – to use the words of Vedder – paradigm that leaves room for different narrative possibilities.8 Furthermore, the openness of

Zola’s genealogical system undermines a single point of origin and challenges an over- determined narrative plot.

8 Nicholas White also finds that Zola’s novels are not written following the “mechanistic plotting of cause and effect” (23), however, he contends that Zola emphasizes a singular point of origin. Lehman 13

Working Bibliography

Baguley, David. “(D)ébauches zoliennes: les “rogatons” des Rougon-Macquart. ” Esquisses/Ébauches. Ed. Sonya Stephens. New York : Peter Lang, 2007. 168-176.

Becker, Colette. La Fabrique des Rougon-Macquart : edition des dossiers préparatoires. Vol. III. : Éditions Champion, 2006.

Brewer, David. “The Encyclopédie: innovation and legacy.” New Essays on Diderot. Ed. James Fowler. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011. 47-58.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. London : Athlone Press, 1988.

Lumbroso, Olivier. L’invention des lieux. Paris: Les Editions Textuels, 2002.

Newlin, Keith. The Oxford Handbook ofAmerican Literar . New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2011.

Schalk, David. “Tying up the Loose Ends of an Epoch: Zola’s Docteur Pascal.” French Historical Studies. 16.1 (1989): 202-216.

Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Warning, Rainer and Rosalyn Raney. “Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart”: Compensatory Images of a ‘Wild Ontology.” MLN. 113.4 (1998): 705-733.

White, Nicholas. “Family histories and family plots.” The Cambridge Companion to Zola. Ed. Brian Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.19-38.

Vedder, Ulrike. “Writing Heredity: Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks” A Cultural Histor of Heredity III: 19th and Early 20th Centuries. 2005, Düsseldorf, Germany. Unpublished conference paper, 2005.

Zola, Emile. La Fortune des Rougon. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1981.

-- Introduction. L’Assmmoir. By Roberth Lethbridge. 1877. New York : Oxford University Press USA, 1999. vii-xlvi.

--Le Docteur Pascal. In Les Rougon-Macquart. Vol. 5. Ed. By Armand Lanoux, Paris, 1967.

--“Unpublished Field Notes.” Anthropology Today. 2.6 (1986) : 4-8.

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Image Source : Lumbroso, Olivier. L’invention des lieux. Paris: Les Editions Textuels, 2002.

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