Paris is the place where life comes to its greatest effervescence, running the risk of ruining itself by exhaustion. 4 The concept of life-world, in German "Lebenswelt", has been introduced by Edmund Husserl in his wo (.)ĥThe myth of Paris in the Rougon-Macquart is a myth of the pulsations of life where it arrives at a maximum of energy and intensity.His great descriptions, which in his novels often detach themselves as isolated blocks, get their maximum effect when they are moved by the great breath of an intensity, of a vision, instead of being the exact and naturalistic reproduction of social 3 ![]() For, far from being the great novelist of an epoch of triumphant experimental science, Zola never entirely frees himself from a visionary and rhetorical romanticism. We will see that he inscribes himself in a literary line with Balzac and, even more astonishingly, with Victor Hugo. ![]() This myth, where visionary strength docs not exclude a pronounced sense of the dynamics of the modern world in perpetual change, is far from the proclaimed programmatic aims of an experimental novel. Whereas in his theoretical reflections as well as in the global ideology of the Rougon-Macquart Zola proclaims a myth of positivity and scientific character, he is in his novels themselves the creator of a new literary myth of Paris. Zola indulges in a myth of scientificalness, but, perhaps, is he only serving a discourse of prestige in order to justify a form of novel the merits of which are quite different from those of an experimentation which should care for scientific respectability. 3 Henri Mitterand especially has repeatedly warned against taking Zola’s naturalism for granted: "mé (.)ĤThe experimental novel becomes a novel of experimentation: a novel of the determination by environment, but also a novel of determination by heredity.Just as medicine has found through method a way from art to science, the novel should, at least in principle, arrive at a kind of new scientific validity. His dream instead was to rival with the exact sciences by an analysis of hereditary and social laws and by the solidity of positive and impersonal facts, which the novel should synthesize to a homogeneous whole in opposition to the tradition of the sentimental and improbable fiction of the older tradition.ĢIn his famous treatise on the experimental novel and the experimental method applied to the novel, Zola insists upon the affinity of his literary project to that pursued "with strength and wonderful clarity" by Claude Bernard in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. It is true, Zola was quite far from wanting to write a myth, be it a myth of Paris or a myth of the Second Empire. The Paris of Zola is the Paris of the Second Empire. The myth of Paris becomes in Zola a myth with precise political and social contours. 1 To give a new shape to the discourse of Paris will be for him the greatest literary challenge. As well as Hugo, Balzac and Baudelaire, Zola is fascinated by the reality of Paris, and, once again, he transforms this reality into a myth. ![]() With Zola and his cycle of the Rougon-Macquart, this "natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire", the myth of Paris, the discourse of Paris, change profoundly. In "Le Cygne" ("The Swan") the crossing of the nouveau Carrousel, finished only recently as a place of manifestation for the imperial splendour of Napoleon III, is rich in political evocations, although the melancholy of the lyrical ego, who suddenly is assailed by his memories of the old city, is perhaps less a political melancholy than a sentiment of alienation which goes far beyond political consciousness. Only once, the situation of the poem is given a precise historical and political reference. Baudelaire’s myth of Paris is in different ways a place of confrontation between moment and eternity, between the ridiculous and the sublime, experiences of the palimpsest memory of a flâneur in the city.
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