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Stigma indelebile: Gide's Parodies of Zola and the Displacement of Realism

1986; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2905652

1080-6598

Emily Apter,

Literature and Culture Studies

Written in 1943, Gide's contentious remark encapsulated nearly fifty years of ambivalence towards his realist predecessor. An admirer in his youth of Zola's La Faute de l'Abbe' Mouret, Gide had pastiched the excesses of idolatrous devotion and its transgressive spirituality in his own post-Symbolist Tentative amoureuse. Shortly thereafter, he oscillated toward parody, using Zola's art of objective realist description as the target of satire in his s6ties. In Paludes, Naturalism was mired in its own rhetorical bog of botanical onomastics. In Le Promethee mal enchan6e, humorous effect was produced, as in the medieval s6tie, by submerging a mythic masterplot in a morass of confabulation and period decor (Prometheus in a Parisian caf6). In Les Caves du Vatican, the fait divers-genre a clef of the realists-was used to construct the edifice of an elaborate narrative farce. Reassimilated as part of a general espousal of realist ethics in the political climate of the 1930's, and finally to be abandoned with irritation in Gide's turning away from activism, Zola remained a central point de repere, positive or negative, in Gide's literary trajectory.