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‘ The Return of the Repressed’. Uncovering Family Secrets in Zola’s Fiction: An Interpretation of Selected Novels. By Rita Oghia-Codsi.

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 71; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knx146

1468-2931

Nicholas White,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

This psychoanalytical account of a range of Zola’s fiction carries the hallmarks of the thesis on which it is based. It brings to bear a range of conceptual models appropriate to its theoretical position: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theories of psychic development (in particular, the phantom) and Freud and Lacan’s theories of infantile sexuality. In so doing, it advertises on its back cover the book’s interest in ‘the question of the author’s family secrets’. But the ‘author’ here, essentially elided with the narrator, is not really the rounded historical figure explored magisterially in the deep structures of Henri Mitterand’s three-volume biography, Zola (Paris: Fayard, 1999–2002) to which the bibliography refers but which the book’s arguments largely eschew. Given the stress on feminine secrets, it is also surprising not to find in the same bibliography Évelyne Bloch-Dano’s revelatory Madame Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1997). Chapters 2 to 6 take us on an essentially chronological journey: from the death-drive and the return of the repressed in La Fortune des Rougon, Thérèse Raquin, and Madeleine Férat; via the function of dreams in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret and La Bête humaine, prostitution and ‘female discourse’ in La Curée and Nana, and gestation and heredity in Le Docteur Pascal; to the nature of truth in Vérité. Rita Oghia-Codsi concludes: ‘although Zola analyses a family under Second Empire France in the Rougon-Macquart and shows its hereditary fault in portraying a corrupt and decadent society, it is, nonetheless, also used as a means of analysing sexual insecurities and anxieties’ (p. 302). There being no Introduction, Chapter 1 is essentially a bibliographical survey that triangulates Zola, psychoanalysis, and narratology in a scholarly geometry where a critic such as Peter Brooks rightly looms large. It is worth recalling, though, that one of the many reasons why his psychoanalytical interpretations remain so persuasive is that they speak eloquently to the turning points in the zigzagging history of the nineteenth century, in all its social, cultural, and political forms. The Le Rouge et le Noir of Reading for the Plot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) genuinely enhances our comprehension of 1830, just as the Nana of Body Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) actually embellishes our understanding of 1870. History and psychoanalysis, we might recall, can be, as they say, critical friends.