Creativity and Procreation in Zola’s L’Œuvre
Women carry inside them an organ that is subject to terrible spasms, over which they have no control, and which creates phantoms of every kind in their imaginations.
—Diderot, Sur les femmes
When Zola sent a synopsis for the ten novels of his projected Rougon-Macquart cycle to his publisher, Albert Lacroix, in 1869, he included a plan for one that would describe “the erethism of the intelligence,” “the modern sickness of the artist,” and “the unhealthy conceptions of brains that develop into insanity.” He was familiar with the work of Moreau de Tours from which he very probably borrowed this terminology, and the hereditary pathology that serves to link the various novels in the cycle has many echoes of the “morbid psychology” explored by Moreau in his book of that title. The hero of the novel that Zola eventually began in 1885 and published a year later under the title L’Œuvre (The masterpiece) was to illustrate the “singular effect of heredity transmitting genius to the son of illiterate parents,” and in particular the “nervous influence of the mother.” The mother in question is Gervaise, the heroine of L’Assommoir, whose “neurosis” manifests as alcoholism and is transmitted with a range of pathological consequences to her four children, Nana, Étienne, Jacques, and Claude Lantier, the central figure of L’Œuvre.1
Moreau’s illustrative tree of nervous pathologies had already defined genius as a morbid phenomenon and linked it to a whole range of other phenomena, from the alcoholism that grew on the branch of the “Spontaneous phrenopathies,” to the “Prostitution” at the tip of the “affective” branch of the hereditary nervous conditions, of which another was that of the “Utopists,” who derived from the nearby “intellectual” offshoot. Nana (as prostitute) in Nana and Étienne (as “utopist”) in Germinal would seem to have their origins in these morbid outgrowths of Moreau’s tree.2 Claude’s son Jacques, who dies at the age of twelve with the “enormous head that marked him as the blemished offspring of genius” and swollen to the proportions of cretinism, exemplifies the “Imbecility” that is yet another variant of the same cluster of “Spontaneous phrenopathies.” The Rougon-Macquart family tree (which Zola drew up several times) is closely, though far from slavishly, mapped onto Moreau’s tree. It grows out of a similar “idiosyncratic hereditary nervous condition,” one of whose principal expressions is the genius that Moreau discusses so fully in the body of his text.
In other words, Claude’s defining feature in Zola’s elaboration of his character is his genius. This is a “genius novel” just as much as an “artist novel,” and Claude is as much the inheritor of Balzac’s Louis Lambert as he is that of the Frenhofer of Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (The unknown masterpiece) with whom he is much more commonly compared. In the family tree that opens Une page d’amour (One page of love), the note on Claude outlines the pathology of his genius before mentioning his occupation as a painter: “Heredity of neurosis that develops into genius. Painter.” And Zola elaborates, “Moral and physical preponderance from the mother, inherited neurosis.” In the preparatory notes for L’Œuvre he reminds himself not to forget “the original neurosis that develops into genius,” and in the longer Ébauche (Draft), the pathology of Claude’s genius returns as a central theme: “Genius is disequilibrium. Claude a genius.”3
Sandoz, Zola’s novelist alter ego and mouthpiece, gives voice to this view when he speaks of Claude as having been “ravaged by an excessive lesion in his genius,” and in an echo of Bianchon’s comments about phosphorous, Claude himself acknowledges “some maladjustment of the nerve centres, or … some hereditary flaw,” which, because of “a gram or two of substance too much or too little,” would make him a lunatic instead of a great man.4 The language of the novel replicates the one used by the medical profession to describe genius as a pathological condition, with its erethisms of which Moreau made so much, its lesions, its neuroses, its disequilibrium, and the unhealthy conceptions of the brain. The hydrocephalus of poor Jacques is a further borrowing from this pathologizing repertoire.
Claude, then, is a genius before he is a painter. Given the views of the medical literature of the day—which also included Lombroso’s Man of Genius and Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869)—the genius had much more than the mere painter to offer the novelist whose template was hereditary pathology. The artist novel was certainly a major feature of nineteenth-century fiction, and novelists almost always portrayed their painters as mad, but the madness in these texts was rarely the specific insanity of genius. Balzac’s Frenhofer is more “master” than “genius,” the latter term being reserved for the young Poussin, “the genius adolescent.”5 And although the painter hero of the Goncourts’ Manette Salomon (1867) eventually goes mad, he is never portrayed as a genius.
If the painter is a natural candidate for Zola’s exploration of genius, this is not just because painters are made by nineteenth-century novelists to bear the burden of the madness that, according to the statistical record, writers suffered to the same degree. Zola was closely associated with many of the painters of his time, including his childhood friend Cézanne, who is usually taken to have been the model for Claude. In Zola’s many writings about painting genius is a recurrent point of reference, although the term is used mostly to convey positive aesthetic value, rather than latent pathology: “Genius alone is sovereign in art,” he wrote in 1881. This positive connotation of genius is repeated in an essay on “L’argent dans la littérature” (Money in literature), written in 1880, where Zola states categorically that “genius alone matters,” and he criticizes the system of patronage under the ancien régime because it was ill suited to the workings of “[g]enius as we understand it nowadays, with its disruptive power.”6
Genius may be a largely positive term for Zola the art critic who regards disruption as a virtue, but for Zola the novelist these “disruptions” are an ambivalent quantity that allows him to explore it both positively as central to the artistic enterprise and negatively as a sterile or destructive pathology. Like Mme de Staël and Balzac, he does so both from an objective external and from a sympathetically internal perspective. Although the collaboration with Édouard Toulouse was still a decade off, he anticipates the scientific outlook by placing rather more distance than do either of the two other novelists between the authorial viewpoint and the failed genius he examines. As a painter, Lantier offers less scope for identification on the part of the author than did Corinne or Lambert, but both author—especially as projected into the figure of Sandoz—and painter are bound together by the issue of artistic creativity that is the novel’s central concern.
CREATIVE GENIUS
What Zola valued in genius was its creativity, the sheer capacity to produce, and in Le Roman expérimental (The experimental novel) he defends the experimental method on the grounds that it ensures the freedom of the novelist’s “creative genius.”7 The biological thinking of the time—enthusiastically embraced by Zola—encouraged the conflation of creation and procreation that is applied both to his conception of the individual productions of the artist and to the artist’s ability to engender a collective future for his chosen medium. Works of art are produced by the individual artist, but his productions also contribute to the genealogical evolution of his own profession. Pathology has a part to play in both processes.
The literary tradition of doomed artists contributes to this representation of pathology, but so too did Zola’s view of contemporary art as debilitated by a “nervous crisis” that results for painters in “a breakdown of the entire cerebral mechanism.” The ambivalent character of genius in the domain of midcentury painting is summed up when Zola writes that Delacroix was “[t]he only genius of our time,” but that he was “afflicted by acute neurosis.” This affliction notwithstanding, the “disruptions” of genius are presented as the means whereby painting might emerge from its stalled development, and in the Ébauche for L’Œuvre Zola writes that “[a]ll this new art … requires a genius to be fully realized.”8 In the novel itself, the entire art world is described as awaiting “the man of genius” capable of creating the masterpieces that would inaugurate a new era in painting.
Zola’s portrayal of the characteristics of this kind of genius are relatively familiar: audacity, force, the unbridled energy of youth, total devotion to art, indifference to public opinion or material reward, and so on. Claude quite clearly fits the bill. He has youth, his life revolves entirely around his art, his painting is bold and energetic to the point where it is described as having a “superb violence.” The older painter Bongrand—whose opinions are portrayed as entirely reliable—is full of admiration for Claude’s Plein air (Open air) and says that he would give ten years of his life to have painted it. This is enough to encourage Claude to believe that he does indeed have the genius he aspires to. But as it turns out, his genius is not enough to enable him to create the masterpiece that would renew a stagnant artistic tradition.
Sandoz, a further source of reliable opinion, comments after Claude’s death that “he was not the man for his own artistic formula … he hadn’t quite the genius necessary to establish it on a firm foundation and impose it on the world in the form of some definitive work.” As Claude himself surmises, his genius is “incomplete.” The judgment, which he hears spoken behind his back one day (and which Zola himself notes in his preparatory draft for the novel), both flatters and horrifies him, and leads him to see his genius as poised on a knife edge between triumph and catastrophe.9 The difference between the two is infinitesimal but decisive: the mere few grams of hereditary substance whose presence or absence will determine whether their bearer becomes a great man or a lunatic.
It is actually never quite clear in the novel whether Claude’s pathology is his genius as such, or its insufficiency. The regular output of the novelist Sandoz does not depend on genius, and it seems to offer the more reliable means of artistic production. The contemporary medical view of genius as inherently unstable is illustrated by Claude whose working habits are portrayed as inveterately erratic. The ecstasy of inspiration experienced at the sight of Christine’s naked breast and the ensuing frenzy of creativity quickly turn into “fever,” “crisis,” and an attack of “crazed rage.” The courageous brutality of his painting all too easily becomes a destructive violence, expressed not just in Claude’s frequent outbursts of anger but in the attacks on his own canvases: he punches a hole in the last one he paints. The masterly outline produced by an initial upsurge of creativity is spoiled through the painter’s inability to move beyond the first moment of inspiration: “he was unable to finish what he had started.”10 His youth also eventually tells against him. Like the other characters, he grows older over the course of the novel but remains a child, usurping his own son for Christine’s maternal attentions and thereby, it is hinted, contributing to the neglect that leads to Jacques’s death. The potential of which Sandoz was once in awe is never realized, and the genius that was supposed to launch a new era in painting is destroyed by an increasingly sterile repetition of the gestures of youth, inspiration, and energy. The creativity of whatever genius he has is repeatedly aborted.
WOMEN: LIVING FLESH AND THE MUSE
This biologizing of artistic creativity inevitably introduces the issue of its gendering, and women are given a variety of roles to play in this connection. Zola is far from unique in providing his painter with a female companion. Following a paradigm established by Balzac’s Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, the plot of the artist novel frequently turns on the rivalry between the painter’s mistress and his art. This certainly applies to L’Œuvre where Christine’s sense of Claude’s painting as rival is particularly acute. But in another narrative strand that runs through the tradition of the artist novel, the emphasis is on the threat posed by women to the ideals of the artist. Balzac’s La Maison du chat-qui-pelote (At the sign of the cat and racket) is perhaps the source for this. Dating from 1829, it describes how the painter Théodore is captivated by the beauty of a young woman who becomes his muse and inspires the masterpiece that earns him recognition for his talents. However, after marrying her, he is obliged to recognize the “cruel truth” that his muse is quite indifferent to his art, and that “his wife was insensible to poetry, she did not inhabit his sphere …; she walked prosaically through the real world, whereas he had his head in the heavens.”11 Augustine’s origins as the daughter of a shopkeeper define the female sphere as domestic and pecuniary in ways that recur in many later novels.
This female sphere is regularly portrayed as a threat to an art whose integrity seems to depend on preserving its implicit masculinity against female contamination. The Goncourt brothers offer an extreme example of this, not just in real life, but also in their novels. The would-be writer, Charles Demailly, in the novel of that name, is brought low by the domesticity and banality of his wife Marthe, whose true nature he fails to spot before he marries her. Charles forgets what he once knew, namely that a writer cannot be a husband, and that celibacy is necessary for thought.12
In Manette Salomon, it is the woman rather than the painter who gives her name to the novel, and who is the conduit through which bourgeois domesticity, commerce, and the demands of family are introduced into the world of art, which is their antithesis. Like Demailly, Coriolis in principle knows better than to marry, and he spells out the various pitfalls of marriage over the course of several paragraphs, the key one of which reads as follows:
In his view, celibacy was the only state that left the artist his freedom, his strength, his brain, his consciousness. He maintained the idea about women and wives, that it was through them that artists become vulnerable to weakness, to subservience to fashion, accommodation with gain and commerce, renunciation of aspiration, to the sad courage to abandon the disinterestedness of their vocation and lower themselves to hasty and botched industrial production, and to money which mothers oblige them to earn from the humiliation and the sweat of talent. And on the far side of marriage there also lay fatherhood which, in his eyes, damages the artist, distracts him from his spiritual productions, and binds him to an inferior type of creation, reducing him to a bourgeois pride in the ownership of fleshly being.13
The emotional, domestic, financial, and procreative demands imposed by women are disastrous for the creative artist, and the rest of the Goncourts’ novel bears this out. Art is portrayed as a male preserve that must be defended against the predations of a femininity that can also attack the artist from within: Coriolis’s moments of weakness and creative inertia are ascribed to the feminine streak in his personality.
These views are echoed in a variety of more or less misogynistic scenarios in Alphonse Daudet’s collection of portraits, Les Femmes d’artistes (Artists’ wives), published in 1878, just a few years before Zola started work on L’Œuvre. (Daudet was a friend of Zola’s.) Claude too invokes the need for celibacy when, toward the end of the novel, he suspends sexual relations with Christine and announces that “genius must be chaste, it must make love only to its own works.”14 Celibacy is the artist’s only defense against the femininity that is art’s undoing. Except that—and this is where the situation starts to become interesting—painters are portrayed as being uniquely dependent on women as models for their art.
If the novels are to be believed, almost every painting in the nineteenth century depicted a woman, and even where the woman is not the central subject of the painting, she is presented as the indispensable component for its success. Frenhofer’s Belle noiseuse, Coriolis’s Bain turc, and Claude’s Plein air are all transformed and reenergized when the artist stumbles on the one woman who can serve as the model for his painting. So, despite the ferociously antifeminine principle of celibacy, it turns out that painting—and sculpture too, for that matter—is crucially reliant on the contribution of a woman. In most cases this contribution is provided by their beauty: Gillette, Augustine, and Manette Salomon are all remarkable for their physical perfection. On this score, however, Christine is different. What she offers to Claude is the living element of human flesh, which can be transferred into the painting itself. Painting in Zola’s procreative aesthetic aspires not to beauty, but to life.
The accidental exposure of Christine’s breast as she sleeps reveals to Claude the figure that he had tried in vain to find for his painting, and she provokes in him the “thrill” of inspiration. For Christine, however, the painter’s gaze is felt as an almost physical raid on her flesh, and this physicality is carried over into the painted canvas: “[S]he was as revolted … as if it were herself lying there, stripped to her virgin nakedness. What hurt her more than anything, was the vehemence, the uncouthness of the painting itself; it pained her as if she had been assaulted and beaten.” Claude works on his canvas as if he is assaulting the body he is in the process of portraying: “he attacked the breasts, which as yet were barely sketched in.” But this assault is driven by the painter’s desire to create flesh of his own: “His excitement grew, for, chaste as he was, he had a passion for the physical flesh of women, an insane love of nudity desired but never possessed, and he was powerless to satisfy himself or to create as much of the flesh as he dreamed of enfolding in an ecstatic embrace.”15
Claude’s virginality and his avoidance of women recall Pygmalion, but his desire is less to create his own painterly mistress than to turn canvas into living flesh, which is his criterion of artistic success. When the passage he is painting falters, he scrapes the canvas clean and the result is tantamount to murder: “It was murder he was committing, total obliteration …, all that remained … was a naked woman’s body with neither head nor breast, a mutilated trunk, a vague, corpse-like shape, the dead flesh of the beauty of his dreams.”16 The canvas is restored to life only when Christine finally agrees to pose and offers her naked body—“female flesh”—to Claude’s art.
She reluctantly makes the same offer when Claude fails to make progress with his final canvas, but the reluctance here is of a slightly different order. She is no longer young and her figure has been distorted by childbirth. More particularly she has an acute sense that the women on Claude’s canvases are now the only ones that he is really interested in, and this includes her younger self portrayed in the Plein air piece. When he comes across his earlier canvas one day, he exclaims, “Elle a noirci” (She’s turned black), where elle seems to refer as much to the woman as to the canvas (la toile) or to the paint (la peinture, la couleur). “He was completely in love with her, the way he talked about her as if she were a real person, a person he felt sudden urges to see again from time to time and who made him forget everything else in his haste to keep their rendezvous.”17
As Claude frantically works on his doomed canvas, Christine is sacrificed in his desire to create a living figure in the painting. She is described as consenting to the “defeat of her body” as Claude “kills” her with the poses he requires of her “while he added to the charms of the other…. And was it not torture to have to make the sacrifice of her own body to help to bring the other woman to life?” Painting becomes an ever greater aggression practiced on the living model: the looks Claude directs at Christine from the top of his ladder are described as “slash[ing] across her like knives from shoulder to knee,” and her body is dismembered and portioned out to the three figures on the boat according to whether the scene requires a breast, a belly, a shoulder or a foot.18
It is through his frustration at not ultimately being able to “create flesh” and “breathe life” that Claude eventually punches a hole in his canvas, which immediately appears to him like a wound from which the lifeblood of his work seems to be flowing. When he has finally succeeded in “closing” the wound, what remains is the faint trace of a “scar” just below the woman’s heart. Claude’s desire to create a living entity is reflected in this confusion of real and painted women, flesh and canvas, until the central figure takes on an eerie life of her own and Claude hears galloping behind him “the pale ghost of his nude figure, still formless after endless recastings and pursuing him now with its aching desire to be born.”19 She finally takes revenge on her failed creator as she wakes Claude from sleep and calls him to a death that may look like a suicide, but which his friend Sandoz claims was a strangling for which he blames the alarming dominatrix in the painting.
All this has a slightly gothic ring to it, but Claude’s failure to realize his masterpiece goes to the heart of Zola’s own aesthetic to which living flesh is also the key. Both Sandoz (who remains reliable on these matters) and Claude (who admittedly is not) share the ambition to capture life itself in their work. Sandoz dreams of creating an “ark” that would contain all life forms, and be produced “in the mighty flow of universal life” rather than in accordance with any manual of philosophy. If this sounds rather short on specifics, it nevertheless echoes the core motif of the demands Zola himself makes elsewhere, namely that the work of art consist of “blood and nerves,” and that the artist give himself body and soul to his work. Or, in the words he places in the mouth of the painter in the essay on Courbet, “I am an artist, and I give you my flesh and my blood, my heart and my thought.” Zola’s Courbet belongs to the family of “makers of flesh,” and his is a painting in which “firm, supple flesh is powerfully alive.” In a wonderful formulation, Zola’s imaginary artist “will applaud when he hears flesh cry out” (lorsqu’il entendra le cri de la chair), and it is this cry that echoes through L’Œuvre.20
BELLIES AND BIRTHING
The focus of Claude’s preoccupation with living flesh is the belly (le ventre). Although he makes his first appearance in the Rougon-Macquart cycle with a small part in Le Ventre de Paris and its depiction of food in Les Halles, he himself is not much interested in food, and often forgets to eat in the frenzy of painting. It is Sandoz who, like his creator Zola, is the gourmet, and fills the bellies of his friends with the meals that unite the group of artist friends every Thursday, and whose menus are carefully recorded in the novel. The bellies that interest Claude are the bellies of women, and he has a particular talent, as the dealer Malgras notes, for painting this feature of their bodies. In trying to explain his “love of beautiful bellies” Claude says, “That’s the part that’s always thrilled me more than all the rest, the belly…. It’s so lovely to paint, like sunshine.”21 As he paints the central figure of his final canvas, his brushstrokes are described as “caressing” her belly. Claude’s bellies are always female bellies, but the embrace he pursues in his painted figures is less the expression of an erotic desire than a fantasized appropriation of the capacity of women to produce living flesh from within their own bodies.
Sandoz makes his own case for inclusion of the sexual act in his own work when he says, “[E]verything must be expressed … and especially the sexual act, the origin and unceasing realisation of the world itself.” For Sandoz too, sex is not the enactment of erotic desire, but, in an audible reference to the title of Courbet’s famous painting of 1866, the “Origin of the world.” The goal of art is to portray “nature’s process of perpetual creation—in short, life itself, all life from end to end.”22 Claude’s preoccupation with the female belly reflects this procreative emphasis; and it is as if in his increasing obsession with the belly of the woman in the canvas, he were desperately trying to find the key to create living flesh of his own. The dictionary definition of le ventre encompasses the entire abdominal cavity, but it becomes increasingly synonymous in L’Œuvre with the uterus. When Claude hangs himself in front of his canvas, his eyes are fixed on the figure’s genitals, to which he has added a mystic rose as if in homage to their procreative powers. His dying breath is interpreted as having been a final attempt to breathe his soul into the painted canvas.
But it fails. And if it fails it is because he never succeeds in bringing forth what he himself has in his own belly. In his early, optimistic phase, he describes his view of the artistic process as follows: “What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have in your belly? Didn’t it all boil down to sticking a female in front of you and painting her as you feel she is?”23 To give what one has inside one’s belly is to paint a woman the way one experiences her—that is, in Claude’s case—with the thrill that the flesh of her own belly inspires in him. The male artist and his female model are both endowed with this procreative belly through which, perhaps, each gives birth to the other. The female character of flesh is no longer confined to the female model, but becomes what the painter himself aspires to. And this is all the more bizarre when one recalls that it is precisely the procreative function of women that conventionally posed the greatest threat to genius.
The notion of artistic creation as a kind of birth is inescapable in L’Œuvre, and this feminization of the creative process is particularly noteworthy if one considers that the engendering capacity of genius was traditionally conceived as male. When the Goncourts make the claim in Charles Demailly that “our children are the works we create,” it is part of their attempt to keep art separate from the female sphere and the demands of real children. In Zola’s reworking of this idea through his focus on the actual birthing process whereby these “children” come into the world, he redefines artistic creation in unambiguously female terms. Zola’s list of key words in the Ébauche includes The Work, The living Work, The Work of flesh, and so on, but also Creation, create, procreate, and then variously Childbirth, Giving birth, Parturition, Conception, Bring forth, Fecundity, the blood of Childbed, and again Create, Give birth.24 These were the words running through Zola’s head as he wrote L’Œuvre, and their drift is clear: Creative Power (another topic in the list) is nurtured in the womb and realized through parturition.
Claude’s inspiration for his final doomed canvas is directly compared to the experience of women in pregnancy: “as if some process of germination were at work within him and something was coming to life, with the accompanying exaltation and nausea familiar to women in pregnancy.”25 Despite these promising symptoms, the pregnancy never reaches term, and the failure of Claude’s genius is a generalized abortion, whether described as the failure of genius to give birth to a work of art, or as his inability to give birth to his own genius. Zola’s attention is on a stalled process of parturition, and he is not attempting a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of genius itself.
In a bizarrely mixed gendering of this procreative view of artistic production, Bongrand is described as devoting himself to the “mightiest effort, the blow that he had been longing to strike for years, one last great work brought forth [enfantée] in his desire to prove that his virility was still unimpaired,” before he finally admits that “he would never give birth to any more living works of art.”26 To “give birth” to a living work of art would be the mark of his virility. As with the mechanics of genius (does it give birth or is it given birth to?), the logic of parturition seems to override distinctions of gender itself.
Even Sandoz, for all that he is presented as succeeding where Claude fails and as having a paternal role in relation to his contemporaries, describes himself as being involved in an endless and agonizing birthing process: “I deliver my own offspring with forceps, and even then the child always looks to me like a monster.” The regular labor of creation through which he produces the offspring that invariably disappoint him can be read as having overtones of this universal—and universally painful—reproductive biology. In the Ébauche Zola too notes that he intends to portray his own experience of the “inner life of production, an endless and very painful birthing.” The “damned of art” are those who “die without being able to create life … and from not being able to deliver what they have in their bellies.” Sandoz is drawing on the same idiom when he describes Claude’s final canvas as an abortion, albeit “a superb abortion.”27
This reproductive blight extends well beyond the artistic sphere, and is everywhere in the novel. The only biological births in L’Œuvre produce sickly children who will ultimately prove not to be viable: in addition to Jacques, who doesn’t live beyond childhood, the two children of Margaillon the architect are the victims of the scrofula and the tuberculosis that are their biological inheritance. Sandoz originally has a job recording births in the Mairie of the fifth arrondissement in Paris, but the grave in which Claude is buried at the end of the novel lies next to a vast cemetery for children, a “children’s city of death” with rows and rows of tombstones recording lives cut short at the ages of two years, sixteen months, five months, and, in the case of one little Eugénie, three days.
L’Œuvre was written at a time when Zola and his wife Alexandrine were suffering from their own childlessness, but the phenomenon of failed parturition is pervasive in the novel and integral to its treatment of genius. If none of the characters succeeds, and no masterpiece is created, this is ultimately ascribed to something much larger than the failure of individual genius. Or rather, individual genius is portrayed as being dependent on broader historical and cultural developments, which are themselves marked by morbidity. Sandoz’s comments at Claude’s funeral are as much a funeral speech for the times as a eulogy for the man. “The century has been a failure,” he claims. “We’re living in a bad season, in a vitiated atmosphere, with the century coming to an end and everything in process of demolition; buildings torn down wholesale; every plot of land being dug and redug and every mortal thing stinking of death.” The solution to the times lies, however, with the times, since they are, Sandoz continues, a period of transition: “We are not an end; we’re a transition, the beginning of something new.”28 For the “deficient reproducers” that Sandoz describes his generation as being, salvation lies with a belief in the continuities of a life force that will eventually result in a purging of contemporary corruption in the form of a viable birth—as happens with the arrival of the “unknown child” at the end of Le Docteur Pascal who is the offspring of a male scientist and a female artist.
The failed machismo of individual genius is counterpointed against this gradual evolutionary process whose rhythm is determined by a transcendent and implicitly female life force that gives birth in its own good time. Individual failure is to be seen in the context of a larger evolutionary process, as Sandoz suggests in his euology: “Could anything be more frustrating than seeing his new notation of light, his passion for reality, … the evolution he started with such originality, delayed, trifled with by a lot of smart nobodies, leading to nothing, simply because the man for the situation has yet to be born? … But he will be, one day! Nothing’s ever completely wasted, and there’s simply got to be light!”29 This belief in the ultimate triumph of a beneficent life force is evident elsewhere in Zola’s fiction, most notably, perhaps, at the end of Germinal, the novel that immediately preceded L’Œuvre. But its interest here lies in the way that it affects the perception of genius, and of its gender associations in particular.
Artistic creativity is powerfully feminized by being envisaged in terms of parturition; and the achievements of revolution and rupture associated with individual and implicitly male genius are offset against the continuities of an implicitly female life force. The effect, however, is not to open up the possibility of female genius, and there is no sense in Zola’s novel that the twentieth century, whose arrival is so eagerly awaited, will offer a stage for the women whose genius Kristeva celebrates in Le Génie féminin (Female genius) and two of whom were already alive, namely, Colette (b. 1873) and Melanie Klein (b. 1882). So too was Gertrude Stein (b. 1874), who later unashamedly proclaimed her own genius through the mouth of Alice B. Toklas. For Zola, women’s art, insofar as it exists at all, is minor: their preferred medium is the modest water color or pastel, and its examples are the fan painting from which Christine’s mother makes a living, or the flower illustrations that Clotilde paints in Le Docteur Pascal.
Like Mme de Staël’s portrait of Corinne or Balzac’s study of Louis Lambert, Zola’s depiction of failed genius in Claude Lantier is a complex affair, poised ambivalently between contradictory perspectives. In the first instance, it allows Zola to create another version of hereditary pathology to add to his Rougon-Macquart family saga, and he does so by drawing freely on the medical literature of the day. To this extent, fiction is merely replicating the view of genius established by the medical profession, and the novelist apparently shares their superior diagnostic vantage point. But the parturient imaginary through which the failures of genius are also represented ends up marginalizing genius within a much larger process, while turning the anxiety about creativity into an experience shared by a whole generation. It is as if Zola were not quite sure whether he himself aspired to genius or no, and his response is to leave the decision to his own biology, which Édouard Toulouse would scrutinize in such detail ten years later. By then Zola was the father of the two (illegitimate) children he had with Jeanne Rozerot—though he doesn’t let on to Toulouse about their existence—and had completed the twenty volumes of Rougon-Macquart cycle. When he died in 1902, genius was moving into the hands of a new breed of professionals, the psychologists of intelligence, and its bearers were no longer virile or parturient artists and writers, but children themselves.