380
PARTISAN REVIEW
or the religious style which precedes his own. The realism of the Flemish,
Spanish, French and Italian schools is still linked by shadows to the Italian
idealization. The naturalists, in literature, are still connected with the Ro–
mantics by way of the narrative.
L 'Assommoir
was held to be the symbol of
realism-the very ordinary story of Gervaise and Coupeau . But this story
and this atmosphere are not in the least ordinary: in the literary context of
the time, they are exotic. Our habit of considering Zola as Balzac's successor
is deceptive. This successor is the author of
Nana.
But
L 'Assommoir
hap–
pened in order to oppose
Les Miserables.
Zola was not misled by this, since in spite of his debt to Flaubert, he
claimed that naturalism would succeed romanticism: chapters, not life–
episodes. No novelist would ever have written
L 'Assommoir
just by looking
at Coupeau, just as no shepherd ever became Giotto by looking at his sheep.
It
has been thought that
L 'Assommoir
is Coupeau plus Zola. We are be–
ginning to understand, thanks to the metamorphosis ,. that in order to shift
from a scenic element to a novel, a change of reference is required . Coupeau
and Gervaise only refer to life, but Zola cannot refer to them without re–
ferring to the fictitious worlds created by writers. Everyone seems prepared
to agree that the library-the world of literature-cannot be a constant ref–
erence, but they will only admit-without it being very clear to them-that
the world of writing, like the world of art, is formed by adjunctions. The
world of Zola would be our own were it not for what has been written since;
just as the Louvre of Cezanne would be ours were it not for what has been
painted since . In spite of the fact that in the Louvre, for instance, the public
desert the antiquities in favor of the Great Period rooms, and that the dif–
ference between the literary worlds of two periods is like the difference be–
tween the Paris of Balzac and the Paris we know today . The burning of the
Tuileries opened up the perspective of the Champs-Elysees, but razed the
palace to the ground . We know this, yet we are not fully aware of it because
we do not differentiate between the world of literature-in any given period
-and that of its writers.
It
seems to us that the seventeenth century was
thriving on Racine, but in fact as late as 1830 the real or imaginary library
was still stocked with the ancient classics. Victor Hugo's plays react against
the classics and in so doing take them into account; this he does in the name
of Shakespeare, with the help of melodrama, but not to relate the story of
Hernani. French literature became a subordinate affair when our revered
French classics held the limelight. What did Ronsard mean to Racine? What
did Malherbe mean to him? His master had not been a French poet, it had
been Euripides. The concept of the unbroken line of French literature which
made the ancient classics gradually appear archeological-it was the Gon–
court's view-was established as late as modern painting. In order to assess
