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18 Friday, December 16, 1977 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Zola's Role as Champion of Justice Among Great in Literary Ranks
Emile Zola earned an in-
erasable page in French
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and world history as a
Dreyfusard, as the author of
"J'Accuse" which aroused
public opinion against the
innocent, condemned
French army officer Alfred
Dreyfus.
Zola had already gained
fame as a novelist and as
one of the leaders among
the French literary giants.
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In both these respects his
name reappears for esteem
in the biography "The Life
and Times of Emile Zola"
by W. J. Hemmings
(Charles Scribner's Sons).
Hemmings' is not a com-
plete review of the Affaire
Dreyfus, yet it briefly cov-
ers the major events and
presents a capsule worthy
of totality in brevity.
The biographer of Zola
points out that Zola was not
impressed with Dreyfus
when he met him. There is
this reference to the Zola
role that merits attention:.
"If Zola had never con-
cerned himself with
Dreyfus, his place in the
history of French literature,
as one of the four major
novelists of the 19th Cen-
tury, would still be assured.
The crucial part he did play
in the famous 'Affair' con-
fers on him an additional
significance of an altogether
different order, and obliges
one to bracket him with the
handful of other writers,
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heroes of the pen as they
were diversely regarded in
their day, that includes such
disparate figures as Milton,
Voltaire, Byron and Hugo,
who interrupted a life of
literary activity to throw
themselves into a struggle
altogether foreign to the
normal preoccupations of
men of letters.
"The incidental result
was that they came to be
revered or reviled, even
long after their death, for
reasons quite other than
those that ordinarily deter-
mine the reputations of
great writers.
"The cause for which Zola
emerged from his tranquil
study, which made him the
butt of hysterical mobs and
which for a few months
turned him into a solitary
exile separated from friends
and family, is not _one that
can be as simply defined as
those for which the other
writers we have named
gave up home, position, or
life itself: popular rights,
religious tolerance, the free-
dom of an oppressed nation.
Dreyfus himself was not the
cause.
"Zola met Dreyfus only
years later and was unim-
pressed; if all his sacrifices
Thad been made merely in
order to rehabilitate this
small-minded' professional
soldier, he might have won-
dered if the struggle had
been worth it. The cause
was greater than Dreyfus,
but lesser than 'the Truth',
which was what Zola sup-
posed it to be when he de-
clared that 'Truth is qn the
march and nothing will gait
it,' or that: 'I defended
Dreyfus as I defended Ma-
net, because that was where
the truth lay.'
"What he was really fight-
ing for was neither a man,
however unjustly used, nor
an abstraction, however
noble, but a principle : the
principle that in a decent,
democratic society, good
ends cannot be used to ex-
cuse bad means, if only be-
cause it is usually those who
employ the means who de-
cide which ends are good.
Only a crazily optimistic ob-
server would say, looking
back over the 80 years that
have passed since then, that
this principle is now gener-
ally accepted and applied.
But at least we know that,
when it is not applied, the
democratic ideal is com-
promised; and it may be
that we owe the beginnings
of this 'knowledge to the
stand Zola took in 1898."
Zola, in the Hemmings
biography, is the popular
novelist. He gained fame as
a libretist. He was an art
lover in addition to attaining
literary glory. It is in rela-
tion to the recognition he
attained internationally'
among the great in the liter-
ary world that Hemmings
presents this critical com-
ment on the subject of his
biography:
"It is not unusual for the
reputation of a writer to
suffer some eclipse during
the first few decades follow-
ing his death, and Zola , was
to prove no excention to thk
rule. His popularity among
the mass of the reading pub-
lic underwent no serious
general decline, according
to figures released from
time to time by his pub-
lishers, but in the inter-war
years, with Proust, Mau-
riac, Julien Green and
Roger Martin du Gard in
the ascendant, Zola ap'--
peared boringly old-fashion-
ed to the intellectual elite:
Gide complained about this
in 1932: I regard the dis-
credit into which Zola has
fallen as a monstrous in-
justice, which reflects
poorly on modern literary
criticism. There is no more
personal and more s repre-
sentative French novelist.'
But, having recorded this
opinion in his diary, Gide
left it at that, and no one
else came along to remedy
the 'monstrous injustice'."
"One might have expected
the 100th anniversary of
Zola's birth to have occa-
sioned some interesting re-
assessments, but as ill luck
would have it, this cente-
nary fell in the first year of
the Nazi occupation of
France; and for the Nazis,
Zola the 'Jew-lover' was
nothing but a degenerate
Bolshevist pornographer.
"Only in 1952, 50 years
after his death, were there
clear signs of a change of
attitude. It was then that,
for the first time ever, one
of Zola's novels, 'La Terre,'
was made the subject of a
French state doctoral
thesis, and this work of
painstaking scholarship
helped to promote an in-
tensive research effort led,
however, predominantly by
American, not French, aca-
demics. The 1960s saw the
appearance of the first
properly annotated editions
of the works, the five-vol-
ume-Pleiade edition of 'Les
Rougon-Macquart' (recently
supplemented by a volume
of the collected short sto-
ries).
"The new school of struc-
turalist critics have discov-
ered in Zola an admirable
subject for their particular
exegetical approach, and
anyone who attends, these
days, one of the inter-
national colloquia organized
for students of the naturalist
novel may sometimes be
tempted to speculate, as he
listens to some of the more
esoteric and jargon-ridden
papers, what the ghost of
Zola, if one may suppose so
obdurate a materialist to
have been granted any form
of spectral survival, would
make of the mind-boggling
manifestations of modern
academic appraisal. Would
he be gratified, or would his
sturdy good sense cause
him to recoil in horrified
amazement and flit back to
whatever Elysian fields he
now roams?
"But apart from this no
longer very recent resur-
gence of specialist interest,
there remains the heart-
ening persistence of Zola's
popularity with the ordinary
reader, shown not only in
the lists of paperback re-
prints of his novels sold in
-
Franep hilt_ahranti_tiin
in
•<
EMILE ZOLA
the English-speaking world,
in the stream of new trans-
lations which have been is-
sued over the past 25 years.
Immediately after the last
war, the only work of Zola's
available in this country
was an Everyman reprint of
Havelock Ellis's pedestrian
translation of "Germinal."
Today, there is not one of
the major novels in the
`Rougon-Macquart' series
that cannot be read in a
comp6tent, often masterly
modern rendering.
"In North America, Zola
has always been held in
higher esteem than else-
where, thanks in ithe first
instance to the early critical
essays of Henry James and
W. D. Howells. His imita-
tors in the United States—
Frank Norris, Theodore
Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Up-
ton Sinclair—have been
more numerous than in any
other country, even if nor.
of them, perhaps, ranks as a
writer of the very first or-
der. So there is a certain
appropriateness in the fact
that, today, the principal
center of Zola studies is
situated on the other side of
the Atlantic, in Toronto, and
that the enormous task of
collecting, collating and
publishing Zola's volumi-
nous correspondence is
being undertaken by a joint
Franco-Canadian team of
scholars to which several
outstanding specialists from
the United States have at-
tached themselves.
"When, some time to-
wards the end of this cen-
tury, they have completed
their task and made avail-
able the fruits of their la-
bors, the material at the
disposal of future biogra-
phers will be immeasurably
greater and this particular
biography will doubtless
need to be replaced by a
more detailed assessment of
Emile Zola and his achieve-
ment;."
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