Zola Before the Rougon-Macquart

Zola has begun to receive the serious critical study he deserves, but which, chiefly for religious and political resons, has until recent years been denied. Professor Lapp now makes an important contribution to this recent work on Zola. It is his belief that a study of the early works of all great writers is indispensable to an understanding of their main work (in this case Rougon-Macquart). In making his examination Professor Lapp has been interested in determining whether certain patters of plot, character, situation, and image which occur constantly throughout the Rougon-Macquart were present also in the works prior to 1870. His study shows that they were, and it places Zola in the novelistic tradition stretching from the eighteenth century to the present. It also demonstrates that Zola's chief problem, like Balzac's and Flaubert's, was to reconcile the romantic and the realistic world views. This clash of opposites becomes more evident when the earlier works are studied: in his first novel, La Confession de Claude, which like others of his early works has strong elements of autobiography in it, Zola exclaims concerning the ugly prostitute whom he makes his heroine, and whom Claude loves: "I am the dream, she is the reality." Evidently part of Zola's development involves the struggle for objectivity which he never fully obtains, since Claude-Zola appears in almost all of his novels.
From this study, which inevitable involves comparisons between the early and later works, emerges a new view of Zola's art, of his sources, of his style, his character portrayal, and his use of myth, his descriptive technique, his handling of structure, point of view, and other matters of first importance in any study of a novelist.
In describing Zola's development as a novelist Professor Lapp succeeds, too, in showing that at the roots of Zola's naturalism lay an attitude to life which developed very early and which found its finest expression in a peculiarc conjunction of the mytho-poetic tradition and his own "bursting out upon" the world.