Please join us for the next two sessions of DIX-NEUF AT A DISTANCE, the virtual seminar series of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes and Dix-Neuf, the journal.
Friday 30 September 2022 @ 17:00 (UK time), 18:00 (French time), 12:00 (EST)
DECADENT SEXUALITES
Friday 21 October 2022 @ 17:00 (UK time), 18:00 (French time), 12:00 (EST)
ZOLA: BLOOD, NATURE, NATION
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Friday 30 September – DECADENT SEXUALITIES
Mathew Rickard (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens)
Robert Pruett-Vergara (Independent scholar, recently University of Oxford)
Moderator: Sam Bootle (Durham University)
Mathew Rickard, ‘La Misère Sexuelle’: An Archaeology of Decadent Incels
The recent phenomenon of ‘inceldom’ (the experience of being ‘involuntarily celibate’) has largely been thought of as an anglophone phenomenon, yet it has been argued that the first modern example can be seen in French writer Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994). However, while the term ‘incel’ is a relatively recent linguistic invention, the misogynist assumption that women owe men sex (and love) certainly predates the term. Both the end of the nineteenth century in France and the beginning of the global twenty-first century witnessed alleged crises of masculinity. Indeed, many of the social anxieties that left their mark on the literature of the fin de siècle remain as current today as then. Decadent literature, with its obsessive explorations of sterility and impotence, continues to speak eloquently to what Jennifer Birkett terms the ‘erotic promises that can never be cashed’ [The Sins of the Father: Decadence in France 1870-1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1986), p. 67]. This paper thus seeks to begin to uncover the nineteenth-century precedents of the current crisis of masculinity and inceldom in a distinctly French setting. What will be revealed is the constant potential for hegemonic and hybrid masculinities to reinvent themselves in comparison to other men and to perceived threats to their performance of masculinity.
Robert Pruett-Vergara, Remy de Gourmont’s Le Désarroi and the Self-Destruction of Symbolist Eroticism
Rediscovered and published as recently as 2005, Le Désarroi (c. 1898-99)is the great lost novel by the French critic, poet, novelist, and playwright Remy de Gourmont. Dismissed from his post at the Bibliothèque Nationale for his scathingly anti-nationalist article Le joujou patriotisme, Gourmont’s secrecy surrounding Le Désarroi is readily explained by the unpublishable images of political violence which it presents, namely, an anarchist bombing of the Palais Bourbon and the gruesome death of 800 people inside.
While Le Désarroi’s themes of anarchism and destruction provide an intrigue unto themselves, I argue, they also arise out of a larger crisis in Gourmont’s fiction concerning the erotic possibilities of the idealist philosophy which he espoused. My ongoing work on Gourmont’s imaginative writing has increasingly aimed to establish Le Désarroi as a site of transition from the high solipsism of Symbolist thought to the naturalistic and outward-looking attitudes which Gourmont and many of his ilk adopted in the early years of the twentieth century.
I will discuss in this seminar how Le Désarroi constitutes a unique and hitherto unexplored crossroads of 19th– and 20th-century erotic sensibilities, a missing link between the subjectivist longings of Sixtine (1890)and the exuberant materialism of Physique de l’amour (1903).
Friday 21 October – ZOLA: BLOOD, NATION, NATURE
Kit Yee Wong (Birkbeck, University of London)
Sophie Maddison (University of Glasgow)
Moderator: Claire White (University of Cambridge)
Kit Yee Wong, Body and Nation: The Myth of Blood in Zola’s La Fortune Des Rougon (1871)
The twenty volumes of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series (1871–93) document the rise and fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852–70). Springing from a violent change of political regime, the origin story of the eponymous Rougon-Macquart family, whose lives are lived out in the books, aligns with that of the Second Empire. It is Louis-Napoleon’s coup, an illegal seizure of power, that institutes the degenerate empire of Napoleon III and consolidates the ambitions of the Rougons. This paper will examine the use of blood as myth in Zola’s network of moral censure in the first volume, La Fortune des Rougon (1871). I argue that Zola creates a somatic discourse that positions the body as shot through with history, so the individual body becomes degraded because of national politics. There was bloodshed during the coup, but it is by raising blood to the level of myth that Zola empowers individual memory as a necessary rupture and corrective against the grand narrative of history. Myth, then, provides a lens through which the moral implications of the coup become visible. The bond between individual, history, and nation, becomes clear when blood becomes mythologised in the novel.
Sophie Maddison, Slime, the Agony of Water, and Ecophobia in Le Ventre de Paris
The protagonist of Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873), Florent Quenu, arguably anticipates twentieth-century, existentialist angst. He has been described by David Trotter as a ‘nauséaste’ [Cooking with Mud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 220–24], and by David Baguley as a ‘precursor’ of Sartre’s Roquentin [Naturalist Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 193]. In the opening chapter of Le Ventre de Paris, Florent sinks into seemingly malevolent vegetables and feels himself ‘drowning’ in Les Halles. The slimy materiality of Zola’s food markets calls to mind Roquentin’s encounter with the chestnut tree in La Nausée (1938), as well as Sartre’s conceptualisation of viscosity in L’Être et le Néant (1943).
Building on ecocritical responses to Sartre’s ‘visqueux’ (often referred to in English as ‘slime’), this paper revisits the existential resonances of Le Ventre de Paris and offers two new angles of interpretation. Firstly, I argue that as Florent’s aversion to Les Halles is driven by a contingent disintegration of boundaries, the ‘sea’ of matter in which he drowns can be read as the ‘agony of water’ – a term used by Sartre to describe the ontological ambiguity of slime. Secondly, I contend that Florent’s exaggerated reaction to his surroundings is an example of ecophobia: the contempt and fear humans feel towards the agency of the natural environment.