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Griffiths_12mm:Griffiths_12mm 13/05/2009 11:29 Page 1

GRIFFITHS
EMILE ZOLA
Filmmakers have drawn inspiration from the pages of Emile LEGENDA is a joint imprint
Zola (1840–1902) from the earliest days of cinema. The ever- of the Modern Humanities
growing number of adaptations they have produced spans eras, Research Association and
genres, languages, and styles. In spite of the diversity of these Routledge. Titles range from
approaches, numerous critics regard them as inferior copies of medieval texts to

AND THE
a superior textual original. But key novels by Zola resist this contemporary cinema and
critical approach to adaptation. Both at the level of char- form a widely comparative
acterization and in terms of their own textual inheritance, they view of the modern
question the very possibility of origin, be it personal or textual. humanities.
In the light of this questioning, the cinematic versions created

ARTISTRY
from Zola’s texts merit critical re-evaluation. Far from being
facile copies of the nineteenth-century novelist’s works, these
films assess their own status as adaptations, playing with both
notions of artistic creation and their own artistic act.

Kate Griffiths is a Lecturer in French at Swansea University.

Emile Zola and

OF
the Artistry of Adaptation
ADAPTATION Kate Griffiths

cover illustration: Still from André Antoine’s 1921

film adaptation of Zola’s La Terre (1887), by kind permission
of Photoplay Productions Ltd. Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation
 lEgEndA
leenda , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of
the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities
Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to
contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern
humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, german, greek,
Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of
distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly
bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature
Association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association (mhra ) encourages and promotes

advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially
modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema.
It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different
disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of
increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the
publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the
humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest
thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell,
Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today
Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities
and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving
scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide.
www.routledge.com
 Editorial Board
Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German)
Professor David Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Soul’s College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)

Managing Editor
Dr Graham Nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK

[email protected]
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation
❖

Kate Griffiths

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

2009
 First published 2009

Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2009

ISBN 9-781-906540-27-2 (hbk)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying,
recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the
publisher.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
 Contents
❖

Acknowledgements ix
Editions Cited x
Introduction 1
1 La Terre and the Art of Inheritance 12
2 L’Œuvre and the Translation of Reality: Moving Between Text and Image 37
3 Nana: Copies and Originals 60
4 La Curée and the Hunt for Authorial Origin: The Pull of the Past 83
5 The Ghost of the Author: La Bête humaine and the Pull of the Future 107
Conclusion 132
Bibliography 139
Index 145
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v

I would first like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British
Academy for the research leave and conference funding which made this monograph
possible. Thanks are also due to the University of Wales, Bangor for the period of
research leave granted to commence the project.
Many friends and colleagues in Swansea and elsewhere have helped this project
in its various stages. I am immensely grateful for their time, patience and insight.
Particular thanks are owed to Michèle Hannoosh, Susan Harrow, Hannah Thompson,
Glynnis Cropp, Derek Connon, Nigel Harkness, Larry Duffy, Graeme Harper, Rob
Stone, Elaine Canning, Nick White, Andrew Counter and Owen Evans for their
guidance, feedback, suggestions and leads. David Evans and Floriane Place-Verghnes
provided valuable opportunities to test-drive aspects of the project. I thank Robert
Singer for his advice and assistance in tracking down rare Zola adaptations and Katie
Halsey for her help on so many occasions.
Finally, I am grateful to be able to record in print my warmest thanks to John,
Margaret, David, Matthew and Daniel Griffiths, and, last but certainly not least, to
Richard Sheppard.
 EDITIONS CITED
v

Unless otherwise stated, the source for the five main novels by Zola discussed in each
successive chapter of this book is Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. by Henri Mitterand, 5 vols
(Paris: Gallimard, 1960–67). Page numbers are given in the text. They are to be found
as follows:
La Terre (Chapter 1) — vol. iv
L’Œuvre (Chapter 2) — vol. iv
Nana (Chapter 3) — vol. ii
La Curée (Chapter 4) — vol. i
La Bête humaine (Chapter 5) — vol. iv
Editions of other works by Zola are indicated in the notes.
 INTRODUCTION
v

Adaptations of the novels of Emile Zola are habitually approached as imperfect

reproductions of a superior textual original, or, as Millicent Marcus puts it in a
different context, as ‘an inferior version [...] of a formally pure source’.1 In 2006,
one of the most recent adaptations of Zola’s work appeared at the National Theatre.
Marianne Elliott staged Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of Zola’s own theatrical
adaptation of his 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin. Critical responses to her production
are revealing. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer is damning in his
assessment of Elliott’s production: ‘Zola’s original novel will haunt my memory far
more potently than this disappointingly pallid and laborious stage version’.2 Whilst
Michael Billington in The Guardian writes far more positively of Elliott’s version,
deeming it ‘a miracle of sound and light, music and movement’, his criticism is
instead reserved for Zola’s own theatrical adaptation: ‘The play, in short, is nothing
like as powerful as the novel.’3 Zola’s novel is implicitly positioned as a potent
original text whose lustre cannot be captured by adapting hands — even if those
hands belong to Zola himself.
Such reactions, far from being reserved for theatrical adaptations of Zola’s novels,
are comparably rife in relation to cinematic adaptations of this nineteenth-century
novelist’s works. Whilst some critics have even gone so far as to hail specific
cinematic adaptations as improvements on the novel, their voices are few and far
between. Writing on the cinematic adaptation of Thérèse Raquin released by Marcel
Carné in 1953, François Vinneuil claims: ‘Le problème de l’adaptation littéraire
est résolu, cette fois, par l’éclatante supériorité, en richesse humaine, en vigueur
artistique, de l’œuvre cinématographique sur le roman.’ 4 Far more frequent,
however, are those who borrow from the vocabulary of inferiority, incapacity and
betrayal in their assessments of the films drawn from Zola’s texts. David Baguley,
reviewing the ‘bad press’ that cinematic adaptations of Zola’s novels have received,
almost habitually, cites Michel Capdenac’s anger at the alterations made by Roger
Vadim in his 1965 adaptation of La Curée: ‘Pourquoi diable, dans ce cas, avoir
conservé le titre, alors que justement ils ont édulcoré ou esquivé ce qui lui donne
sens, c’est-à-dire l’essentiel, l’arrière-plan politique et social.’5
These fulminations and their counterparts have done nothing to put off those
with an urge to adapt Zola’s texts into film. Cinema’s love affair with Zola’s novels
and short stories is an abiding one. Some eighty cinematic adaptations of Zola’s
works have been created and he is, as Robert Singer points out, ‘one of the most
adapted authors in world literature’.6 The first known cinematic adaptation of
Zola dates from as early as 1902, the year of the author’s death, when Ferdinand
Zecca’s Les Victimes de l’alcoolisme appeared. Zecca’s five-minute film is made up of
2 Introduction

five tableaux apparently based on L’Assommoir. The link between early cinema and
literature is a well-established one. As soon as film technology had advanced far
enough in terms of possible film length and complexity to allow the production
of narrative works, filmmakers began to adapt established literary texts. Such
adaptations not only enabled them to exploit the notoriety of blockbusting works
for commercial gain, but also simultaneously permitted the nascent medium of
film to claim some sort of cultural legitimacy for itself. However, the link between
early cinema and Zola’s novels in particular is pronounced. A consideration of just
one of his novels, L’Assommoir, is revealing. Following Zecca’s 1902 adaptation, a
further three French adaptations were made before the outbreak of World War
I: Albert Capellani’s L’Assommoir (1909), Gérard Bourgeois’s Les Victimes de l’alcool
(1911) and Emile Chautard’s Le Poison de l’humanité (1912). D. W. Griffith adapted
L’Assommoir in America to create The Drunkard’s Reformation which appeared in
1909. Moreover, Griffith’s film underlines the complex processes of filtration
which often lie behind certain adaptations of Zola’s texts. As Diane Smith and
Robert Singer point out, Griffith’s film stems from the New York revival, in
1903, of the play Drink, which was the British theatrical version, created by
Charles Reade in 1879, of Gastineau and Busnach’s French theatrical adaptation
of L’Assommoir.7
The reasons for early French cinema’s interest in Zola’s texts specifically are
open to debate. A variety of responses have been suggested. Leo Braudy parallels
the technical possibilities and ambitions of the new medium with Zola’s naturalist
aesthetic ideal. He claims:
The young French film-makers of this period believed that the essence of the
new medium was its ability to record and immerse itself in authentic detail.
Their theories of film were usually parallel to the precepts of Emile Zola in his
Le Naturalisme au théâtre, a polemical blast at the artificialities and limited social
viewpoint of nineteenth-century French popular drama.8
Sergei Eisenstein offers a slightly different explanation for the popularity of Zola’s
texts as subject matter for the early years of film: what he deems their pre-cinematic
qualities. Eisenstein, a life-long admirer of Zola’s novels, cites the nineteenth-
century novelist as being ‘in the methodological sense the greatest school for a
filmmaker (his pages read like complete cue sheets)’. Whilst never adapting Zola’s
texts, Eisenstein makes the following claim of Zola’s work:
I reread him. Before each new project I reread the appropriate volume of his
works. Before The Strike: Germinal. Before The General Line: Earth. Before
October: The Débâcle for the attack on 18 June 1917 and The Happiness of Women
for the rape... of the Winter Palace.9
Jean Chothia, in contrast, suggests that some of Zola’s inf luence on film stems
from André Antoine, a key name in the theatre and the cinema to whom this book
will return, and whom Chothia sees as a conduit carrying some of Zola’s texts and
ideas into the spheres of theatre and subsequently film. Whilst Antoine’s output as
a filmmaker was comparatively small, his impact was not. Chothia explains this
impact in the following terms:
 Introduction 3

His inf luence in cinema derives partly from the presence in the new industry of
actors and régisseurs — de Max, Joubé, Tourneur, Capellani, Gémier — whose
theatrical training had been with Antoine, and partly from the recurrence
among the early scripts of the French cinema of works that had inspired or had
figured in the repertoire of Antoine’s theatres.10
Cinema’s attraction to Zola’s texts is not limited to its nascent years. Filmmakers
from a variety of eras and countries, with affiliations to very different cinematic
schools of thought, have, throughout the twentieth century, turned to create
versions of Zola’s texts. In order to attempt to do some justice to the variety of
Zolas that exist in celluloid form, this current volume incorporates readings of two
silent adaptations of the novelist’s work (André Antoine’s La Terre of 1921 and Jean
Renoir’s Nana of 1926) as well as more modern sound versions of Zola’s novels.
Jean Renoir’s 1938 French adaptation of La Bête humaine is evaluated alongside Fritz
Lang’s 1954 film noir Hollywood remake of the same text, entitled Human Desire.
Whilst Renoir’s La Bête humaine was hailed, as Chapter 5 will make clear, as an
exemplar of Zola adaptation, this monograph also turns to analyse the reputedly
‘bad’ adaptation which, as we have seen, infuriated Capdenac amongst others:
Roger Vadim’s 1965 version of La Curée. Moving into the twenty-first century,
the adaptation of Zola’s text into the medium of television will also be considered
via an analysis of Edouard Molinaro’s 2001 Nadia Coupeau, dite Nana. Small screen
adaptations of Zola’s novels have largely been neglected in the well-trodden
field of Zola studies,11 but Molinaro’s self-ref lexive approach to the artistry of
adaptation, and the interaction of this two-part televisual offering with its cinematic
predecessors, make a clear case for its inclusion in this volume.
Whilst my opening paragraphs have attempted to suggest the sheer breadth of
adaptations which Zola’s work has triggered, it is not the intention of the current
book to detail and encompass this range — such an attempt would run to several
volumes. Moreover, whilst clearly inf luenced by them, this piece will not retrace
the steps of the body of scholars such as Leo Braudy, Tom Conley, Russell Cousins
and Robert Singer, to name but a few, scholars who have valuably and persuasively
focused on Zolian adaptation from the perspective of specific films, key directors
or delimited historic eras. Rather, the central aim is to reconsider the critical
framework according to which cinematic adaptations of Zola’s texts are most often
assessed in a work that spans a variety of directors, eras and films. ‘Under most
literary lenses’, an adaptation is, according to Kamilla Elliott, considered as ‘an
inferior reproduction of a superior original’.12 However, both Zola’s approach to his
texts and a significant selection of his works resist and destabilize the terminology of
copy and original so central to conventional approaches to adaptation. Three factors
are of key importance here and will be sketched out in subsequent paragraphs.
First, adaptation is not something to which Zola is passively subject, it is a process
in which he is actively and thoughtfully involved as he transforms and monitors the
transformation of his own texts into other media in his lifetime. Secondly, at the
level of plot, specific novels question the possibility of origin at a personal level in
their exploration of characters’ ability to author their own destiny. Finally, as Zola
renders the personal origins of his characters problematic, so too, in certain texts,
4 Introduction

he explores the origin of his own authorship, playing with the status of his works
as textual originals, dramatizing adaptation as a narrative theme.
Zola’s involvement in the theatrical adaptation of his own work is well known.
His own adaptation of the novel Thérèse Raquin, the adaptation from which the
Nicholas Wright version mentioned above is drawn, was staged in 1873. In 1879
William Busnach and Octave Gastineau’s adaptation of Zola’s L’Assommoir opened at
the Ambigu. Busnach subsequently, and with Zola’s permission, adapted Nana, Pot-
Bouille, Germinal and Le Ventre de Paris, as well as La Bête humaine, though this last
script was not produced. Zola signed Renée, his own adaptation of La Curée written
between 1880 and 1881, but he distanced himself to an extent from the adaptations
undertaken by Busnach. Responding to criticism that the adaptation of Nana did
not uphold his theatrical naturalist theories, Zola playfully distances himself from
the work by underlining that it does not appear under his signature:
Reste la grosse question de savoir si j’ai collaboré à la pièce et dans quelle mesure.
[...] J’estime que je n’ai pas à répondre. On ne m’a pas nommé, cela doit suffire.
Cherchez les causes, dites que j’ai juré de ne jamais rien signer en collaboration,
ajoutez bien que Nana pourrait bien être une expérience et un acheminement,
imaginez encore que je veux un autre terrain. Et il y a de grandes chances pour
que vous soyez dans la vérité. Mais ce sont là des suppositions. Un seul fait
demeure: on ne m’a pas nommé, je ne suis pas de la pièce.13
Busnach’s correspondence reveals, however, the active participation of Zola in the
creation of this adaptation.14 Zola also collaborated with Alfred Bruneau to create
‘théâtre lyrique’.15 Moreover, as Lawson A. Carter points out, a consideration of
Madeleine Férat reveals that Zola also engaged in the adaptation of theatre into novel
form.16 This novel first existed as a play. Having had it refused by the Gymnase and
the Vaudeville theatres in 1866, Zola subsequently adapted it into a novel published
under the title La Honte in L’Evénement in 1868 and then in book form with the
title of Madeleine Férat.
Not only are textual origins blurred as Zola’s original works are transformed,
often by their creator’s hand, into different media, but origins at times prove equally
problematic, as I have suggested, at the level of characterization. Zola’s interest in
questions of race is well known. It forms the very backbone of the Rougon-Macquart
series and finds expression in the family tree offered in accompaniment to the
collection. However, using characters such as Nana, Jacques and Buteau as case
studies, the chapters of this book underline that genetics often do not fix the origins
of the Zolian character — rather, they more frequently testify to the very difficulty
of so doing. Jacques and Buteau inherit the adapted genetic texts of an endless series
of forebears, a series to which there is no true origin. Origins prove as problematic
in relation to Nana. Whilst the novel which bears her name devotes textual space
to her genetic inheritance, Nana, as Chapter 3 of this volume suggests, ultimately
points to a genetic origin which is not her own.
No consideration of concepts of origin in Zola’s text can be approached without
reference to Naomi Schor’s persuasive analysis of the topic in relation to La Fortune
des Rougon.17 Schor’s book not only testifies to what she deems ‘Zola’s obsession
with origins’, it also points out the way in which such origins prove to be impossible
 Introduction 5

to pinpoint in the novelist’s fiction.18 Analysing La Fortune des Rougon, the founding
volume of the Rougon-Macquart series, a volume tellingly bearing the subtitle Les
Origines, Schor focuses on the shifting position of the cemetery, the Aire Saint-
Mittre, containing the grave stone upon which ‘all of the Rougon-Macquart rests’.19
However, the contents lying beneath this grave cannot be discovered by reading
the inscription on it. Schor writes: ‘[...] the origins of the Rougon-Macquart are
encoded in a half-erased message, at the same time revealed and concealed, thus
literally indecipherable’.20 And, perhaps even more importantly for this volume,
this apparent point of origin points elsewhere, for the grave’s contents have been
transported from a cemetery that no longer exists. Schor is not, as she herself points
out, the only critic to testify to the problematic nature of origins in Zola. She
harnesses aspects of Jean Borie’s reading of Zola to her fiction, in particular his
claim that the genetic torments of the Rougon-Macquart family have no locatable
origin, no founding event: ‘Jamais, pas même dans Le Docteur Pascal lorsque Zola
résume et passe en revue le cycle tout entier, il ne précise quel est ce premier
crime qui accablera la famille’.21 And, just as the general origins of the family
Zola’s novelistic series depicts are intriguingly problematic, so too, as other critics
in the sphere of Zola studies make clear, are the personal presences of many of its
individual members. The eye may devour the seemingly omnipresent body of the
courtesan Nana, but it can never truly locate, fix or uncover her.22 Similarly in La
Terre Buteau may seek to assert his self-possession and originality, but his identity
ultimately proves to be the latest replica in a seemingly endless series of forebears
who deny him originality.23
Zola’s exploration of the problematic nature of personal origins in his texts at the
level of characterization runs alongside an examination of the origins of certain of
his own texts. Zola offers a self-conscious and probing assessment of his fiction’s
ability to realize its stated desire to capture the reality which is the origin behind
its pages. And, as characters’ authorship of their own destiny is mediated by the
inherited, adapted genetic texts of a series of their forebears, so Zola points to the
way in which his own authorship is at times inherited and adapted from a series of
earlier authors and other genres. As Russell Cousins puts it:
The author was no stranger [...] to transposing material from one literary
medium to another, or indeed to emulating the techniques initiated in other art
forms. [...] Several of his atmospheric descriptions were a conscious attempt to
extend the techniques of the impressionists to the world of literature.24
Fidelity discourses revolve around notions of an ‘original’ novel (or work) of
which a subsequent cinematic adaptation is a copy. However, texts such as La
Terre, L’Œuvre and La Curée, to cite but a few examples, destabilize their status as
textual original. They point to their position as adaptations, and often adulterated,
problematic ones at that, of earlier texts, other genres and external reality. Put
simply, Zola destabilizes origins, be they those of his characters or indeed those of
his own artistry.
Thus, harnessing and adding to the existing body of critical work in the sphere of
Zola studies on the problematic nature of origins in Zola’s texts, this volume seeks
to remobilize such work in the sphere of adaptation. It does so both to underline the
6 Introduction

particular and perhaps unexpected resonances of such work when re-contextualized

in the sphere of Zola and cinema and to make clear the key case study Zola offers
scholars of adaptation. In a highly original manner, his texts frustrate those who
would view them solely through the lens of fidelity criticism. Fidelity critics have in
some ways become straw men, their approaches persuasively undercut by a growing
number of cinema scholars. Brian McFarlane states, and goes on to demonstrate,
that ‘No critical line is in greater need of re-examination — and devaluation’.25
Julie Sanders seeks to valorize notions of infidelity in creative terms: ‘Fidelity to the
original? [...] It is usually at the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts
of adaptation and appropriation take place’.26 Millicent Marcus points out that the
very terms of the debate on the transformation of the novel into a cinematic copy
are problematic since novels, like adaptations, constitute something of a shifting,
adapted source: ‘The novel is itself a mixed form whose mongrel status has often
made it suspect among the apostles of generic homogeneity in literature.’27
This current volume is deeply indebted to and inf luenced by such revisionist
voices, voices which will recur in its text. Yet it recognizes that fidelity, as an issue,
will not quite go away. Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen in their 2000 work The
Classic Novel: From Page to Screen acknowledge McFarlane’s belief in the need to move
beyond fidelity as an all-encompassing critical framework, whilst making clear that
all the essays in their edited volume ‘take the question of fidelity as their critical
point of reference’.28 Fidelity is, and should be, an issue for those who adapt. Instead
of using it as the sole means to judge adaptations of Zola’s texts, this monograph
instead explores the way in which specific cinematic adaptations themselves
consider the question of fidelity. They dramatize it as one of their central narrative
themes, acknowledging Zola’s own text in their images, assessing their own act
of authorship in relation to that text. Specific adaptations of Zola’s texts consider
their status as adaptations, as copies, albeit in altered form. They consider their own
authorial act, pointing to the borrowed origins of their work, to what they have
altered, to what they have changed. In so doing, they echo in part the self-conscious
authorial stance of Zola as he points to the texts from which he has borrowed, the
texts which he has adapted into his own pages. Writing in the context of Italian
film, Millicent Marcus has identified in specific films what she calls allegories of
adaptation or umbilical scenes, moments ‘in which the film reveals the traces of its
derivation from the parent text and discloses its interpretive strategy’.29 Such scenes
feature in a number of the adaptations to be studied in the course of this volume as
filmmakers consider their own authorial act, as well as that of the source text they
copy. I do not make this claim for all cinematic adaptations of Zola’s work, and
consequently not all of Zola’s adaptations and the adaptations springing from them
find a space in this monograph. Instead this volume is structured around specific
pairings of works, literary and cinematic, which actively engage in a dialogue about
authorship, origin and adaptation.
My reading of the interaction of the work of Zola and various filmmakers with
notions of textual origin and adaptation is informed at various points by certain
theoreticians of textual relations. Harold Bloom’s Freudian reading of textual
relations and literary property in terms of anxiety and parricide in The Anxiety of
 Introduction 7

Influence resonates in relation to La Terre, a novel in which Zola portrays paternal

relations and the inheritance of property precisely in terms of usurpation, anguish
and the repeated murder of the father.30 It is arguable that Zola did at times express
anxiety in relation to notions of inf luence. In L’Œuvre, his character Claude
bemoans the fact that he cannot remove the trace of Delacroix from his works.31
And Zola himself uses the term anxiety when wondering what future readers will
make of him:
Voici, hélas! que j’arrive à un âge où le regret de n’être plus jeune commence,
où l’on se préoccupe de la poussée des jeunes hommes qu’on sent monter
derrière soi. Ce sont eux qui vont nous juger et nous continuer. J’écoute en
eux naître l’avenir, et je me demande parfois, avec une certaine anxiété, ce
qu’ils rejetteront de nous et ce qu’ils en garderont, ce que deviendra notre
œuvre entre leurs mains, car elle ne peut être définitivement que par eux, elle
n’existera que s’ils l’acceptent.32
However, in La Terre and elsewhere, Zola explores his own textual inheritance
from his literary fathers in a manner more joyful than anguished. Zola’s intricate
exploration of the borrowed layers of other works in his texts could be paralleled
with Gérard Genette’s image of the palimpsest. Discussing the shifting and multiple
relations between hypotexts and hypertexts, Genette evokes ‘la vieille image du
palimpseste, où l’on voit, sur le même parchemin, un texte se superposer à un autre
qu’il ne dissimule pas tout à fait, mais qu’il laisse voir par transparence’.33 Genette
does not explicitly address the question of cinematic adaptation in much depth. He
acknowledges it only in passing.34 However, his image of the palimpsest is key to
my reading both of Zola’s novels which playfully point to the receding series of
texts from which they have borrowed and to the adaptations of Zola’s novels which
acknowledge Zola’s text as a source but also, at times, earlier cinematic versions of
that text. Via the image of the palimpsest this monograph will explore the accreted
authorial identities both in Zola’s texts and in the adaptations made of them.
However, in this book about the shifting traces of earlier authors, the importance
of the traces of Jacques Lacan in my reading of Zola and adaptation must also be
acknowledged. Whilst Genette may explore the concept of the textual palimpsest,
Lacan enacts it, exploring and questioning his own authorship in a manner which
is compelling in relation to Zola’s text. Lacan invokes earlier authors to facilitate
his own points. Their identities are initially acknowledged and their texts remain
distinct: ‘Elle [la découverte freudienne] s’exprime assez bien par la fulgurante
formule de Rimbaud [...] Je est un autre’.35 However, Lacan blurs the citational
nameplates of the sources from which he borrows, teasingly erasing them: ‘La vie ne
songe qu’à mourir — Mourir, dormir, rêver peut-être, comme a dit un certain monsieur,
au moment précisément où il s’agissait de ça — to be or not to be.’36 Ultimately he
rewrites any number of earlier sources, subsuming them into his own authorial
voice. Descartes’s ‘je pense, donc je suis’, for example, becomes Lacan’s ‘je pense où
je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas’.37 Lacan scripts himself over the text of
the seventeenth-century thinker but alerts his reader to the palimpsest-like nature
of his textual act by choosing not only one of the most canonical writers of all
time, but one of his most celebrated lines. Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum’ has become
8 Introduction

a cliché in its own right, a fragment of text whose provenance can never fully be
erased. Lacan undertakes a similar action in relation to other lines whose earlier
author can never truly be erased: Shakespeare’s ‘to be or not to be’ and Molière’s
‘tarte à la crème’ from L’Ecole des femmes.38 Lacan performs the way in which his
own speech always points to someone else, someone earlier, leading his reader back
in time, space and text. The texts from which Lacan borrows, themselves borrow
from earlier texts and so on, seemingly ad infinitum: ‘Vous connaissez tous le thème
de l’Anneau de Hans Carvel, bonne histoire du Moyen Age, dont La Fontaine a fait
un conte et que Balzac a reprise dans ses Contes drôlatiques.’39
The theories of Genette and Lacan offer a useful starting point for an exploration
of the way in which certain Zola texts and specific films made from them playfully
explore the palimpsest of their own artistic identity, revelling in notions of textual
mobility. Mobility is, Julie Sanders suggests, a feature of the study and terminology
of adaptation. In support of such a claim she cites the following list from Adrian
Poole which attempts to define the Victorian era’s interest in reworking the
artistic past: ‘[...] borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating; [...]
being inf luenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed; [...] homage,
mimicry, travesty, echo, allusion, and intertextuality’.40 Sanders multiplies this
mobility of terminology by offering additional suggestions of her own: ‘We could
continue the linguistic riff, adding into the mix: variation, version, interpretation,
imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel, sequel,
continuation, addition, paratext, hypertext, palimpsest, graft, rewriting, reworking,
refashioning, re-vision, re-evaluation.’ 41 Whilst recognizing the mobility of possible
terms to describe the processes of adaptation, this monograph will structure itself
around the following selection of its many variants since they are dramatized by
Zola as narrative themes: inheritance, translation, imitation, the pull of texts past,
the processes of replacement and displacement.
Chapter 1 explores the theme of inheritance on three levels in relation to La Terre.
First, at the level of narrative, characters inherit from their fathers, constructing and
reinforcing their identity through the property and money they receive by means
fair and foul. This exploration of inheritance runs alongside a textual variety of the
same phenomenon as Zola’s novel about inheritance itself makes use of aspects of
the literary property and riches of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Moreover, Zola’s novel
was subsequently staged at the theatre in 1904 and adapted in a film by André
Antoine released in 1921. The impact of each of these acts of inheritance is assessed
in relation to authorship, be it personal (at the level of characterization), textual (that
of Zola) or cinematic (that of Antoine).
Chapter 2 turns to consider the question of translation, a theme prominent
in Zola’s L’Œuvre. Not only does Zola present his work as the translation of
the impressionists into novelistic form, he also explores the novel’s status as a
translation of the reality the naturalist school seeks to render. However, origins
in L’Œuvre prove just as thorny a concept as they were in La Terre. Zola may
proffer reality as the source behind his textual translation, but it is a reality,
L’Œuvre makes clear, which cannot be accessed. Characters’ identity cannot
be unlocked in this roman à clef and, via the character of Christine and the
 Introduction 9

portraits painted of her, Zola destabilizes the relationship between source and its
artistic reproduction.
Notions of imitation lie at the heart of Chapter 3 and its exploration of the novel
Nana. Imitation is a key narrative theme as society ladies turn to imitate the novel’s
heroine. However, Zola will not allow Nana to be considered as a point of origin.
He not only denies the reader access to his heroine as a point of origin, mediating
her constantly through a series of artistic screens, parts, images and idées reçues, he
also examines her genetic background to reveal that in terms of heredity she points
to an origin which is not her own. Questions of origin are key to a variety of the
adaptations derived from Nana. This chapter explores Jean Renoir’s 1926 silent
adaptation of Nana and Edouard Molinaro’s 2001 version of the same text. Whilst
these versions destined for the large and small screen are very different, both engage
with Zola’s unpicking of the dialectic between copy and original, assessing their
own status as textual copies, evaluating their own authorial act in self-ref lexive acts
of adaptation.
Adaptation is the focus of Chapter 4. Roger Vadim’s 1965 adaptation of Zola’s
La Curée has, as this introduction has already suggested, received a largely critical
reception, being frequently denounced as an unfaithful copy of Zola’s original
text. However, Zola’s novel not only plays with notions of origin, it revels in its
status as an adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre, making explicit, at the level of narrative,
a hypotextual presence which was only implicit in La Terre. Moreover, Racine’s
Phèdre offers no more stable a point of origin than Zola’s text, for it lies at the end
of a series of earlier adaptations of the original Phaedra myth. And, as Lévi-Strauss
points out, ‘Comme les rites, les mythes sont in-terminables’.42 Zola’s play on the
labyrinthine series of texts and adapted images forming the pages of his novel finds
an echo in Vadim’s film. Vadim, like Zola, in a self-conscious manner, considers his
own cinematic act of adaptation, entering into Zola’s exploration of the palimpsest
at the heart of his authorial act.
If Chapter 4 considers the pull of texts past on Zola’s corpus, Chapter 5 assesses
that of texts future, turning as it does to assess the issues of replacement and
displacement in relation to La Bête humaine. Such issues are narrative themes in
Zola’s novel, themes taken up and enacted by the long line of adaptations made
from that novel. Working with Jean Renoir’s 1938 French adaptation of Zola’s text
and Fritz Lang’s 1954 Hollywood remake, this chapter analyses the accretion of
traces of ghostly authorial identities as successive filmmakers remake not only Zola’s
text, but adapt the cinematic adaptations which have preceded theirs. These ghostly
authorial identities find a compelling parallel in the text itself as the protagonist’s
own criminal act is authored by the whispering ghostly voices of a seemingly
endless series of forebears.
To suggest that origins are problematic in Zola’s fiction is not necessarily new.
However, to offer a portrait of Zola as an author destabilizing origins in terms
of genetics and textuality and to explore the subsequent implications of this
destabilization of origin for cinematic adaptation is perhaps more so. Adaptations
of Zola’s texts are, as has been suggested, often written off as inferior copies of a
textual original. However, if certain Zola novels destabilize their status as textual
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