1. Letter to the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
2. Teaching the Novel
3. Re-Capturing the Novel
4. An essay in Literary Imagination
5. Another essay in Literary Imagination
6. Is There A Monkey In This Class?
7. Children of the Rougon-Macquart
8. For a Re-evaluation of Zola's Characters
9. Time, History, and Myth in Zola
10. Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin and Zola's Germinal
11. The Claws of the Cat in Balzac
12. Zola and Surrealism
13. Pour un nouveau surrealisme
14. Various reviews of my book on Zola
15. Pascal and 19th-Century Ennui
16. Space in Zola
17. Time and Zola's Characters
18. Zola's Conception of Time
19. People and Things in Zola
1. Letter published in the Summer 2006 ALSC Newsletter
A Defence of NEH Seminars
To the Editor:
I am writing in response to a brief passage in Dan Patrick’s moving tribute to Roger Shattuck in the Spring 2006 Newsletter. “He said he would be delighted to [write me a letter of recommendation for an NEH seminar in American History that I had applied for], though not without tactfully intimating, in passing, that an English teacher who belonged to the ALSC might find better things to do than spend his summer toting a required laptop around in the groves of the NEH. In the end, my not being selected to attend that seminar told me that he had perhaps been right...”
Having participated in two NEH seminars for college teachers (1980 and 1984) and having subsequently been selected to direct eight NEH seminars for school teachers (1987-2006), I would like to stress three points.
The first is that what matters most in our profession is good teaching. Period. That’s not to say that good scholarship and creativity aren’t important and integral parts of what we do. Nor is it to say that there isn’t a place for the discussion of literary theory or of political relevance in various arenas of our profession. But it all begins with and flows into and out of good teaching, and unless we live this aspect of our lives through our active support of teachers and participation in teacher education courses and programs, we can run the risk of being intellectually dishonest with ourselves and many of our colleagues. (I will not go into detail here about the five years I spent directing the creation from whole cloth of a nine-discipline Master of Arts in Teaching program at UMass Dartmouth, but I will be happy to discuss at another time how, I believe, most ALSC members can effectively contribute to such a process.)
Second. Many of the individuals with whom I have collaborated in NEH seminars—teachers of history, social studies, journalism, world geography, English, French, Spanish, German, art, and psychology, to mention just a few of the areas of study they represent—have published their own scholarly papers or had their own creative work exhibited. Some of them have PhDs, most have master’s degrees, and most would have gone on for the doctorate had they but lived in the kind of socio-economically favorable times which subsidized my own five years of graduate studies in the late 1960s. Their brilliance and commitment to the profession are matched by their inspirational qualities and made even more appreciable by their lack of pretentiousness. In fact, as much as I have enjoyed and continue to be almost daily rewarded by thirty-five years of university teaching, nothing can approach the exhilaration of directing an NEH seminar. I suspect that most other seminar directors feel the same way.
Third. School teachers, too many of whom survive the daily battering of just not being properly appreciated for what they do, need the kinds of intellectual challenges that NEH seminars provide in lengthy and substantive seminars—the very kinds of professional and engaging activities that one-and-three-quarter-hour seminars at ALSC conferences cannot even begin to approach. Just take the time to ask school teachers who have participated in such programs, and they'll gladly explain why NEH seminars are of such tremendous value to them. Maybe then the ALSC will have a greater understanding of how better to advance its goals, as well as a deeper appreciation of the seamless web of education and the relevance of the profession of teaching.
Lew Kamm
Chancellor Professor
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
2. Issue Subject Editor, Academic Exchange Quarterly, Summer 2003: Teaching the Novel
This issue of AEQ includes various articles examining different approaches to facilitating the effective teaching of the novel in the undergraduate classroom. English, American, and foreign literatures are included. Here is my introduction to the volume.
As a privileged instrument of creativity involving the relationships between our experiences and our awareness of those experiences, the novel manifests itself in a variety of psychological, historical, sociological, political, autobiographical, speculative, and sentimental ways. The novelist looks at the world through a creative screen, even through a kind of magical kaleidoscope that dismembers, deforms, and recomposes a reality rendered iridescent by his or her vision: a genuine chemistry takes place in which the substance of observed, lived, or imagined reality becomes, through a kind of poetic transubstantiation, a new substance, one which is unlike any other: the novelistic substance itself. But how do we re-capture the power and wonder of this substance for our students and for ourselves as instructors? How do we balance the author’s depiction of life and the world and our interpretation of that depiction? How do we train the mind to enjoy and communicate with the various forms of this literary experience and to share the experience with others? And what about the intimately related challenges of teaching short fiction?
If we consider the novel as a narrative in prose dealing with people and their actions in a certain time and in a certain space, all of which conveys a certain vision on the part of the author; if we utilize close reading of verb tenses, adjectives, phrases in apposition, choice of nouns, point of view, and so forth to focus on even only one of the defining aspects of the genre, we can forge a host of questions enabling students to come to grips with the central issues, themes, and challenging questions that rest at the foundation of the interconnecting elements of virtually any great novelist’s work. But that is just one way that we could try to approach the many challenges we face when trying to teach the novel, regardless of the language in which we may read and discuss it with our students. Is this kind of approach similarly appropriate for the teaching of short fiction? What of the changing perspectives of the author, the characters, the reader, whether in the novel or in short fiction? How does the incorporation of literary theory affect these questions? What does our study of pedagogy or of second language acquisition reveal about effective approaches to studying fiction?
This issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly offers several articles devoted to practical and theoretical experiences, methods, and assessments that enable the teaching of the novel and short fiction to be a genuinely meaningful and effective educational experience for students and instructors—especially in an age when requiring 100-150 pages of reading a week is considered by many in the profession to be too much for students who attempt to read fiction in English, let alone who face the challenges of being able to read and analyze it in a foreign language. Moreover, these articles are a reminder of how fiction challenges us to confront ourselves, to evaluate our basic assumptions about knowledge and belief, language and reality, and intellectual and emotional authority, in short, our culture, our ideological commitments, and the human condition.
3. “Re-capturing The Novel,” Academic Exchange Quarterly, VI (Fall 2002), 198-202.
This article develops my conceptual approach to the teaching of the novel as illustrated in the eight National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for Teachers I have directed (1987-2006) on Balzac and Zola: Esthetics and Ethics in the Novel.
See: http://home.earthlink.net/~blueheeler19/neh06/06syllabus.html
4. “Comment Dirais-Je...,” Literary Imagination, IV (Spring 2002), 270-71.
An essay devoted to suggestions for how we may effectively teach the novel in an era when too many students often have difficulty reading as much as 150 pages a week in English, let alone in a foreign language. If we consider the novel as a narrative in prose, dealing with people and their actions in a certain time and in a certain space, all of which conveys a certain vision on the part of the author… we can forge a host of close-reading questions related to the central issues and interconnecting elements of possibly any great novelist's work. See # 2.
5. “Fission and Fusion,” Literary Imagination, III (Spring 2001), 278-79.
An essay focusing on the dangers of relying too heavily on definitions of isms (realism, naturalism, for example). The purpose of the work of art is constantly moving—not merely between an impressionism and a naturalism, as in the case of Emile Zola, for example—but between two larger factors: a function determined specifically by social and historical context and, paradoxically, an immanence which points to universal questions of humankind and considers art without reference to any specific contextual reality or ism. See # 11.
6. “Is There A Monkey In This Class?,” Academic Exchange Extra, May 2000 (http://www.higher-ed.org/AEQ/sp-ma.htm).
This essay constitutes further development of an earlier essay (# 13) published in French Review. To read the article, please go to the higher-ed.org link above.
7. "Children of the Rougon-Macquart: The Lessons of Alzire in Germinal," Excavatio, III (1993), 32-39.
The children of the Rougon-Macquart present the kinds of ambiguities and contradictions that characterize Emile Zola's work as a whole. Their diversity ranges from the the monstrous acts of theft and murder of Jeanlin, Bébert, and Lydie in Germinal, the presence of Laure and Jules at the murder of their grandfather in La Terre, the sly perversity of Angèle and her relationship with the maids in Pot-Bouille, or the jealolusy and egotism of Jeanne in Une Page d'amour to the innocence of Angélique in Le Rêve, the wholeseome playfulness of Cadine and Marjolin in Le Ventre de Paris, the primitive, yet positive, life force symbolized by Désirée in La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, and the "enfant inconnu" and its accompanying "drapeau d'appel à la vie" in Le Docteur Pascal.
More than any of these children, Alzire, the deformed nine year-old in Germinal, seems to deserve special attention. Even in the recapitulative Le Docteur Pascal, she is the one child who is recalled as having died of hunger, thus setting her apart in a series of novels where the presence of food serves as an ideological springboard to issues of repression, class conflict, and politics, and in a novel among whose most dramatic passages is the march of the striking miners roaring across the plain, shouting, "Du pain! du pain! du pain!" Discussion of several passages provides us with examples of insight that go far beyond Alzire's years or simple voyeurism. She lends to Germinal and to our understanding of the miners' oppression a mature, assertive presence reflective of Zola, the scientific observer whose sight and insight, documentation and imagination, provide us with multiple points of view that broaden our vision and enhance our appreciation of the people, events, and themes of the novel.
Two passages in particular merit close attention. Immediately following Zola's description of the Sunday morning activities of Village 240, where the weak, chorus-like voices of the children, the reference to the last crops of the gardens now ravaged by winter, and the smell of warm soup all evoke the efforts of the miners to assert their struggle for life against the challenges of death, Alzire's futile, pre-pubescent attempt to nurse her younger sister is a moving yet pathetic act, emblematic of the many contradictions and conflicts--hunger and satisfaction, sterility and fertility, despair and hope--which help to make Germinal the masterpiece that it is. Moreover, this scene stands in powerful and ironic contrast to the final passage of the Rougon-Macquart: the description of Clotilde breast-feeding her child, a scene symbolic of "le recommencement éternel de la vie," which rests at the heart of Germinal and the entire Rougon-Macquart series.
Alzire's dying visions echo the earlier evocation of the barren gardens and theme of nourishment in the school house scene, constitute a preview of Catherine's hallucinatory vision of the sun moments before her death, and recall her own earlier vision of a warm home where children have plenty to eat. This last scene also occurs along with the first of three references relating the novel's title to an image of the sun, thus linking the images of hunger, despair, rebirth, and hope, while joining with Etienne's vision of the miner overcoming his unhappiness, "balayé par un grand coup de soleil" (181). These are the very words Zola used when he explained how he fell upon the title of the novel, and they are similar to those used by La Maheude in the face of Alzire's death. No other death in the novel so overwhelms Etienne. None so moves La Maheude. No other character's presence more effectively highlights what Zola meant when, echoing La Maheude's lament, he proclaims, "Germinal est une œuvre de pitié et non une œuvre de révolution."
Among the many characters of Germinal, Alzire seems initially to have little if any significance. Close examination shows, however, that this child effectively captures significant contradictions, images, and themes of the novel and emerges as a more complex and important character than previously imagined. If, as Barthes, Lacan, Freud, and others suggest, nineteenth century novelists "wove intricate fantasies around their surnames or even initials, encoding them in their fiction through various devices, ranging from anagrams to translations," Alzire, because of her name, deserves special attention. Originally called Flora in the preparation of the novel, her name was changed perhaps as a result of autonomination. Like Zola, Alzire is there on the scene observing phenomena, and also like him, she is unable to change the world except by our knowledge of her gentleness, intelligence, and sacrifice, in short, by the richness of her human qualities and the lessons of her life.
8. "Catherine's Eyes and the Sun in Zola's Germinal or For a Re-evaluation of Characters in the Rougon-Macquart," Emile Zola 1991: un nouvel engagement: "Le Cri de ma chair", ed. Monique Fol (Berkeley, 1992), 90-94.
It has become commonplace in Zola criticism to stipulate that the characters ofLes Rougon-Macquart are essentially functional, subservient to the plot or main idea of the different novels, and even that their various movements can be plotted as if they were chess pieces on the structural board of the novel. However, Henri Mitterand, stressing that each character taken individually is really only a silhouette if not a caricature, still acknowledges their complexity: "Chaque personnage est déterminé dans Germinal avant tout par la manière dont il s'apparente et/ou s'oppose aux autres, à l'intérieur d'un ensemble plus large groupant les personnnages dénommés et les personnages qui restent dans l'anonymat. Chacun est à étudier comme une pièce d'un système, qui est avant tout un système textuel, et qui est original en tant que tel."
I do not wish to suggest here that Catherine Maheu is as central a figure in Germinal as Gervaise is, for example, in L'Assommoir, although Zola's original intention in the Ebauche was to "étudier le personnage de Catherine, de façon à le faire central et intéressant. Il faut qu'il emplisse le livre, si je veux obtenir beaucoup d'intérêt. Ne pas le faire passif, idyllique, trouver une lutte humaine, quelque chose de poignant en elle." Rather I focus on a sequence of passages as they relate to Catherine, for they suggest that a significant error can be made by too readily dismissing her importance as a character. Zola's references to Catherine's limpid green eyes, as clear and deep as springwater, emerge as an explicative leitmotif enabling him to lead us to the sun-bathed image of the novel's title. Significantly enhancing the effectiveness with which Zola communicates what he describes as the "mystical" and "symbolic" image of Germinal, Catherine assumes a more important role in the novel than has been customarily granted by critics and offers an example of the value of re-examining the interrelationship between character and development of the novel in Les Rougon-Macquart.
In fact, Catherine is not the only character who offers such a conclusion, and other critics have pointed to members of Zola's vast dramatis personae, revealing that their significance lies, not merely in the conception of characters as larger than life presences in the tradition of the psychological novel or as new-novel-style challenges to this tradition, but in their fundamental humanity and in the rich multiplicity and ambiguities of their individuality, their relationships to one another, and to the development of the novels in which they appear.
Why, then, an insistence on the predominant functionality of Zola's characters? Among several reasons, the primary one seems to be Zola's commentators and an often mechanistic mode of criticism emblematic of the nineteenth century. By contrast, Zola's work transcends the context he gave to it and in which he created it, a mark of his enduring modernity. It seems appropriate now to utilize an approach which is holistic and humanistic in its totality, which highlights the individuality and interrelationships of characters, and acknowledges that it is they who truly define Zola's work as he himself described it in Le Docteur Pascal: "humaine, débordante du sanglot immense des êtres et des choses."
9. "Emile Zola: Time, History, and Myth Reviewed," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 20 (Spring-Summer 1992), 384-96.
Since the resuscitation of Zola studies in the early 1950's, several interpretations of Zola's conception of time, myth, and history have been put forth. These variations result from the ambiguities in Zola's writings as much as from the many points of view of literary critics. Inasmuch as these themes rest at the foundation of Zola's vision and prophetic sight, it seems appropriate to bring together in one place and to try to resolve the essential ideas of the various and often contradictory analyses of the subject.
10. "Balzac's La Peau de chagrin and Zola's Germinal: Points of Contact," NCFS, 19 (1991), 223-31.
La Peau de chagrin depicts an infernal contract and the complexities of life as competitive labor no less than Germinal portrays the socio-economic problems of labor versus capital. Geological parallels are attributable to each author's expressed interest in geology as a foundation for understanding man, art, and history. The strength of the economic and geological affinities in works so central to an understanding of the novelists' esthetics and thought emphasize the value of re-examining the conceptual and artistic relationship between the authors' various novels in the light of these social and physical sciences.
11. "The Claws of the Cat in Balzac's La Peau de chagrin," Romance Notes, 30 (1990), 209-17.
One of the more successful symbols used by Balzac in developing the dialectics and thematics of this novel is feline imagery. All but two of the many references to a panther, tiger, cat, or kitten are directly related to a female character and highlight the development of themes associated with male-female relationships in the novel. All are accompanied by the suggestion of the interrelationship between predator and prey and usually involve a reference to a bird. The images thus immediately relate to the central desire-castration of desire theme or one of its variations. At the same time, they contribute to the patterns of alternation and antithesis upon which the novel is founded and offer early examples of the effectiveness and significance of animal imagery in Balzac's work.
But it is not merely a question of utilizing this imagery because of its immediate effectiveness in revealing man as part of the naturalistic kingdom. It is more importantly a case of a descriptive and developmental technique whose significance will be more clearly defined by Balzac in his 1842 comparison between "Humanity" and "Animality" and which he consciously and comparatively employs early in his career to convey the enigmatic complexity of the novel that he placed at the foundation of The Human Comedy.
12. "Zola's Object and the Surrealist Image," NCFS, 11 (Spring-Summer 1983), 321-33.
Emile Zola's hypertrophic awareness of concrete reality is as indispensable to the phenomenon of his image-making as the notion of a communicating vessel is to the surrealist's search for the reconciliation of the container and the contained. Three major areas offer points of contact. Zola's alchemy of words, as evidenced in Au Bonheur des Dames, reveals a "veritable chemistry," in which the link between metaphor and the process of lyrical development provides a poetic transubstantiation of the real into the surreal. Zola's appreciation of the modern, and its correlative association with the animism and metamorphosis of a world forever in the process of becoming, underlines the parallel between his novels and paintings by Masson and Ernst, "le cadaver exquis," and Breton's desire to destroy convention. Zola also has a surrealist predilection for the insolite. Gloves and mannequins are but two fetish objects that bring to mind the surrealist's play of analogies, Eluard's poetry, Magritte's painting, and Bellmer's Doll. Zola emerges as a proto-surrealist writer whose object and concomitant apocalyptic vision help to explain the re-creation of the world promised by the alchemist and cherished by Breton: Behold, I make all things new.
13. "Pour un nouveau surréalisme," French Review, 56 (1983), 461-62.
A professor of French literature and language, I find that the course I enjoy teaching the most is Freshman English. After all, not many people study French these days, and on a per capita basis, I tend to find more talented students in English 101/102 than in my various French courses. It is particularly gratifying, for example, to see how my Freshman English students respond to my explanation of three fundamental approaches to literary criticism.
Formalist criticism, I explain, focuses primarily on the literature itself, how the author uses language to express thought and how thought is expressed by language. I compare the formalist to an astronomer studying a star. Proponents of biographical/historical/sociological criticism, while not ignoring the star, are inclined nevertheless to concentrate more on the external forces of its glitter. The third group, the psychoanalysts, structuralists, post-structuralists, and so forth are, I suggest, like those astrophysicists who sometimes appear less concerned with life today than with their various theories about the origin and future of the universe. Indeed such literary critics often lose sight of the work of art they are presumably trying to explain. I further add that it seems rather significant that few trained psychoanalysts are involved with literary analysis and that perhaps this fact suggests something about the validity of literary scholars' psychoanalytic discussions.
These last comments have never failed (in my four years of teaching Freshman English) to provoke animated student reaction (e.g., "What's it matter how perilous such methods of literary criticism may be? If they help to enrich the art of literary analysis, aren't they justified?").
I respond that we are not all friends of Ariadne and that the critical maze, for example, of "intended," "implied," "liberated," "informed," and "archi" lecteurs is enough to turn off many intelligent, imaginative readers concerned more with promoting the humanities and training minds to communicate with the various forms of cultural and artistic experience than with playing the kind of scholarly games examined by Joel Conarroe (PMLA, January 1980). Moreover, if the primary purpose of literary analysis is to probe the secret of humanity's relationship to itself and to the world and to seek a new, higher level of reality, then perhaps we should organize a new school of literary criticism, "pour un nouveau surrealisme."
At the foundation of this acupunctural approach to literary criticism would be an orientation to the East that would necessitate numerous personal library acquisitions. The Bible would be replaced by the Bhagavad-Gita. Sartre would be scorned and H. P. Blavatsky revered. The Anatomy of Criticism, Of Grammatology, and Pleasure of the Text would no longer be required reading, whereas reference to The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation would be considered necessary for the publication of an article. The Judeo-Christian conception of time would be supplanted by literary scholars' appreciation of quantum physics and the realization that the cosmos, as described by modern physics, is much more Buddhist than most Westerners have previously thought. Finally, membership in The Theosophical Society in America would rival that of the Modern Language Association of America.
"New Surrealist" theories of literature would produce numerous fascinating articles filled with such terms as "the higher self," "universal mind," "super-conscious life goal," shunyata, dharma, and karma. We might read an article explaining that Diderot was indeed an "embattled philosopher" trying to reconcile the moral imperatives of his previous incarnation as a medieval monk with the scientific imperatives of his earlier existence as an Atlantean physicist. Another article could offer a related explanation of "les deux Zola" or of the simultaneous existence of the atheist and the devout believer that various readers find in the Montaigne of the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond." Pascal's "l'homme passe l'homme" would be interpreted as a recognition of the vertical view of life, according to which an individual measures himself, not by others (horizontally), but by his previous selves. New meaning and significance would similarly be attributed to Rousseau's "Fifth Promenade," as well as to the essential import of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, to the Romantics' longing for "je ne sais quoi de vague et de flottant," and to the underlying message inherent in Balzac's utilization of reappearing characters.
The interrelationship of Descartes's "je pense, donc je suis," Pascal's all-but-stated "je pense, donc je m'ennuie," and Chateaubriand's implied "je m'ennuie, donc je suis" would open new fields of inquiry when considered, not in the light of the nothingness of ennui, but in regard to the no-thing-ness of shunyata, an experience that liberates us from matter and makes us aware of the existence of energy, or though as energy, and therefore suggests the intimate link between psychoanalysis and physics. In this last respect, one recalls the following statement by physics Nobel laureate, Percy Bridgman: "It has always been a bewilderment to me to understand how anyone can experience such a commonplace event as an automobile going up the street and seriously maintain that there is identity of structure of this continually flowing, dissolving and reforming thing and the language that attempts to reproduce it with discrete units" (The Nature of Physical Theory, p. 21). Imagine the discoveries that could be made by examining the rapport between Bridgman's statement the "ecriture artiste" and literary impressionism of the nineteenth century, and the technique of lithochronism in surrealist painting!
Perhaps the most significant revelations of this "new surrealism" would be apparent in Andre Breton's longing for the creative integration of the unconscious mind and the phenomenal world. Indeed, the communicating vessel so necessary to the surrealist's search for the reconciliation of the container and the contained could be viewed as the individual artist's oversoul. We might thus explain the surrealist's analogical vision of the world and joining of apparently unjoinable realities—such as Lautreamont's chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table—as the concrete manifestation of the mind/self existing on two levels of experience simultaneously. The presumably new and unique objects of Yves Tanguy or the "ready-mades" of Marcel Duchamp would then emerge as being far more ready-made than previously imagined, not to mention the new definition that could be assigned to the notion of Renaissance innutrition.
Inasmuch as it seems impossible to substantiate many of these assertions, proponents of the "new surrealism" would suggest that the French Review, for example, cease to publish interviews of living authors and reproduce instead taped sessions of these authors in regressive hypnosis. The fertility of such an approach, whose findings could perhaps be analyzed in conjunction with those of the University of Connecticut's International Association for Near-Death Studies, has already been demonstrated by Jess Stearn in the case of Taylor Caldwell. One wonders how contemporary authors, questioned under regressive hypnosis, might be surprised to learn what they say about their novels, plays, and poetry. Additionally, literary scholars would have a field day. We would soon read the latest about the intended self, the implied self, the liberated self, the informed self, and, above all, the archiself. Of course, trained hypnotists and psychiatrists affiliated with the Association of Past Life Research and Therapy would note that this "new" school of literary criticism no longer seemed to be analyzing literature, but, to quote one of my students, at least the art of literary analysis would be enriched.
14. The Object in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart. Madrid (1978). Excerpts from 6 reviews of this book:
1. French Review: "This book is the first major systematic, in-depth study
of Les Rougon-Macquart focusing on the question: How does Zola's utilization
of the object help, within the framework of the genre of the novel, both to
translate his vision of life and to contribute to the universality of Les
Rougon-Macquart.... But even those who might feel like arguing with Mr. Kamm
on certain points will no doubt agree with this reviewer that this book is
an admirable scholarly achievement. Kamm not only writes with extraordinary
clarity, force, grace, and, I might add, courtesy with regards to other
critics; he not only obviously possesses a profound knowledge of those
aspects of Zola with which he is principally concerned; he comes very close,
it seems to me, to penetrating to the heart of Zola's art and thought....
There can be little doubt, moreover, that Kamm has brilliantly demonstrated
his final conclusion..." (December 1979)
2. Nineteenth-Century French Studies: "By focusing on the imaginative
transformations of the external world in the twenty volumes of the series,
the study takes on an extraordinarily broad span of reference.... The most
valuable elements of this interesting book are the perceptive analyses of
individual novels of the series, like the discerning study of the intricate
fabric of connotations in Au Bonheur des Damesin Chapter I, or the
demonstration of the various cases of assimilation between man and things in
a number of works (ch. II), or the exploration of the confined spaces and
closed worlds in several novels of the series (ch. IV)." (Spring 1979)
3. Modern Language Review: "Professor Kamm is at his most persuasive when
he is talking about the link between metaphor and the process of lyrical
development. Though some of his points have been made before, here his
close readings of the texts represent a genuine contribution in a neglected
area of research." (January 1980)
4. Modern Language Journal: "In his ambitious book, Kamm has made an
important contribution in drawing together the critical commmentary on the
subject and adding to it his own perspicacious and rewarding insights." (1980)
5. Choice: "Kamm's present volume is an incisive, scholarly, theoretical
collection of structuralist essays.... Kamm's subjective, hypothetical
interpretation will undoubtedly raise some questions, but there is no doubt
as to the validity of this thesis. This monograph is a significant
contribution to the wealth of Zola criticism already available." (July 1980)
6. University of Toronto Quarterly: "Lewis Kamm's study . . . attempts to
grasp the very act of Zola's literary creation [and] to discover the secrets
of Zola's creative genius by examining his use of objects in relation to the
other basic elements of a fictional text. . . . His perspicacity and new
insights permit him not only to make skilful restatements and mises au point
of ideas expressed by other critics such as Guy Robert and Philip Walker,
but also to go further in the sharpening of their concepts." (Spring 1981)
15. "Pascal and Nineteenth-Century Ennui," Romance Notes, 17 (1976), 21-23.
Two recent analyses of ennui in French literature reveal conflicting interpretations concerning the relationship between the ennui of Pascal and that of the nineteenth century. A review of the fundamental elements of ennui resolves this conflict. Thought and the inability to involve oneself in the present are at the root of ennui both for Pascal and for the nineteenth century. Descartes's "je pense, donc je suis" becomes, for Pascal, "je pense, donc je m'ennuie," which, for nineteenth-century writers and heroes, is re-stated as "je m'ennuie, donc je suis." In both cases, sensibility produces knowledge, which in turn yields the disproportion between desire and capability. Using the Kierkegaardian conception of repetition to illustrate how history and literature renew the idea of original sin with that of original chaos, one observes how the ennui of the nineteenth century represents a recognition and re-creation of the ennui of Pascal. The proper relationship between the two is then found in neither of the conflicting interpretations but in and out of both of them and in Paul Valery's L'Ame et la danse.
16. "The Structural and Functional Manifestation of Space in Zola's Rougon-Macquart," NCFS, 3 (1975), 224-36.
Spatially, the novels of the Rougon-Macquart form a tightly knit system in which characters and events seem imprisoned. Zola's descriptions of things, which constitute space, structurally manifest this notion of enclosure. Beginning the various milieus he wishes to depict, he focuses on geometric lines of orientation and the relationship among things as their size, quantity, or number and combines reality with his own poetic imagination, evoking primarily the aspects of space that create an atmosphere of physical and mental entrapment. His exposition and resolution of chronologically developed relationships between things and characters structures our increasing knowledge of the space in which his stories unfold. Thus he fuses the structural manifestation of space with its functional manifestation, which enables him to impose on us the effect of journeying into a world where people are oppressed by the sensation of suffocation and haunted by darkness, an Simultaneously, however, Zola's novels present a world marching forward, toward prophetic openings in space that are functionally complemented by the new points of view its very depiction imposes on us.
17. "Time and Zola's Characters in theRougon-Macquart," Romance Notes, 16 (1974), 83-86.
The relationship between time and Zola's characters in the Rougon-Macquartstrengthens the interpretation that Zola's conception of time is linear. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret presents a characteristic illustration. Zola constructs a breach in the personal time of Serge Mouret, concentrating first on the religious education of his character and then on the natural education. He also reminds us of the historical continuity of Serge's life, describing the abbot's erotic love of Albine's hair and feet in the Paradou in the same manner that he had described Serge's erotic worship of the hair and feet on statues of the Virgin Mary in the previous existence. Three evocations of the breach in the Paradou wall thematically unite these two time periods and illustrate Serge's inability to mend his personal life into an historically homogeneous unit. Other major characters reveal Zola's focus on this theme of bringing harmony and continuity to one's life. They thus communicate Zola's fundamental interest in the perpetual becoming of mankind, a linear process necessary for the apocalypticism and prophetic sight of the Rougon-Macquart.
18. "Zola's Conception of Time in Les Rougon-Macquart," French Review, 47, Special Issue No. 6 (1974), 63-72.
Although previous criticism has emphasized a circular conception of time in Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart, textual analysis of Zola's descriptive technique and dramatic presentation reveals instead his linear conception of time. Whether his vision and talent act as a camera panning the view, or, as in the "symphony of cheeses," he injects a fluid dynamism into his descriptions on the model of a piece of music, Zola describes things sequentially in the process of becoming. The dialectics of life and death and the literary devices of leitmotif and repetition signal, not the myth of eternal return, which permits neither the apocalypticism nor the prophecies so important in Zola's work, but forever new moments in the linear, eternal process of creation. Similarly, the suite of overlapping scenes and the succession of superposed chapters illustrate Zola's tendency to present reality in a sequence of blocks which seem to arrest le devenir to depict individual moments, heteroclitic bricks of time, which have a chronological union and whose whole and continuity are found within the Romanesque structure itself. This unity of style and architecture harmonizes with Zola's linear conception of time, which by its very nature is a sequential process.