Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 49, No. 1, doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqs036
Advance Access Publication 15 November 2012
N U T R I T I O N, H U N G E R A N D FA S T I N G :
S P I R I T UA L A N D M AT E R I A L
N AT U R A L I S M I N Z O L A A N D H U Y S M A N S
FRANCESCO MANZINI
ABSTRACT
This article analyses imbricated discourses of nutrition, hunger and fasting in
Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and Huysmans’s A Vau-l’eau (1882), A Rebours
(1884) and Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901). In particular, it argues that Zola’s
neo-physiological Naturalism, as eventually theorized in Le Roman expérimental
(1880), actually produces a rhetoric of hunger and fasting, most notably in Le
Ventre de Paris. This rhetoric, it is argued, was taken up and developed by
Huysmans, finally becoming central to his Spiritual Naturalism, ostensibly formulated to counter the materialism of Zola’s Naturalism. The article begins by
looking at physiological and materialist discourses of nutrition – as encapsulated by slogans to the effect that ‘you are what you eat’ – and their impact on
literary debates that, in the 1870s, opposed Zola and Barbey d’Aurevilly. It
then shows how these discourses of nutrition are supplanted in the fiction of
Zola and Huysmans by a rhetoric of hunger and fasting typically associated
with Catholic conceptions of sanctity.
Keywords: hunger; nutrition; fasting; materialism; physiology; Naturalism; Spiritual
Naturalism; Zola, Émile; Huysmans, Joris-Karl; Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules
JEAN-ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN begins his Physiologie du goût (1825) with twenty
‘Aphorismes du professeur pour servir de prolégomènes à son ouvrage et de
base éternelle à la science’. The first five of these read as follows:
I
II
III
IV
V
L’Univers n’est rien que par la vie, et tout ce qui vit se nourrit.
Les animaux se repaissent; l’homme mange; l’homme d’esprit seul sait manger.
La destinée des nations dépend de la manière dont elles se nourrissent.
Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.
Le Créateur, en obligeant l’homme à manger pour vivre, l’y invite par l’appétit, et
l’en récompense par le plaisir.1
There is a tension in these aphorisms between Brillat-Savarin’s playful epicurean hedonism and his nutritional determinism. On the one hand, he condemns
a view of eating as no more than the satisfaction of animal appetite; on the
other, he suggests that the fates of both individuals and nations might be determined by their chosen means of sustenance. It is fairly clear that the fourth of
# The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews.
All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.
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his aphorisms relates mainly to the second: Brillat-Savarin is less interested in
physiology and more interested in taste. Nevertheless, Brillat-Savarin’s ‘Dis-moi
ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es’ alludes playfully to the physiology of
Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, who in his Rapports du moral et du physique (1802)
asserts that ‘le cerveau digère en quelque sorte les impressions; [. . .] il fait organiquement la sécrétion de la pensée’.2 Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism soon lost its
playfulness, mutating to become the explicitly materialistic ‘you are what you
eat’ of modern popular food science. The Dutch-born physiologist Jacob
Moleschott played a leading role in founding the science of food through such
works as his Physiologie der Nahrungsmittel (1850). He was also active in popularizing this new science, most notably in his Lehre der Nahrungsmittel für das Volk
(1850). This last work inspired Ludwig Feuerbach to write a review article in
which he coined the punning dictum ‘der Mensch ist, was er ißt’ [‘man is what
he eats’].3 Moleschott and, via him, Feuerbach, were interested in the chemistry
of food rather than its taste: Moleschott’s theories included such striking, radical
and controversial notions as his famous ‘ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke’
[‘no thought without phosphorus’].4
The materialist wing of the Parisian medical establishment took up such
ideas, much to the scorn of, for example, Gustave Flaubert who, as the son and
brother of famous surgeons, greatly enjoyed mocking the self-assured positivism
of doctors (and pharmacists). Thus Flaubert uses one of his carnets de travail to
transcribe an extract from Fernand Papillon’s ‘Le Choléra morbus’ – an article
printed in the Revue des Deux Mondes on 15 October 1872 – under the mocking
heading ‘Chimie philosophique’:
Il n’y aura lieu d’entrer dans l’étude des corruptions du sang qui constituent les maladies
infectieuses que le jour où le sang de l’homme sain sera convenablement connu,
c’est-à-dire où l’on aura établi avec une définitive précision chimique la nature des substances albuminoı̈des. Là est pour le moment le grand desideratum de la biologie. [. . .] La
nutrition ne sera expliquée que lorsqu’on aura établi avec certitude la formule des transformations par lesquelles passe l’aliment depuis l’instant où il est dissous dans l’estomac
jusqu’à celui où il est rejeté sous forme de produits de désassimilation par les divers
émonctoires.5
As far as Flaubert was concerned, such writing was self-satirizing and required
no further comment. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that Flaubert
sided with the ‘spiritualists’ against the ‘materialists’; rather, his even-handed
approach allowed him to hold both camps in seemingly boundless contempt. In
literature, these two camps were best represented in the early 1870s by two very
different writers, one – the neo-Romantic, Catholic dandy, Jules Barbey
d’Aurevilly – a sworn enemy, and the other – Émile Zola – a personal friend
of Flaubert.
Both Barbey and Zola were prolific journalists and critics who enjoyed
sniping at each other in print. Zola used his ‘Le Catholique hystérique’ (Le Salut
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public, 10 May 1865) – a review of Barbey’s Un Prêtre marié (1865) – to accuse
the latter of mental instability:
Il est difficile [. . .] de juger froidement une œuvre semblable, produit d’un tempérament
excessif. Tous les personnages sont plus ou moins malades, plus ou moins fous; les épisodes galopent eux-mêmes en pleine démence. Le livre entier est une sorte de
cauchemar fiévreux, un rêve mystique et violent.6
Barbey riposted with reviews of Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris and La Faute de l’abbé
Mouret (1875). In the latter article, Barbey plausibly accuses Zola of trying to
found a new literature on a crude interpretation of materialism: ‘Les livres de
M. Zola ont l’indoctrinante prétention d’être de l’art appuyé sur de la science.
Grande pipée pour les niais!’7 In the former, he focuses more narrowly on
Zola’s materialism. Barbey starts by noting that Le Ventre de Paris offers a literary
representation of ‘la Halle, sans métaphore’.8 He goes on to claim that Zola
describes ‘les choses du ventre’ with a passion ‘qu’on dirait famélique, tant elle
est intense!’ ( pp. 211 – 12). This descriptive zeal, founded on Zola’s ‘science
technique’ and his ‘connaissance du métier’ ( p. 211), allows Zola to confuse the
art of the charcutier with that of the novelist: ‘cela s’appelle le réalisme, cette idée,
et cela sort des deux choses monstrueuses qui s’accroupissent, pour l’étouffer,
sur la vieille société française: le Matérialisme et la Démocratie’ ( p. 213).
Barbey claims to know where this idea is leading:
[Le] Ventre de Paris est l’œuvre à présent la plus avancée (et vous pouvez l’entendre comme
il vous plaira!) dans le sens de vulgarité et de matière qui nous emporte de plus en
plus. . . Mais ce ne sera pas la dernière! Il y a plus bas que le ventre. Il y a ce qu’on y
met et il y a ce qui en sort. Aujourd’hui on nous donne de la charcuterie. Demain ce
sera de la vidange. Et ce sera peut-être M. Zola qui nous décrira cette nouvelle chose,
avec cette plume qui n’oublie rien. ( pp. 213 –14)
Barbey has imagined the literary universe implied by Papillon’s article and
already decried by Flaubert, that other gross materialist from Barbey’s jaundiced perspective. He traces the origins of this literary universe back to the
materialists of the eighteenth century, La Mettrie, Helvétius and Cabanis, whom
he misquotes:
Car la physiologie, qui envahit tout, envahit le roman comme le reste [. . .]. Nous ne
disons plus avec la grossière brutalité de Cabanis: ‘La pensée n’est dans l’homme qu’un
excrément de son cerveau.’ Mais nous disons philosophiquement et exactement la même
chose, avec des mots différents et un autre style. ( p. 114)
This literary universe would eventually be described by Zola himself in Le
Roman expérimental (first published as a series of articles in 1879 and then eventually collected with other pieces of literary criticism in volume form and under
the same title in 1880):
Le roman expérimental est une conséquence de l’évolution scientifique du siècle; il continue et complète la physiologie, qui elle-même s’appuie sur la chimie et la physique; il
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substitue à l’étude de l’homme abstrait, de l’homme métaphysique, l’étude de l’homme
naturel, soumis aux lois physico-chimiques et déterminé par les influences du milieu; il
est en un mot la littérature de notre âge scientifique, comme la littérature classique et
romantique a correspondu à un âge de scolastique et de théologie.9
Thus for Zola’s exemplar, the physiologist Claude Bernard, as for Zola, ‘il ne
saurait y avoir ni spiritualisme ni matérialisme. Ces mots appartiennent à une
philosophie naturelle qui a vieilli, ils tomberont en désuétude par le progrès
même de la science’ (LRE, p. 82).
Applying these theories to Zola’s novels, one would expect to find a pervasive
interest in physico-chemical laws and physiological determinants such as nutrition. Zola’s ‘Ébauche’ for Le Ventre de Paris suggests he was planning just such a
novel: ‘Mes Rougon et mes Macquart sont des appétits.’10 Certainly, Le Ventre de
Paris contains a great deal of food matter, presented in realist detail by turns selfconsciously salivating and nauseating. However, this essay argues that Zola’s
narrative in the novel is actually organized around the supposedly outdated
opposition of materialism and a secularized spiritualism. Le Ventre de Paris leads
its readers to a surprising conclusion: you are, it turns out, not what you eat but
what you do not eat; hunger and fasting prove more important than nutrition.
***
The bulk of Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût is made up of various thematically
organized meditations: one of these is on the concept of fasting, defined as ‘une
abstinence volontaire d’aliments dans un but moral ou religieux’ (PG, p. 260).
Brillat-Savarin speculates as to the origins of this custom:
les hommes affligés de calamités publiques ou particulières se sont livrés à la tristesse, et
ont négligé de prendre de la nourriture; ensuite ils ont regardé cette abstinence volontaire comme un acte de religion.
Ils ont cru qu’en macérant leur corps quand leur âme était désolée, ils pouvaient
émouvoir la miséricorde des dieux; et cette idée, saisissant tous les peuples, leur a inspiré
le deuil, les vœux, les prières, les sacrifices, les mortifications et l’abstinence. (PG,
pp. 260–61)
Seen from Zola’s scientistic perspective of Le Roman expérimental, there ought to
be no place for such rituals in the modern novel, interested solely in natural as
opposed to metaphysical man: ‘l’homme métaphysique est mort, tout notre
terrain se transforme avec l’homme physiologique’ (LRE, p. 89). However, Les
Rougon-Macquart is more than the physiological examination of a family; it is also
the ethico-political denunciation of the Second Empire.
Zola uses Le Ventre de Paris to portray the events of 2 December 1851
(Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s eighteenth Brumaire) as a calamité publique. Florent,
the novel’s hero, is arrested on 4 December and convicted a few days later for
opposing the Prince-President’s coup d’état; the evidence against him takes the
form of the blood on his hands, which he acquired trying to help a woman in
the street after she had been shot by one of the government’s soldiers. There is
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already a religious structure of sacrifice at play here: Florent is the scapegoat
who, through a process of reversibility, is fitted to take on the sins of the future
Emperor precisely on account of his total innocence. Florent is a secular saint
whose martyrdom takes the form of a hunger that defines him from the
moment he is convicted. The story of his transportation to, imprisonment in,
and escape from Cayenne is the story of his hunger.
This narrative can be traced back, by way of Les Misérables (1862), to Hugo’s
Claude Gueux (1834): its eponymous hero, a prisoner, is tortured by his appetite,
left unsatisfied by the meagre portions of food that he receives; he strikes up a
friendship with another, thinner prisoner, who gives Claude part of his daily
ration; when a guard separates the two friends out of pure spite, Claude judges,
convicts and executes the guard. Le Ventre de Paris foregrounds the analogue to
this story of hunger, recounted as though it were a fairy-tale by the thin Florent
to his extended family, made up of his half-brother Quenu, now a fat
butcher-cum-charcutier, the latter’s splendidly plump wife Lisa and their daughter
Augustine. Quenu is barely listening, for he is preparing a black pudding;
Augustine is delighted by the story; Lisa is appalled, not by the iniquity of the
Empire but by Florent’s indecent victimhood, and more particularly by his
hunger.11 Lisa’s disapproval starts when she hears Florent’s description of his
daily ration of food:
Lisa paraissait ne pouvoir cacher son étonnement ni son dégoût; le riz plein de vers et la
viande qui sentait mauvais lui semblaient sûrement des saletés à peine croyables, tout à
fait déshonorantes pour celui qui les avait mangées. Et, sur son beau visage calme, dans
le gonflement de son cou, il y avait une vague épouvante, en face de cet homme nourri
de choses immondes. (LVP, p. 144)
As far as Lisa is concerned, Florent is very much what he ate. Even more,
however, it turns out that, for her as for Zola, he is also what he did not eat.
Thus her astonishment and disgust turn to outright disbelief when she hears
that in the course of his escape Florent did not eat for three days:
‘Non!’, dit-elle, ‘je ne crois pas ça. . . D’ailleurs, il n’y a personne qui soit resté trois jours
sans manger. Quand on dit: “Un tel crève de faim”, c’est une façon de parler. On
mange toujours, plus ou moins. . . Il faudrait des misérables tout à fait abandonnés, des
gens perdus. . .’
Elle allait dire sans doute ‘des canailles sans aveu’; mais elle se retint, en regardant
Florent. Et la moue méprisante de ses lèvres, son regard clair avouaient carrément que
les gredins seuls jeûnaient de cette façon désordonnée. Un homme capable d’être resté
trois jours sans manger était pour elle un être absolument dangereux. Car, enfin, jamais
les honnêtes gens ne se mettent dans des positions pareilles. (LVP, p. 148)
It is interesting that Lisa conceives of Florent’s starvation as a disordered form
of fasting. His inability to find food is viewed as a refusal to consume food:
Florent is on hunger-strike. Lisa’s positive view of nutrition carries with it a
transparent set of bourgeois moral assumptions (of a type sometimes attributed
to Zola). Florent’s story lacks bienséance and therefore verisimilitude, for it is no
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25
longer the story of natural man (‘l’Univers n’est rien que par la vie, et tout ce
qui vit se nourrit’). His fasting has turned him instead into a monster, outside of
nature. His story – a religious story of fasting and sacrifice – is a story that can
no longer be told with propriety.
Lisa is blind to the impropriety of her own position, as analysed by Zola via
Claude Lantier’s opposition of ‘les Gras’ and ‘les Maigres’:
‘Pour sûr’, dit-il, ‘Caı̈n était un Gras et Abel un Maigre. Depuis le premier meurtre, ce
sont toujours les grosses faims qui ont sucé le sang des petits mangeurs. . . C’est une continuelle ripaille, du plus faible au plus fort, chacun avalant son voisin et se trouvant avalé
à son tour. . . Voyez-vous, mon brave, défiez-vous des Gras.’ (LVP, p. 301)
Claude is well aware of the hostility that Florent, as ‘le roi des Maigres’
( p. 302), will arouse: ‘en principe, vous entendez, un Gras a l’horreur d’un
Maigre, si bien qu’il éprouve le besoin de l’ôter de sa vue, à coups de dents, ou
à coups de pieds’ (ibid.). Lisa appears to think of Florent as the runt of the
family; she wants him to eat; she wants him to share in the family’s newfound
wealth, punctiliously handing him his augmented share in an inheritance on his
return to Paris; she blames him for not satisfying his hunger. Yet she never questions her own hunger, conceived of as a moral good, a natural appetite that
simply must be satisfied. One of Florent’s fellow escapees is the symbolic victim
of this hunger, for he is eaten alive by crabs when marooned on a rock; the
Quenus are maliciously and of course falsely accused of putting human meat in
their charcuterie, but more generally they are carnivores in a Naturalist world
characterized, as Barbey observes with regard to La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, by
what at times appears to be Zola’s materialist sense of ‘l’égalité des Espèces!!!’.12
Lisa represents life that feeds on other life to satisfy hunger. To this extent,
Zola’s opposition of ‘les Gras’ and ‘les Maigres’ would be inverted by
H. G. Wells’s representation of Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine (1895):
the capital-owning intelligentsia have evolved into plump Eloi, who serve as
food for the underground, proletarian race of Morlocks.
Unlike the Morlocks, Florent responds to real hunger, of the kind deemed
impossible by Lisa, not by eating his fellows but by losing his appetite. It is in
this context that ‘la nourriture’, to cite Christopher Prendergast, is used in Le
Ventre as a ‘symbole moral ( peu plausible d’ailleurs)’.13 Prendergast’s parenthetical aside confronts us once again with notions of verisimilitude; in our scientific
age, food is just food. Yet, both for Florent and for Lisa, hunger proves central
to public morality.
***
As Florent continues his story, he insists on the hunger that Lisa would deny,
recounting how his stomach had often been ‘tenaillé par la faim’ in the days
after his escape (LVP, p. 149). Zola is here returning to the insistent theme of the
opening chapter: Florent’s unsatisfiable hunger. We first meet Florent stretched
out across the road leading to Paris: he is mistaken for a drunk, but in reality he
has collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. He had been reduced to eating
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leaves; now he is allowed to ride in the cart of Mme François as she brings her
vegetables to Paris: ‘cette approche sans fatigue ne le laissait plus souffrir que de
la faim. La faim s’était réveillée, intolérable, atroce. Ses membres dormaient; il
ne sentait en lui que son estomac, tordu, tenaillé comme par un fer rouge’
( pp. 36– 37). This return to Paris is the pendant of his earlier departure. Two
days after his arrest, he had been transported to Bicêtre: ‘c’était depuis ce jour
qu’il souffrait de la faim; il avait eu faim dans la casemate, et la faim ne l’avait
plus quitté’ ( p. 43). This hunger, at first physical, almost immediately becomes
psychological: an instinctive response to political injustice. The humanity of the
prisoners has been denied: ‘Ils se trouvaient une centaine parqués au fond de
cette cave, sans air, dévorant les quelques bouchées de pain qu’on leur jetait,
ainsi qu’à des bêtes enfermées’ (ibid.). Florent has been reduced to the status of
an animal; after his summary trial, he is taken from Paris to Le Havre, completing the thirty-six-hour journey without food or water:
Non, la faim ne l’avait plus quitté. Il fouillait ses souvenirs, ne se rappelait pas une heure
de plénitude. Il était devenu sec, l’estomac rétréci, la peau collée aux os. Et il retrouvait
Paris, gras, superbe, débordant de nourriture, au fond des ténèbres; il y rentrait, sur un
lit de légumes; il y roulait, dans un inconnu de mangeailles, qu’il sentait pulluler autour
de lui et qui l’inquiétait. ( p. 44)
Florent’s stomach has shrunk just as Paris’s belly has expanded. For
Napoleon III has bought off the bourgeoisie by satisfying its appetite for money
(as we see in La Curée) and its hunger for food (in Le Ventre). As Zola puts it in
the ‘Ébauche’, ‘[Le Ventre] complète La Curée, elle est la curée des classes
moyennes’ (LVP, p. 449). He continues:
L’idée générale est: le ventre [. . .] – le ventre de l’humanité et par extension la bourgeoisie digérant, ruminant, cuvant en paix ses joies et honnêtetés moyennes; – enfin le
ventre dans l’Empire, non pas l’éréthisme fou de Saccard [in La Curée] lancé à la chasse
des millions [. . .] mais le contentement solide et large de la faim, la bête broyant le foin
au râtelier, la bourgeoisie appuyant solidement l’Empire, parce que l’Empire lui donne
sa pâtée. (Ibid.)
The novel’s first chapter ends with a false dawn. Florent, having eventually
found his fat and prosperous half-brother, gently asks for the next meal to be
brought forward: ‘j’ai faim, vois-tu’ ( p. 79). Florent’s hunger, it would seem, is
finally about to be satisfied. But it turns out that Florent’s appetite will never
return, for he has learnt to dream rather than work and to think of the needs of
others rather than his own. His stomach may have shrunk but this change, originally more psychological than physiological, is now above all moral and
political: he cannot bring himself to participate in the petit-bourgeois curée symbolized by Les Halles and his half-brother’s business. Indeed, he will work
actively to try and bring about a revolution that will put an end to all this nauseating consumption. Florent, treated like an animal, loses his capacity to eat in
the manner of Brillat-Savarin’s ‘homme d’esprit’; he will even lose most of his
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hunger. Instead, it becomes increasingly plain that he is a lay saint, fighting
against the tide of materialism symbolized by the food clogging the arteries of
Paris. At first he thinks he objects to the plenty all around him because it seems
to mock his hunger:
Aveuglé, noyé, les oreilles sonnantes, l’estomac écrasé par tout ce qu’il avait vu, devinant
de nouvelles et incessantes profondeurs de nourriture, il demanda grâce, et une douleur
folle le prit, de mourir ainsi de faim, dans Paris gorgé, dans ce réveil fulgurant des
Halles. ( p. 72)
But in fact Florent and Zola object to the feeding frenzies and digestive comas
of Second Empire Paris. It is in this sense that food functions as a moral
symbol. Afflicted by a public calamity, Florent enters a state of permanent
sadness; he comes to believe that this melancholy will serve some higher
purpose, hence his initial refusal to participate in the life of the Second Empire,
the life of Les Halles (he will eventually be persuaded to take a position inspecting the fish market). It is this refusal that causes Lisa to hate Florent, ostensibly
because he does not work and so is a useless mouth to feed, but actually
because he is not hungry enough, and does nothing to stimulate, maintain and
satisfy what she regards as a natural appetite: ‘Moi, je ne pourrais pas vivre à
rêvasser toute la journée. Vous ne devez pas avoir faim, le soir. . . Il faut vous
fatiguer, voyez-vous’ ( p. 109). This hatred will finally be returned:
Croyant avoir à venger sa maigreur contre cette ville engraissée, pendant que les défenseurs du droit crevaient la faim en exil, [Florent] se fit justicier, il rêva de se dresser, des
Halles mêmes, pour écraser ce règne de mangeailles et de soûleries. ( p. 312)
***
Huysmans first met Zola in April 1876. According to Robert Baldick, the
former had used the paltry proceeds of Le Drageoir à épices (1874) to purchase
the first volumes of Les Rougon-Macquart: ‘These he had read and re-read and
discussed with his friends, marvelling at the conservatory scene in La Curée, the
descriptions of the markets in Le Ventre de Paris, the account of Albine’s death in
La Faute de l’abbé Mouret.’14 In other words, Huysmans was drawn to Zola by
those very texts that had most infuriated Barbey. Part of Le Ventre’s attraction lay
in its materialist description of (decaying) food, ‘la Halle, sans métaphore’ as
Barbey had put it.15 Another part of its attraction, however, at least judging by
Huysmans’s own subsequent literary output, lay in its descriptions of unsatisfied
(and unsatisfiable) hunger: ‘la Halle’ as metaphor or moral symbol.16
A Vau-l’eau presents the story of M. Folantin, a man who no longer has an
appetite either for food or for sex. On the face of it, and returning to
Brillat-Savarin’s second aphorism, M. Folantin’s problem is that he cannot
afford to eat as a man, only feed as an animal. It is in this spirit that Folantin
intends to go to a restaurant at the start of the story merely in order to ‘se
repaı̂tre’.17 Thereafter the act of eating is frequently defined as an animal activity simply designed to stave off hunger: food is simply ‘pâture’ (N, pp. 97, 110);
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restaurants are recommended on the grounds that ‘on en a à sa faim’ ( p. 108).
Huysmans follows Zola in allowing for ‘les faims aimables de la jeunesse’ (LVP,
p. 303): he concedes that hunger produces appetite in the young and that the
satisfaction of such appetite can bring pleasure. This precocious appetite for
food is linked to Folantin’s sexual desire, rendered with Huysmans’s characteristic misogyny: ‘Ainsi que dans ces gargotes où son bel appétit lui faisait dévorer
de basses viandes, sa faim charnelle lui permettait d’accepter les rebuts de
l’amour’ (N, p. 91). Soon, however, all pleasure is lost and with it, all appetite.
Folantin, now rich enough to feed himself to satiety, cannot bring himself to eat
even as ‘son corps, déplorablement nourri, criait famine’ ( p. 126):
Hélas! Rien ne me divertit, rien ne m’intéresse; et puis mon estomac se détraque! Ah! ce
n’est pas pour dire, mais les gens qui ont dans leur poche de quoi s’alimenter et qui ne
peuvent cependant manger, faute d’appétit, sont tout aussi à plaindre que les malheureux
qui n’ont pas le sou pour apaiser leur faim! ( p. 127)
Huysmans is foregrounding Folantin’s refusal to participate in the bourgeois
process of stimulating, maintaining and satisfying appetite – a refusal that had
formed the basis of Florent’s ethico-political rejection of the Second Empire.
Hunger itself is preferable to such participation. Folantin is sufficiently bourgeois, however, to seek refuge in the new ( pseudo-)science of nutrition.
Folantin starts to feed himself not with food but rather with Moleschott’s
chemical elements, either unadulterated or as contained in the empiric medicines of his age:
Il se désespérait, car à ses ennuis moraux se joignait maintenant le délabrement physique. A force de ne pas se nourrir, sa santé, déjà frêle, chavirait. Il se mit au fer, mais
toutes les préparations martiales qu’il avala lui noircirent, sans résultat appréciable, les
entrailles. Alors il adopta l’arsenic, mais le Fowler lui éreinta l’estomac et ne le fortifia
point; enfin il usa, en dernier ressort, des quinquinas qui l’incendièrent; puis il mêla le
tout, associant ces substances les unes aux autres, ce fut peine perdue; ses appointements
s’y épuisaient; c’étaient chez lui des masses de boı̂tes, de topettes, de fioles, une pharmacie en chambre, contenant tous les citrates, les phosphates, les proto-carbonates, les
lactates, les sulfates de protoxyde, les iodures et les proto-iodures de fer, les liqueurs de
Pearson, les solutions de Devergie, les granules de Dioscoride, les pilules d’arséniate de
soude et d’arséniate d’or, les vins de gentiane et de quinium, de coca et de colombo!
( pp. 99 –100)
Folantin is already attempting, on his modest budget, to realize the dream he
shares with the hero of A Rebours: both Folantin and des Esseintes hope to find a
way of refining bourgeois consumption, notably by privileging the artificial over
the natural. Thus des Esseintes, whose pampered stomach eventually proves
even less capable of digesting foods than that of Folantin, finally resorts to being
fed by chemical enemas:
L’opération réussit et des Esseintes ne put s’empêcher de s’adresser de tacites félicitations
à propos de cet événement qui couronnait, en quelque sorte, l’existence qu’il s’était
créée; son penchant vers l’artificiel avait maintenant, et sans même qu’il l’eût voulu,
N U T R I T I O N, H U N G E R A N D FA S T I N G
29
atteint l’exaucement suprême; on n’irait pas plus loin; la nourriture ainsi absorbée était,
à coup sûr, la dernière déviation qu’on pût commettre.18
Huysmans has moved beyond the food dandyism of Brillat-Savarin; man rises
above the status of mere animal not by enjoying refined foods but by bypassing
mastication, ingestion and digestion altogether:
Quelle économie de temps, quelle radicale délivrance de l’aversion qu’inspire aux gens
sans appétit, la viande! quel définitif débarras de la lassitude qui découle toujours du
choix forcément restreint des mets! quelle énergique protestation contre le bas péché de
la gourmandise! (AR, p. 231)
Indeed, des Esseintes goes so far as to imagine ways of mocking hunger itself:
Il serait facile de s’aiguiser la faim, en s’ingurgitant un sévère apéritif, puis lorsqu’on
pourrait logiquement se dire: ‘Quelle heure se fait-il donc? il me semble qu’il serait
temps de se mettre à table, j’ai l’estomac dans les talons’, on dresserait le couvert, en
déposant le magistral instrument sur la nappe et alors, le temps de réciter le bénédicité,
et l’on aurait supprimé l’ennuyeuse et vulgaire corvée du repas. (Ibid.)
The nutrition-based physiology of a Moleschott makes possible the peptone
enemas that serve not so much to determine natural man as to provide a
glimmer of moral comfort to secularized metaphysical man. The latter fasts
not in order to accomplish a religious act of penance or self-sacrifice (at least
not yet) but rather to protest against political calamity: Florent, Folantin and des
Esseintes, each in their own way, are on a kind of hunger-strike, in protest
against the bourgeois moral order.
In his review of A Rebours, Barbey insists on the differences between
Huysmans’s new approach and that of his nominal chef d’école:
M. Huysmans n’a pas, lui, le gras optimisme de M. Zola! Il n’a pas, lui, la joie de vivre!
quoiqu’il la veuille aussi comme pas un [. . .]. Le livre de M. Huysmans, pour qui la vie
n’est pas le pâturage de M. Zola, est donc, au fond, un livre de désespéré.19
In particular, Barbey views the novel as ‘la nosographie d’une société putrifiée
de matérialisme, et cela uniquement donne à son livre une importance que
n’ont pas les autres romans physiologiques de ce temps’ ( pp. 113 – 14). Perhaps
he insists on these differences because he recognizes des Esseintes’s inhuman
dreams as echoes of his own Un Prêtre marié, praised by Huysmans in A Rebours.
Barbey’s novel had pitted Sombreval, the married priest of the title, against his
daughter, Calixte. The latter is determined to expiate her father’s sin through
the mechanism of reversibility and so voluntarily acquires a series of lifethreatening diseases; she is kept alive by her father, now a chemist, who prepares
medicines with which to feed and sustain her.20 The origins of Calixte’s illnesses
are certainly not physiological; they may in fact lie in the incest narrative that
runs through the text.21 Ostensibly, however, her pervasive sickness is divinely
inspired, like all disease from Barbey’s Maistrean perspective. Another way of
putting this last point is that Calixte’s various illnesses represent that portion of
30
FRANCESCO MANZINI
her divinely created life that exceeds materialistic determination. Sombreval is
presented by Barbey as a Promethean figure; his elixirs (at one point used also
as a poison for the purpose of killing, tellingly in order to silence an accusation
of incest) represent the nec plus ultra of science. As such, they can cure any
physiological illness, but not Calixte’s metaphysical sickness. It is this sickness
that finally afflicts Folantin and des Esseintes. What Barbey fails to acknowledge,
and perhaps also to realize, is that a very similar metaphysical sickness also
afflicts Zola’s Florent. The nutrition provided by Les Halles ought to determine
Florent’s thoughts; the phosphorus provided by the fish that he is employed to
inspect ought to increase his capacity for thought; other trace elements ought to
modify his melancholy mood, itself surely the product of his chronic malnutrition in French Guiana and his periods of near-starvation during his long
journey back to Paris. But there is something about Florent, as there is about
Barbey’s Calixte, that exceeds human physiology: Florent, like Calixte, is a
modern saint, or, to put it another way, takes the place of the Catholic saint
within Zola’s political theology.
***
There is a long tradition of what Rudolph Bell has labelled ‘holy anorexia’.22
Clearly, on one level, Florent, Folantin and des Esseintes each suffer from a
type of eating disorder determined by their neurosis, neurasthenia, hysteria, or
other catch-all label used in the nineteenth century to denote psychological
disturbance. Zola and Huysmans, however, finally reject this explanation. In the
latter’s case, the rejection is clear-cut and couched in explicitly anti-physiological
terms. Thus Huysmans’s definition of Spiritual Naturalism insists on that which
exceeds materialist determinism: ‘Il faudrait [. . .] suivre la grande voie si profondément creusée par Zola, mais il serait nécessaire aussi de tracer en l’air un
chemin parallèle, une autre route, d’atteindre les en deça et les après, de faire,
en un mot, un naturalisme spiritualiste.’23 Eventually, after his conversion to
Catholicism, announced to the wider world by the publication of En Route in
1895, Huysmans would come to pinpoint this excess in terms strikingly similar
to those employed by Barbey in Un Prêtre marié. Huysmans’s Sainte Lydwine de
Schiedam, a novel-cum-hagiography partly derived from medieval accounts of the
Blessed Lydwine, presents its reader with the story of Calixte’s analogue (or the
analogue of such nineteenth-century stigmatics as Anne-Catherine Emmerich
[Anna Katharina Emmerick] and Louise Lateau), suffering from a range of
divinely inspired diseases in expiation of the sins of her age:
Par un miracle évidemment destiné à certifier l’origine extra-humaine de ces maux,
Lydwine ne mangeait plus ou si peu! – En trente ans, elle ne goûta pas à plus d’aliments
qu’une personne valide n’en ingère d’habitude pendant trois jours.
Durant les premières années de sa réclusion, elle consommait pour tout repas, du
matin au soir, une rondelle de pomme de l’épaisseur d’une petite hostie que l’on grillait,
au bout d’une pincette, devant l’âtre; et si elle tentait d’avaler parfois une bouchée de
pain, trempée dans de la bière ou du lait, elle n’y parvenait qu’à grand’peine; puis ce fut
N U T R I T I O N, H U N G E R A N D FA S T I N G
31
trop encore de cet émincé de pomme et elle dut se contenter d’une larme d’eau rougie
sucrée, stimulée par un soupçon de cannelle ou de muscade, et d’une miette de datte;
elle en vint ensuite à ne plus se sustenter qu’avec ce vin trempé d’eau; elle le humait plus
qu’elle ne le buvait et en absorbait à peu près une demi-pinte, par semaine.24
This diet causes her to stop sleeping almost completely: ‘on a compté qu’elle
n’avait pas dormi la valeur de trois bonnes nuits en l’espace de trente-huit ans!’
(ibid.). Lydwine becomes famous as the woman who neither eats nor sleeps, yet
continues to live. Her diet, as just described, is clearly based on food and drink
that has been prepared in such a way as to mimic the forms of the wafer and
wine of the Eucharist; but it is the host itself that is actually the staple of this
diet and she can only swallow it if it is consecrated, as demonstrated when an
attempt is made to trick her. These evident proofs of her sanctity provoke hostility among the curious who come to see her: she is accused of secret gluttony;
attempts are made to expose her as a fraud: ‘Et Lydwine un peu surprise de cet
acharnement, leur demandait quel intérêt elle pouvait bien avoir à mentir de la
sorte, car enfin, disait-elle, manger n’est pas un péché et ne pas manger n’est
point un acte glorieux, que je sache’ ( p. 123). It is God who allows her to live
like this; God who is free to suspend physiological laws, in her case (ibid.) and
in the cases of her fellow Saints ( p. 280). The resentment she encounters, for
example from the burghers of Schiedam, is the analogue of Lisa’s resentment of
Florent, of bourgeois resentment of everything that exceeds the positive, normative bourgeois order. It is a secular resentment of the martyrdom of a saint.
Thus it is that the burghers of Schiedam function as the analogues of the
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie decried by Barbey and by Flaubert, by
Huysmans and by Léon Bloy, but also by Zola in Le Ventre de Paris. Spiritual and
material Naturalism both finally rest on a rhetoric of hunger and fasting that
trumps scientistic discourses of nutrition and the bourgeoisie’s insistence on the
satisfaction of appetite.
Oriel and University Colleges
Oxford OX1 4EW / OX1 4BH
United Kingdom
[email protected]
N OT E S
1
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ed. by Jean-François Revel (Paris: Julliard,
1965), p. 23 [hereafter PG].
2
Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme et lettre sur les causes premières (Paris: Baillière, 1844 [1802]), p. 138.
3
Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Die Naturwissenschaft und die Revolution’ [1850], in Feuerbach, Werke,
ed. by Erich Thies, 6 vols (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), IV, pp. 243– 65 ( p. 263). Feuerbach went on
further to develop materialist ideas, for example in his essay Über Materialismus und Spiritualismus
(1866).
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FRANCESCO MANZINI
4
Jacob Moleschott, Die Lehre der Nahrungsmittel für das Volk, 2nd edn (Erlangen: Enke, 1853),
p. 120.
5
Gustave Flaubert, Carnets de travail, ed. by Pierre-Marc de Biasi (Paris: Balland, 1988), p. 486.
6
Émile Zola, Mes Haines (Paris: Faure, 1866), p. 46.
7
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, ‘Zola, La Faute de l’abbé Mouret’, in Le XIXe Siècle, ed. by Jacques Petit,
2 vols (Paris: Mercure de France, 1964–66), II, pp. 253–59 ( p. 254).
8
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, untitled review in De Balzac à Zola, ed. by Michel Lécureur (Paris:
Les Belles Lettres, 1999), pp. 211–24 ( p. 211).
9
Émile Zola, Le Roman expérimental, ed. by François-Marie Mourad (Paris: GF-Flammarion,
2006), pp. 64– 65 [hereafter LRE].
10
See Émile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris, ed. by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1979),
p. 449 [hereafter LVP].
11
Florent’s narrative is regularly interrupted by heavy-handed descriptions of the black pudding
production process and blatantly symbolic interjections such as ‘ “Passez-moi le sang!” cria Quenu, qui,
d’ailleurs, ne suivait pas l’histoire’ (LVP, p. 146). Barbey alludes to this passage when summing up Zola’s
work: ‘Telle est la signification de son livre: faire de l’art, en faisant du boudin!’ (De Balzac à Zola, p. 212).
12
Barbey, Le XIXe Siècle, II, p. 259.
13
Christopher Prendergast, ‘Le Panorama, la peinture et la faim: le début du Ventre de Paris’, in
Les Cahiers Naturalistes, 67 (1993), 65– 71 ( p. 65). Prendergast uses this article above all to analyse the
way in which ‘la nourriture [. . .] permet [. . .] l’exploration du rapport problématique entre la vie
moderne et l’art’ (ibid.). Thus the starving Florent is used by Zola, in Prendergast’s analysis, to contextualize Claude Lantier’s neo-Impressionist, aesthetic appreciation of Les Halles. Prendergast
concludes by observing that ‘toute étude de ce roman et des questions qu’il soulève engage visiblement des considérations d’ordre éthico-politique’ ( p. 71).
14
Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, ed. by Brendan King, 2nd edn (Sawtry: Dedalus,
2006), pp. 61– 62.
15
Baldick articulates this view as follows: ‘It was, of course, the background which rescued
Zola’s novels from mediocrity; and his readers, impressed by such monumental décors as the market
in Le Ventre de Paris [. . .], often failed to notice that Zola’s characters were mere puppets, governed
only by instinct and the author’s whim’ ( p. 120).
16
See Jean Borie, Huysmans: le Diable, le célibataire et Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1991), pp.145– 90, for
an account of Huysmans’s attitude to food and nutrition.
17
J.-K. Huysmans, Nouvelles, ed. by Daniel Grojnowski (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 2007), p. 86
[hereafter N]. See also p. 109.
18
J.-K.Huysmans, A Rebours, ed. by Pierre Waldner (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1978), pp. 230–31
[hereafter AR]. Huysmans’s mechanization of bodily functions would be echoed by Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam in his arch and playful L’Ève future (1886), the tale of the invention of an ideal mechanical woman.
19
Barbey, De Balzac à Zola, p. 112.
20
See Francesco Manzini, The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos (London: IGRS, 2011),
pp. 89–125.
21
Barbey’s story may find its origins in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844),
the story of a doctor’s daughter reared on poisons extracted from plants; this tale, fairly transparently,
functions as a disguised incest narrative.
22
Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985). See also Walter
Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation, 2nd
edn (London: Continuum, 2001) and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia
Nervosa, 2nd edn (New York: Random House, 2001).
23
J.-K. Huysmans, Là-bas, ed. by Yves Hersant (Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1985), p. 31.
24
J.-K. Huysmans, Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam, ed. by Claude Louis-Combet (Lyon: A Rebours,
2002), pp. 120 –21.