Neohelicon
Volume/Issue:
Volume 39: Issue 2
Poetics of infinite regress
Narrative abrogation in Zola’s Nana
Author:
R.-L. Barnett

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Pages:
439–452
Online Publication Date:
09 Aug 2012
Publication Date:
01 Dec 2012
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-012-0151-z
Keywords:
Nana; Zola; Rougon-Macquart; Naturalism; Body-poetics; Prostitution; Narratology; Semiotics; Nana; Zola; Rougon-Macquart; Naturalisme; Poétique-du-corps; Prostitution; Narratologie; Sémiotique
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Abstract  

Within the tangled skein of Zola’s Nana, malady—metaphysical and metaphorical—yields but violated debris: a disassemblage of annexed marginalia, bits of flesh, disinherited, as it were, and subsisting in the absence of all signifying matter. So with discourse. It, likewise, transpires as a breed of involuted play, a repository of ill-defined wantingness, an interstice, an illusion, oxymoron, annulation, oneiric absence—until it slakes perniciously into silence. To the extent that readability (the infamous “lisible”) is constructed largely upon some brand of referential chain (even in its post-modern, intratextual demeanors), the disintegration of the novel’s nuclear substance un-does, in a very real sense, any brand of integrality. As the inexorable “virus” eviscerates and strips away the actrice, the theater, the stage, the visage of Venus, the play, the script, the auto-referentiality of narcissistic glances, the vituperative glare of those “perdu[s] derrière les jupes,” in sum, the very matter of the exposé (énoncé and énonciation), we, as readers, are extradited to the margins of discourse, left at an end, at the end with none but the somatic vestiges of Zola’s bloat queen, whose deleted marrow is the only marrow that there is, usurping the text and, ultimately, the contours of its own ravaged frame. Yet there lurks, all else effaced, this “monstre de l’Écriture, lubrique, sentant la fauve”: Zola’s epithetic turn of phrase, the genitive pitting of beastliness and textliness, significantly repeals difference and proffers a conjunctive vision of word and world withered.

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Cover Neohelicon
Neohelicon
Print ISSN:
0324-4652
Online ISSN:
1588-2810

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Neohelicon
Language English
Size B5
Year of
Foundation		 1973
Volumes
per Year		 1
Issues
per Year		 2
Founder Akadémiai Kiadó
Founder's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
Publisher Akadémiai Kiadó
Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publisher's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
CH-6330 Cham, Switzerland Gewerbestrasse 11.
Responsible
Publisher		 Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN 0324-4652 (Print)
ISSN 1588-2810 (Online)

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