#a lot like birds u have my heart..... their songs are so poetic and deep and beautiful n im just here drawin pikmin fanart to em | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

pilferingapples · 2 years ago

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I’ve just finished reading The Ladies’ Paradise- the only other Zola novel I’d read was Germinal and. mon dieu. Similar themes but a bit of a shift in tone, eh? Did Hugo and Zola know each other?

Oh, good question! On a casual search--and I mean very casual-- I can't find any record of them meeting? It seems likely they'd have had a lot to talk about--they both hated NIII, for one, always a good start with post- coup Hugo! And Zola seems to have had a real fondness for Hugo's work? Their timelines would have allowed for a meeting, even in France-- I'm just not running across any evidence of one! As to Zola's own writing, I confess, I've not gotten even through Germinal--my last attempted read of it ran into a wall of Life Happening Extremely at me >< Definitely one I need to give another go, though!

I did find this excerpt of some of Zola's literary criticism, though, and really I'm kind of surprised by how positive he is about Hugo! Under cut for length:

(from the May 1879 edition of the Atlantic!)

I remember my own youth. We were a few young boys in the heart of Provence, in love with nature and poetry. The dramas of Victor Hugo seemed to us like wonderful visions. After the close of school, I remember, ice-cold from the classic tirades we were obliged to learn by heart, we just warmed ourselves by committing whole scenes from Ernani and Ruy Blas. How often, on the shore of a little stream, after a long bath, we performed among ourselves whole acts! Then we fancied, Ah, if we could only see all that in the theatre! and it seemed to us that the roof rang with the ecstatic applause of the spectators. . . .

We remember with what wonderful light shone the verses of Victor Hungo at their first appearance. It was like a new blossoming of our national literature. Lyric poetry was unknown to us. We had only the choruses of Racine and the odes of Rousseau, which now seem to us so cold and stilted. Hence the impression produced on cultivated youth was very deep, and this impression has not yet disappeared. It seems impossible that any new tree should grow in our literary soil within the shadow of the huge oak planted by Victor Hugo. This oak of lyric poetry spreads its branches to all the ends of the earth, covers all the land, fills the sky, and there is not a single poet who would not come to muse beneath and carry away in his ears the song of its birds. They are fated to repeat the music of this all-pervading voice. There is no room for other songs in the air. For the last forty years there is but one poetic language, — the language of Victor Hugo. When any epoch receives so deep and strong an impression, the next generation must suffer, and must make repeated efforts before it can free itself and attain the possibility of developing freely its own creative power.

...Obstacles of every kind prevent one’s speaking frankly one’s thought when frankness would be almost rudeness. Victor Hugo is still living, and surrounded by such an aureole of glory, after so long and brilliant a life as literary king, that the truth spoken in the face of that ancient autocrat would seem almost an insult. True, we are far enough from romanticism now. For the drama, at least, we are posterity, and may pronounce our judgment; but I think respect will close our lips while Victor Hugo is alive and can hear us. . . . They have reproached me personally, that I am an ungrateful son of romanticism.

No, I am not at all ungrateful. I know that our elder brothers won a glorious victory, and we are bound by enthusiastic gratitude to Victor Hugo. But it angers me, and I begin to rebel, when partisans wish to bind French literature to romanticism. If you have won freedom, then permit us to use it. Romanticism was nothing else than a rebellion: it remains for us now to use the victory. The movement begun by you is continued by us. Is that wonderful? It is the law of humanity. We borrow your soul, but we do not wish your rhetoric.”

Evidently the romance with us has entered upon a period of triumph such as it never knew even in the time of Balzac. It may be said that the two great currents of our age, the scientific research for which Balzac made the beginning, and the artistic rhetoric created by Hugo, have become one. The romantic element has lived its life; history begins. I speak of the universal history of man, of the significant pile of human documents [sic] heaped up at the present time in the realistic romance. What a mass of facts, of observations, of documents of every kind, are scattered, for instance, in the Nabob; with what strong pulse life beats in them! At the present time the romance has become the instrument of the age, the great investigation of man and of nature.

there is...so much I have questions about around this (for one big thing , I want to know who the "partisans" were who were trying to pin French lit to Romanticism, given that by 1879 most people I'd consider to have any frontline claim to Romanticism were, y'know. Dead.) but again: more positive about the old guard than I'd been expecting! If I'd grown up trying to be a writer under the shadow of Victor Main Character Hugo, I'd probably want to go all Montresor on him XD

#long post #it feels like they MUST have met??#but ...did they????#Zola #critical reaction

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