The Judgment of Paris by Ross King

Author:Ross King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 1999-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Zola had confidently predicted to his publisher that Thirésè Raquin would enjoy a "succès d'horreur."16The forecast proved accurate as the novel became both hugely popular—the first edition sold out in less than four months—and highly controversial. The novel was denounced as "putrid literature" by a writer in Le Figaro. "In the past several years," the critic exclaimed in outrage, "there has grown up a monstrous school of novelists which pretends to replace carnal eloquence with eloquence of the charnel house, which invokes the strangest medical anomalies, which musters plague victims so that we can admire their blotchy skin . . . and which makes pus squirt out of the conscience."17 Zola could hardly have been more pleased with the denunciation. Taking maximum advantage of the opportunities for publicity, he fired off a defense of his so-called "cesspit of blood and filth" in a preface to the second edition.18 He claimed his motive was a scientific one and the novel itself merely a kind of experiment in which he scrupulously but dispassionately viewed the results of mixing together a powerful man and an unsatisfied woman. His efforts, he suggested, resembled those of a chemist with his test tubes or an anatomist with his scalpel and his corpse—or, better still, a painter with his paintbrush and a nude model. "I found myself in the same position," Zola wrote, "as those artists who copy the nude body without feeling the least stirrings of desire, and are completely taken aback when a critic declares himself scandalized by the living flesh depicted in their work."19

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