Prophetic Myths in Zola

Certain Myths exerted an extraordinary hold on Zola's imagination, as one may see not only in La faute de l'abbé Mouret (1875) but also in at least two of his greatest works, Germinal (1885) and La débâcle (1892). These latter novels were written in a period overshadowed by the idea of decadence—the period described by Mario Praz in the last chapter of The Romantic Agony—when Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Schopenhauer's philosophy were the rage in France and such representative authors as d'Aurevilly, Verlaine, and Huysmans gave voice to a gloomy premonition that the Dies Irae of the West—decadent Latin civilization in particular—was at hand. Zola's La joie de vivre (1884), with its setting suggestive of legendary villes englouties, came out the same year as Elémir Bourges' novel Le crépuscule des dieux and the first volume of d'Aurevilly's La décadence latine; and the next year, the year Germinal was published, saw the foundation of the Revue Wagnérienne. It is not surprising that nearly all the myths appearing in Zola's novels at this time reflected this widespread mood of cosmic catastrophism. Yet even where he used the same mythological themes (for example, Sodom and Gomorrah) as some of the decadents and did so in the same historical frame, the sharp differences in their approaches to history clearly emerge. For where the decadents were almost exclusively obsessed with the theme of decline and fall and a sense of “delicious death agony” (to borrow a phrase from Praz), Zola, without being indifferent to this, was predominantly concerned with the theme of cultural regeneration. Significantly, nearly all the myths evoked in the novels we have mentioned are myths of catastrophe and death but also, at the same time, of redemption and rebirth.