ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to extend conception of corporeality in the Rougon-Macquart to include fictional bodies and actual bodies. It explains how particular authorial obsessions or certain readerly practices relate to narrative rhythms. The chapter considers how bodies — actual and fictional — participate in the textual process and shape the body of writing, for corporeal instabilities — or, at least, anxieties about such instabilities — appear to be reflected in the tension between totalizing desire and fracturing momentum that is integral to Massin Zola's writing. The relation between the rhythms of narrative and the rhythms of reading is illumined by S. Mallarme's experience of reading Zola. The creative act — whether in real life or in the fictional world — is, for Zola, urgently corporeal: it is the product of nerves, tears, blood, muscle, eye and hand. Zola's perception of his body's recalcitrance informs his lifelong concern that physical impediments are a block to his writerly progress and process.
