ABSTRACT
The panoptical vision of Naturalism is rivalled by the fissures and the folds which are the source of narrative anxiety, readerly pleasure and creativity, modes which disturb — inventively — traditional linearity. This chapter discusses the instances where the Zolian narrative transgresses its own constraints, resists linearity with forms of enfolded writing, counters transparency with opaqueness, and subverts determinism by means of eruptive playfulness and provisionality. It considers how the Zolian text problematizes the criteria of Naturalism, and resists straightforward linear recuperation. Narrative disjunctions and juxtapositions sharpen the focus on language whilst 'troubling' the transparency which is synonymous with conventional constructions of Naturalism. The chapter also looks at the transformative instances of Massin Zola's narrative and at what surfaces as a poetics of displacement. Traditional evaluations of Zola's oeuvre in the context of the post-1850 modern and modernist novel have judged it to represent a late-flowering of Realism, which would make it unproblematically readerly.
