ABSTRACT
Massin Zola's novels reveal a strikingly modern sense of the formative role of discursive practices in constituting the social body. The linguistic articulations of the social body, represented by Gervaise Macquart and her voisinage, impact upon the individual body of the reader: thus a textual body of signs produces a further body of signs, this time located in the flesh. The chapter focuses on how the body comes to language and how it articulates itself verbally and materially, in the form of 'body language'. The manifold social body expresses itself eloquently, sometimes arrestingly, always pre-linguistically, through the language of the body. The interrelation between individual body, verbal and non-verbal language, and the wider social body to which the individual belongs and which he/she frequently resists, is iterated. In the context of the strike in Germinal, the tensions, desires, rivalries and possibilities which crisscross the social body develop into fissures between and within social groups, and surface in discursive fractures.
