Tasso, Zola and the Vicissitudes of Pastoralism

The presence of pastoral topoi in Zola's narrative acquires significance in terms of the author's professed positivistic objectives for the novel, for the pastoral vision postulates a philosophy of life that predicates the abandonment of social strife, the possibility of a Golden Age as a gratuitous act, the solipsistic glorification of an optimal status quo not to be altered. Yet pastoral themes and images persist with a lingering nostalgia throughout Zola's work, usually in a veiled and seemingly uncompromised way to reach a crucial confrontation in La Faute de l'abbé Mouret. Pastoralism represents for Zola a constant temptation contrary to his velleitaristic intent – a temptation that must ultimately be faced and exorcised. Serge Mouret's rejection of pastoralism is Zola's own rejection. Both are celebrants of rites which are incompatible with the pastoral ideal: Serge is a celebrant of death, Zola of the social order. Linguistic and sociological reasons collaborate to make the end of the pastoral experiment inevitable: in Zola's work pastoralism dies of linguistic suffocation and the inability to sustain a philosophy of brotherhood or of the social order. (AM)