Riddick on Cooke (2023)

“Apprécier [Zola] le romancier sans étudier l’homme public,” wrote Saint-Georges de Bouhélier in the aftermath of “J’Accuse… !”, “cela sera impossible aux futurs historiens de notre époque. Les deux expressions de Zola, l’action littéraire et l’action publique se déterminent l’une par l’autre.” Fast forward to the future, what have literary critics made of the connection between Zola the novelist and Zola the public intellectual? In the mode of literary history, scholars such as Henri Mitterand and Alain Pagès have analyzed the imbrication of Zola’s oeuvre with his journalistic activity. As for the late style of the novels written around the time of the Dreyfus Affair—when the author made his famous intervention in the public sphere—many have concluded like Naomi Schor that the former enemy of Romanticism became a latter-day Hugo.

Proposing an alternative perspective, Roderick Cooke’s The Dreyfus Affair’s Literary Politics “sets out the case that Zola’s Dreyfusard engagement was decades in the making on the aesthetic level” (2). In the first two chapters, the book close reads Zola’s journalistic and literary output for their political ideas, applying the same method, in three subsequent chapters, to the leading anti-Dreyfusard and literary critic Ferdinand Brunetière, the avant-gardist Bouhélier, and the minor Naturalist Henry Céard. Combining microhistory with “unit-ideas”—a concept taken from the father of the history of ideas Arthur Lovejoy—Cooke coins the term “microhistories of ideas.” He contends that this method of close textual analysis allows for greater granularity than a “macroscopic study” such as Christophe Charle’s classic account of writers in the Affair (8).

In the first chapter, “The Prehistory of ‘J’Accuse …!’: Zola’s Career as Critic,” Cooke argues that Zola’s political engagement was shaped by three key moments prior to the Affair: the “battle of truth and justice” (the author’s taking up the cudgels for Manet), the “battle of literature against politics” (his campagne of 1880–81 staking out a dissenting position for literature) and the “battle of the bankruptcy of science” (his response in various genres to Brunetière’s 1894 “Après une visite au Vatican”). Building on existing scholarship—Mitterand has called the 1866 Salon Zola’s “première Affaire”—this chapter is especially original in drawing out Zola’s response to Brunetière through close readings of the late novels Rome (1896) and Paris (1898).

The second chapter contends that “J’Accuse …!” forms an “interconnected whole” (77) with the eleven other articles published during the Affair, establishing continuity between Zola’s previous writing and these journalistic interventions, which share “some of Zola’s oldest unit-ideas, such as the ethical value of solitude, the paramount importance of truth, and a deep mistrust of the inherently corrupting practices of politics” (130). After Zola’s return from exile, the chapter concludes, there is a change in the tenor of the final articles for Dreyfus, which express disappointment at the resolution of the Affair. These immediate expressions of disappointment are equated with Charles Péguy’s retrospective antipolitical stance in Notre Jeunesse (1910).

Brunetière is the subject of the third chapter, which argues that his opposition to Naturalism, originally articulated in the 1870s, set the terms for his anti-Dreyfusism. Just as Brunetière ingeniously turned Zola’s ideas against the Dreyfusards in “Après le procès,” he was agile in defending literary idealism against what he saw as vulgar realism. An interesting aspect of this was his search for an alternative, non-Zolian Naturalism in Alphonse Daudet and George Eliot. These literary critical leitmotifs would return in Brunetière’s scathing review of Paris at the height of the Affair, as well as the social Catholicism of “Après une visite au Vatican.”

The fourth chapter, “Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, Dreyfusard malgré lui,” explains Bouhélier’s seemingly paradoxical Dreyfusism in relation to his literary manifestoes of the 1890s. Would-be chef d’école of the anti-Symbolist ‘Naturisme,’ Bouhélier was also antisemitic, revanchist, and militaristic. Cooke argues that Bouhélier’s surprising Dreyfusism can be explained not only by his personal loyalty to Zola, but also by a tangle of ideas in his writing, ideas about the relationship of poets to the masses that Dreyfusard engagement promised to realize. After the Affair, Bouhélier’s positions would soften, paving the way for his consecration as a playwright. In a 1977 article not cited by Cooke, Christophe Charle argues that avant-gardists like Bouhélier lined up behind Zola because it gave them the connection to public life that they lacked by virtue of their position within the literary field.

The fifth chapter looks at the strange case of Henry Céard, who had been a close friend of Zola and one of the contributors to the Soirées de Médan (1880), before attacking the author of “J’Accuse …!” during the Affair. Writing for well-heeled, antirevisionist (rather than anti-Dreyfusard) newspaper readers, Céard deployed a great many literary allusions, also drawing upon his former intimacy with Zola to allude to damaging episodes from the author’s past. Cooke admits that it is hard to challenge the explanatory power of historical sociology with regard to Céard; antirevisionism was a path to career success for the failed writer. What the why misses, he contends, is the fine grain of the how in the battle between frères ennemis.

The book’s method raises the question of what is at stake for literary criticism in demonstrating the essential unity of an individual author’s activity or oeuvre. Is this a return to humanism, to biographical criticism? What of the competing claims of dialectical criticism, which places contradiction at the heart of culture? Throughout the book, the central concept of “unit-ideas” returns to establish the fundamental continuity between aesthetics and politics: “What was wrong with Zola’s novels in 1875, for Brunetière, was the same malady afflicting his Dreyfusard campaign in 1898” (176), “aesthetics could be a source for writers’ political discourse” (209), “existing aesthetic ideas were central to writers becoming engaged in the Affair” (216). While these continuities are mainly compelling, the opposite case, that of rupture, could also be argued.

Cooke’s The Dreyfus Affair’s Literary Politics examines with an esprit de finesse the work of four writers who become engaged in the scandal of the century. It is especially rich in making connections across the literary landscape of the mid to late nineteenth century; to the study of writers’ journalistic activity, it adds the specificity of their engagement in political journalism. Scholars of Zola, of Third Republic literature, and of the connection between literature and the press will find material of interest to them. We’ve become increasingly attentive to the back-and-forth between literary and media forms in the nineteenth century; The Dreyfus Affair’s Literary Politics draws our attention toward intellectual historical dimensions of that relationship.