L'inscription idéologique dans le roman naturaliste: l'exemple de Zola

Abstract

This work explores different means of locating the ideological discourse in the realist novel. Ideology is considered here in its broadest meaning, that is to say a set of beliefs shared by a social group as common knowledge. In the process of fiction writing, the author and his/her narrator produce, parallel to the fiction, an ideology-bearing discourse. The first chapter situates this function of the narrator in relation to other functions and within the limits of the narrative. Parameters for the collection of ideological discourse in the realist novel are introduced in the second chapter of the first part. These parameters are set according to syntactic and grammatical criteria: changes in verb tenses, use of deictics, passages in the style indirect libre, choice of terms in similes and metaphors. In the second part of the study, the parameters are applied to eleven of Zola's novels, written between 1868 and 1899. First the ideological discourse is collected and divided into themes; it is then demonstrated that the discourse relating to women displays a number of types (of women) that can be compared with those considered in structuralist studies of the same texts. In a fourth chapter, a corpus of similes and metaphors relating characters to animals is analyzed; it shows that recurrence of this type of presuppositional figures can constitute the prominent though underlying message in the discourse. Zola's thought as a novelist still seems ambiguous to his critics. Was he on the fringe of the doxa of his times, or was he an opportunist petit-bourgeois? The present study does not claim to answer this question, but merely to suggest a few paths that could lead to a better understanding of this writer's ideology.