Re-forming pleasure: working-class aesthetic experience in Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir

Abstract

Days after the attack on the Tuileries palace, home to a prisoner-king and a royal collection of art, the Republican Assembly passed an act that strikingly materialized the ideals of the Revolution by declaring the palace and its collections to be national property. And yet, the aesthetic pleasure newly available to the public at the Louvre was to become as regimented as any of Haussmann’s boulevards. Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) famously depicts the parade of a working-class wedding party across Paris as they make their way to the Louvre. Their visit to the museum intersects with critical debates about the politics of aesthetics and the move to cultivate Taste and regulate pleasure in the nineteenth century. While many critics have read the “uninformed” or “puerile” pleasure the characters take in the art on display at the Louvre as symptomatic of a society that seeks to maintain an aesthetic hierarchy, I instead read the Louvre as the site of shifting political and social forms that unsettle the marginalization or degradation of working-class aesthetic pleasure. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, I argue that the novel enacts a formal redistribution of the discursive control of the aesthetic space of the Louvre. In contrast to the third-person omniscient narration that elsewhere seeks to impose order, the works of art in the Louvre are subject to ekphrastic description by the members of the wedding party. As these characters describe and comment on the works of art, the novel renders their discursive authority legitimate and invests their “uncultivated” pleasure with value. Importantly, this reading allows us to revisit a part of the novel that has traditionally been read as a failure of a larger, democratic cultural project and instead recuperate it. To do so requires a recalibration of our understanding of the formal principles at work in nineteenth-century novels. As the story goes, nineteenth-century novels developed sophisticated multi-plot narratives and a clear regime of forms, like the bildungsroman or the marriage plot, that would later be shattered and fragmented by the formless and impressionistic narratives of modernism. Yet this distinction – like many accounts of periodization – is built on a fragile foundation that assumes that the nineteenthcentury novel is in fact a form that privileges perspective and forward-driven narrative to lend it coherence. But what if this were not the case? Jacques Rancière, borrowing from Virginia Woolf, asks a version of this question in examining the “mode of linkage,” a phrase that we might take as a definition of form. In “The Thread of the