The Vatard Sisters Read Free Page A

writers. I’d even be very upset if they didn’t insult M. Huysmans. Deep down, I’m not worried: they will insult him.
    Nothing is more simple than this book. Its subject isn’t even a news item, because a news item requires drama. They are two sisters, Céline and Désirée, two workers in a bindery, who live with their dropsical mother and their armchair philosopher father. Céline “lives it up”. Désirée, who is keeping herself for her future husband, has a chaste relationship with a young worker, then she breaks up with him at the end and marries someone else; and that’s it, that’s the book. This bareness of plot is typical. Our contemporary novel is simplifying itself, out of a hatred of plots that are over-complicated and which don’t ring true…A page of human life: that’s enough to hold one’s interest, to present deep and lasting emotions. The most trivial record of human experience grabs you by the guts more forcefully than any contrivance of the imagination. It’ll end up giving us simple studies, without sudden plot twists or denouements, the account of a year in someone’s life, the story of a love affair, the biography of a character, notes taken from life and arranged in order.
    Here, we see the power of the record of human experience. M. Huysmans has scorned all picturesque arrangement. There is no straining of the imagination: scenes of working class life and Parisian landscapes are tied together by the most ordinary story in the world. And yet, the novel has an intense life, it grabs you and impassions you, it raises provoking questions, it is hot with struggle and triumph. Where does this flame come from? From the truth of its representations and the personality of its style, nothing more. All modern art is here.
    ( Le Voltaire , 4 March 1879)

    Zola’s influence on the contemporary reception of The Vatard Sisters was significant. Up to this point in his career as a writer, Huysmans was still relatively unknown outside a small, specialised readership (a number of reviewers had difficulty with his name, referring to him variously as J.-R. Huysmans, Huismans, and Huysmanns), so the association with Zola brought a great deal more publicity and attention to the book than it would otherwise have received. However, Zola’s efforts to praise the novel as an embodiment of the Naturalist method inevitably did as much harm as good in certain quarters, and a large proportion of those who reviewed the book used the opportunity to attack Zola and Naturalism in the process. Louis Ulbach, for example, who had violently attacked Zola’s Thérèse Raquin when it appeared in 1868, made an explicit reference to Zola’s comments, using them as a launchpad to attack the Naturalists in general and Huysmans in particular:

    With a formidable irony Zola wishes that M. Huysmans, the author of The Vatard Sisters, be “dragged through the gutters of criticism, that he be denounced to the police by his colleagues, and hear the mob of the envious and the impotent screaming at his heels. It’ll be then that he’ll feel his power.”
    Zola flatters his disciple too much and compromises him by dedicating him to martyrdom…As for the gutters of criticism, the author of L’Assommoir evidently seems to believe they’re neither very clean nor very healthy. If they are infected, it is not by critics, but by Naturalists.
    ( Revue Politique et Littéraire, 8 March 1879)

    Ulbach rejected Zola’s description of the book as a simple story about two girls. For him it was nothing more than “a transcript of their physical needs. When they’ve had their fill, the author closes his book, loads it onto the rubbish cart, and that is that.” Ulbach then countered Zola’s claim that “All modern art is here” by noting that Charpentier had published a string of writers, such as Théophile Gautier, Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Saint-Beuve, who represented a considerable section of modern art, and that The Vatard