The Vatard Sisters Read Free Page B

Sisters had no relationship to them whatsoever.
    The reviewer in Le Siècle also used Zola as a kind of critical yardstick, mostly in order to make Huysmans’ novel seem even more extravagant and crude by comparison:

    M. Huysmans is a wild representative of the Naturalist school; it is difficult to push infatuation and advocacy of it any further. From M. Zola, M. Huysmans has copied only the minor part, the mean, vulgar part. Wide open horizons scare him. In reading The Vatard Sisters one asks oneself if the author hasn’t wanted to make a caricature of the genre. L’Assommoir is pale and colourless beside the crudity of language in The Vatard Sisters . The opening chapter, which introduces us to a book bindery workshop is a masterpiece of the genre. Good God, what language! And what a literature! It makes you shudder. Which won’t stop The Vatard Sisters from selling a considerable number of copies. On the contrary!
    ( Le Siècle , 9 March 1879)

    In his commentary on The Vatard Sisters, Zola had stressed the role of reality, as opposed to that of the imagination, as the primary factor in the Naturalist creative process: “If we spurn the imagination, in the sense of something invented that is added on to reality, we put all our creative forces into presenting real life truthfully…” ( Le Voltaire , 4 March 1879). Unsurprisingly, given the hostility to Naturalism in the conservative press, this nuanced view was caricatured by a number of reviewers of Huysmans’ novel, mostly notably by Albert Wolff , a conservative journalist who had already made a name for himself with a series of ferocious criticisms of the Impressionists . Wolff deliberately distorted Zola’s words and mocked Huysmans’ novel for its lack of imagination:

    The present situation is summed up in a word with regard to a novel by a young man, M. Huysmans; it is called The Vatard Sisters and paints without any effort of imagination, in unbridled realistic terms, an episode in the life of two female workers. It is apropos of this obstreperous book that Émile Zola, the male wet-nurse of the whole school, cried with such pride:
    —This book is our triumph. There’s no imagination at all in the whole thing!
    No imagination, that’s to say no illusions, no poetry, nothing but a completely arid life, with all its desolations, its sadnesses and its abominations. Man is a biped like any other animal, who has descended from the apes in order to become a worm.
    ( Le Figaro , 17 March 1879)

    A similar technique was used by the reviewer in La Jeune France :

    After La Dévouée [a novel by Huysmans’ friend and fellow Naturalist, Léon Hennique], here comes The Vatard Sisters . And after The Vatard Sisters… ? Honestly, is all this really serious? They tell us that there is talent in this book, we would like it better if there weren’t. M. Zola himself has summed up his literary theory: “No imagination”. Books like this one show that M Zola is being obeyed—even more perhaps than he would like.
    ( La Jeune France , 1 April 1879)

    As well as using Zola’s ideas as a means of attacking Huysmans’ book, another approach was to compare it to L’Assommoir , which had itself caused an outrage on grounds of indecency. Gaston de Saint-Valry in La Patrie , described the novel as “a second dilution of L’Assommoir ”, which was not intended as a compliment, before summing it up in the following terms:

    In short, nothing is more vulgar, more banal, nothing demands less talent, originality or invention.
    ( La Patrie , 11 March 1879)

    Likewise, the critic of Le Soir was similarly offended by the general tone and subject matter of the book and compared it to the worst aspects of L’Assommoir , though he at least acknowledged that Huysmans had some good qualities as a writer:

    Why don’t we tell M. Huysmans the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? He has within him a germ of a bold, virile talent; he has a faculty of intense observation,