Conclusion: Taxidermy, Taxonomy, and l’esthétique naturaliste

Abstract

Critics have often looked to the extensive correspondence and planning notes of Flaubert and Zola for these authors’ commentaries on their writing methods, and on the vagaries of their style. One of the points that this book has tried to make is that there is just as much commentary, albeit implicit rather than explicit commentary, contained within the body of their fictional works. Both are acutely concerned with the documentary culture of their age, and their works articulate its problematics. Because so much of their work is concerned with the body, and because the body offers such powerful metaphors, it is unsurprising that it can be seen to offer metaphorical possibilities for the text in its documentary interactions with its discursive environments. A further illustration of this can be found in a supplementary example drawn from outside our main corpus, which may offer a finishing touch, a way of imposing coherence on the different strands of the foregoing chapters.