Word: zolas
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Much of Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature...
...namely, that the future of the fictional novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism . . . that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him." This realism, argues Wolfe, was what characterized the success of writers as varied as Zola, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Lewis, whose Elmer Gantry prefigured the Jim Bakker affair by more than half a century. Nor is Wolfe too modest to add that such realism is what "created the 'absorbing' or 'gripping' quality" peculiar to his own novel...
...Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from realism for his "neo- fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast of literature as truly a smorgasbord. I wouldn't want a world in which there were only Balzac and Zola and not Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka. The idea that because we live in a large and varied country we therefore ought to write the sweeping, panoramic novel is like arguing that our poets all ought to be like Walt Whitman rather than Emily Dickinson...
...Nazis were banned as divisive. Leftist union leaders were arrested and replaced by Nazis preaching the harmonious unity of the working classes (strikes were banned). Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, rallied students to a vast bonfire outside the University of Berlin, where the works of illustrious liberals (Emile Zola) and Jews (Heinrich Heine) were consigned to the flames. Jews were barred from public office, the civil service and professions like teaching and journalism. The basic idea behind all this was embodied in the slogan "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" (One people, one nation, one leader...
...Critics compare you with Dickens, Balzac, Zola. Pretty good company...