Page 131 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Emile Zola: La Fortune des Rougon (The Fortune of Rougon) 1871
This is the first novel in Zola’s epic masterpiece: Les Rougon Marquart - a series of 20 novels published in book form, tracing the lives of the members of two branches of a family living during the French Second Empire (1852-1870). Zola - like several of the painters he befriended (Courbet, Manet etc) - was a naturalist - eschewing historicism. Zola was inspired by Honore Balzac (especially La Conditione Humaine - Balzac’s immense study of French Society in the period immediately before the Second Empire - 91 works published between 1799-1850, and in his essay examining the differences between their approaches he wrote: “In one word, his work wants to be the mirror of the contemporary society. My work ...will be something else entirely. The scope will be narrower. I don’t want to describe the contemporary society, but a single family, showing how the race is modified by the environment. (...) My big task is to be strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist” (Zola: Différences entre Balzac et moi 1869). Zola was of course influenced by developments in the sciences, especially the theories of Evolution and Heredity - also of great interest to the Victorian English mind-set.
There is of course in the 19th century, a growing tradition of grand family sagas - epic stories told through many episodes and books, tracing a family or group of people through a period of time. John Galsworthy had a literary hit with his 9-part The Forsyte Saga (1906-1921) and Trollope’s The Chronicles of Barchester (1855-1867) is another example. The public taste for serialisations was as strong in France as it was in Britain and America, where serialised novels were a standard in publishing after the success of Charles Dickens ‘ Pickwick Papers (1836-37), released in 20 parts over 19 monthly installments. In America, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a literary succès d’estime - the best-selling novel of the century - over 300,000 sales in USA, around 1.5 million in Britain. It was an anti-slavery book. Its success built the background case for the American Civil War of the 1860s, and it was sold in both hardback and serial form, in magazines and supplements, and in the 20th century, in comic-book versions too. The paradigm of serialisation was inherited in the film, radio, television, and digital worlds - both for content and for data - the essential data-flow of the internet is by ‘packet-switching’ (Baran/Davies 1964)- the serialisation of data into small packets, tagged with a packet sequence number, and the address of recipient and sender.