Le solide et le volatile. Propos sur la représentation du corps romanesque sur fond de la crise des structures au XIXe siècle (Flaubert, Zola, Mirbeau)

The aim of the article is to analyze the presentation of the novel body in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century against the backdrop of the crisis of structures that appears along with romanticism and gains strength in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was a time saturated with ideas of socio-biological evolutionism, which promote materialism, entropy, transformation and the disintegration of permanent structures, including socio-economic ones (Marx, Capital). Flaubert, Zola and Mirbeau, faithful to this poetics, subordinate the presentation of the body to the dynamics of change, including images of “volatilization” and decay. These “volatile” and crumbling bodies are at odds with the realist-naturalistic poetics prevailing in the second half of the nineteenth century, dominated by ostentatious materialism. This peculiar transformation of the physical state of matter, from “solid” to “volatile,” may have been interpreted as a symptom of a change in the way reality is presented. As this analysis shows, the volatility of bodies becomes in realist writers an indestructible form of decay and (still) a material form of absence that resists destruction by death. Paradoxically, taking a volatile form, the body does not disappear but reorganizes itself, dematerializing, transforming and reappearing. Both representations of the body and emerging modernity appear as a dynamic, constantly changing process and not as a frozen structure.