Zola's Fiction FR3219b

A Closer Look at Zola and his Writing :

Contexts

The Naturalist Illusion

Contexts :

Born in 1840, Emile Zola reached adulthood during the Second Empire (1852-70). After financially and intellectually modest beginnings (including failure at the baccalauréat), Zola made tentative steps in the world of letters, writing poetry in the style of Musset, working for the publisher Hachette, and then progressing to short fiction (firstly in Contes à Ninon) and art criticism (defending Manet against the Salon jury of 1866). It was the development of Zola's skills as a writer of prose fiction which led to fame, notoriety, and fortune.

After attempts at longer fiction (notably Thérèse Raquin (1867)) Zola began in 1868 to plan a cycle of novels which was to become the Rougon-Macquart. It is largely on the basis of this set of novels that Zola's fame rests; all six of the prescribed novels for this subject belong to the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Originally conceived as a series of ten novels, the cycle would mushroom into a twenty-novel account of the social and personal realities of life under the reactionary regime of the Second Empire. The first novel in the series, La Fortune des Rougon, began to appear in newspaper serialisation in 1870.

At this point history intervened as the Prussians invaded France. Bismarck's troops tore through the French army, eventually laying siege to Paris. The Second Empire fell and a new government which chose to negotiate with the new German state, was set up in Versailles, some distance from the city of Paris itself. However, within the walls of the city a radical urban movement, the Commune, refused to yield. No longer under siege from the Prussians, the Commune now faced siege from its own countrymen, the Versailles troops. 'La semaine sanglante' (triggered by the entry into Paris of the Versailles troops on 21 May 1871) marked the end of such resistance and Thiers's new regime, the Third Republic, was born, bathed in the blood of fellow Frenchmen. It was under this new political structure that the book-length edition of La Fortune des Rougon appeared in October 1871, and that all of Zola's subsequent novels would appear. As Zola notes in the preface which accompanies La Fortune des Rougon in book form:

Depuis trois années, je rassemblais les documents de ce grand ouvrage, et le présent volume était même écrit, lorsque la chute des Bonaparte, dont j'avais besoin comme artiste, et que toujours je trouvais fatalement au bout du drame, sans oser l'espérer si prochaine, est venue me donner le dénouement terrible et nécessaire de mon oeuvre. Celle-ci est, dès aujourd'hui, complète; elle s'agite dans un cercle fini; elle devient le tableau d'un règne mort, d'une étrange époque de folie et de honte.

The subtitle of the cycle is 'Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire' and as such it can be read as a retrospection from the vantage point of the Third Republic as we look back at the preceding imperial regime. The irony in this historical distancing is that it was only too easy for Zola's readers to see in his diagnosis of the ills of the Second Empire many of the flaws of the supposedly less reactionary republican regime. Written in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the novels of the Rougon-Macquart capture in vivid specificity an image of France during a process of social modernisation, as urban and industrial transformation spread. In cultural terms, these texts represent the endpoint of the grand realist project of nineteenth-century fiction. As such, we might say that Zola's novels sit between modernity and modernism (2).

This subtitle denotes the two intellectual models (the one scientific, the other sociological) which underpin Zola's cycle, and in particular its dissection of human behaviour. The 'histoire naturelle' refers to the influence of genetics within a family:

Je veux expliquer comment une famille, un petit groupe d'êtres, se comporte dans une société, en s'épanouissant pour donner naissance à dix, à vingt individus qui paraissent, au premier coup d'oeil, profondément dissemblables, mais que l'analyse montre intimement liés les uns aux autres. L'hérédité a ses lois, comme la pesanteur.

Zola's interest in a scientific explanation (or perhaps one should say corroboration) of literary characterisation can already be seen in Thérèse Raquin which uses nineteenth-century views of physiology in order to investigate aberrant drives of a sexual and criminal kind which characterise what Zola will call la bête humaine. Just such behaviour re-emerges in the Rougon-Macquart but the use of a genetic model allows Zola to construct his cycle within the aesthetically unifying structure of a single family. Characters may themselves reappear in different novels, as in Balzac's La Comédie humaine, but it is the transmission of characteristics which is particular to Zola's enterprise.

The double-barrelled Rougon-Macquart denotes the two sides of the family tree which Zola's cycle elaborates (3). La Fortune des Rougon informs us about Tante Dide, the maternal origin of all the characters in the family tree. She gives birth to a son, Pierre, in 1787, fathered by her husband, Rougon, who thus gives his name to the legitimate side of the tree. However, after the latter's death she takes a lover, the alcoholic Macquart, who gives his name to the illegitimate side of the family by fathering Antoine (born in 1789) and Ursule (1791). These dates are heavy with symbolism, for the republic which has its origins in the Revolution of 1789 is plagued throughout the nineteenth century by the conservative claim that it is merely an illegitimate regime which has usurped the paternal authority of the monarchy. Only by the end of the century will that argument ultimately be non. Thus personal and public histories continuously interweave throughout the cycle.

Zola suggests in the preface to the opening volume that the family is characterised by an excess of desire which pushes against social rules. These desires take many forms (for instance, economic in La Curée and L'Argent, social in Pot-Bouille or political in Son Excellence Eugène Rougon), but underpinning them all is the sexual impulse:

Les Rougon-Macquart, le groupe, la famille que je me propose d'étudier a pour caractéristique le débordement des appétits, le large soulèvement de notre âge, qui se rue aux jouissances. Physiologiquement, ils sont la lente succession des accidents nerveux et sanguins qui se déclarent dans une race, à la suite d'une première lésion organique, et qui déterminent, selon les milieux, chez chacun des individus de cette race, les sentiments, les désirs, les passions, toutes les manifestations humaines, naturelles et instinctives, dont les produits prennent les noms convenus de vertus et de vices.

The Naturalist Illusion :

This use of scientific models as a means of authenticating literary activity is in keeping with the rise of the naturalist school of writing which came to prominence in various forms in many western cultures in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In France its greatest exponent was Zola. Around the maître de Médan (4) developed a network of contacts between writers who shared Zola's mixture of fascination and horror before the excesses of modernity and who were keen to transcribe such excesses in legible and authentic ways. Rather than seeing science simply as a source of incontrovertible 'truth', it is perhaps more useful if we decode it as a source of intellectual authority off which the naturalists could feed. This bid for authority can also be seen as the culmination of the mimetic (5)project which characterises many of the most important novels of the nineteenth century.

Although they all use very different methods in the service of reflecting actual experience, Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert are the prominent French novelists who set out the terms of this project. This desire to construct fiction as a mirror to reflect recent or contemporary realities dictates Zola's use of the sociological criteria implied in the second part of his cycle's subtitle, an 'histoire sociale'. This creates a mode of categorisation and typology which always risks slipping into the stereotypes on which it depends in order to make sense of the world. The illusion of objectivity is fostered by his use of an apparently omniscient (or all-knowing) narrator who tries to conceal any parti pris in what Mitterand calls a 'récit à la non-personne'. Behind such attempts at concealment the ideology of Zola's writing is nevertheless legible. Moreover, twentieth-century theories of the sign have led us to question any simplistic version of the relation between words and things. Naturalism has suffered much in this interrogation of the referential certainty of language (6). Precisely because his fiction reaches back to an eighteenth-century mode of fictional self-consciousness and artifice, Stendhal (7) is seen to pre-empt some of the naiveté of naturalism's vigour and enthusiasm. Flaubert too is said to anticipate modernism's self-doubt (8). Zola himself seems to have been aware that his vast project invites closest comparison with Balzac (9). Recent criticism on Zola has, however, chosen to find virtue in the very instability of naturalist reference to a 'real world' beyond the text.

Although Zola was a prolific journalist and critic, his best known body of theoretical statements is to be found in Le Roman expérimental (1880) which again made much of the analogy with the 'experimental' method of scientists such as Dr. Claude Bernard. Rather than offering a programme which his cycle would follow, this collection of essays provided a justification of his writing in the wake of the notoriety provoked by novels such as L'Assommoir and Nana. Naturalist writing generally aspired to a rigorous and systematic appraisal of human activity in accordance with the three principles of Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) :

race - or heredity, in the form of innate urges and instincts. In Taine's words, 'la molécule originelle est héréditaire et la forme acquise se transmet en partie et lentement par l'hérédité'.
milieu - to quote Taine, 'la molécule organisée ne se développe que sous l'influence du milieu' (10).
moment - in addition to these biological factors, Taine concludes by invoking the force of immediate circumstance.

Rather than merely measuring Zola's writing against such criteria, you might see such principles just as scaffolding which allows Zola to construct a far more ornate edifice. In the words of Mitterand, 'il faut défendre Zola contre lui-même'. Some of Zola's lesser known novels (such as Le Rêve and La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret) stand at one remove from the archetypal naturalist novel and show Zola to be more multifaceted than his canonical fiction might suggest. Indeed, many of the novelists associated with naturalism (such as Guy de Maupassant and J.-K. Huysmans) are as conspicuous for their self-distancing from this rhetoric of objectivity as for their adherence to it.

When Le Docteur Pascal appeared in 1893 as the conclusion to the Rougon-Macquart cycle, avant-garde writers no longer saw naturalism as the saviour of the novel genre. Indeed, this, and Zola's final novels, exhibit a trend towards forms of idealism (such as the cult of maternity) which experienced readers of Zola's may well find hard to swallow. The only other set of novels which Zola completed was Trois Villes which staged the clash of secular scientific republicanism and the catholic ralliement in Lourdes, Rome and Paris. By the time Zola began his Quatre Evangiles with Fécondité in 1899, he was already embroiled in the Dreyfus Affair. This engagement, as much as any of his novels, still stands as a symbol of his commitment to social justice, however ideologically compromised we may now take his fiction to be. Only Travail and Vérité were completed before his death by asphyxiation in 1902. The circumstances surrounding this 'accident' continue to this day to remain a source of uncertainty.

Learning Outcomes :

Once you have studied this introduction, you should be acquainted with the main threads which will run through the course :

the nature of naturalist writing.
the relationship to history of Zola's fiction.
how Zola attempts to create the illusion of reality.
the ways in which Zola's writing also exceeds the bounds of such a literary programme