Naturalism

While Taine sought to develop a scientific method for the analysis of literature, Zola's naturalism was a method for writing novels; where Taine sought to understand a nation through its literary output, Zola used naturalist philosophy as a basis for creating characters, and with them a portrait of French society in the second half of the nineteenth century. Combining Taine's theories with research developments in the biological and behavioral sciences, Zola conceived of the novel as a laboratory for the study of human behavior under the influence of heredity and environment. By his mid-twenties, having published several novels, he began to plot out his massive life's work, a twenty-novel series entitled The Rougon-Macquart—a work to rival the vast Human Comedy of Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), to be based in science rather than intuition.

Zola tirelessly promoted his theories in columns that appeared in newspapers, magazines, and journals. Unfortunately, the most widely anthologized expression of this theory is also among the least thoughtful. This essay, "The Experimental Novel" (1880), is essentially an extended paraphrase of the physician Claude Bernard's influential 1865 work, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. The essay is now regarded as historically interesting if theoretically naïve, and contemporaries—including former disciples of Zola, such as the author Henry Céard (1851–1924)—ridiculed it as a misunderstanding of Bernard's work.

To take this essay as representative of Zola's thinking about naturalism would be a serious error. Naturalism in literature was as much a promotional concept as a literary-critical one, and the range, variety, and energy of Zola's writing about the term indicates he was perhaps less interested in providing a final definition than in keeping alive the heated debates about naturalism. As a literary critic, theater critic, and essayist, Zola was a provocateur: he was strident, often caustic, and prone to dramatic and sensationalist gestures. Early in his career, Zola came to understand and exploit the value of notoriety; his first volleys of criticism were collected in 1866 under the title My Hatreds, and his unrepentant slogan "I am here to live out loud" is still occasionally cited by artists and activists. "The Experimental Novel"—along with many of Zola's defenses of naturalism—is best understood from this perspective: to criticize the essay for its lack of theoretical rigor is to miss entirely its brilliance as a provocation and a promotion.

If Zola's criticism is more confrontational than systematic, a broader look at his writing on naturalism nonetheless reveals several consistent ideas. First, Zola often claimed that the lurid, pornographic subject matter of many his novels was incidental to naturalism; what counted was the method—which, as his former disciple Céard observed, could hardly be called "experimental," but that nonetheless shared the careful, systematic observational methods of the emerging social sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. For audiences that consumed Zola's novels as quickly as he could write them and for critics and government censors who called naturalism "putrid literature," the graphic content of the novels was naturalism's most salient feature, and Zola and his publishers often faced obscenity charges in France and abroad (cheap pulp editions with racy covers appeared in the United States as late as the 1950s). For Zola, however, unflinching analysis was the substance of naturalism.

A second, often overlooked theme that runs throughout Zola's writing on naturalism is his repeated association of naturalism and democracy. Perplexed scholars have called this connection a double dysfunction, a strange marriage, a paradox: nineteenth-century theories of biological determinism seem hardly compatible with the Enlightenment ideals of citizenship and self-government. In the words of the critic Harold Kaplan, for naturalist literature in the United States, "democracy seemed to require strong idealizations to support free choice" (p. 37). But for Zola, naturalism in literature and democracy in politics were logical, even necessary evolutionary developments. Zola likened the outsized protagonists of Romanticism to kings and princes, out of place in the modern world. For him naturalism, like democracy, was a representation—faithful if at times unflattering—of the common people.