Naturalism

Naturalism was politically controversial in its heyday—conservatives called Zola a "literary anarchist," while liberals saw his work as a "calumny of the people"—and its place in literary history has been hotly debated by scholars. By the mid–twentieth century, three major strands of thinking about naturalism's legacies had emerged in Europe. In the early part of the century, Zola was adopted by the French left and elevated to the status of one of France's great writers. Thanks in part to Zola's courageous role in the Dreyfus affair, a political scandal that rocked France in the 1890s, naturalism—once reviled for its unsympathetic portrayals of the working class—was reassessed as an eye-opening portrait of the exploitation of the weak. As a result Zola, spurned by the literary establishment and prosecuted by the French government during his lifetime, was eventually laid to rest in the Pantheon, France's secular cathedral to the "Great Men" of France.

Twentieth-century critics who favored the difficult modernist writing of James Joyce or Marcel Proust, however, were suspicious of this popularity. Naturalism's accessibility and faith in science were incompatible with the modernist turn toward self-consciousness, interiority, opacity, and style; from the modernist perspective, Zola's naturalism looked like a kind of dead end of realism, an overextension of realist strategies at a time when modernist artists were turning away from representational art forms. As the critic James McFarlane put it, naturalism "exhausted itself taking an inventory of the world while it was still relatively stable, [and as a result] could not possibly do justice to the phenomena of its disruption" (p. 80).

A third response to Zola and naturalism is best represented by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács (1885–1971), a prominent figure in leftist aesthetic debates in Europe in the mid–twentieth century. Lukács affirmed the common antithesis between realism and modernism, but saw naturalism as a form of modernism, not an outgrowth of realism. The differences between naturalism and modernism were, for Lukács, merely superficial differences of style. On a more substantive level—for Lukács, the ideological level—naturalism is a form of modernism. As he put it, "There is a continuity from Naturalism to the Modernism of our day"—a continuity of "underlying ideological principles" (1963, p. 29). In contrast to "critical" realism's "dialectical unity," both naturalism and modernism, despite their widely divergent styles, deny the possibility of understanding and action, instead presenting the human condition as one of alienated subjectivity, isolation, and psychopathology. For Lukács, then—in spite of Zola's courageous politics (see his 1940 essay "The Zola Centenary")—naturalism was, like modernism, "not the enrichment, but the negation of art" (1963, p. 46).