Emile zola naturalism
Tout afficher ». The theoretical claims for such an approach, which are considered simplistic today, were outlined by Zola in his Le Roman Experimental The Experimental Novel, What we alone must accept is what I will call the stimulus of the ideal. Certainly our science is very limited as yet, beside the enormous mass of things of which we are ignorant.
This great unknown which surrounds us ought to inspire us with the desire to pierce it, to explain it by means of scientific methods.
Le roman experimental de emile zola biography
And this does not refer only to scientific men; all the manifestations of human intelligence are connected together, all our efforts have their birth in the need we feel of making ourselves masters of the truth. Mathematics serves as a tool to physics, to chemistry, and to biology in very different measure; physics and chemistry serve as powerful tools to physiology and medicine.
In this mutual help which the sciences are to each other, you must distinguish clearly the savant who advances each science and he who makes use of it. The physician and the chemist are not mathematicians because they employ calculation; the physiologist is not a chemist or a physician because he uses chemical reactions or medical instruments, any more than the chemist and the physician are physiologists because they study the compositions or the properties of certain liquids and certain animal or vegetable tissues.
We are neither chemists nor physicians nor physiologists; we are simply novelists who depend upon the sciences for support. We certainly do not pretend to have made discoveries in physiology which we do not practice; only, being obliged to make a study of man, we feel we cannot deny the efficacy of the new physiological truths.
And I will add that the novelists are certainly the workers who rely at once upon the greatest number of sciences, for they treat of them all and must know them all, as the novel has become a general inquiry on nature and on man. This is why we have been led to apply to our work the experimental method as soon as this method had become the most powerful tool of investigation.
We sum up investigation, we throw ourselves anew into the conquest of the ideal, employing all forms of knowledge. I think that the experimental novelists equally ought not to occupy themselves with this unknown quality, unless they wish to lose themselves in the follies of the poets and the philosophers. If we some day succeed in knowing it, we shall doubtless owe our knowledge to method, and it is better then to begin at the beginning with the study of phenomena, instead of hoping that a sudden revelation will reveal to us the secret of the world.
The only ideal which ought to exist for us, the naturalistic novelists, should be one which we can conquer. Besides, in the slow conquest which we can make over this unknown which surrounds us, we humbly confess the ignorant condition in which we are. We are beginning to march forward, nothing more; and our only real strength lies in our method.
Claude Bernard, after acknowledging that experimental medicine is in its infancy still, does not hesitate to give great credit to empirical medicine. In the complex sciences dealing with man empiricism necessarily governs the practice much longer than in those of the more simple sciences. Certainly if doctors must resort to empiricism in nearly every case, we have much greater reasons for using it, we novelists whose science is more complicated and less determined.
I say once more, it is not a question of creating the science of man, as an individual and as a social being, out of the whole cloth; it is only a question of emerging little by little and with all the inevitable struggles from the obscurity in which we lie concerning our own natures, happy if, amid so many errors, we can determine one truth.
We experiment, that is to say that, for a long time still, we must use the false to reach the true. Such is the feeling among strong men. Claude Bernard argues fiercely against those who persist in seeing only an artist in a doctor. All this, which I will not tire you by repeating, applies perfectly to the experimental novel.
I will address to the young literary generation which is growing up around me these grand and strong words of Claude Bernard. I know none more manly. This profound conviction sustains and controls my scientific life. I am deaf to the voices of those doctors who demand that the causes of scarlatina and measles shall be experimentally shown to them, and who think by that to draw forth an argument against the use of the experimental method in medicine.
These discouraging objections and denials generally come from systematic or lazy minds, those who prefer to rest on their systems or to sleep in darkness instead of making an effort to become enlightened. The experimental direction which medicine is taking to-day is definitely defined. And it is no longer the ephemeral influence of a personal system of any kind; it is the result of the scientific evolution of medicine itself.
The students must be inspired before all else with the scientific spirit, and initiated into the ideas and the tendencies of modern science. All my literary life has been controlled by this conviction. I am deaf to the voices of the critics who demand that I shall formulate the laws of heredity and the influence of surroundings in my characters; those who make these discouraging objections and denials but speak from slothfulness of mind, from an infatuation for tradition, from an attachment more or less conscious to philosophical and religious beliefs.
The experimental direction which the novel is taking to-day is a definite one. And it is no longer the ephemeral influence of a personal system of any kind, it is the result of the scientific evolution, of the study of man himself. My convictions in this respect are so strong that I endeavor to impress them clearly upon the minds of the young writers who read my works; for I think it necessary, above all things else, to inspire them with the scientific spirit, and to initiate them into the ideas and the tendencies of modern science.
If it is necessary to state the facts precisely on any one subject, it is on that of the impersonal character of the method. That was recommended a long time ago, and numerous attempts have been made in this direction. I have said that I introduce nothing, that I simply endeavor to apply in my novels and critical essays the scientific method which has been in use for a long time.
But naturally they have pretended not to hear me, and they still continue to talk of my vanity and my ignorance. I have already repeated twenty times that naturalism is not a personal fantasy, but that it is the intellectual movement of the century. It is the characteristic of the experimental method to depend only on itself, as it carries within itself its criterion, which is experiment.
It recognizes no authority but that of facts, and it frees itself from personal authority. Man must be strong and free in the manifestation of his ideas, must follow his instinct, and not dwell upon the puerile fears of the contradiction of any theories; It not only throws off the philosophical and theological yoke, but it no longer admits scientific personal authority.
This is not said from pride or boastfulness. The experimentalist, on the contrary, shows his humility in denying personal authority, for he doubts his own knowledge, and he submits the authority of men to that of experiment and the laws which govern nature. Hence it is nothing but a vast movement, a march forward in which everyone is a workman, according to his genius.
All theories are admitted, and the theory which carries the most weight is the one which explains the most. There does not appear to me to be a literary or scientific path larger or more direct. Everyone, the great and the small, moves freely, working and investigating together, each one in his own specialty, and recognizing no other authority than that of facts proved by experiment.
Therefore in naturalism there could be neither innovators nor leaders; there are simply workmen, some more skillful than others. We must be immovable on the principles of experimental science determinism , and yet not believe in the theories absolutely. In fact, the coming of experimental medicine will result in dispersing from science all individual views, to replace them by impersonal and general theories, which will be, as in other sciences, but a regular co-ordination deduced from the facts furnished by experiment.
These names belong to an old school of natural philosophy which has fallen into disuse in the progress of science. We shall never fully understand either mind or matter; and, if this were the proper place, I could easily show that on one side as on the other you soon reach scientific negation, from which it follows that all considerations of this kind are idle and useless.
It is for us to study only phenomena, to know the material conditions of their manifestations, and to determine the laws of these manifestations. I think that it is best for us to accept the philosophical system, which adapts itself the best to the actual condition of the sciences, but simply from a speculative point of view.
For example, transformism is actually the most rational system, and is the one which is based most directly upon our knowledge of nature. Behind a science, behind a manifestation of any kind of the human intelligence, there always lies more or less clearly what Claude Bernard calls a philosophical system. But the system exists none the less, and it exists so much the more as science is less advanced and less firm.
For us naturalistic novelists, who are still in the lisping stage, hypothesis is fatal. Nevertheless, if in practice Claude Bernard thrusts aside philosophical system, he recognizes the necessity of philosophy. Hence philosophers always confine themselves to questions that are in dispute, and to those lofty regions that lie beyond the boundaries of science.
In this way they communicate to science a certain inspiration which animates and ennobles it. They strengthen the mind——developing it by an intellectual gymnastics——at the same time that they ever carry it toward the never completed solution of great problems. Thus they keep up a cult of the unknown, and quicken the sacred fire of investigation, which ought never to be extinguished in the heart of a savant.
Claude Bernard evidently looks upon the philosophers, among whom he believes he has a great many friends, as musicians often gifted with genius, whose music encourages the savants while they work and inspires the sacred fire of their great discoveries. But the philosophers, left to themselves, will sing forever and never discover a single truth.
Le roman experimental de emile zola biography youtube: Le Roman expérimental est un ouvrage d' Émile Zola paru en Il regroupe un ensemble d'articles publiés notamment dans Le Bien public ou Le Voltaire qui exposent sa vision du roman naturaliste dont il est devenu le chef de file.
I have neglected until now the question of form in the naturalistic novel, because it is precisely there that individuality shows in literature. But the question of method and the question of rhetoric are distinct from each other. And by naturalism, I say again, is meant the experimental method, the introduction of observation and experiment into literature.
Rhetoric, for the moment, has no place here. Let us first fix upon the method, on which there should be agreement, and after that accept all the different styles in letters which may be produced, looking upon them as the expressions of the literary temperament of the writers. If you wish my true opinion upon this subject, it is this: that to-day an exaggerated importance is given to form.
I have a great deal to say on this subject, but it would carry me beyond the limits of this essay. In reality, I think that the form of expression depends upon the method; that language is only one kind of logic, and its construction natural and scientific. He who writes the best will not be the one who gallops madly among hypotheses, but the one who walks straight ahead in the midst of truths.
We are actually rotten with lyricism; we are very much mistaken when we think that the characteristic of a good style is a sublime confusion with just a dash of madness added; in reality, the excellence of a style depends upon its logic and clearness. Claude Bernard considers that philosophers are really musicians who play a sort of Marseillaise made up of hypotheses, and swell the hearts of the savants as they rush to attack the unknown; and he has much the same idea of artists and writers.
I have remarked that a great many of the most intelligent savants, jealous of the scientific certainty which they enjoy, would very willingly confine literature to the ideal. They themselves seem to feel the need of taking little recreations in the world of lies after the fatigue of their exact labors, and they are fond of amusing themselves with the most daring hypotheses, and with fictions which they know perfectly well to be false and ridiculous.
However far astray the savant may be in his hypothesis, he still remains the equal of the poet, who is certain to have been equally mistaken. The point to be emphasized is this, that our domain is not limited to the expression of sentiments as unchangeable as human nature because it is essential also to exhibit the working of these sentiments.
We have not exhausted our matter when we have depicted anger, avarice, and love; all nature and all of man belong to us, not only in their phenomena, but in the causes of these phenomena. I well know that this is an immense field, the entrance to which they would willingly have refused us; but we have broken down the barriers and have entered it in triumph.
There one is dealing with a spontaneous creation of the mind that has nothing in common with the verification of natural phenomena, in which our minds can create nothing. I can only repeat what I have said before, that apart from the matter of form and style, the experimental novelist is only one special kind of savant, who makes use of the tools of all other savants, observation and analysis.
We operate, like him, on man; and Claude Bernard recognizes this fact himself, that the cerebral phenomena can be determined the same as other phenomena. The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays. Droits d'auteur.
Le roman experimental de emile zola biography wife
Tout afficher ». French novelist, journalist, playwright, and poet — Early life [ edit ]. Later life [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Literary output [ edit ]. Dreyfus affair [ edit ]. Main articles: Dreyfus affair and J'accuse. Wikisource has the original text of Zola's article: J'accuse! Wikisource has an English translation of: J'Accuse! The Manifesto of the Five [ edit ].
Death [ edit ]. Scope of the Rougon-Macquart series [ edit ]. Quasi-scientific purpose [ edit ]. Characterisation [ edit ]. Zola's optimism [ edit ]. In popular culture [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ].
Le roman experimental de emile zola biography pdf
French language [ edit ]. Works translated into English [ edit ]. Modern translations [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 22 August Collins English Dictionary. Retrieved 15 July Zola et le naturalisme.
Paris, France: Presses universitaires de France. ISBN Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 7 February In Chisholm, Hugh ed.
Cambridge University Press. Zola et autour d'une oeuvre : Au bonheur des dames. Zola: A Life. Farrar Straus Giroux. Vices had fertile ground, so that one lived in true Roman putrescence. Any cloistered association of people who belong to the same sex is morally reprehensible," he wrote in , and the Goncourts report him lamenting on one occasion that "I had a perverted youth in wretched provincial school.
Yes, a rotten childhood! Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 9 November Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. F-8 — via ProQuest.
Le roman experimental de emile zola biography wikipedia
La Fortune des Rougon. Paris, France: Gallimard. Library of Alexandria. Books : a living history. Los Angeles: J.