Here you have, then, the moral purpose of the experimental novelist clearly defined. The return to nature, the naturalistic evolution which marks the century, drives little by little all the manifestation of human intelligence into the same scientific path. II, 1264 ; 215)Sans pouvoir expliquer comment, il se trouvait le visage collé à la grille du passage des Panoramas, tenant les barreaux des deux mains. Entre les arêtes fines des piliers, ces minces barres jaunes mettaient des échelles de lumière, qui montaient jusqu’à la ligne sombre des premiers toits, qui gravissaient l’entassement des toits supérieurs, posant dans leur carrure les grandes carcasses à jour de salles immenses, où tramaient, sous le jaunissement du gaz, un pêle-mêle de formes grises, effacées et dormantes. Mais, ce matin-là, il avait une gaieté et une innocence d’enfant, son mystère ne leur soufflait que de la tendresse à la face.
In this way they communicate to science a certain inspiration which animates and ennobles it. 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.” This is why I have said so many times that naturalism is not a school, as it is not embodied in the genius of one man, nor in the ravings of a group of men, as was romanticism; that it consists simply in the application of the experimental method to the study of nature and of man. This great unknown which surrounds us ought to inspire us with the desire to pierce it, to explain it by means of scientific methods. I have given this passage entire, as it is of the greatest importance. We have the method; we should go forward, even if a whole lifetime of effort ends but in the conquest of a small particle of the truth. He declares: “All natural philosophy is summed up in this: To know the laws which govern phenomena. was approached by a narrow path. The only great and moral works are those of truth. There is no nobler, higher, nor grander end.
In living beings the phenomena are of enormous complexity, and the greater mobility of living organisms renders them more difficult to grasp and to define.” What can be said, then, of the difficulties to be encountered by the experimental novel, which adds to physiology its studies upon the most delicate and complex organs, which deals with the highest manifestations of man as an individual and a social member? But see what splendid clearness breaks forth when this conception of the application of the experimental method to the novel is adequately grasped and is carried out with all the scientific rigor which the matter permits to-day. For Zola, Naturalism is scientific realism, a kind of realism which accepts and uses the scientific methods based upon the proposition that man’s free will is an illusion and his acts are determined by his heredity and environment. All that can be said is that there is an absolute determinism for alI human phenomena.
He next wrote his Les Trois Villes series consisting of … Determinism dominates everything. Thus without having recourse to the questions of form and of style, which I shall examine later, I maintain even at this point that we must modify nature, without departing from nature, when we employ the experimental method in our novels.
Since medicine, which was an art, is becoming a science, why should not literature also become a science by means of the experimental method ? It is a belief that man does nothing, by himself, it is fate that brings about change in his life. A great lyrical poet has written lately that our century is a century of prophets. Claude Bernard in each page of “L’Introduction” comes back to this idea.
The naturalistic novelist conceives himself as a scientific sociologist and psychologist, i.e.
What determined my choice, and made me choose “L’Introduction” as my basis, was the fact that, medicine, in the eyes of a great number of people, is still an art, as is the novel. Some day the physiologist will explain to us the mechanism of the thoughts and the passions; we shall know how the individual machinery of each man works; how he thinks, how he loves, how he goes from reason to passion and folly; but these phenomena, resulting as they do from the mechanism of the organs, acting under the influence of an interior condition, are not produced in isolation or in the bare void.
A droite et à gauche, vers la Madeleine et vers le Corps législatif, des lignes d’édifices filaient en lointaines perspectives, se découpaient nettement au ras du ciel ; tandis que le jardin des Tuileries étageait les cimes rondes de ses grands marronniers. His last sentence is that experimental medicine adheres to no medical doctrine nor any philosophical system.
The reasoning subsequently will be of the simplest; if the experimental method can be carried from chemistry and physics into physiology and medicine, it can be also carried from physiology into the naturalistic novel.
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. Therefore in naturalism there could be neither innovators nor leaders; there are simply workmen, some more skillful than others. We are continuing, by our observations and experiments, the work of the physiologist, who has continued that of the physicist and the chemist.
Publication date 1894 Topics French fiction, French literature, Criticism Publisher New York, The Cassell Publishing Co ... FULL TEXT download. An experimentalist has no need to conclude, because, in truth, experiment concludes for him.
“The idea should always remain independent; it must be enchained neither by scientific, nor philosophical, nor religious beliefs.