Zola and the Science of Painting

The article explores a paradox in Zola's writing: the resistance to advances in scientific theory by the author of Du Progrès dans les sciences et dans la poésie (1864), as the first of many such assimilations of scientific progress and artistic trends. This is exemplified by the challenge posed to his Naturalist aesthetic by Michel-Eugène Chevreul's seminal De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (1839), popularised during the period of Zola's most sustained art criticism. This radical revision of the science of optics is increasingly accommodated in contemporary painting, from 1880 onwards, at the very moment of Zola's disenchantment with Impressionism. Although L'Œuvre, his novel of 1886, is set in the Second Empire (consistent with the historical limits of Les Rougon-Macquart), Zola inserts into his narrative the theory of complementary colours, the awkward anachronism notwithstanding, to explain his fictional painter's creative impotence. In relation to the latter, the article looks in detail at the genesis and textual details of a key passage in the novel in which Zola's irony at the expense of Chevreul's theories is almost explicit. At least as telling is his response to unsolicited advice about them: ‘J’ai plus de confiance dans l'observation directe que dans la théorie’. One could hardly conjure up a more succinct summary of Zola's unreconstructed approach to the science of painting which simultaneously testifies to his own principles of representation.

De L'œil du savant au regard impudique dans La Curée

La Curée is a novel about financial excesses and sexual appetites. A problem arises for Zola: how to describe sexual acts and avoid censorship? Zola's strategy is to portray sexuality in a slightly indirect way. He uses a scientific gaze as an alibi to describe human sexuality. This article demonstrates how Zola combines references to botany and fairground anatomy for this purpose. Botany allows Zola to write about sexuality in a way that is both explicit and indirect. In addition, the naturalistic method of observation offers a ‘neutral’ scientific perspective of sexuality. Finally, references to anatomical Venuses allow the pseudo-pedagogical observation of the naked female body. Therefore, an indecent, voyeuristic gaze reveals itself behind science as alibi, behind the naturalist gaze.

Medical Humanism or Scientia Sexualis? Building a Sexological Concept in Fécondité

This article argues that Zola's late novel Fécondité, while on the surface a transparently didactic roman à thèse articulating populationist concerns, is in fact at the same time a roman de mœurs implicated genealogically in a broader range of issues than pro-natalist ethics and various behavioural and therapeutic bêtes noires, containing identifiable traces of other contemporary pathological concerns, contingently marshalled for pro-natalist ends. Exploiting the terminological flexibility of what Peter Cryle and Alison Moore have referred to as a long-established ‘constellation of themes’ constituted by ‘impotence, frigidity and sterility’, Fécondité participates in the fin-de-siècle production of a key sexological concept. It does so through relentless deployment of the malleable motif of female sexual coldness – a signifier of pathological conditions named in contemporary medical and pseudo-medical literature as ‘frigidité’, ‘froideur’, and so on – and its polyvalent application to distinct pathologies manifesting in a variety of its female characters, in particular inabilities to desire, to conceive, and, significantly, to climax. Zola's novel appears at a moment where women's sexual pleasure was becoming normalised, to the extent that its absence now counted as a pathological disorder; Fécondité deploys tropes of coldness – consequential upon anti-reproductive practices – to suggest that it is attempted disruption of the natural reproductive order that ensures such disordered absence. Ultimately, while Fécondité is readable as didactic expression of a ‘humanitarian’ natalist ethics and representation of doctor-patient encounters, treatment, experience of illness and other ‘medical humanities’ concerns, it is however important not to overlook this representation's discursive contingencies, particularly the coalescence of sexological and populationist concerns at a moment when both were of considerable significance. Fécondité in this sense straddles two major fin-de-siècle discursive economies, offering an ideal object for a critical medical humanities valuing the pathological as well as the pathographical.

Émile Zola and the Literary Language of Climate Change

On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid. Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes. The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.

La Critique et le dépassement de la « méthode expérimentale » dans Thérèse Raquin

This article makes the case for reading Zola’s protagonists Laurent and Thérèse as literary foils for one of the founding fathers of the experimental method, namely the physiologist Claude Bernard, and his wife, Fanny Martin. Drawing more particularly on elements from Bernard’s and Martin’s lives, as well as Bernard’s scientific writings, the article shows that Zola ‘performs’ two grueling experiments in the aforementioned novel: the first one, initiated by the author himself, results in the death of three protagonists and the paralysis of the fourth one; the second experiment, initiated by Laurent, reveals that the latter’s evaluation of Thérèse and his ensuing hypothesis are seriously flawed. In fact, Laurent’s gaze is marred by his tendency to ‘dirty’ nature (‘salir la nature,’ to borrow Zola’s expression), and his experiment doesn’t turn out the way he had originally planned, as both lovers turned murderers end up committing suicide together. This article thus argues that, in Thérèse Raquin, Zola resorts to critical posturing as a vivisector in a text that can be read as a revenge narrative which gestures towards the possibility for vivisectors to be ‘redeemed’ as individuals made fully capable of feeling compassion for their objects through angelic intervention.

La Foi expérimentale: Lourdes d'Émile Zola

This article would like to show the rhetorical ambivalence of Émile Zola's Lourdes, in which the naturalist method (seeing, showing) is the one used by the young Sophie Couteau to convince her audience of the miracle of which she is the lucky one. It is precisely the paradox of this novel to denounce the religious imposture and the commercialization of the miracle, while underlining the similarity of the methods employed by the religious discourse, the medical discourse and by the naturalist novel.