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Thanks. Shapiros10  contact me My work 17:33, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

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Realism versus Naturalism
Realism had become the dominant mode of literary production in nineteenth century France. Its basic goals and tents were stated by many, and thus a large diversity of opinion existed as to its definition. Realism in its simpler sense has been defined by one of its vigorous advocates, William Dean Howells as “the truthful treatment of material” but the concept of truth and the nature of material are to be designated. George Eliot, on her part, regards Realism as “faithful representation of common place things”. In their attempt to portray life objectively in the context of artistic medium, French novelists rejected the conventions of classicism and romanticism and sought new ways of representation to match the new changes in science, economy, politics and society. French realism reached its peak when adopted by great writers such as Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert. However, by the second half of the nineteenth century, it saw a transformation with the works of Emile Zola who created a new concept – Naturalism – which he defined as a fragment of nature seen through a temperament. The two concepts, though they share some common grounds and principles are so distinct that they stand sometimes as opponents. An analysis of Balzac’s novel Old Goriot (1834) and Zola’s Germinal(1885) may reveal where the two concepts meet and where they differ from each other. It is not a surprise that realism found a ground to flourish in France – in the period of the July Monarchy – where its intellectuals witnessed economic, political and social changes such as the decline of aristocracy and the rise of a new class “the bourgeoisie” which gained wealth and power, thus, strengthening the distinctions between lower and upper classes, the fact that inspired men of letters to develop new forms and styles. On the subject Honoré de Balzac states:

In their quest for new aesthetics, French realists were largely influenced by the new doctrines that emerged in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ideas of Darwin’s precursor Lamarck, Lock and Condillac had great influence on early realists like Balzac and Stendhal. In addition, Karl Marx developed in the late 1840’s a political philosophy which stands against urbanization and advocates equal distribution of wealth. Consequently, realists were concerned with what is absorbed in by the senses, so they tried to attain truth by observation and recording of reality. To reach success they thought a writer must select facts with preconceived aesthetics or ethical ideals but must set down his observation impartially and objectively, he represents people from different social backgrounds in their everyday life without any authorial interpretation. Such representation, being inspired by the Scottish novelist Walter Scott, is characterized by the inclusion of history in the French novel. Balzac greatly admired Walter Scott and imitated his method of bringing a historical period to life by depicting human existence through detailed description and analysis. In the preface to the series La Comédie humaine, he writes “The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works.” In this context Marison Ayton Crawford writes:

In the nineteenth-century French critic Taine has said that the novels of the Comedie humaine constitute a Record Office filled with archives. Bruntière examines them as historical documents; as realistic, in their truth to the details of everyday life (which Balzac’s predecessors had kept out of  the novel as being vulgar and uninteresting), and in their introduction of classes of men hitherto ignored by literature. 2

In much the same way as Balzac’s la Comédie humaine had attempted to portray france of the restoration (1814-30) and the July monarchy (1830-1848). Zola intended to produce a complete portrait of France under the second empire (1852-1870).

I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good thing that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world. 3 Zola used interconnected novels and recurring characters to produce a comprehensive portrayal of French society between 1852 and 1820. He was influenced by Balzac’s fictional model when he started the long series called les Rougon Macquart - of which germinal is a part- and subtitled histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second empire. Zola, however, sought to provide a more coherent pattern of relationships than the haphazard interconnections of la Comédie humaine the unifying feature of Zola’s series was two branches of a single family the Rougons and the Maquarts since no single family could reasonably be expected to encompass the broad rouge of social types that he sought to represent, Zola chose to create a family with two braches the one legitimate with the inherited social advantage of education and wealth, and the other illegitimate social outcasts with inherited genetic failings aggravated by their harsh urban and industrial milieux. In all the novels of the series Zola pointed out some political or social injustice or abuse, the most notable example is Germinal which deals with the working and social conditions of coal miners in northern France under the second empire. The title Germinal contains a reference to the French revolutionary calendar which replaced the old calendar in an attempt to break with the feudal past. Germinal was the name given to the seventh month of that calendar which spanned the period from mid-March to mid-April-its meaning is double edged: the month has positive connotations as well since it evokes the revolutionary violence of 1 April 1795 when the people rioted and invaded the convention crying ‘du pain’ Zola was aware of this moment in France’s revolutionary history and indeed made a note of it. There is a clear echo of the scene in Germinal:

Les femmes avaient paru, près d’un millier de femmes, aux cheveux épars, dépeignés par la course, aux guenilles montrant la peau nue, des nudités de femelles lasses d’enfanter des meurt – de – faim – Quelques - unes tenaient leur petit entre les bras, le soulevaient, l’agitaient, ainsi qu’un drapeau de deuil et de vengeance, d’antres, plus jeunes, avec des gorges gonflées de guerrières, brandissaient des bâtons ; tandis que les vieilles, affreuses, hurlaient si fort que les cordes de leurs cous décharnés semblaient se rompre. Et les hommes déboulèrent ensuite, deux mille furieux, des galibots, des haveurs, des raccommodeurs, une marne compacte qui roulait d’un seul bloc, serrée, confondue, au point qu’on ne distinguait ni les culottes déteintes, ni les tricot de laine en loques, effacés dans la même uniformité terreuse. Les yeux brûlaient, on voyait seulement les trous des bouches noires, chantant la Marseillaise, dont les strophes se perdaient en en un mugissement confus, accompagné par le claquement des sabots sur la terre dure. Au dessus des têtes, parmi le hérissement des barres de fer, une hache passa, portée toute droite, et cette hache unique, qui était comme l’étendard de la bande, avait dans le ciel clair, le profil aigu d’un couperet de guillotine. (Germinal.V.5)

The bourgeois society that had begun in the violence of 1789 could be destroyed by forces which it could not control.

Although many of the economic abuses described in the book had already been reformed by the time of its writing, Germinal is the most stirring working class novel of the cycle. Workers attending Zola’s funeral in 1902 tossed their beloved author was laid to rest. In addition to historical circumstances places were of great importance to Balzac who used to study locations and write down his observations in notebooks which he found useful in writing his novels. The presence of Paris and its streets is seen in his novels; readers often recognize the locations of events happening in places they pass by in their daily life. Balzac himself said “the streets of Paris possess human qualities and we cannot shake off the impressions they make upon our minds.”4 Later realists such as the English Charles Dickens and the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky took his labyrinth city as a model for their realistic writings the describes lovingly the topography of Paris, his Muse. The city is one of the characters, and has a language and will of its own: Left alone, Rastignac walked a few steps to the highest part of the cemetery, and saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding seine. It is gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the column of the place Vendome and the dome of the Invalids; there lay the splendid world that he wished to conquer. (Old Goriot 1835) Balzac was greatly concerned with people’s clothing, food, the decor, architecture and furniture of their houses. Such elements give life to his characters; he regarded the surroundings as “both an extension of personality and a moulding force.”(M.A.Crawford:1) The beginning of Old Goriot is often cited as an example of Balzac’s genius for description, which does not suffer from the fault he sometimes fell into of losing himself in a mass of details which become formless and tedious. No novel ever had its setting more exactly visualized. In page after page of minute particularity he builds up the boarding-house in all its concreteness, and then bring living, breathing personalities on the scene, and in his exposition shows us what has brought these people here, what their parts have been, or may have been, what their hope, on lack of hope for the future, and what their relations are with each other. All this is done with the greatest vividness of perception and warmth of feeling is conceived somewhat more ethically and with ever greater emphasis upon the complementary relation between person and milieu.5 Similarly, Zola payed a lot of attention to details, he wrote with a journalistic eye, filling notebooks with facts gathered by personal observation and by correspondence with his network of experts preparatory to his work of authors ship He would then write a sketch of the projected work, and finally, write daily and methodically, sometimes for years, to produce his experimental novels. He rode in the cab of Germinal he visited coal mines. This was something very different from Balzac’s creative writing process, which produced La Comédie humaine. Nineteenth century French writers were largely influenced by science.Balzac, on one hand, regarded the novel as an instrument of scientific inquiry; he had the scientist’s urge to discover law underlying the apparent disorder of the universe. He was interested in gall’s system of phrenology, in Lavater’s work and physiognomy, in Mesmer’s theory of the transference of a magnetic fluid in the hypnotism of one human being by another, in the problem presented by the phenomenon of premonition, and he had a new theory of the omnipotence of the human will. It is no accident that Old Goriot is dedicated to a zoologist. The theory of evolution was very much in the air at that time, and Balzac was interested in the theories of Darwin’s precursor, Lamarck, Darwin himself was to produce the Origin of species in 1859, nine years after Balzac’s death. In the “Avant-propos” to la Comédie humaine Balzac compares under the influence of Geoffrey Saint- HiLaire‘s theories of the animal kingdom and human society. “Does not society make of man, according to the milieu in which his activity takes places, as many different men as there are varieties in Zoology?” However, Balzac sees that human life and human customs are more multifarious and there are dramatic conflicts in love which never occur among animal. He remarked that the differences between a soldier and a labourer are so considerable as those that mark out the wolf and the lion, and was concerned with the descriptive and classification of men and women as “social species”, as well as with their variation from the class as highly specialized individuals. Zola, on the other hand, was the central novelist and theorist of naturalism whose objective was the exact and scientific description of social reality. He claimed not to be interested in such themes as morality, sin, guilt or atonement but with the working of specific temperaments when brought together. In the preface to the second edition of Thérèse raquin (1868) Zola claimed: “mon but a été un but scientifique avant tout … j’ai montré les troubles profonds d’une nature sanguine au contact d’une nature nerveuse… j’ai simplement fait sur deux corps vivants le travail analytique que les chirurgiens font sur des cadavres”. One of the most significant influences upon Zola’s development as a naturalist was his reading of the Introduction à la médecine expérimentale by the physiologist Claude Bernard In this work, Bernard had tried to establish a method for the investigation of medicine Zola responded to his by trying to apply Bernard’s method to literature. His ideas are expounded in Le Roman Experimental and as the title suggests, Zola attempted to apply Bernard’s idea of experimentation to the novel. In Le Roman Experimental Zola argued that just as science was on the way to explaining the laws of the physical world, novelists could and should do very much the same by explaining the laws of human behaviour; Zola stated: “si la méthode expérimental conduit à la connaissance de la vie passionelle et intellectuelle…l’homme n’est pas seul, il vit dans une societé, dans un milieu social, et dès lors, pour nous romancier, ce milieu social modifie sans cesse les phenomènes”6. Zola’s novels constantly underline the limitations under which individuals act, stressing environmental and genetic factors and playing down any meaningful sense of human agency. Zola was greatly concerned with the doctrine of determinism; the wide range of social backgrounds used in Les Rougon-Maquart enabled him to study the determining influence of milieu on different characters. As one can see in Germinal Zola was concerned with the effects on miners of the dreadful conditions in which they lived and worked. The physical effects of the miner’s environment are dwelt on at some length in the novel. The Mahu family in Germinal is typical of all mining families in the coron (pit village) and is in a state of permanent fatigue: they are all influenced by their environment. While the proposal of an experimental method applied to the novel was undoubtedly innovative for its time, many problems, however, face the writer among which is objectivity. As most scientists deal with physical phenomena external to themselves they can remain relatively objective, impartial. This same objectivity was the aim of Zola. He claimed in an article in Le Figaro of 18 September1884, just before the publication of Germinal that naturalism does not make pronouncements, it examines, it describes and it says: this is how it is. Let the public draw its conclusions. As far as characters are concerned, Balzac sought to present them as real people as if he were observing them in real world, this reality was remarked by Oscar Wilde, who said    “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of  [Illusions perdues protagonist]         Lucien de Rubempré…It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”7. The repetition of his characters through the different novels of La Comédie humaine strengthens the realist representation. Rogers notes “when the characters reappear, they do not step out of nowhere: they emerge from the privacy of their own lives which, for an interval, we have not been allowed to see.” Balzac also used a realist technique which French novelist Marcel Proust later named “retrospective illumination”, whereby a character’s past is revealed long after she or he first appears. There are many an anecdotes about Balzac’s relation outside the novel. Once Balzac interrupted one of his friends, who was telling about his sister’s illness, by saying: “that’s all very well, but let’s get back to reality: to whom are we going to marry Eugènie Grandet?” Social history of art, Arnold Hauser states: “Balzac himself always speaks of his characters as of natural phenomena, and when he wants to describe his artistic intentions, he never speaks of his psychology, but always of his sociology, of his natural history of society and of the function of the individual in the life of the social body. He became, anyhow, the master of the social novel, if not as the ‘doctor of the social sciences, as he described himself, get as the founder of the new conception of man according to which the individual exists only in relation to society.”8 At time Balzac had been accused of over dramatizing his characters, and seeming reality, as it were, in an apocalyptic vision Baud Laine said that Balzac’s characters were all geniuses, chock full of his own vitality, and endowed with his own ambition and determination Perhaps Zola’s greatest literary excellence is his ability to maintain the artful illusion of scientific impartiality while detailing the often sinister exterior and interior lives of his characters Some are easy to hate, but Zola given to caricature in his minor characters Even the most vile with blood on their hands excite within us some degree of compassion and understanding when treated by the pen of the master. In his series les Rougon-Maquart, certain genetic characteristics are traced through the original couple and then down through their various offspring both on the legitimate and illegitimate sides of the family. In particular there is the recurrent theme of ‘le sang gaté’ (tainted blood) which inflicts individual characters inherited madness; alcoholism and congenital promiscuity haunt both branches of the family. Zola’s innate pessimism meant that this family history was are of decline and fall. The legitimate Rougon are subjected to an essentially genetic degeneration, while the members of the impoverished Macquart branch are the victims of both social and genetic disasters. However, in Germinal one may feel that Zola’s interest was in politics rather than genetics, Marxist politics is present, and more over Marx himself had been quoted by Zola in the novel. This may be the reason behind its popularity in France. Similarly Balzac’s vision of society had been praised by many critics including the Marxist Friedrich Engels who claimed that he had learned more from Balzac than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together. Balzac received great praise from critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Camille Paglia. In 1970 Roland Barthes published SLZ, a detailed analysis of Balzac’s story Sarrasine and a key work in structuralist literary criticism. Naturalism differs from realism in subject matter, it took as subjects ugly and unpleasant stories and people, it threw out anything peculiarly human on religions, denying that man had any moral freedom of choice and asserting that his whole life was determined by heredity and environment. It is often completely pessimistic, taking the gloomiest view of life. Although scholars have generally characterized naturalism as distinguished by Zola’s heightened sense of determinism and more complete rejection of literary idealism, the observation and description of reality, the mimetic function of realism is still present in Naturalism, as can be seen in detailed descriptions of the squalid conditions in which characters live. Thus Naturalism can be regarded as extension of Realism and not a break with it.

Endnotes 1.	SE. woodson. Realism and Naturalism. The 504. 7 mars. 2008 < http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ balzac.htm> 2.	Marion Ayton Crawford. Old Goriot. Harmondsworth: Penguin Book Ltd.1951:7

3.	Lew. Kamm "Balzac’s La peau de chagrin and zola’s Germinal : points of contact "NCFC, 19,1991 : 223 - 37. 7 Mars. 2008  4.	 5.	Eric Aurbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953: 471 6. 7.	For further details see the article on French realism  8.	Arnold Hauser. Social History of Art. vol. 4, 1962