Zola had come to Paris from Aix with instructions from his school friend Paul Cézanne to report back on the art scene in the capital, and this he did, giving an account of the Salon of 1859, the biennial exhibition sponsored by the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the official showcase for new work in the visual arts. Already, the Salon was starting to reflect conflicts between different trends, and it was turned into a battleground with the arrival of the Impressionists in the 1860s, though the seeds of these upheavals were sown in 1859, when works submitted by Manet and Whistler were rejected by the Académie.
In 1861, a painting by Pissarro was also rejected by the Salon committee, and protests from the younger painters grew. The emperor, Napoleon III, demanded that for the following exhibition, in 1863, the painters who had been rejected by the Académie should be allowed to exhibit their works in another part of the Palais de l‘Industrie, in what became known as the Salon des Refuses. It was at the first of these that Édouard Manet exhibited his pastoral scene Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which showed two young students, fully clothed in modern dress, apparently enjoying a picnic beside a naked woman, with another bathing in the river behind them. The Empress Eugénie was shocked by this canvas and it caused a scandal.
Zola wrote a passionate defence of Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe and Manet’s other outrageous painting, Olympia (the one with the cat). As Robert Lethbridge argues, Zola may have seen Manet’s notoriety as a means to establish his own name, even though Manet himself may have had doubts about ‘such blatant exercises in publicity’.6 He would become an acquaintance of Manet, of Pissarro and of other writers and painters. In late 1867, Zola sat for a portrait by Manet, which was exhibited in the Salon in 1868. He would later record the artistic life of the 1860s and the struggle of the Impressionists in one of the novels of Les Rougon-Macquart, L’Œuvre (1886). Outside literature, painting was the art that interested him most. He often referred to Manet as a ‘Naturalist’ painter, using the word to associate the new, anti-Romantic movement in art with his own practice in literature.
This connection with the world of the plastic arts is reflected in various ways and at different levels in Thérèse Raquin. The most overt link is the character of Laurent, a young peasant who has come up to Paris and wants to be an artist, not because he is driven by any particular urge to paint, but because he thinks that a painter’s life will be ‘a jolly business, not too tiring’, and allow him to ‘smoke and lark around all day long’ (Chapter V). Zola’s description of Laurent’s paintings, in particular the portrait of Camille, shows how futile this approach is, and this gives the writer an opportunity to describe what painting should not be: Laurent’s technique is ‘stiff, dry, like a parody of the primitive masters’, he is hesitant and he paints ‘with the tips of the brushes ... making short, tight hatching strokes, as he might when using a pencil’ (Chapter VI). Ironically, it is only in a state of nervous collapse following Camille’s murder that Laurent discovers a real talent for painting — evidence of Zola’s belief in the relation between neurosis and artistic creation.
Particular paintings may have directly inspired some of the scenes in the novel: Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe could well have been in Zola’s mind as he described Thérèse, Laurent and Camille in Saint-Ouen finding a shady spot with a carpet of green where the ‘fallen leaves lay on the ground in a reddish layer’, while the ‘tree trunks were standing upright, numberless, like clusters of Gothic columns, and the branches dipped right down to their foreheads, so that their only horizon was the bronze vault of dying leaves and the black-and-white shafts of the aspens and oaks‘, making ‘a melancholy pit in the silence and cool of a narrow clearing’ (Chapter XI). And the image of the dead girl whom Laurent sees in the Morgue, her ‘fresh, plump body ... paling with very delicate variations of tint ... half smiling, her head slightly to one side, offering her bosom in a provocative manner’ with ‘a black stripe on her neck, like a necklace of shadow’ (Chapter XIII), was probably suggested by Manet’s Olympia, who has a black velvet choker round her neck. In each case, though, if Zola has borrowed from Manet, he has transposed the meaning of the work, giving it a more sinister significance that fits his purpose in the novel.
In any case, it is not necessary to find such direct correspondences between particular paintings and passages in the novel to be aware of the influence of painting on the author. Contemporary critics talked about the ‘painterly’ qualities of his writing. His descriptions are carefully composed, with a strong sense of colour. In Thérèse Raquin, in fact, he uses a palette of dark colours and half-tones to convey a strong sense of chiaroscuro. The adjectives ‘yellow’ and ‘yellowish’ occur with particular frequency, as do ‘greenish’, ‘bluish’, etc., in settings that are dark, dingy and gloomy. Apart from which, Zola’s mind was so imbued with ideas about painting that they influence his whole aesthetic: he wanted to do in literature what painters do on canvas: to represent the reality of nature without mere imitation of nature, discovering its poetic truth and the individual essence of the person creating the work.
Thérèse Raquin was not Zola’s first published work; it came after a rather long literary apprenticeship and an extended reflection on the nature of literature and the tasks of the writer. His first book, which appeared in 1864, was a collection of Provençal stories, the Contes à Ninon. In the following year, he published the semi-autobiographical La Confession de Claude, and this was followed in 1866 by the short novel Le Vœu d‘une morte, a story of love and devotion. He even wrote a serial novel in the manner of Eugène Sue, Les Mysteres de Marseille, which he later dismissed as merely a pot-boiler (though Henri Mitterand and others have found it interesting and pointed out how much time and effort Zola devoted to the work). He was a prolific journalist, a literary and art critic, and the author of an important manifesto, ‘Two Definitions of the Modern Novel’, a paper which he sent to the Congrès scientifique de France, held in Aix-en-Provence in December 1866.
He was also reading a good deal, going to the theatre, visiting exhibitions, talking to a widening circle of friends — all of which helped to define what he saw as the current situation of literature and the writer’s task. Zola had read with interest the exiled Victor Hugo’s essay on literary genius, William Shakespeare (1864). The 1860s saw a continuing reaction against Romanticism in literature, with the publication in 1866 of the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, an anthology of poetry including work by Paul Verlaine, Leconte de Lisle and Stéphane Mallarmé: Zola was to make fun of these Parnassians a couple of years later in an article for L’Événement illustré; he was no longer greatly interested in poetry, despite his schoolboy efforts at writing verse.
His chief concern was the novel, a form that carried less prestige than poetry, but had a much wider appeal to an increasingly literate public. If it was to establish and retain its status as a major literary form, it would have to demonstrate that it was not merely frivolous entertainment, but a literary art, offering at the same time a means to analyse human psychology and human society. The historical novel, popular in the earlier years of the century, had revealed new possibilities for the genre as an analytical tool, and Balzac had shown how fiction could use an imaginative construct to explore the workings of society in the novels of La Comédie humaine.
Zola greatly admired Balzac, whom he discovered only in the mid 1860s: he praised in particular Balzac’s ability ‘to see both the inside and the outside of contemporary society’.7 Eventually, Les Rougon-Macquart would be an enterprise comparable to Balzac’s, doing for the Second Empire what La Comédie humaine had done for the Restoration: the opening of Thérèse Raquin, carefully situating the coming action with its description of the Passage du Pont-Neuf, has a decidedly ‘Balzacian’ feel, recalling the scene-setting first pages of novels such as Le Père Goriot and César Birotteau. The aim is to establish a realistic environment in which the characters can develop, both as individuals and as representatives of their class and time.
The brea
k with the fantastic story-telling of the Romantics and, at the same time, with the popular novel of adventure and melodrama, was most decisively made by the novelist whom Zola would come to admire most among his contemporaries: Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had been published in book form in 1857, but was already the subject of a prosecution for obscenity and blasphemy when it appeared as a serial in the previous year (charges on which Flaubert was acquitted). Zola would soon be able to sympathize with Flaubert’s predicament — and also to appreciate how useful a sensational controversy could be for the sales of a novel and the fame of its author. Throughout his life, he was happy to attract controversy and to exploit his reputation for scandal.
Zola came late to Flaubert’s masterpiece, as he had done to Balzac, not reading Madame Bovary until the mid 1860s; but it made an enormous impression. The story of the adulterous doctor’s wife, who dreams of romance and commits suicide after an unhappy love affair, was important to him on many counts, including as an analysis of the tedium of contemporary provincial society and as an exercise in style. Flaubert’s method was as far removed as one could imagine from that of prolific popular novelists such as Alexandre Dumas or Eugène Sue: he honed every word, he wrote and rewrote tirelessly, he had an almost religious veneration for his art and he aimed as far as possible to remove the artist from his work. The writer was to be a recorder of reality who shrank from nothing: the description of Emma Bovary’s death from poisoning makes no concessions to the sensibilities of the susceptible reader; nor does it, on the other hand, indulge in the horror for its own sake. The writer merely observes and refuses to turn away. Flaubert, for Zola, was ‘the pioneer of the century, the painter and philosopher of our modern world’.8
Flaubert’s immediate imitators included the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, now remembered chiefly as the authors of a literary journal. In 1864, they published their fifth novel, Germinie Lacerteux, the story of a servant girl’s descent into alcoholism, degradation and hysteria. The writers’ brief Preface — ‘the public likes false novels, this is a true one’ — became a manifesto of Naturalism. They began by proclaiming that, in a democratic age, the ‘lower orders’ deserved to be the subject of a novel, and that the novel, as a genre, was now ‘the great, serious, passionate and vital form of literary study and social inquiry’, having taken upon itself ‘the studies and duties of science’. The Goncourts were aware of the influence of their method and subject matter on Zola, their younger contemporary, whom they referred to in a rather proprietorial manner as ‘our admirer and our pupil’.9
Even when literary and artistic Romanticism was at its height in France, in the 1820s and 1830s, there had been critics who saw it as a futile reaction against an age that was becoming increasingly scientific and utilitarian. ‘The idea of beauty presided over the civilization of Antiquity; modern society is increasingly dominated by those of truth, justice and utility,’ one wrote in the Revue encyclopédique in 1828,10 and this argument helped to explain the social alienation of the Byronic outsider. Zola was to use a similar contrast between the novel in Antiquity (‘a pleasant lie, a tissue of wonderful adventures’) and the modern novel, adapted to the ‘scientific and methodical tendencies of the modern world’.11 Balzac, in his Preface to the Comédie humaine, had put forward the idea of the novelist as a kind of natural scientist, classifying society in much the same way as Buffon12 had classified the natural world: ‘there will always be social species as there are zoological species’.
The image that Zola uses most frequently is not the Balzacian one of the Naturalist, but that of the surgeon. In the Preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin,13 in which he defends the novel against its critics, he writes of having performed ‘on two living bodies the analytical work that surgeons carry out on dead ones’; and he sees himself as ‘a mere analyst, who may have turned his attention to human corruption, but in the same way as a doctor becomes absorbed in an operating theatre’. The writer, he insists, is describing, analysing, representing with the detachment of an artist looking at his nude model or a doctor examining a patient.
It is not surprising, therefore, that he finds the ultimate philosophical underpinning of what he is doing not in art or literature, but in science. The title of his theoretical work Le Roman experimental (1880) should not be read in what would almost certainly be its modern meaning, referring to fiction that experiments with literary form. What Zola means is the novel as experiment, in the scientific sense, adopting a title that deliberately echoes the doctor and scientist Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865) and La Science expérimentale (1878). The first of these was among the works that most influenced Zola’s intellectual development in the years leading up to the writing of Thérèse Raquin, with its description of the application of scientific method to medicine and the need for systematic observation and verification.
The underpinning of Bernard’s ideas came from the Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, whose Cours de philosophie positive had been published between 1830 and 1842. With the anti-Romantic critics of the 1830s, Comte believed that humankind had entered a stage of development dominated by positive, scientific understanding, which could be applied not only to the natural world, but also to society; it was to be based on observation of material phenomena and on experience, rejecting theoretical or metaphysical propositions that could not be verified by experiment or observation.
Comte’s philosophy was to influence Zola particularly through the writings of the critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, whom he may first have encountered thanks to one of his teachers at the lycée, Pierre-Émile Levasseur,14 and he would certainly have encountered Taine later, after he started to work for the publisher Hachette, Taine being one of their authors. It was through Taine that he came to appreciate Balzac, and he would pay tribute to the critic in a long article in La Revue contemporaine (15 February 1866), later saying of Taine that ‘he is, in our age, the highest manifestation of our curiosities, or of our need to analyse, of our desire to reduce everything to the pure mechanism of the mathematical sciences’.15
Taine’s literary and historical criticism was based on a Positivist approach that saw writers, like other historical figures, as the product of ‘race, milieu, moment’. But if the task of the critic is to study the work of writers who are shaped by their heredity and their environment, why should the writer not treat the characters in fiction in the same way? They, too, can be treated as the product of a particular race, milieu and historical moment. The novel, instead of being a mere fantasy, will become a laboratory in which the novelist carries out his experiment, a scientific instrument for the analysis of individuals and society.
Of course, Zola was writing in the days before Freud and psychoanalysis; theories of human psychology contained elements that we would nowadays find odd. In particular, doctors still believed in the idea of ‘temperament’, which derived from the medieval concept of ‘humours’. According to the Larousse dictionary of 1875, human temperaments could be divided up into bilious, sanguine, nervous and lymphatic, with an additional category, phlegmatic (a combination of lymphatic and bilious). The nervous and sanguine temperaments were to be considered more or less normal, while the bilious and lymphatic were weaker and pathological.16
The Larousse dictionary shows that there had been some development in the concept since the Middle Ages. For a start, the melancholic temperament had been discarded, and the temperaments were no longer considered to be so closely related to particular organs of the body or to the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. Nor were they thought of as innate: a person’s temperament could alter according to circumstances, so there were cases of ‘mixed’ temperaments and many individuals were unclassifiable. But the basic theory — that humans could be divided into psychological types according to certain physiological criteria — was still accepted, not least by Zola. ‘In Thérèse Raquin I set out to study temperament, not character,’ he wrote i
n the Preface to the second edition, meaning by this that he wanted to show how human beings of a particular disposition react when placed in a given set of circumstances. And throughout the novel he refers to the sanguine temperament of Laurent and the nervous temperament of Thérèse, these two temperaments being opposite and complementary. Laurent is earthy, driven by his animal needs, while Thérèse is nervous, changeable, hysterical; and each of the main protagonists in the novel has physical characteristics that correspond to the traditional descriptions of his or her particular temperament: Laurent’s ruddy cheeks, Thérèse’s pale face and the lymphatic Camille’s blond hair.17 What Zola aims to do here is exactly what he attributed to the Goncourts in his review of Germinie Lacerteux: putting ‘a certain temperament in contact with certain facts and certain beings’.18 And the Goncourts themselves had written in their diary: ‘Since Balzac, the novel has had nothing in common with what our fathers understood by “novel”. The present-day novel is made with documents described or noted down from nature, just as history is made out of written documents.‘19 The ‘milieu’ and the ‘moment’ were ready for Zola’s first serious attempt to apply his theories in Thérèse Raquin.
In December 1866, Zola published a short story in Le Figaro under the ironic title ‘Un mariage d’amour’ (‘A Love Match’). This tells how a young man, Michel, marries a ‘thin, nervous’ girl, Suzanne, who is ‘neither ugly, nor beautiful’. For three years they live together in harmony, until Suzanne starts to fall passionately in love with one of her husband’s friends, Jacques. Tacitly, the two lovers get the idea of killing Michel.