Zola's Naturalism in the Rougon-Macquart: The Fatality of Sexuality - Paperback

by Famahan Samaké (Author)

This book is the published version of my PhD thesis, which was defended at the University of Glamorgan now known as the University of South Wales, United Kingdom, on August 21st 2003. The original text was edited in accordance with the needs of the book publishing industry and also to appeal to a larger audience. In this work, I tried to show what was at the core of the naturalistic aesthetics: determinism. In Zola's views, determinism is all about the combination between the influence of the social milieu and that of heredity which determines every human being's fate. Beyond that, I took great interest in showing how much we are indebted to Zola due to his undeniable contribution to the renewal of the novel writing techniques. I notably pointed out the anachronistic discourses, the mise en abyme, the hypertrophy of the true detail, the opulence of the metonymic and the synecdochic digressions, or the intrusion of the pagan and religious myths in the naturalistic novel.

Beyond that purely aesthetic aspect, I discussed Zola's autobiography which is all about the criticism of the author. That led me to specify the strengths and weaknesses of the man, a prodigiously talented writer despite the controversies surrounding him in his day. Ideologically, Zola was a natalist and a republican who loved justice. All his journalistic and literary production can be summed up in a single word: struggle. He was a wrestler obsessed with the denunciation of the privileges of the elite of the Imperial society and of the various injustices the people suffered from. His tireless struggle against these two unbearable scourges had the sole purpose of putting an end to them altogether so that progress and social welfare would benefit all of his fellow citizens.