What was Naturalism

Naturalism as a literary movement took decisive shape in France in the 1870s, in and around the fiction and the polemical writing of Emile Zola. It achieved powerful expression in the drama of the final decades of the nineteenth century. Few European literatures of the period remained entirely immune to its profound, charismatic bleakness. During the twentieth century, Naturalism took root most consistently in the literature of the United States.

Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels describe the degenerative effects of heredity and environment on the members of a single, far-flung family. They trace the passage of a genetic 'flaw' down the legitimate line of the ruthlessly acquisitive Rougons, and an illegitimate line divided between the proletarian Macquarts and the provincial bourgeois Mourets. Degeneration manifests itself disproportionately among the Macquart offspring, most notably in L'Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880), Germinal (1885), and La Bête humaine (1890).

Realism with attitude

Realism, Raymond Williams once observed, is secular, contemporary, and extensive.

Realism dwells on the human rather than the divine; and on, and in, the present, or a past so immediate that it can be taken to have made the present what it is. It seeks always to extend the range of people, events, and topics considered fit for representation.

Naturalism achieved definition as realism's supplement. It constituted both a continuation of existing efforts to come to terms with the world as it is – and the exposure of a lack or shortfall in those efforts.

Naturalism, at any moment in the history of a literature, prides itself on being more secular, more contemporary, and more extensive, than whatever passes at that moment for realistic.

For example, Zola regarded Naturalist fiction as an advance on mere 'observation' by virtue of its adherence to the very latest in scientific method. His essay on 'Le roman expérimental' (1879) claims that the methods developed by Claude Bernard for the study of physical life are equally applicable to the study of life in all its other dimensions, social as well as psychological. Naturalism has always had to prove itself contemporary in method as well as in subject-matter.

Similarly, if realism prided itself on extending fiction's franchise to the middle, lower-middle, and working classes, then in that respect, too, Naturalist writers were keen to go further.

Edmond de Goncourt explained the continual postponement of the novel he and his brother Jules had meant to write about high society by the difficulty of penetrating that milieu: 'to get hold of a Parisian drawing-room you must wear out the silk of its chairs'. Unwilling to sit still for quite that long, the brothers had decided to start at the other end of the social scale, in the more readily accessible milieu inhabited by the 'dregs of humanity'. They set about chronicling 'what is low, what is repugnant, what stinks'.

Naturalism, then, amounts to an attempt to get to the very bottom of what it might mean to be human, in a particular place at a particular time.

Zola developed his 'experimental' method during the period between the publication of L'Assommoir (1877), a novel about slum life, and that of Nana (1880), a novel about the rise and fall of a working-class prostitute.

Too much?

Naturalist method has often been regarded as over the top: as too starkly in excess of mere observation.

In an essay first published in 1896, Frank Norris firmly distinguished Zola's work from that of a 'realist' like W.D. Howells, whose novels concern 'the smaller details of everyday life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception-room, tragedies of an afternoon call, crises involving cups of tea.' There are no tea-cup crises in the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

What there is instead, Norris pointed out, is romance. The only things that ever happen to the protagonists of a 'naturalistic tale' are palpably momentous. These unfortunates find themselves perpetually 'wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life'. For Norris, Zola's fiction resembled that of realists like Howells or Honoré de Balzac less than it did that of the great romancer and activist Victor Hugo. 'We have the same huge dramas, the same enormous scenic effects, the same love of the extraordinary, the vast, the monstrous, and the tragic.'

Norris was right. There is a lot of romance in Naturalism; or, if you prefer, a lot of melodrama. And the explanations Naturalist writers found for the way people behave often owed less to scientific than to mythological thinking. Theories concerning the degenerative effects of heredity and environment which once looked like science, now look like myth, or ideology.

Description

But there may be another way to conceive this avoidance of tea-cup crises. If Naturalism's plots scale human behaviour up, into the vast, the monstrous, and the tragic, then its attention to the sorts of minute detail generally not thought worth describing scales it down. In Naturalism, someone drops the tea-cup, by accident (bad luck), or a result of inherited clumsiness (bad genes) – either way, we get to hear all about the resulting mess. Description makes it impossible for us to avoid 'what is low, what is repugnant, what stinks'.

'Narrate or Describe?' Georg Lukács asked, in an essay of 1936 which charts the novel's sorry decline into Naturalism, from Scott and Balzac to Flaubert, Zola, and beyond. Lukács understood that decline as a re-ordering of the elements of fiction, to the point where description predominated over narrative. Naturalist doctrine encouraged (among other things) a particular kind of description, of a more or less de-populated environment, of objects without – or so it might seem – a subject.

Lukács thought that a predominance of description of that kind had adversely affected the novel's capacity to articulate meaning and value. 'Narration establishes proportions,' he observed, 'description merely levels.' Description fails to sort the significant from the insignificant. Where there is proportion, between foreground and background, between major event and minor, as in Scott and in Balzac, there can be meaning. And where there is meaning, in fiction, there can be an assessment of value (moral, social, political).

Literature, like life, needs meaning and value. But how would we know that if there wasn't also a literature which asks us to imagine life without them?

Bibliography

Baguley, David. Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Goncourt, Edmond de. 'Levels of Realism', in George J. Becker, ed. Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 244-6.

Harrow, Susan. Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Oxford: Legenda, 2010).

Lukács, Georg. 'Narrate or Describe?', in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 110-48.

Norris, Frank. 'Zola as a Romantic Writer', in Novels and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1986), 1106-8.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, rev. ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).

Trotter, David. 'Naturalism's Phobic Picturesque', in The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 40-58.