Academic paper on Émile Zola, fall 2000

Zola’s ambition upon arriving in Paris in 1858 at the age of 18 was to be a Romantic poet, in the style of Victor Hugo, whom he revered.   But Zola fell under the influence of many of the new forces that were coming to define 19th century.   A realistic technique was evolving in literature, a technique that placed at its center observations of human life and the concerns of contemporary life.  Dr. Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) produced another critical shift in Zola’s orientation toward the natural world and motivated the young writer to “replace the novel of pure imagination [with] novels of observation and experiment.”   Zola made good on the promise and took up the naturalist cause not only in fiction but in art and the theater, writing his first naturalist play in 1865.   But it would be another seven years before Zola would have a play produced.  That play was Therese Raquin.

The preface to Therese Raquin finds Zola struggling with the process of translating a literary text to the theatrical idiom.  Zola concedes that in adapting his first major novel he is not only violating his own creed but is undertaking the additionally perilous task of adapting to the stage a novel that was first greeted with hostility.  In fact, there was such severity in the critical response that Zola had taken it as a sort of perverse challenge.  The critics, Zola recalls, “dragged [the book] gaily through the gutter and declared that if such vileness were to be paraded on the stage, the hissing of the audience would extinguish the footlights.  I am, by nature, extremely curious.”  

Beyond such admittedly “childish” curiosities, however, Zola recognized in Therese Raquin another possibility.  “In it I found a collection of people such as I had been seeking, characters who completely satisfied me, in short the components I required and all ready to be used.”  

Zola readily acknowledges “great faults” in the play.   But he is already more concerned with the theoretical value of the work and the radical direction it vigorously suggests the theater should take.   Zola is also attentive to the radical character of his proposals.    Production conditions in 19th century France were especially hostile to the elemental formula the author was espousing, but Zola perceives circumstances as being ripe for such change.   
 
Much as Hugo had arrived at his own theoretical notions by placing his outlook toward the theater in a larger frame, specifically that of Christianity, Zola considers the role of theater in reference to intellectual trends.  He speaks of a “broad movement of truth and experimental knowledge which in the last century has been growing and spreading throughout the whole field of human intelligence.”   

By 1880, seven years after the publication of the preface to Therese Raquin, Zola had developed this theory to such an extent that the advancements made in literature, historical inquiry, human intelligence, the arts and natural science are folded into a cohesive argument that concludes that comparable progress in the theater was inevitable.  The argument, presented in the book The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, and titled “Naturalism in the Theater,” claims as its starting point the creation of a scientific method.  “It was a revolution,” Zola writes.  “Science detached itself from empiricism, its method consisted in marching from the known to the unknown…. The tool was found; such a way was to consolidate and extend all the sciences.”     

This “revolution” created an effect, reversing the traffic of ideas that had until then flowed from the letters to the sciences and fixed in place considerations of “facts and surroundings.”  Zola concludes: “Man is no longer an intellectual abstraction; nature determines and completes him.”    Of course, this had a profound effect on literature.  Abstractions were replaced “by realities, empirical formulas by rigorous analysis,” Zola notes.  He singles Balzac and Stendahl for his highest praise, both of whom “escaped the craze of Romanticism.”       
 
Romanticism, then only a recent casualty of this relentless progress, is, in Zola’s estimation, a product of the French Revolution, which itself was a product of this “evolution in the human mind.”  Zola considers the movement “but a skirmish,” one that made a dramatic break with the rules but which only cleared the way for the conquest of the Naturalists.  Such a heady burst “of color, of passion,” Zola feels, was doomed to an early demise, and the century would belong to the Naturalists, to “the direct sons of Diderot.” 

Zola, as he promises in the title of his essay, finally works his way to considerations of the stage, again giving shape to his argument with the examples of history.  Once more he credits the Romantic “insurrection” for staking out the radical new territory that  the Naturalists now claimed.  But he hastens to note the resemblances of the Romantics to the Neoclassicists,  not of the Romantics to the Naturalists, thereby placing his own authentic tradition at a distance from what he considers a false form, one characterized by lies and exaggeration.  As a result of what Zola calls “this inevitable crisis of in romanticism, the traditions of naturalism reappear.”

Zola counts among the “best known” playwrights many more failures than successes in establishing a pure, naturalist ethic in the theater, but is nonetheless encouraged by the work of certain playwrights toward that aim.   The best of these, Zola feels, is Emile Augier, “the real master of our French stage.”  Zola writes: “The new formula grew greater with him; exact observation, real life, true pictures of our society in correct and quiet language, were introduced. What is there to prevent M. Augier from being the genius waited for, the genius destined to make the naturalistic formula a fixture?”  Zola has an answer of course.  Just as the playwrights Sardou and Dumas fils were hindered by convention, so was Augier.  “His hand was not bold enough to rid himself of the conventionalities which encumber the stage,” Zola writes.   While he finds the evolution in the novel to have been “much more rapid,” he concludes “that the evolution, far from being an accomplished fact on the stage, is hardly commenced.” 

At this point, Zola returns again to considerations of the novel and the play and the challenges in translating the naturalism of one to the other.  Zola attributes one of those difficulties to the comparatively slow rate of change in the theater relative to the rapidity of change in the novel.   Echoing an assertion made in his 1873 preface, Zola speaks of the “stronghold of tradition” that is the theater.   In the preface, Zola had optimistically determined the time to have arrived “when the public themselves unconsciously become the accomplices of the innovators.  That time when … they feel the imperious need for freshness and originality.”   

Despite the “stormy criticism” and “violent discussion” that greeted his first theatrical effort and the subsequent failure of two other plays, Zola in 1880 was no less certain of naturalism’s claim of legitimacy in the theater.   In fact, he seems more certain of it.  Nor does he shrink from arguments that naturalist theater is an untenable proposition, that only the novel can make a legitimate claim to the naturalist program.   “I have perfect faith in the future of our stage,” he announces dauntlessly.   Zola considers the theater uniquely qualified to take on the naturalism he champions.    “The wonderful power of the stage must not be forgotten and its immediate effect on the spectators,” Zola writes.    

Clearness and conciseness are given as two examples of this “wonderful power” and Zola elaborates on the force and efficiency of spoken dialogue and action.  Zola  finds the scenic design to have the same efficiency of effect – as it compares to literary description – that the spoken word offers.   “Are not the stage settings a continual description, which can be made much more exact and startling than the descriptions in a novel?” Zola asks.  

Another concern for Zola is the narrative.  “When a play shall be nothing more than a real and logical story – we shall enter into perfect analysis,” he contends.   
 
Zola’s optimism is compelling.  “We shall yet have life on the stage as we already have it in the novel,” he declares in the final paragraphs of his essay.   Therese Raquin, in 1873, was not to be the play to realize Zola’s ambitions in this respect.  It closed after nine performances and elicited the harsh comment of the critic Francisque Sarcey, a champion of the so-called “well-made play,” who said: “This fellow Zola makes me a little sick.”  Zola had met with the same failure that other novelists of the time, Balzac and Flaubert notable among them, had themselves found in the theater.  But the following year, Zola tried again.  Les Heritiers Rabourdin, a departure from the naturalist form, would have an impact on future theatrical production, but it too closed within the month.   The critical and popular misfortunes of Zola’s third play, Le Bouton de Rose, a comedy produced in 1878 and written specifically for the stage, occasioned his wary but still hopeful reflections that same year, published in the preface to Plays:

When I began to write my novels, there was a similar violence manifested against them by the public and the press.  For 10 years, they treated me as a pariah, conceded me not the slightest talent, and the least honesty…. Unfortunately, it is different in the theater, when you wish to bring to it new ideas….  A mob, a whole hall of 1,500 or 2,000 spectators, can shout you down and silence you brutally.  One can do nothing to yield to force.  The only protest possible is to publish plays and wait…. What I await is an evolution in our drama.  I have much stubbornness and much patience.   They have ended by reading my novels.  They will end by reading my plays!

By the 1880s, Zola had found some success, less directly, in stage adaptations of his novels by others.  Zola himself had a hand in some of these adaptations, the most significant among them the 1879 production of L’Assommoir, which enjoyed a run of 300 performances that year.   Though Zola would never firmly establish himself in the theater, his influence, as he had calculated, was finally being recognized.  It was in 1887 that Andre Antoine founded the Theatre-Libre (the Free Theater),  an organization that would commit its energies to putting Zola’s naturalistic theories into practice.  The theater staged several of Zola’s novels and it was there, with Zola’s urging, that Ibsen – and modern realism – was introduced to French audiences.    Antoine’s theater also yielded one of the naturalist program’s leading exponents, Jean Jullien, a playwright who worked heavily under the influence of Zola.   August Strindberg also acknowledged Zola’s influence and it was the Theatre-Libre that  first presented his Miss Julie, a play whose preface is, in Marvin Carlson’s evaluation, “probably the best-known statement of the ideas and practices of the naturalist theater.”    
 
Zola died in 1902, the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning.  By then his naturalist formula had been roundly denigrated in theory, undermined in practice, become the object of a moderate reformist program, and created a durable anti-realist reaction, first in the form of symbolism, then extending into Expressionism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Dadaist projects.  Naturalism’s positive influence, however, proved to be as durable, with its presence commonly recognized in forms as diverse as the “epic theater” of Brecht and the theater of the absurd, as well as expressionism, and of course, realism.

Bibliography:

Clark, Barrett H. European Theories of the Drama.  New York: American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., 4th ed., 1959.

Carlson, Marvin.  Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Dukore, Bernard F. Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1974.

Gassner, John & Edward Quinn (editors).  Readers Encyclopedia of World Drama. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969.

Gerould, Daniel (editor). Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel.  New York: Applause Books, 2000.

Grant, Elliot M. Emile Zola.  New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966. 

Hochman, Stanley (editor).  Encyclopedia of World Drama, vol. 5.  New York: McGraw Hill, 2nd edition, 1984.

Richardson, Joanna. Zola. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978.

Shipley, Joseph T. The Crown Guide to the World’s Greatest Plays: From Ancient Greece to Modern Times.  New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 2nd edition, 1984.

Weber, Eugen.  “The Naturalist,” The New Republic, July 31, 1995, p. 36-41.

Weightman, John. “Between Animal and Angel,” The New York Review of Books, March 21, 1996, p. 41-45

© 2000
Stephen Andrew Miles