ZOLA, , (1840-1902). A French
naturalistic novelist, born in Paris, April 2, 1840. His father was a Venetian with Greek blood in his veins. Zola studied at the Lycée Saint-Louis, but after twice failing to get his bachelor's degree,
he found work in 1862 in the publishing house
of Hachette in Paris, and at the same time
began to write for the newspapers. He had
already written a number of novels and tales, his
first book being the Contes à Ninon (1864), when
in 1869 he undertook to relate in a series of
connected volumes what he called the “Physiological
history of a family under the Second
Empire.” To this family he gave the name of
“Rougon-Macquart.” The first novel of the
series, La fortune des Rougon, was not published
until 1871, after the fall of the Empire. Other
novels of the series, La curée (1870), Le ventre
de Paris (1873), La conquête de Phassans
(1874), La faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875), and
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon ( 1876), succeeded
each other until 1870 without arousing much
attention. But the seventh novel of the series, L'assommoir (1878), achieved instantaneous success. It was a powerful picture of life among the working class of Paris and of the havoc created therein by alcoholism.
The pictures presented by Zola were realistic
beyond anything that had been known hitherto
in French literature. The ugly side of life was
presented with a descriptive fullness and a boldness
of vocabulary from which French masters
of realism had always shrunk. Zola, of course, was attacked as well as praised. In defending himself he claimed to have ushered in a new literary school, which he called ‘naturalistic’ His novels were described by him and the followers whom he soon gathered about him as ‘documents’ intended to give to the public a complete picture of French contemporary society. The success of L'assommoir was repeated in 1880 by Nana, and later by several other novels of the series, notably by Germinal (1885). The whole series consisted of 20 volumes, the last two of which, La débâcle, dealing with the unreadiness of France for the Franco-German War, and Le Docteur Pascal, were published in 1892 and 1893.
This series contains Zola's most remarkable
productions. It is very uneven; it must be
admitted that some of the volumes, Pot-Bouille
(1882), for instance, which claims to be a picture
of the life of the middle class, present hardly
anything that is not nauseating and at the same
time tedious in the highest degree. Others, Germinal, La terre (1887), La bête humaine (1890), L'argent (1891), La débâcle (1892), are works of great power. It need hardly be said that not one of these is free from the features that are known as objectionable. In fact, passages which seem to be quite unnecessary to the development of the story would indicate that Zola took pleasure in introducing into his books, thanks to his literary skill, descriptions which no other writer would have dared attempt. While presenting to the pulic the productions of his creative imagination, Zola considered it his duty also to develop his literary theories and to attack those of his opponents; this was done in a number of volumes of literary criticism, the most important of which were Le roman expérimental (1880) and Les romanciers naturalistes (1881), so that it is not very difficult, through a comparison of his theoretical utterances with his practical performances, to see whether Zola achieved exactly what he claimed to do. The enemy against which he loved to direct his sharpest attack is romanticism; the intellectual
faculty which he seems most to descant against
is imagination; and yet any one who takes the
trouble to analyze the literary elements of his style
of writing, and carefnily to examine the events
that succeed each other in the development of
his plots, is almost inevitably led to the
conclusion that Zola never entirely shook off the
influence of the romantic school, and especially
of its great master, Victor Hugo. He was
himself carried away by his creative imagination
more often than he kept it under control.