Some comments on Zola's Pessimism after reading The Masterpiece

Here is an excerpt from Zola's The Masterpiece. This is from the very last pages of the novel and it in a way serves as a conclusive summary of the problems and overall worldview evoked in the novel. These lines are spoken by Sandoz, Zola's alter-ego in the novel. (Sandoz gets all the best lines in the novel though Claude is the main hero and we get to know his thoughts only through a mode of free indirect discourse.)

It was inevitable. All our activity, our boastfulness about our knowledge was bound to lead us back again to doubt. The present century has cast so much light on so many things, but it was bound to end under the threat of another wave of darkness. … And that is the root of our troubles. We have been promised too much and led to expect too much, including the conquest and the explanation of everything; and now we’ve grown impatient. We’re surprised things don’t move more quickly. We’re resentful because, in a matter of a hundred years, science hasn’t given us absolute certitude and perfect happiness. Why then continue, we ask, since we shall never know everything and our bread will always be bitter? The century has been a failure. Hearts are tortured with pessimism and brains clouded with mysticism for, try as we may to put imagination to flight with the cold light of science, we have the supernatural once more in arms against us and the whole world of legend in revolt, bent on enslaving us again in our moment of fatigue and uncertainty. … I’m no more sure of things than anyone else; my mind, too, is divided. But I do think that this last shattering upheaval of our old religious fears was only to be expected. We are not an end; we are a transition, the beginning only of something new. … And it’s that sets my mind at rest, and somehow encourages me: to know we are moving towards rationality and the firm foundations that only science can give.

Zola is often criticized for being a pessimist, not an ordinary pessimist but a more dogmatic and recalcitrant pessimist, even going so far as to deliberately structure his novels in order to prove this pessimistic thesis, the idea that men are not some "metaphysical marionettes" gifted with a divine or mystical free will but "physiological men" who are subject to laws of nature (pre-eminently, heredity) and the vicissitudes of their environment. (This is also something that Marxist critics like Georg Lukacs dislike in Zola, because it questions the innate humanism of Marxist philosophy)

Just to give a perspective to this debate about pessimism, here is an excerpt from an essay by Henry James, where he advises young novelists to avoid the dogma of either pessimism or optimism and instead be true to Life (available here, emphasis mine)

This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. “Enjoy it as it deserves,” I should say to him; “take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, publish it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you, and do not listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air, and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert have worked in this field with equal glory. Do not think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of life itself. In France to-day we see a prodigious effort (that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy, his results would be of the highest value. As for the aberrations of a shallow optimism, the ground (of English fiction especially) is strewn with their brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must indulge in conclusions, let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible—to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize. 

But like in the excerpt from The Masterpiece posted above, Zola's pessimism is not as simple and straightforward as it seems. Zola is relentless in his focus on decadence and degeneration but his intellect rebels against it. Zola's was a case of pessimism of the will and the optimism of the intellect. Zola was writing his Rougon-Macquant novels when these theories were in the air in France, so to speak. For example, see Max Nordau's Degeneration, published contemporaneously with Zola's novels, a book which had a dark afterlife in the Nazi Germany where degenerate art took on a different meaning. (Ironically, Nordau, a Jewish physician himself, thought of growing anti-semitism itself as a mark of decadence and degeneracy, for example in the context of Wagner).

Many of Zola's own disciples, most famously Maupassant and Huysmans, and later other leading lights of the literary decadent movement in France, not as well-known outside France, abandoned Zola's "optimism of the intelllect" and gave in whole-heartedly to the pessimism of the will and even eventually to nihilism. Schopenhauer was one of the leading intellectual figures for these writers, and his theories became very popular, specially as the general cultural mood in France soured after the catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The debacle seemed to prove to these writers that French race was indeed weak and degenerate, and deserved the punishment it got in the war. Zola tackles these themes in the context of the war in his novel La Débâcle, where one of his heroes Maurice is said to have learned these pessimistic theories in the intellectual circles of Paris, and is seen to be obsessed with the idea of Life itself as a form of War (in the Darwinian sense), a war in which weak and degenerate are routed and which then paves way for a much healthier society and race. This view also had dark aftereffects later in the context of first world war, where many French intellectuals (even including giants like Bergson) turned warmongers and justified war in these pseudo-mystical terms based on the philosophy of vitalism. I had touched upon some of these themes in my earlier blog on La Débâcle.

In The Masterpiece, Zola tackles the problem of artistic decadence head-on. Like in the excerpt quoted at the top, Zola seems to suggest that the upsurge of decadence was itself a form of reaction, a reaction of romanticism and mysticism against the onward march of science, reason and progress. This romanticism not only affect one's view of world but the very idea of an artist. This reaction and in turn Claude, the artist figure, is a transitional figure, an inherited weak character, whose tragic spiritual weakness, leads him to succumb to this reaction and eventually leads to his tragic downfall.

Ironically, Zola himself is often grouped together with the decadent writers or at least is accused of paving the way for literary decadence (often by Marxist critics like Lukacs). A careful reading of The Masterpiece will serve to dispel these criticisms as it shows Zola was more interested in portrayal of decadence instead of its justification, a form of cultural "diagnosis" so to say. Like all great artists he gives all different sides of the "debate" an equal say in the novel, sometimes like Milton with Satan and Dostoevsky with Ivan Karamazov, he may even paint the other side in stronger terms so that the eventual "message" or the conclusion of work can get skewed against what he originally intended. So in The Masterpiece Claude ultimately turns out to be a tragic-heroic character, a sort of last gasp of the romantic ideal of art and artist.

I feel The Masterpiece is a very important work in Zola's oeuvre, even though in purely stylistic terms it is nowhere near his masterpieces like L'Assmmoir or Germinal, because it serves as self-reflexive statement of purpose or intent on behalf of Zola and it shows that his artistry was much more complex than what many of his own manifestos and pamphlets about "naturalism" or "experimental novel" seem to suggest. I have seen many readers are put off by some of the comments in those pamphlets which often reek of most basic and even a vulgar form of scientism, materialism and determinism, and they never to actually read his works and even when they do, they do it with that bias already gleaned from reading those manifestos. One should instead read this novel to get a good hold of Zola's artistic ambition and what he thought of the place of art in society and what its relationship with life and the real world was, and how that relationship was changing with the advent of science.

P.S. Zola's most sustained engagement with Schopenhauerian ideas and its critique is in his novel La Joie de Vivre (a recent English translation is titled The Bright Side of Life). It is not very well known and doesn't seem to be very widely read in English but it is one of my personal favourites of his novels. It is one of the most powerful evocations of the struggle between the two forces of optimism and pessimism about the nature of life that takes place in one's soul that I have ever read.

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