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Modern European Intellectual History. Lecture 3 From Naturalism to Decadence January 30, 2008. outline. intro: positivism naturalism as positivism in literature J.-K. Huysmans from naturalism to decadence Against the Grain Huysman’s Catholicism and later career
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Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 3 From Naturalism to Decadence January 30, 2008
outline • intro: positivism • naturalism as positivism in literature • J.-K. Huysmans from naturalism to decadence • Against the Grain • Huysman’s Catholicism and later career • conclusion: decadence as a limited response to positivism
positivism: central planks • determinism • imperialism • minimalism • triumphalism
naturalist theory: “experimental novel” • 1) prestige of science: “the scientific pathway … the general evolution of the century” (p. 33) • 2) Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865): extension of principles of natural science to living beings, showing possibility (in spite Bernard’s own views) of extension of science to art • 3) determinism: “A like determinism will govern the stones of the roadway and the brain of man. … [T]here is an absolute determinism for all human phenomena.”
theory cont’d • 4) end of “metaphysics”; no more deep questions; how rather than why. “The metaphysical man is dead; our whole territory is transformed by the advent of the physiological man” (p. 54). • 5) novel as experiment: framing of hypothesis, organization of experiment, observation of results • 6) “Rhetoric … has no place here. … [T]o-day an exaggerated importance is given to form” (p. 43).
theory cont’d • 7) genius in organizing investigations of nature, not in imaginatively departing from nature • 8) ultimate ideal: mastery of causes and freedom to perfect humanity • 9) causes to be sought in domains of inheritance and environment • 10) novels as rooting out social disease: “One member … becomes rotten, and immediately all around him are tainted, the social circulus is interrupted, the health of that society is compromised” (p. 29).
practice • Thérèse Raquin (1867) • Les Rougon-Macquart ( • La Fortune des Rougon (1871); La Curée (1871–72); Le Ventre de Paris (1873); La Conquête de Plassans (1874); La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875); Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876); L'Assommoir (1877); Une Page d'amour (1878); Nana (1880); Pot-Bouille (1882); Au Bonheur des Dames (1883); La Joie de vivre (1884); Germinal (1885); L'Œuvre (1886); La Terre (1887); Le Rêve (1888); La Bête humaine (1890); L'Argent (1891); La Débâcle (1892); Le Docteur Pascal (1893) • “J’accuse”(1898)
Huysmans’s career • naturalist period: Marthe (1876), Les Sœurs Vatard (1879) • decadent period: A rebours (1884), Là-bas (1891)
the theory of practice • 1) hatred of bourgeois civilization • 2) bourgeoisie have in fact led civilization to decline rather than to progress • 3) hatred of bourgeois positivism • 4) critique of restricting art to reflection
theory of practice, cont’d • 5) artifice and artificiality as a general alternative to nature and naturalism • 6) but artifice which does not depart from but mocks or inverts the natural norm • 7) Des Esseintes as an experimentalist
limits of decadence • does it break with determinism? • does it offer alternative to bourgeois life, or just screed against it? • does it offer art as a genuine alternative, or simply a theoretical one?
