Naturalism as Paranoia in Octave Mirbeau

Abstract

When Emile Zola embraces the therapeutic aims outlined by Claude Bernard in his Introduction a la medecine experimentale, when he adopts the methodological rigor and medical idiom of the literary diagnostician, he acknowledges the inadequacy of existing art an epistemological system. In his pretension the role of moralist and healer Zola implicitly admits the failure of fictional narrative a method of explanation. Because its theoretical foundations are set in science, Naturalism exhibits the paranoia which Cyndy Hendershot claims was typical of fin-de-siecle European intellectuals. This kind of paranoia is characteristic of much late-nineteenth-century thinking and is connected, Hendershot argues, to the increasing prevalence of scientific discourse throughout all social discourse and the sense of inferiority experienced by non-scientists saturated with scientific terminology (I9). As hereditary flaws take the place of original sin and an unhealthy environment is cited explain deviant behaviors once attributed satanic influence, evil is pathologized and the psychologist replaces the directeur de conscience. The result, Pierre Citti writes, is that [l]e role tenu par le peche dans [le] roman [...] du XVIIIe siecle, la maladie et l'anomalie le tiennent chez les Naturalistes (27). In his analysis of the case of Judge Schreber, Freud describes paranoia involving a process of double displacement whereby a subject denies feelings of guilt (inspired, Freud says, in Schreber's case by latent homosexuality) and projects them hostility directed from outside. (1) In literature a similar process of double displacement occurs the directionlessness and disorder of life are denied and projected the teleological structure and successful resolution provided by fiction. In Naturalism, Edward Jayne points out, denial is carried out as the exploration of failure prove valid a deterministic sociology (I34). When medicine supersedes morality, and the paranoiac can no longer project guilt a malevolent external force, sin is re-situated in a system which, because of its defectiveness, cannot correct the abnormality of a disturbed patient. Zola's utopianism may therefore come from displacing an earlier generation's religious faith onto a belief in technological advancement-from trusting in knowledge-producing (Hendershot 17) that deny individual flaws and project them the future perfectibility of the species. Rejecting complexity and randomness, Naturalism moves from the explanatory completeness of an earlier theological model a totalizing system of scientific proofs. By identifying with Doctor Pascal, Zola invokes the medical expertise of his character in order cure his own ignorance a novelist. Haunted by the paranoid denial of deviance and difference, Naturalist discourse generates the neuroses it needs objects of diagnosis. Production of neurasthenia and hysteria becomes a business that fills the story, the sanitarium, and the Salpetriere. With his delusional claims of diagnostic infallibility the psychiatrist joins the ranks of his insane patients. According Doctor Triceps, one of the deranged doctors showcased in Octave Mirbeau's satirical novel, Les vingt et un jours d'un neurasthenique (1901), Naturalism itself is a neurosis. With his claims of creative and salvatory divinity, Zola belongs in une maison de fous (292) along with his characters. Remarquez bien, says Triceps his audience of spa patrons, ce que je dis de Zola, je le dis egalement d'Homere, de Shakespeare, de Moliere, de Pascal, de Tolstoi (292). Illustrating the spread of paranoid discourse from medicine the associated fields of politics, law, commerce, and metaphysics, Mirbeau shows that the only obstacle the triumph of totalizing systems of explanation is his own plotless novel. In Mirbeau's story the narrator characterizes genocide, colonialism, perversions of justice, the institutionalization of the poor articulations of a paranoid system that seeks classify what is exceptional. …