Nutrition, Hunger and Fasting: Spiritual and Material Naturalism in Zola and Huysmans

Abstract

This article analyses imbricated discourses of nutrition, hunger and fasting in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and Huysmans's A Vau-l'eau (1882), A Rebours (1884) and Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901). In particular, it argues that Zola's neo-physiological Naturalism, as eventually theorized in Le Roman expérimental (1880), actually produces a rhetoric of hunger and fasting, most notably in Le Ventre de Paris. This rhetoric, it is argued, was taken up and developed by Huysmans, finally becoming central to his Spiritual Naturalism, ostensibly formulated to counter the materialism of Zola's Naturalism. The article begins by looking at physiological and materialist discourses of nutrition – as encapsulated by slogans to the effect that ‘you are what you eat’ – and their impact on literary debates that, in the 1870s, opposed Zola and Barbey d'Aurevilly. It then shows how these discourses of nutrition are supplanted in the fiction of Zola and Huysmans by a rhetoric of hunger and fasting typically associated with Catholic conceptions of sanctity.