Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [15]
In our times, there are only two or three men who can read, understand and judge a book.4 I accept criticism from them, certain that they would not speak until they had discovered my intentions and assessed the results of my efforts. They would be very careful not to mention those great empty words: ‘morality’ and ‘literary modesty’. They would recognize my right, at a time when we enjoy freedom in art, to choose my subjects wherever I please, asking me only for works that are conscientious, and knowing that only stupidity harms the dignity of literature. They would surely not be surprised by the scientific analysis that I tried to apply in Thérèse Raquin. They would recognize it as the modern method and the universal research tool that our century uses so passionately to lay bare the secrets of the future. Whatever their conclusions, they would accept my point of departure: the study of temperament and of the profound modifications of an organism through the influence of environment and circumstances. I would be faced with true judges, with men honestly searching for truth, without puerility or false modesty, who do not feel that they must appear to be sickened by the sight of naked, living anatomical specimens. A sincere study purifies everything, as fire does. Of course, my work would be very humble in the presence of this tribunal that I have imagined: I should call down on it all the severity of those critics and wish it to come away from them blackened with crossings-out. But at least I should have the great joy of having been criticized for what I tried to do, not for something that I did not do.
Even now, it seems to me that I can hear the judgement of such great critics, whose methodical and Naturalist criticism has revived the sciences, history and literature. ‘Thérèse Raquin is the study of too exceptional a case; the drama of modern life is more adaptable than this, less enveloped in horror and madness. Such cases are to be shifted to the background of a novel.5 A wish to lose none of his observations encouraged the author to foreground every detail, so giving still more tension and harshness to the whole. Apart from that, the style does not have the simplicity required by an analytical novel. In short, for the writer now to make a good novel, he will have to see society from a broader perspective, paint it in its many and various guises, and above all adopt a clear, natural written style.’
I have tried to reply in twenty lines to attacks that are annoying because of their naive bad faith, and I notice that I have started to discourse with myself, as always happens when I keep a pen in my hand for too long. I will stop, knowing that readers do not like this. If I had the will and the time to write a manifesto, I might perhaps have tried to defend what one journalist, speaking of Thérèse Raquin, called ‘putrid literature’.6 But, then, what’s the use? The group of Naturalist writers to which I have the honour to belong has enough courage and energy to produce strong works that carry their own defence in them. One must have all the bias and blindness of a particular type of critic to oblige a novelist to write a Preface. Since, out of love for clarity, I have committed the sin of writing one, I ask pardon of intelligent folk who can see