Naturalism as Paranoia in Octave Mirbeau

When Emile Zola embraces the therapeutic aims outlined by Claude Bernard in his Introduction à la médecine expérimentale, when he adopts the methodological rigor and medical idiom of the literary diagnostician, he acknowledges the inadequacy of existing art as an epistemological system. In his pretension to the role of moralist and healer Zola implicitly admits the failure of fictional narrative as 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-siècle 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 to the sense of inferiority experienced by non-scientists saturated with scientific terminology" (19).

As hereditary flaws take the place of original sin and an unhealthy environment is cited to explain deviant behaviors once attributed to satanic influence, evil is pathologized and the psychologist replaces the directeur de conscience. The result, as Pierre Citti writes, is that "[l]e rôle tenu par le péché dans [le] roman [. . .] du XVIIIe siècle, la maladie et l'anomalie le tiennent chez les Naturalistes" (27).

In his analysis of the case of Judge Schreber, Freud describes paranoia as 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 as hostility directed from outside. ¹ In literature a similar process of double displacement occurs as the directionlessness and disorder of life are denied and projected as the teleological structure and successful resolution provided by fiction. In Naturalism, as Edward Jayne points out, denial is carried out "as the exploration of failure to prove valid a deterministic sociology" (134).

When medicine supersedes morality, and the paranoiac can no longer project guilt as 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 systems" (Hendershot 17) that deny individual flaws and project them as the future perfectibility of the species. Rejecting complexity and randomness, Naturalism moves from the explanatory completeness of an earlier theological model to a totalizing system of scientific proofs. By identifying with Doctor Pascal, Zola invokes the medical expertise of his character in order to cure his own ignorance as a novelist.

Haunted by the paranoid denial of deviance and difference, Naturalist discourse generates the neuroses it needs as objects of diagnosis. Production of neurasthenia and hysteria becomes a business that fills the story, the sanitarium, and the Salpêtrière. With his delusional claims of diagnostic infallibility the psychiatrist joins the ranks of his insane patients. According to Doctor Triceps, one of the deranged doctors showcased in Octave Mirbeau's satirical novel, Les vingt et un jours d'un neurasthénique (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 to his audience of spa patrons, "que ce que je dis de Zola, je le dis également d'Homère, de Shakespeare, de Molière, de Pascal, de Tolstoi" (292). Illustrating the spread of paranoid discourse from medicine to the associated fields of politics, law, commerce, and metaphysics, Mirbeau shows that the only obstacle to 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 as articulations of a paranoid system that seeks to classify what is exceptional. Expressing order, not ideology, privileging arrangements over the things that are arranged, "cultural paranoia," as Patrick O'Donnell argues, "is not content but method: a way of seeing the multiple stratifications of reality...