Zola’s Fin-de-Siècle Pessimism: Knowledge in Crisis

Zola’s Fin-de-Siècle Pessimism: Knowledge in Crisis David F. Beil A S MICHEL FOUCAULT HAS POSITED in certain of his studies that have become classics, the judicial and criminal contexts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are extremely rich in informa­ tion concerning the nature of a new set of analytical techniques and tools that began to be applied to the understanding of human behavior during that period, tools invented by thinkers and practitioners of the day. Fou­ cault’s study of these matters, undertaken in Surveiller et punir, begins ostensibly as nothing more than an analysis of several specific domains— schools, the army, prisons.1But it slowly widens to encompass the whole region of what the French call “les sciences humaines.” The provocative bent of Foucault’s argument appears when he suggests that the tech­ niques conceived and implemented largely without conscious theoretical formulation in “ disciplinary” contexts were, in fact, the very ones brought to bear in the kinds of analysis typical of what were later to be called “les sciences humaines.” The following is a good example of a remark by Foucault postulating the disciplinary origin of the supposedly neutral methods characteristic of the human sciences: On parle souvent de l’idéologie que portent avec elles, de façon discrète ou bavarde, les “ sciences” humaines. Mais leur technologie même, ce petit schéma opératoire qui a une telle diffusion (de la psychiatrie à la pédagogie, du diagnostic des malades à l’embauche de main-d’œuvre), ce procédé si familier de l’examen, ne met-il pas en œuvre, à l’intérieur d’un seul mécanisme, des relations de pouvoir, qui permettent de prélever et de constituer du savoir? (Surveiller et punir, 187) Foucault does not, of course, have a monopoly on these questions. One could just as easily follow a different path to reach similar epistemological conclusions by beginning with a study that would focus, for example, on the development of statistical thinking in the nineteenth cen­ tury. The formulation of the notion of the norm as a statistical entity in the domain of human behavior has a fascinating history of its own, one that spanned the gamut from the nascent practice of criminology to the first speculations concerning population eugenics as the century pro­ gressed. A study of these matters would follow an itinerary encountering Vo l . XXXII, No. 4 21 L ’E sprit C réateur along the way the work of thinkers such as Adolphe Quetelet, James Clerk Maxwell, and Francis Galton.21 cannot pretend in the space allot­ ted here to treat these matters in detail. What I would like to do, how­ ever, is to gauge certain developments that occurred in the domain of the analysis of human behavior over the course of the nineteenth century by using two novelistic landmarks: on the one hand, the third part of Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes and, on the other, the twelfth chapter of Zola’s La Bête humaine. My contention will be that somewhere between the two novels the potential for using a certain type of factual knowledge in order to provide explanations for human be­ havior is called into question. And thus a previous explanatory ap­ proach, if not totally supplanted, is at least supplemented by a different way of viewing human action. The result is a situation that Zola views with some skepticism, even pessimism, for it seems to produce knowl­ edge that is in some ways less reliable than the knowledge yielded under prior conditions. The two passages I want to study briefly are descriptions of judicial investigations directed by judges invested with considerable discretionary power: Camusot in Splendeurs et misères and Denizet in La Bête humaine. Balzac uses the arrests of Lucien de Rubempré and Carlos Herrera in Splendeurs et misères as an occasion to explain in detail how the criminal justice system in France at the end of the decade of the 1820’s functions. For Zola, the murder of Séverine Roubaud at the end of La Bête humaine gives new impetus to the judicial aspects of the novel, largely...