The Vital and the Statistical

Is naturalism "data fiction?" It can scarcely be denied that the roots of what we now know as "Big Data" lie in the consolidation of statistical thinking over the course of the 1800s.¹ In particular, applications of statistics to phenomena such as crime and suicide during the later years of the century play a significant role in the disciplinary emergence of what would become the social sciences: sociology, psychology, criminology, and so on. These are, of course, the same years that saw the rise of the literary genre of naturalist fiction, in the U.S. as well as in France and, arguably, elsewhere in Europe as well. Statistics, as a tool for the quantitative analysis of individual and social life, can thus readily appear relevant to that genre's aspirations to scientific status, as codified most famously in Émile Zola's comparison of his novelistic practice to the researches of the physician Claude Bernard in his 1880 essay "The Experimental Novel."

Rather than simply affirm naturalism's clear investments in statistical thinking, however, I aim here to place these in dialectical tension with another component—vitalism—that grows just as directly out of the genre's self-conception as a form of scientific fiction (and, in many ways, specifically medicalizing fiction, as Bernard's role implies). As we will see, these two features of naturalism's scientific aspirations often take quite different forms and, as a result, play against one another as much as they harmonize. The present essay will explore these before moving to the particular case of a novel by Frank Norris, the American writer who most directly modeled himself on Zola in his posthumously published first effort, written in the mid-1890s, Vandover and the Brute (1914). On a broader level, I hope to show, the recognition of vitalist currents in naturalist work can enable us to place the still pertinent question of quantitatively driven methodologies, and their applicability to human and social questions, within a longer historical trajectory that runs backward as well as forward in time.

For all its scientific aspirations, naturalism clearly remains fascinated by large, impersonal forces that are conceived of as resistant to quantification and that gain their authority through their immediate and at times overwhelming effect on the senses. Here, logics of aggregation appear that are not in any way statistical in nature. Rather, from Norris's vast fields of wheat and grains of desert sand to Zola's cornucopias of market goods and mighty human crowds, we see a satisfaction taken in a largeness often presented as, in itself, an emblem of power. In the face of such massive conglomerations, human technique appears humbled; one can only allow them to roll majestically or terrifyingly forward like waves. Thus, the statistical and all other tools of rationalization must finally stand aside in the face of what are depicted as the movements of nature or "Life" itself.

Should such visions be termed "vitalist," to use the term often associated with holistic conceptions of the life force? It is certainly possible to make such a claim; indeed, the common association of vitalism with thought and imagery of this kind can begin to account for why the term often provokes such immediate negative reactions. As noted by Georges Canguilhem, the French historian of medicine whose writings remain one of the most valuable resources on this subject, the Nazis did draw directly on the turn-of-the-century vitalist writings of biologists like Hans Driesch, "using theories of Ganzheit ('wholeness') to advocate against individualist, atomist, and mechanist liberalism and in favor of totalitarian forces and social forms" (72). It is fair to say that similar potentialities can be found in Norris's essays depicting the Anglo-Saxon race as an "elemental energ[y]" following its natural destiny toward progress through conquest ("Frontier" 1188). Some tempering of such irrationalist visions by statistics' insistence on the relativity of norms might well appear highly welcome. And yet as Canguilhem goes on to note, of course, fascism might better be understood as combining its vitalist imagery with rational techniques, such as eugenics, of a highly modern...