Editing Émile Zola (section)

==Zola's optimism==
[[File:Luc Barbut Davray Zola.jpg|thumb|Luc Barbut-Davray, Portrait of Zola, oil on canvas, 1899]]
In Zola there is the theorist and the writer, the poet, the scientist and the optimist – features that are basically joined in his own confession of [[positivism]];{{Citation needed|date=October 2016}} later in his life, when he saw his own position turning into an anachronism, he would still style himself with irony and sadness over the lost cause as "an old and rugged Positivist".<ref>{{Cite web |title=Émile Zola to France's Young Generation (1893) – Positivism |date=14 November 2012 |url=http://positivists.org/blog/archives/652 |access-date=2022-05-31 |language=en-US}}</ref><ref>See Émile Zola's speech at the annual banquet of the Students' Association at the Hotel Moderne in Paris, 20 May 1893, published in English by ''The New York Times'' on 11 June 1893 at [http://positivists.org/blog/archives/652 http://www.positivists.org].</ref>

The poet is the artist in words whose writing, as in the racecourse scene in ''[[Nana (novel)|Nana]]'' or in the descriptions of the laundry in ''[[L'Assommoir]]'' or in many passages of ''[[La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret]]'', ''[[Le Ventre de Paris]]'' and ''[[La Curée]]'', vies with the colourful impressionistic techniques of [[Claude Monet]] and [[Pierre-Auguste Renoir]]. The scientist is a believer in some measure of scientific determinism – not that this, despite his own words "devoid of free will" ("''dépourvus de libre arbitre''"),<ref>Émile Zola, ''Les Œuvres complètes'', vol. 34, Paris: 1928, ''[[Thérèse Raquin]]'', preface to 2nd edition, p. viii.</ref> need always amount to a philosophical denial of [[free will]]. The creator of "''la littérature putride''", a term of abuse invented by an early critic of ''[[Thérèse Raquin]]'' (a novel which predates {{lang|fr|Les Rougon-Macquart}} series), emphasizes the squalid aspects of the human environment and upon the seamy side of human nature.<ref>Émile Zola, ''Les Œuvres complètes'', vol. 34, Paris: 1928, ''[[Thérèse Raquin]]'', preface to 2nd edition, p. xiv.</ref>

The optimist is that other face of the scientific experimenter, the man with an unshakable belief in human progress.{{Citation needed|date=October 2016}} Zola bases his optimism on ''innéité'' and on the supposed capacity of the human race to make progress in a moral sense. ''Innéité'' is defined by Zola as that process in which "''se confondent les caractères physiques et moraux des parents, sans que rien d'eux semble s'y retrouver''";<ref>Émile Zola, ''Les Œuvres complètes'', vol. 22, Paris: 1928, ''[[Le Docteur Pascal]]'', p. 38.</ref> it is the term used in biology to describe the process whereby the moral and temperamental dispositions of some individuals are unaffected by the hereditary transmission of genetic characteristics. Jean Macquart and Pascal Rougon are two instances of individuals liberated from the blemishes of their ancestors by the operation of the process of ''innéité''.{{Citation needed|date=October 2016}}