Novel Knowledge: Judgement, Experience, Experiment

Abstract

I begin with Émile Zola’s manifesto ‘Le Roman Expérimental’ of 1880, although my own essay is concerned with the novel of the first half of the eighteenth century, and specifically with the place of the new novel of that time in the scientific revolution. Inspired by the writings of the physician Claude Bernard about contemporary medical research, Zola set forth a programme for the novel, emphasising its power to define the workings of the human machine in society. ‘What constitutes the experimental novel’, Zola says, is

to possess a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall give them to us, and then finally to exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily, and in the heart of which he himself experiences a continual transformation.