Who Needs Art? The Human Document and Strategies of Self-Representation

Abstract

As with any genre, to understand the specificity of the human document model articulated during the interwar period we must analyze it with reference to its direct antecedents. The human document did not appear on the European literary scene ex nihili. In France, it already had a long history tracing back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century.² The invention of the term “human document” (if not of the genre itself) was contested between Emile Zola and Edmond Goncourt. It was cited profusely by both of these prominent Naturalists, for example, in Goncourt’s Les Frères Zemganno and Le Faustin, and by Zola in Thérèse Raquin and in his collection of critical essays, Le Roman experimental. In 1879, five of these essays were published in Russian translation in the flagship Russian periodical Vestnik Evropy, appearing even before a French edition had been released. Zola’s ideas quickly penetrated Russia, where a similar phenomenon—the so-called “physiological sketch“³—had been thriving for decades. Discussing contemporary literature, Zola presents Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) as a template for the novel. He maintains that, following in the tracks of contemporary science, the writer must turn away from the abstract metaphysical man to the natural human being, who is under the unshakeable sway of physical and chemical laws and is shaped by his environment.⁴

There is no art and art is unnecessary … Only the document exists, only the fact of spiritual life. A private letter, a diary and a psychoanalytic transcript are the best forms for its expression.¹