Organic Society and degenerative inheritance in the Naturalism of Émile Zola

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, the naturalism literature relied on medical physiology and topographical treatises to produce a discourse on the physical and cultural degeneration of society. One of the novelists who best explained the degenerative discourse in his literary corpus was Emile Zola; however, one of the hermeneutic problems underlying the French novelist's work is that there is no strict separation between the literary text, social medicine and the use of biological metaphors. A problem that Gilles Deleuze managed to detect through the concept of the “crevices”, but which does not explain how it is possible to think about deviant behavior without resorting to Freudian notions of the death instinct. For this reason, the main contribution of the article is an explanation of the concept of degenerative heritability without resorting to Freudian psychoanalysis and, on the contrary, to make explicit the scientific theories that support the concept of degeneration assumed in the naturalistic composition.