Word: macquart
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...took a hard look at his cheap-jackery, and resolved to do better. He calmly decided, as he said, to "swallow" his time and spit it out again in a series of 20 long novels about the Rougon-Macquart, in which all the main characters were the legitimate and illegitimate descendants of one oversexed farm wench. For his series he invented a new ism, based on close, pessimistic observation of mankind, and called it Naturalism. But Zola no more believed in Naturalism than he did in God, Wilson concludes. The important thing was this: "I, I alone will be Naturalism...
...amazing thing was that some of the novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle proved, unarguably, to be masterpieces: L'Assommoir, a tragedy of poverty, Germinal, a tale of striking workmen, and La Terre, a brutal epic of farm life. For 25 years, as his books peddled the "black poetry" of pessimism and garbled heredity under the name of hard fact, men of state and men of letters rose to protest-but not to much avail-that Zola was lying. Millions read Zola's books...
...world's great fiction traditions none is hardier than the encyclopedic chronicle of French national life. Honoré de Balzac's La Comedie Humaine was a procession of some 90 stories. Then came Emile Zola's 20-volume series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart. Now Jules Romains' Men of Good Will, a study of French history and habits between 1908 and 1933, has reached its 13th and penultimate volume...
...incident is typical of Zola. For the 20 novels of his Rougon-Macquart series he investigated every form of humanity from gigolo to genius. His notebooks fattened with vicarious experiences. Nana's obscene smiles were for his pages, not for him. Called by the public Dr. Filth, the slimy Giant, he was in reality a clinical analyst of living. His private life was of astounding purity. His livelihood was labor, his distraction more labor...
...accumulation of details may be called a realist, but in his massing of movements and men, he is certainly an idealist, but an idealist whose ideals were of the mud rather than of the sky. In one of his works he has taken the family of Bougon Macquart and carried them on through one book after another in all their adventures, a thing which no writer since Balsac has attempted, and by this means he gives a back-ground of the world and time which most modern French writers fail...
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