In preparing this book, I was primarily motivated by the following two questions-questions that had haunted me ever since I had begun exploring Zola at Yale in the early fifties: what was Zola really like as a philosophical and religious thinker, and what reflections or possible reflections of his philosophical and religious thought can be found in Germinal, his masterpiece and one of the most moving and at the same time intellectually and spiritually stimulating and influential novels ever written? Not only were these questions of interest to me in themselves; I suspected- with good reason, as it turned out-that it was impossible fully to understand and appreciate Germinal without the answers.
In my efforts to discover them, I was led, first of all, to make a survey of all the philosophical and religious ideas that I could perceive in the immense corpus of Zola's writings (novels, work notes, correspondence, essays, poems, short stories, etc.)-forgetting for the moment everything previously done on the subject, so as not to be misled by other critics' possible distortions. After this, it was necessary to note which of these ideas tended to recur, the period and extent of their recurrence, the nature of their hold on Zola, their interrelationships, the patterns, logical or otherwise, into which they fell, the systems or movements to which they could be related, the over-all tendencies that they seemed to manifest. I was then obliged, needless to say, to contemplate Germinal in the light of what I had found, identifying all its various reflections or possible reflections.