Abstract In this article, I analyze Zola’s often-understudied 1882 novel of the bourgeois apartment building, Pot-Bouille, to show how it stages the particular impossibility of accurately capturing the nineteenth-century bourgeois type and, more generally, a critique of naturalist method. Pot-Bouille exposes the hypocritical, even deceptive nature of the immeuble’s residents through scenes where the narrator is the only one able to observe their duplicitous behavior; simultaneously, it offers numerous instances of imperceptibility or events that cannot be documented or observed. Studying this work alongside Zola’s own preparatory notes and the novel’s critical reception, I suggest that in this urban novel of the interior, the theories of observation imagined by the naturalist author (and by the first sociological thinkers too) prove at once indispensable and impossible. Ultimately, I argue that in its attempt to expose the difficulties in reducing the bourgeois to a knowable or essential type, Pot-Bouille anticipates twenty-first century scholars such as Sarah Maza, Franco Moretti, and others who write about the porous, even mythical nature of the concept of the bourgeoisie.

中文翻译：

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“米。Zola n'observe plus”：Zola 的 Pot-Bouille 中的资产阶级类型

摘要 在这篇文章中，我分析了左拉 1882 年经常被研究的资产阶级公寓小说 Pot-Bouille，以展示它如何呈现准确捕捉 19 世纪资产阶级类型的特殊不可能，以及更一般地说，对自然主义方法的批判. Pot-Bouille 通过叙述者是唯一能够观察到他们口是心非的行为的场景，揭露了 immeuble 居民的虚伪，甚至是欺骗性质；同时，它提供了许多无法被记录或观察到的不可察觉或事件的实例。结合佐拉自己的准备笔记和小说的批判性接受研究这部作品，我建议在这部室内城市小说中，自然主义作者（以及第一批社会学思想家）设想的观察理论既不可或缺又不可能。最后，我认为，在试图揭露将资产阶级简化为可知或基本类型的困难时，Pot-Bouille 预计了 21 世纪的学者，如 Sarah Maza、Franco Moretti 和其他撰写多孔的，甚至是神话的资产阶级概念的本质。