3 - The Transparent City: Mansions, Montage and Commodity Architecture in The Kill and The Ladies’ Paradise

Summary

This chapter addresses the invisibilities, openings and transparencies of city architecture in Émile Zola's Paris, focusing on La Curée (The Kill) from 1872 and Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) from 1883, the second and eleventh books in the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871–93), which endeavoured to provide ‘A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. The architecture which dominates these two novels – Haussmann's boulevards and their mansions in La Curée, the modern department store in Au Bonheur des Dames – comes closer to bringing about total visibility and connectedness than any of the city spaces I have considered so far. Yet even as they seem to achieve total openness in the city, these forms of architecture continue to repress and exclude other spaces and forms of life, especially working-class spaces. They do so not through darkness or obfuscation as in Mary Barton, but through the promotion of visibility to an absolute and overwhelming principle. This process involves a phantasmagorical blending of architecture and commodities, in which the commodity's mystifying and alienating character comes to be incorporated into the structure of the city. Glass and iron allow transparency to become heightened in these predominantly bourgeois spaces, but in such a way that new kinds of ideological enclosure are created, thereby taking to an extreme Lefebvre's illusion of transparency. This involves a confusion of interior and exterior which recalls what we saw in Dickens, but now operating less through processes of mobile ruination and restoration (though these are also present) than through the extension of the intoxicating logic of the commodity into a principle of architectural structure.

The multiplication of visibility and transparency brought about by these new forms of architecture is both described and enacted by Zola's use of literary montage, which anticipates cinema, as Sergei Eisenstein was the first to point out. For Eisenstein the Rougon-Macquart cycle was not only a single ecstatic whole built out of a series of montage effects (matching what Eisenstein sought to achieve in his films), but also ‘poetic and musical’, in the way Zola

painstakingly selects from ‘all possible ones’ those particular details and those hours or moments and those very conditions of temperature and light that repeat emotionally the same psychological nuance with which Zola is trying to overwhelm the reader at a given moment.