Zola: Arcade Games?
Geoff Woollen
It’s pleasant to go strolling (the French verb would, of course, be
flâner) through Paris in search of sites intimately connected with
favourite authors’ works and/or lives — say the rue Vilin (Perec) or
the Tuileries gardens (Proust) — and see how they look now. For
Zola, the location of the Assommoir gin-palace became one of the
annexes of the Tati department store which phagocyted the whole of
the area round Barbès-Rochechouart; now, in a curious reversal of the
entrepreneurial expansionism of Octave Mouret’s Au Bonheur des
Dames, this empire lies derelict, and lives on in the badging of smaller
franchises within the soulless galeries marchandes which are our
present-day arcades. Gervaise Coupeau’s laundry business in the rue
de la Goutte d’Or was until recently a High Fidelity-type shop, Sadi
Disques, specialising in North-African vinyl; and, close to where Zola
first lived, when he and his mother came to Paris, in the rue Monsieurle-Prince, stood a pub at its junction with what he most precisely, in
Thérèse Raquin, terms the ‘ancienne place Saint-Michel’.1 It could be
what has become Score-Games, one of those cyberparadises for
pimply hoodies and nerds. If a little wordplay can, now and later, be
tolerated, this idea of a Zola site supplanted by an outlet for ‘arcade
games’ has interesting implications.
Reports of the death of the Paris arcades in Zola are much
exaggerated. One of Walter Benjamin’s criticisms of Zola is a
commonplace of the way this poor baby seal is culled by Marxist
criticism on account of his naïve positivism, to which accounts of the
fault lines in nineteenth-century society revealed, in spite of
1. See Geoff Woollen, ‘How streetwise was Zola?’, Bulletin of the Emile Zola
Society, 16 (1997), 24–8.
IJFrS 6 (2006)
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themselves, by reactionary writers such as Balzac or Baudelaire are
infinitely to be preferred.2 A second way in which he ‘sexes up’ the
anti-Zola dossier, though, is more interesting: Benjamin contends that
Zola, as it were, plays ‘arcade games’ in the sense of acting like a
grumpy old man, sulking in his tent, flying in the face of modernity:
In the arcades, Fourier saw the architectonic canon of the
phalanstery. […] Its brilliance persists, however faded, up
through Zola, who takes up Fourier’s idea in his book Travail,
just as he bids farewell to the arcades in his Thérèse Raquin.3
Never trust what writers say about their own writings. When
Zola undertook to defend his Thérèse Raquin against hostile
critics, he explained that his book was a scientific study of the
temperaments. His task had been to show, in an example,
exactly how the sanguine and nervous temperaments act on one
another — to the detriment of each. But this explanation could
satisfy no one. Nor does it explain the admixture of colportage,
the bloodthirstiness, the cinematic goriness of the action. Which
— by no accident — takes place in an arcade. If this book really
expounds something scientifically, then it’s the death of the
Paris arcades, the decay of a type of architecture.4
In other words, his sleazy Parisian passageways compare
unfavourably with the airy, light-affording thoroughfares whose
recreational, aspirational and commercial possibilities were an object
of such fascination to Benjamin.5
2. Georg Lukács, in ‘Pour le centième anniversaire de la naissance de Zola’,
Balzac et le réalisme français (Paris, Maspero, 1973), pp. 92–105, p. 99, argues
that in Zola, unlike in Balzac, there is no salutary ‘lutte contradictoire des
préjugés contre la réalité’.
3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in The Arcades
Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 5.
4. Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 203–4.
5. Ibid., p. 158 (from convolute F: ‘Iron construction’).
ZOLA’S ARCADES
5
In Thérèse Raquin, the gothic horror of the opening description
of the passage du Pont-Neuf6 scarce needs any reminder. Here are
some of the salient details:
Au bout de la rue Guénégaud, lorsqu’on vient des quais, on
trouve le passage du Pont-Neuf, une sorte de corridor étroit et
sombre qui va de la rue Mazarine à la rue de Seine. Ce passage
a trente pas de long et deux de large, au plus; il est pavé de
dalles jaunâtres, usées, descellées, suant toujours une humidité
âcre; le vitrage qui le couvre, coupé à angle droit, est noir de
crasse.
Par les beaux jours d’été, quand un lourd soleil brûle les rues,
une clarté blanchâtre tombe des vitres sales et traîne
misérablement dans le passage. Dans les vilains jours d’hiver,
par les matinées de brouillard, les vitres ne jettent que de la nuit
sur les dalles gluantes, de la nuit salie et ignoble.
A gauche se creusent des boutiques obscures, écrasées,
laissant échapper des souffles froids de caveau. […]
Au-dessus du vitrage, la muraille monte, noire, grossièrement
crépie, comme couvert d’une lèpre et toute couturée de
cicatrices.
Le passage du Pont-Neuf n’est pas un lieu de promenade. On
le prend pour éviter un détour, pour gagner quelques minutes. Il
est traversé par un public de gens affairés dont l’unique souci
est d’aller vite et droit devant eux. […] Les boutiquiers
regardent d’un air inquiet les passants qui, par miracle,
s’arrêtent devant leurs étalages.
Le soir, trois becs de gaz, enfermés dans des lanternes lourdes
et carrées, éclairent le passage. […] Le passage prend l’aspect
sinistre d’un véritable coupe-gorge.7
6. The passageway may now no longer be seen, having been demolished in 1912 to
leave the (now pedestrianized) open square that is the rue Jacques-Callot. The
passage du Pont-Neuf had been completed in 1823, running over the spot on
which had stood the salle Guénégaud, one-time home of the Académie royale de
musique and penultimate location, after Molière’s death, of the amalgamated
troupes that would form the Comédie française.
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What seems, in a photograph reproduced by Henri Mitterand,8 to be a
most innocuous-looking passageway is made barely recognizable,
shrunk to half its actual length of sixty-odd metres, and, at less than
two metres wide, claustrophobically narrow. The lighting, because of
the filthy glass roofing panes, causes surreal forms to dance in the
shadows, the paving is damp and sticky, and the commercial
possibilities afforded are non-existent (‘les passants qui, par miracle,
s’arrêtent’).9 Who would linger after dark in this coupe-gorge? No
doubt a person like Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve.
At the time of writing, Zola had to endure the reproaches of this
critic, who wrote to him that ‘je connais ce passage autant que
personne, et par toutes les raisons qu’un jeune homme a pu avoir d’y
rôder. Eh bien! Ce n’est pas vrai, c’est fantastique de description’.10
(We are close to knowing what all these reasons were in SainteBeuve’s case, and may remember what Louis Aragon, in the
disponibilité of a no-job looking for a toe-job, says of the ready
availability, in his ‘Alhambra de putains’, the passage de l’Opéra, of
the venal ministrations of ‘ces mains que tout abominablement révèle
expertes’.11) Zola replied, and put up some defence of this
environmental over-determination, but of course is unable
posthumously to contradict the later strictures of a Benjamin. These
concerned his Kolportage, i.e. the lurid, pulp-fictional aspect of the
novel, and in particular the contention that here he ‘[bade] farewell to
7. Thérèse Raquin, in Emile Zola, Œuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris,
Tchou, ‘Cercle du livre précieux’, 1966–1970), 15 vols, I, pp. 525–6. This
edition will hereafter be designated OC.
8. OC, I, p. 524.
9. Zola will later retreat from the hyperbole of this last point and allow for there to
be some customers entering the Raquin’s shop: ‘A chaque cinq minutes, une
jeune fille entrait, achetait pour quelques sous de marchandise’ (OC, I, p. 536).
10. This letter, of 10 June 1868, and Zola’s reply are reproduced by Henri Mitterand
(OC, I, pp. 680–2), and in most ‘pléiadisé’ critical editions, as Gérard Genette
calls them. See Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1987), pp.
309–10).
11. Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris, Gallimard, 1926), pp. 134 and 47,
respectively.
ZOLA’S ARCADES
7
the arcades’, as it were pronounced a death warrant on them, and for
thirty-five years at that. In other words, whereas a passage was
intended to be a place to ‘die for’, in Zola it was to die in, and this is
more or less what happens to the unfortunate Raquin cat, François,
thrown out of the window by Laurent and breaking its spine on the
black wall opposite. Such passéisme was not dialectical, in that Zola
portrayed only the seeds of destruction, and not of transformation.12
Searching for the word passage on ‘Le Catalogue des Lettres’
CD-ROM of Les Rougon-Macquart results in 271 ‘hits’, most of
them, of course, to do with going by (‘au passage de’, etc.). When it
comes to narrow corridors running between houses, a passage may
well be a vennel, wynd or ginnel that is not roofed over. The French
word arcade, which occurs only six times in the singular in Les
Rougon-Macquart and ten times in the plural, is understood in the
restricted senses of an arcaded street corner open to the elements, such
as the junction of the rue au Lard and the rue de la Lingerie near the
Halles,13 cloistered walkways such as those surrounding a courtyard,
or a vaster, round-arched doorway such as the ones between the
Halles pavilions or ‘l’arcade énorme du Palais de l’Industrie’.14 Such
an unglamorous passageway is the significantly-named passage des
Eaux in suburban Passy, dark, damp, moist, oozing, not to say
cascading, seeming to figure functional aspects of the trangressive
female body of Hélène Grandjean.15 Plenty more on the subject of
bodily passages has been written by David Bellos in a seminal article
12. Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 1045–6.
13. In Le Ventre de Paris, in Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris, NRF Gallimard,
‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1960–67), 5 vols, I, p. 764. This edition will
hereafter be designated RM.
14. In L’Œuvre (RM, IV, p. 117). It is no coincidence, as will be seen later, that this
example and that of Saint-Eustache are both viewed by Zola’s character Claude
Lantier.
15. See Une page d’amour, RM, II, pp. 829 and 925, and specifically the guiltridden chapter of crisis (IV.ii) in which ‘Le passage s’ouvrait sous ses pieds
comme un trou noir’ (p. 995).
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on Germinal,16 and one may go to town on the mots à double entente
concerning backstairs work in Pot-Bouille,17 but such equivocal smut
will be neglected here, save for a reminder of the contemporary joke
that the actress and ‘singer’ Hortense Schneider, a model for Nana,
was commonly known as ‘le passage des Princes’.
But it is passageways that are, as Frédéric Lock would say of the
passage Jouffroy, ‘couvert[s] en vitres’,18 the celebrated glazed (if not
yet double-) atrium type, often purpose-built as such, that most
concern us, and specifically the ones situated near the grands
boulevards of Paris. Zola mentions the following passages: de
l’Opéra, Colbert, des Panoramas, Jouffroy, Choiseul, Saint-Roch,
Sainte-Anne, Verdeau, and de la Madeleine, most of them in the
central, deuxième arrondissement, area. They are often the haunts of
prostitution, as for Nana and Satin, or for the activities of an
enthusiastic amateur, such as never-climaxing bourgeois housewife
Valérie Vabre, who is up to no good in the passage Saint-Roch, ‘à la
porte d’un garni louche’.19 There are slumbering, underdeveloped
shops in the passage Sainte-Anne that will be blown away by the
Bonheur des Dames. 20 There are seedy hotels in the passage des
Panoramas,21 and some low-life stage-door johnnies hanging round
the Théâtre des Variétés artists’ entrance within it.22 Then there are
the iron gates that are shut at night; Count Muffat’s walk of shame, in
chapter VII of Nana, ends with him rattling the bars of these in
impotent frustration.23 One last, not altogether insignificant, point is
16. ‘From the Bowels of the Earth: An Essay on Germinal’, Forum for Modern
Language Studies, 15 (1979), 35–45.
17. The dubious, idiosyncratic use of the pronominal s’enfiler is noteworthy here.
18. Frédéric Lock, Dictionnaire historique et topographique de l’ancien Paris
(avant l’annexion) (Paris, Hachette, 1867 [1855]), p. 204.
19. In Pot-Bouille, RM, III, p. 314.
20. RM, III, p. 598.
21. In L’Argent, RM, V, p. 257.
22. In Nana, RM, II, p. 1226.
23. Ibid., p. 1281.
ZOLA’S ARCADES
9
that the slatternly Adèle deposits her new-born, illegitimate baby
‘dans le passage Choiseul dont on ouvrait les grilles’.24
All of this, then, seems to sort ill with the initial perception of
the ‘luxe, calme et volupté’ aspect of the passages in Benjamin: with
what, translingually, we might call the Arcade Feier aspect.25 Were
these thoroughfares not reputed to be havens of tranquility and
commercial opportunity, where the shopping and flâning (to avoid
another adjective) crowd of the mid-nineteenth century were said to
eat, drink, and indulge in conspicuous consumption? For this would
seem to be the picture that emerges from the essay ‘Paris Capital of
the Nineteenth Century’ that stands at the threshold of the immense
chantier of convolutes (critical building materials) gathered together
as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The mid-century malls are
favourably compared with a very seedy prototype, the earth-floored
Galeries de Bois of the Palais-Royal, threshold of the gaming houses
of Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin and Le Père Goriot, lair of
prostitutes, and home of the rapacious publishers of Illusions perdues.
A ‘contemporary illustrated Paris guide’ is quoted by Benjamin as
saying:
These arcades, a new contrivance of industrial luxury, are glasscovered, marble-floored passages through entire blocks of
houses, whose proprietors have joined forces in the venture. On
both sides of these passages, which obtain their light from
above, there are arrayed the most elegant shops, so that such an
arcade is a city, indeed a world, in miniature.26
Clearly picking up on this, Vanessa Schwartz writes:
At the same time, the newly built passages or arcades, located
either directly off the boulevards or just slightly to the south of
the boulevard Montmartre, attracted fashionable society. Early
24. In Pot-Bouille, RM, III, p. 371.
25. Apologies to the québécois band for taking their name in vain.
26. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 3.
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WOOLLEN
mini-malls of the luxury trade, the arcades were described as ‘a
city, indeed a world in miniature’.27
It would be interesting to know which guide is being referred to here,
and indeed it should be noted that this is citation and not necessarily
personal opinion. Others certainly wax rather less lyrical about the
seething, raw energy that is generated within the arcades. Adolphe
Joanne’s 1863 guide does no more than hint, perhaps:
Paris renferme 183 passages, galeries ou cours, sortes de rues
praticables seulement pour les piétons et le plus souvent vitrées
en tout ou en partie par le haut. Plusieurs, bordés de riches
magasins et splendidement éclairés, servent de lieu de
promenade et de rendez-vous, le soir surtout et pendant
l’hiver.28
More detail is provided by essayist Emile de la Bédollière, in the
Lacroix Paris-Guide of 1867. He begins by comparing the coarse
vitality of the passages with the Galeries de Bois before going on to a
sharp-eyed hour-by-hour sociology of the passage:
Les passages sont ce qu’était jadis le Palais-Royal. […] Vers
onze heures apparaissent les habitués du Dîner de Paris, du
Dîner du Rocher, du Dîner du passage Jouffroy; puis les gens
qui se sont donné rendez-vous pour aller déjeuner ensemble
dans les établissements susnommés ou dans un restaurant
quelconque du boulevard. […]
A partir de midi l’affluence augmente.
Les étrangers, les provinciaux se montrent. A la population
flottante se joignent des stationnaires qui se tiennent en
permanence dans les passages, soit par désœuvrement, soit par
intérêt. […]
27. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle
Paris (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, University of California Press,
1998), p. 19.
28. Adolphe Joanne, Le Guide parisien (Paris, Hachette, 1981 [1863]), p. 114.
ZOLA’S ARCADES
11
Dans les passages rôdent encore, quaerentes quem ou quid
devoret,29 les déclassés, les décavés, les parias, les invalides de
la mauvaise chance, de la fainéantise ou de la débauche. […]
Cinq heures sonnent; les journaux du soir se distribuent dans
les kiosques des boulevards […].
A six heures, grand remue-ménage! le faubourg descend! Les
habitants des quartiers Bréda et Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
s’avancent à la conquête des Boulevards. C’est une région que
signalent de loin le cliquetis du jais, l’odeur du musc, le
frissonnement de la soie. Quelques-unes de ces amazones,
armées en guerre, portent pour épaulettes des plaques de
passementerie avec des torsades de fausses perles, elles ont
pour uniforme des toques surmontées de panaches, de celles
qu’au moyen âge, on nommait des chapels de paon. […]
Cette troupe féminine s’égai[ll?]e, comme disaient les
chouans, et prend des positions stratégiques, depuis le passage
Jouffroy jusqu’à la rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin.30
The French translation of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, or
Passagenarbeit, is Le Livre des passages, also fairly neutral. But what
upbeat, ennobling and aspirational connotations are conferred by the
English word arcades! For a start, this now effectively limits
consideration to the vaulted or roofed-over, at the expense of those
open to the elements. It makes one think, in English, of the more
technologically developed, since Arcades and arceaux, in French,
normally refer only to the limited stereotomy (stone carving) of
cloisters beneath round arches, or to round-arched entrance doorways,
whereas the full range of tectonic possibilities of ironwork will be
required for arcades in our sense of the term.31 Although it is a
misleading etymology — but when did that ever stop people
29. Like ravening wolves out to devour whom- or whatever.
30. ‘Les Boulevards de la porte Saint-Martin à la Madeleine’, in Guide Paris (Paris,
Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1867), 2 vols, II, pp. 1295–6.
31. Benjamin makes this distinction in convolute F (‘Iron Construction’), op. cit, p.
156. The only observed instance in the relevant part of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs
du mal, ‘Babel d’escaliers et d’arcades, / C’était un palais infini […].’ (‘Rêve
parisien’), is not to be understood in the sense of covered passageway either.
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responding? — the Arcadian pastoral idea, of Poussin’s four
shepherds deciphering the tombal inscription Et in Arcadia ego can
also be present in our minds. So the spin imparted in translation is
powerful indeed.
The celebrated chapter ‘Ceci tuera cela’ of Hugo’s Notre-Dame
de Paris, which argues that the printed word, issuing from
Gutenberg’s press, will kill off the book of stone that is a cathedral,
muses on ‘le pilier qui est une lettre, l’arcade qui est une syllabe, la
pyramide qui est un mot’.32 The terms of this extended metaphor,
comparing constitutive elements of the logos to those of an edifice,
show Hugo at his most visionary and grandiose. Hugo’s architectural
commentaries (pored over by Benjamin in convolute F, ‘Iron
Construction’) discuss how the gothic, vaulted ogive arch33 supplanted
the romanesque, rounded one because the new form of construction
tamed problems of thrust that restricted the scope of its predecessor.34
How much less claustrophobic and more expansive, though, were the
structural potential of iron and cast-iron bolted together! In Le Ventre
de Paris, a daring juxtaposition of the old (Saint-Eustache) and the
new (a Baltard-built iron market pavilion of the Halles) is surely
effected in a way that makes nonsense of any claim that Zola ‘leaves
the arcades behind’ for thirty-five years in the explicit homage paid to
Hugo. It will be noted that Claude Lantier, Zola’s artist figure, is twice
designated a flâneur, that is, a person of ideological effervescence and
intellectual availability quite superior to the catastrophe-junkie
badaud;35 once, indeed, when going for an early-morning stroll, in an
example of nominal syntax that may forever be unsurpassed, Claude
‘prom[ène] sa flânerie dans l’arrivage des légumes’.36 The text
continues:
32. Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes. Roman I (Paris, Robert Laffont, ‘Bouquins’,
1985), p. 619.
33. Ibid., p. 621.
34. Ibid., specifically, chapter III.i (‘Notre-Dame’) and V.ii (‘Ceci tuera cela’).
35. In Le Ventre de Paris (RM, I, pp. 618 and 680).
36. Ibid., p. 892; see also p. 798.
ZOLA’S ARCADES
13
En passant devant la rue du Roule, il avait regardé ce portail
latéral de Saint-Eustache, qu’on voit de loin, par-dessous le
hangar géant d’une rue couverte des Halles. Il y revenait sans
cesse, voulait y trouver un symbole.
— C’est une curieuse rencontre, disait-il, ce bout d’église sous
cette avenue de fonte. Ceci tuera cela, le fer tuera la pierre, et
les temps sont proches… Je m’imagine que le besoin
d’alignement n’a pas seul mis de cette façon une rosace de
Saint-Eustache au beau milieu des Halles centrales. Voyezvous, il y a là tout un manifeste; c’est l’art moderne, le réalisme,
le naturalisme, comme vous voudrez l’appeler, qui a grandi en
face de l’art ancien.37
This ambitious pronouncement is significant indeed, with its
mentions of ‘manifeste’, ‘art moderne’, and the idea that the label
chosen for Naturalism might be fairly arbitrary but, whatever it was,
would embody the ‘arcades idea’.38 Where Hugo talks about
architecture with somewhat imprecise afflatus, Zola goes into the nuts
and bolts of how the Eisenkonstruction so praised by Benjamin makes
the vast archway spans of the pavilions possible, as when Lisa Quenu,
going down into the basement area under a pavilion, ‘restait sur la
dernière marche, levant les yeux, regardant la voûte, à bandes de
briques blanches et rouges, faites d’arceaux écrasés, pris dans des
nervures de fonte et soutenue par des colonnettes’.39 The only,
unanticipated, problem with Claude Lantier’s argument regarding
ironwork killing off stone is that if we look at photographs from the
37. Ibid., p. 799.
38. Ibid., p. 799. The exact view described, i.e. looking north up the rue des
Prouvaires from the junction with the rue Saint-Honoré, joined by the rue du
Roule from the south, can be seen in an excellent contemporary photograph by
Charles Marville, see Marville: Paris, ed. M. de Thézy (Paris, Hazan, 1994), p.
352.
39. RM, I, pp. 790–1.
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WOOLLEN
early 1970s, we see this very pavilion being demolished, and SaintEustache still standing!40
In Au Bonheur des Dames, the vast stairwell based on that of the
Au Printemps department store,41 is described with lyrical enthusiasm:
On avait vitré les cours, transformées en halls; et des escaliers
de fer s’élevaient du rez-de-chaussée, des ponts de fer étaient
jetés d’un bout à l’autre, aux deux étages. L’architecte, par
hasard intelligent, un jeune homme amoureux des temps
nouveaux, ne s’était servi de la pierre que pour les sous-sols et
les piles d’angle, puis avait montré toute l’ossature en fer, des
colonnes supportant des poutres et des solives. […] Partout on
avait gagné de l’espace, l’air et la lumière entraient librement, le
public circulait à l’aise, sous le jet hardi des fermes à longue
portée [wide-spaced trusses]. C’était la cathédrale du commerce
moderne, solide et légère.42
Les escaliers de fer, à double révolution [forming a double
spiral], développaient des courbes hardies, multipliaient les
paliers; les ponts de fer, jetés sur le vide, filaient droit, très haut;
et tout ce fer mettait là, sous la lumière blanche des vitrages,
une architecture légère, une dentelle compliquée où passait le
jour, la réalisation moderne d’un palais de rêve, d’une Babel
entassant des étages, élargissant des salles, ouvrant des
échappées sur d’autres étages et d’autres salles, à l’infini.43
Finally, and at last recognized by Benjamin, there are the ideal
ateliers of Travail, but with a ‘machine enfin amie’ guaranteed to
40. What had disappeared, in 1869, was the clumsy, stone-built pavilion, nicknamed
the ‘fort de la Halle’ (wordplay on ‘fortress’ and ‘market porter’), but not the
church.
41. Strictly speaking, as yet unbuilt, according to the time frame of the novel, but
then neither were more than three of the ten Halles pavilions claimed to confront
the returning Florent in 1858.
42. RM, III, pp. 611–2.
43. Ibid., p. 626. The last sentence is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s futuristic lines
quoted above (note 31).
ZOLA’S ARCADES
15
cause the gravest of offence to dialectical materialists, with lavish use
made of the even cleaner constructional material of steel.44
If, in Zola, dirt, sweat and sundry secretions sully the passages,
it must be allowed that in Benjamin too all is not sweetness and light.
He talks of the ‘unfathomability of the moribund arcades’ in an
oneiric short story by Strindberg that perhaps prefigures the
Surrealists.45 Also, it was the more modern, 1840s ones like the
passage Jouffroy that were of the kind particularly to enthuse
Benjamin, as the lighter sheathing of their glass panes in iron and castiron conferred downlighting possibilities somewhat denied to earlier
ones.46 A vast amount of un-idealized and quite critical citational
commentary is presented in the convolutes, and Benjamin seemed
under no illusions about the human flotsam to be found in this socivilized cadre, of whom he writes: ‘Pimps are the iron bearings of
this street, and its glass breakables are the whores.’47 But there is also,
in both Benjamin and Zola, the most elevated, aspirational discourse
on the sky’s-the-limit potential of the human constructional spirit,
embodied in iron and cast-iron.
The only difficulty that remains in considering Zola concerns the
fact that these novels are filtered through the viewpoint of a narrator,
who may well not be interchangeable with the author, returning us to
what Benjamin said above about the untrustworthiness of the writer.
The somewhat bombastic utterances of a young Turk such as the
budding Impressionist Claude Lantier, for instance, might not
necessarily be fully endorsed. Ideally, we would have to catch Zola
saying similar things in his signed journalistic articles, and these are
not hard to find. Here is an extract from his report on the 1878
44. OC, VIII, p. 894.
45. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 205 (from convolute H: ‘The Collector’). Also in this
context may be mentioned the celebrated jotting that ‘The father of Surrealism
was Dada; its mother was an arcade’ (p. 883), clearly recalling Aragon’s passage
de l’Opéra (Le Paysan de Paris).
46. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 150 (from convolute F: ‘Iron Construction’).
47. Ibid., p. 155.
16
WOOLLEN
Exposition universelle, describing the pavilion erected on the Champde-Mars:
La façade principale, tournée vers la Seine, se distingue par une
grandiose originalité. Nous sommes ici, de nouveau, face à cette
architecture contemporaine dont j’ai parlé et où s’exprime le
style du dix-neuvième siècle, avec ses constructions
audacieuses de fer et de fonte, si légères et si solides en même
temps. […] Rien ne peut être plus majestueux que ces
gigantesques pavillons, avec leurs colonnes élancées et leurs
arcs fins, mais puissants, qui rappellent des palais de fées
pétrifiés par un coup de baguette magique. Malgré moi, je
m’abîme dans la rêverie devant ces modèles de notre
architecture. Il me semble qu’ils resteront debout dix siècles et
étonneront les générations futures. Ce sont des archétypes, et
comme tels ils méritent l’immortalité; ils marqueront à jamais le
vrai moment, le moment unique, ce point de civilisation où se
rencontrent et se mêlent les arts et la science. Là se manifeste
tout notre progrès intellectuel et social.48
The Arcades Project, then, both as realistically observed decor
and elevational lifestyle aim, would appear to be alive and well as
much in Zola, the alleged ‘murderer’ of the passage du Pont-Neuf, as
in Walter Benjamin, his accuser.
University of Glasgow
48. Etudes sur la France contemporaine, back-translated from the June 1878
number of the Saint-Petersburg journal Vestnik Evropy (The European
Messenger), in OC, XIV, 346.