Zola's Object and the Surrealist Image

Emile Zola's hypertrophic awareness of concrete reality is as indispensable to the phenomenon of his image-making as the notion of a communicating vessel is to the surrealist's search for the reconciliation of the container and the contained. Three major areas offer points of contact. Zola's alchemy of words, as evidenced in Au Bonheur des Dames, reveals a "veritable chemistry," in which the link between metaphor and the process of lyrical development provides a poetic transubstantiation of the real into the surreal. Zola's appreciation of the modern, and its correlative association with the animism and metamorphosis of a world forever in the process of becoming, underlines the parallel between his novels and paintings by Masson and Ernst, "le cadavre exquis," and Breton's desire to destroy convention. Zola also has a surrealist predilection for the insolite. Gloves and mannequins are but two fetish objects that bring to mind the surrealist's play of analogies, Eluard' s poetry, Magritte's painting, and Bellmer's Doll. Zola emerges as a proto-surrealist writer whose object and concomitant apocalyptic vision help to explain the recreation of the world promised by the alchemist and cherished by Breton: Behold, I make all things new. (LK)