‘Les objets plus ou moins déformés’: Émile Zola’s Screen Theory of Representation and the Rougon-Macquart Cycle

Abstract

This article argues for renewed attention to Émile Zola's notion of the ‘Écran transparent’ in light of calls to read the novelist's Rougon-Macquart cycle as proto-modernist. It claims that in his 8 August 1864 letter to Antony Valabrègue, Zola lays the theoretical foundations for a departure from verisimilitude, advancing instead a mode of perception that frequently generates deformed objects – objects engendered by a ‘surréalisme particulier’ (Gilles Deleuze). The article re-reads the ‘prospective qualities’ (Susan Harrow) of Germinal, Au Bonheur des Dames and La Curée to explicate the deformative logics of the Zola's Screen.