Zola: Colorist, Abstractionist Susan Harrow ZOLA: COLORIST, ABSTRACTIONIST anet’s pools of glossy black, Mallarmé’s spaces of absolute white, Whis- Mtler’s liquid blues and silvers . .1 The work of Zola’s contemporaries drives the search for pure color, spurred by the desire to attenuate, abstract, or abolish the empirical referent. This abstractionist quality is integral to the inter- art project of the later nineteenth century, in particular the modern movement that forms in the wake of Baudelaire and Manet.2 The aesthetics of Whistler, Mallarmé, and Zola reveal a consonance of approach and sensibility in terms of color and abstractionism that traverses the boundaries between visual and textual media. The titles of Whistler’s paintings tend to subordinate subject matter and privilege the artist’s color work, evacuating the referent.3 Mallar- mé’s exploration of blanc and blankness takes forward a primarily monochro- matic project, while red, gold, and azure form the poet’s wider tonal palette: “L’Azur,” the poet’s frst major poem (Poèmes du “Parnasse contemporain” of 1866), intimates the desired horizon where the real is abolished and beauty reigns.4 Zola’s early essays on the painting of Manet (1866–68) illuminate 1. Manet’s blacks are central to his painting, emerging often in representations of clothing, male and female: Breakfast in the Studio: The Black Jacket, 1868; Berthe Morisot in Black Hat, 1872; and the barmaid’s dress in Un bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1882. At the time of writing, the exhibition “Manet in Black,” which focuses on Manet’s printmaking and graphic art, is taking place at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In ekphrastic terms we think of Manet and Mallarmé’s collaboration over the translation-illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven in 1875. 2. Joy Newton discusses Zola’s practice in terms of “interdisciplinary osmosis” (35). The key primary texts are, of course, Baudelaire’s “Salon de 1846” and “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (1863). 3. I am thinking here of Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 2, 1864; Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1871; Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, 1871–74; and Nocturne Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, 1872–75. Whistler insisted on the need for art to transcend representation and, in the process, free itself from affective, didactic, and anecdotal freight. For Whistler, the modern artwork stands in and for itself, generating value that is existential rather than representational. For a probing examination of Whistler’s aesthetic, see Dayan, chapter 1. 4. Mallarmé’s attention to the symbolic and plastic resonance of monochrome values is a structuring quality of his poetry and his poetics. See Abbott on the expressive The Romanic Review Volume 102 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 466 Susan Harrow the prismatic patch or the color trace that slips free of its referent: when Zola writes “[Manet] voit blond et il voit par masses” (Pour Manet 105), his very syntax enacts the fight from a subject (or subject matter) to style, echoing the abstractionist aesthetic that will develop across the arts in the latter part of the century. At the same time, Zola shapes our reading of the painting, driving our attention to color (“il voit blond”) and to abstractionism (“il voit par masses”) (105). By fltering his ideas so often in terms of color and abstract form, Zola performs in his writing on art a process analogous to the erasure of referential value in modern painting. Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine identifes the shift from Naturalist nominalism to prismatic abstraction in his preface to Écrits sur l’art as a signal feature of Zola’s art writing, here with reference to Manet’s painting: “Tête, fond, vêtement, s’ils sont encore nommés, se métamorphosent en leur simple chromatisme” (24–25). In his introduction to Zola’s essays on Manet, Leduc-Adine observes, “[Zola] veut d’abord trouver les éléments form- els d’une nouvelle grammaire visuelle et picturale; tout tableau est d’abord une forme, une matérialité, et avant d’en étudier le sens, il étudie avec précision le système des couleurs,” and he highlights by way of example Zola’s careful nuancing of the whites in his appraisal of “Olympia” (Pour Manet 23). Later, when Zola is discussing Manet’s Le Linge (1875), the novelist underscores the painter’s insistence on color that is fragmented, fattened, and planal in the treatment of the central laundress fgure: “Les yeux sont représentés par deux plaques noires: le nez, les lèvres, sont réduits à de simples lignes roses” (Écrits sur l’art 349). As he foregrounds color and form in Manet’s painting, Zola develops a heuristic approach that draws the reader (and the viewer) into the material qualities of the artist’s work and begins to nurture the reader’s capac- ity for simultaneous focus on color and abstraction (or dissolution). More than this, when one medium (writing) transposes the processes of another (visual art), the intermedial capacity of both media is revealed as an urgent site of scholarly study. Yet, the potential of an intermedial approach may often go unnoticed or be neglected, as Henri Mitterand suggests when he identifes an unexpected relation between Zola, Manet, and Mallarmé: “Un même fl, inaperçu des critiques, et encore mal perçu aujourd’hui, unit L’Assommoir, Le Linge et L’Après-midi d’un faune, en dépit des différences de genres et de langages” (338). In this article I want to respond to the suggestiveness of Mitterand’s highlighting of the intermedial capacity of Zola’s writing while eschewing a conventional ekphrastic reading. My approach is to shift the focus from Zola’s engagement with the visual medium of Manet and his followers in order to explore Zola’s work as a colorist and abstractionist in his own medium, with specifc reference to two novels of the Rougon-Macquart series. qualities of color in Baudelaire’s and Mallarmé’s aesthetics, specifcally the power of color to speak as if with its own voice. Zola: Colorist, Abstractionist 467 Zola and Color Practice It is useful, in the frst instance, to review some of the key constraints on evaluating color in writing. As soon as we try to move beyond discussions of elementary color symbol- ism (that of the red sky over Paris in La Curée, for example) or seek to engage in more than a rudimentary decoding of variable color (that of the dyer’s water in L’Assommoir), we encounter a blind spot. Color practice is occluded in critical readings of Zola’s novels (and of literature more generally). The reader of the chromatic text is, to all intents, color-blind, or at least begins from that position. He or she enters the monochrome space of (conventionally) black- and-white typography, that is, a space where the words “bluish green” appear, in colorist terms, no different on the page from “reddish brown”: the verbal medium cannot begin to equal the visual medium. This is an immediate and nonnegotiable constraint on any bid to “read for color.” There is a further constraint: Zola’s practice cannot be described within the parameters of normative ekphrasis. Zola’s search for color or his move to inscribe color (which is a bid to activate the suggestion of color in the reader’s mind) develops independently of any reference to a specifc artwork and even to artwork in general, thereby resisting traditional defnitions of ekphrasis. There is no verifable given art model against which to read Zola’s visual quality, the visuality of his writing. In this respect Zola’s approach may be seen as the antithesis of the appropriative or colonizing bid of ekphrasis, which seeks to subordinate a given visual image to the presumed hegemony of the verbal medium. It is clear that we must approach Zola’s visuality differently: as a medium that is both distinct from and parallel to that of painting. My approach here is fundamentally interartistic in that it seeks to suggest and intimate reciproci- ties, connections, and analogues between visual and verbal media. Rather than speculate on the infuence of particular artworks, I aim to explore the visuality of Zola’s writing. Beyond ekphrastic resistance, there are other constraints upon reading Zola chromatically. First, one can perhaps get beyond the story (to the horizon of symbol or allegory), but one cannot get beneath it: the plot is the ground that shapes the choice of metaphors and informs visuality. Color inevitably con- tains and reveals the infection of story. Color cannot be subjectless and pure in the writerly medium in the way that a painting by Mondrian or Rothko might appear maximally abstract; thus, we confront an absolute difference of medium. Immersed in the diachronic work of reading a narrative, the reader is telos-bound to carry that story with him or her and to interpret the color instance on that basis, to seek meaning and to project meaning back onto that color instance. The incommensurable differences between the arts mean that reading for color is an activity at once tantalizing and variously constrained. 468 Susan Harrow If the persistence of a blind spot over the writing (and the reading) of color is predictable, not to engage with Zola’s color practice would be paradoxical given the writer’s scrupulous inscription in his art criticism of the chromatic qualities of painting, and given the consummate color work of his fction writ- ing. While we must remain attentive to those intermedial differences and to what Peter Dayan in his introduction to Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art terms the “incalculable” relationship between artistic media, it is also possible and, arguably, productive to seek to probe potential intermedial ana- logues (3).