The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times

The first comprehensive study of Zola based on the role of visual perception in his theories and works.The late nineteenth-century novel can be considered, in certain respects, as a visual art form. The Visual Novel attempts to develop and implement a visual methodology for approaching the novel, while undertaking a comprehensive study of Emile Zola's twenty-novel series, Les Rougon1acquart, and suggesting relationships between Zola's work and that of his contemporaries in painting, experimental psychology, and criticism. The author also analyzes three paintings from the impressionist period in detail and relates them to the handling of thematic content, viewpoint, and description in Zola's novels.William Berg traces the impact of vision in many of the major areas of novelistic endeavor: Zola's theories stress the key role of vision in the experimental method. Optical instruments and effects, underscoring the important motif of 'looking" (le regard), occupy a major place in the thematic content of Zola's novels. Viewpoint, central to Zola's program of narration objectivity, is characterized by a multiplicity of perspectives, often crossing the conventional boundaries between the spaces of narrator, character, and reader. Descriptive passages reveal a progressive, perceptual style, where the hazy impression yields to the solid, material perception of reality, embodying the crucial notion of determinism. Finally, Zola's figures, stimulated by external effects of light and color and shaped by the internal forces of fear and desire, lead us to locate the role of hallucination and visual imagination in the perceptual and creative processes. Berg then suggests parallels between Zola and other novelists of his time in each of the above areas, further demonstrating the visual nature of the cultural climate of late nineteenth-century France.