Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows

Abstract

I'd like to take off from a famous pronouncement, the This will kill that, not as declared by Claude Frollo in Notre-Dame de Paris, but instead as restated by Claude Lantier in Le ventre de Paris. Zola has his painter utter it, not very far from Beaubourg, at the point where he passes in front of Baltard's recently constructed pavilions for Les Halles. Claude has just noticed the rose window of Saint-Eustache, framed by the arcades of a passageway. It's then he repeats Victor Hugo's prophecy. Or rather he subverts it. For while Hugo's pedagogical idealism announced the book would sound the death knell of the cathedral, so once the scholar replaced the priest, democratic knowledge would replace hierarchical learning, Zola's message has nothing to do with secular freedom of thought; what he proclaims is a future of materialist satiety: at the same time iron replaces stone, Les Halles supplants the church and consumption displaces redemption; it's earthly nourishment will sweep away the opiate of the people. Zola was wrong, of course. This, in fact, didn't kill that. Contrary to what the naturalist manifesto prophesied, Baltard lost on all fronts-that of form and of content. His pavilions have disappeared. And, dominating a newly opened esplanade, the church's massive volume holds sway as it would never before have done, even during the most religious epochs. Zola was wrong. But that's not the point. The difference between Hugo's This will kill that and Zola's is for the former death is-like the book