Gutted buildings : the hapticity of demolition in Émile Zola’s The Kill

Abstract

Émile Zola’s La Curée (or The Kill as it is commonly titled in English), the second instalment in the French novelist’s magnum opus Rougon-Macquart cycle, has had an unconventional reception in the Anglophone context. With its deep imbrication in the geo-politics of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s large-scale urban renovation of Paris, the novel first captured the attention of the postmodern geographers during the spatial turn of the 1980s. More recently, the critical focus has shifted to its materialism and the disruptive nature of the novel’s affects. A key leitmotif in the novel is the ‘gutted building’, the demolished architecture that was a product of the haussmannisation of Paris, a preoccupation that straddles both the spatial and affective registers of the text and which is distinctly haptic in its tactile interfacing between body and environment. Focusing specifically on the hapticity of demolition in The Kill, this essay examines how affects complicate both the didactic intent of the novel and Zola’s principally deterministic focus on the influence of milieu and environment on human behaviour.