Modern Sensitivity: Émile Zola’s Synaesthetic Cheeses

In the mid-1890s, Émile Zola took part in a vast study of cognitive and physiological processes, conducted by Édouard Toulouse, and thus subjected himself to hundreds of tests that calculated his perceptual thresholds and fine motor skills.¹ The doctor probed the author’s sensory-motor system, measuring everything from his field of vision and sense of touch to his heart rate, reaction to smell, memory of sounds, and sensory associations. In the published work, Toulouse included charts, diagrams, and even photographs to document the writer’s intellectual and physiological competencies, and in so doing, he gave his readers various means of visualizing how sensations could be felt and interpreted. By participating in the enquiry, Zola essentially became a nineteenth-century medical record of a perceiving subject’s encounter with stimuli, a transcript of the modern human sensorium.

The explicit aim of Toulouse’s medical-psychological enquiry was to determine the extent to which ‘névropathie’ manifested itself in both the madman and the genius via an analysis of the subject’s receptiveness to — and subsequent understanding of — sensory information.² But the text reads more as a defence of Zola’s naturalism against its critics than as a study of pathological disorders. Apparently Zola’s descriptive techniques had called into question the proficiency of his perceptual apparatus and by extension the soundness of his mind as well as his moral conscience.³ According to Émile Hennequin, one of the critics to whom Toulouse responded directly, a literary work revealed its author’s mental and perceptual faculties by showing his personal way of apprehending the world ‘par un rythme et un groupement d’images, d’idées, d’émotions et de sensations’.⁴ Critics of Zola challenged his peculiar style, frequently deemed too visceral, vulgar, or uncanny.⁵ Even up to the middle of the twentieth century, the argument remained that the Zolian text relayed the (dys)functionality of its author’s perceptual organs. As one textbook asserted, ‘l’œil de Zola, ou sa plume, déforme ou agrandit tous les objets.’⁶ This deformation has been seen to undermine Zola’s pursuit of scientific objectivity, as he elaborates it in Le Roman expérimental.⁷ However, Toulouse reassured his late-nineteenth-century audience that Zola’s reactions to stimuli fell within a normal spectrum and firmly concluded that ‘l’étude des sensations et des perceptions ne permet pas de vérifier cette critique qu’on lui a adressé de grossir les objets’.⁸ Since the experiments revealed that Zola felt things normally, his perception, or means of interpreting the sensations, was deemed normal as well.

In arguing over the quality of the writer’s sensory apparatus, what both Toulouse and Zola’s critics seemed to overlook was the fact that Zola’s unusual depiction of materiality — which is fundamentally a narration of various sensorial encounters one has with objects — is not in fact a representation of his potentially pathological process of perceiving the world. It instead demonstrates literature’s ability to experiment with, and alter, the feeling of things. Zola does, in fact, ‘grossir les objets’, but not because he is incapable of perceiving them objectively.⁹ Rather, he plays with the functions of the five senses to highlight and redefine the sensibilités (the capacities to receive, filter, and analyse information) of his characters — and of his readers. This remapping of sensitivities is particularly evident in Zola’s representations of synaesthesia: when colours have weighted textures, or smells register as sounds. His sensory writing articulates a growing contemporary concern about how (and what) the modern subject is able to perceive. Like Toulouse’s Enquête, Zola’s examination of cross-modal perception takes inventory of the perceiving subject’s potential, giving readers new means to evaluate and diagnose aberrant perceptual processes; but unlike Toulouse, Zola undertakes this experimentation in order to reroute incoming stimuli while providing innovative visualizations of sensorial events. Zola effectively encourages readers to enact a ‘pathological’ mode of feeling.

In its experimentation, his synaesthetic writing is connected at once to medical- scientific discourses and modernist aesthetic practices which each developed new representational...