This chapter addresses the invisibilities, openings and transparencies of city architecture in Émile Zola's Paris, focusing on La Curée (The Kill) from 1872 and Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) from 1883, the second and eleventh books in the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871–93), which endeavoured to provide ‘A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. The architecture which dominates these two novels – Haussmann's boulevards and their mansions in La Curée, the modern department store in Au Bonheur des Dames – comes closer to bringing about total visibility and connectedness than any of the city spaces I have considered so far. Yet even as they seem to achieve total openness in the city, these forms of architecture continue to repress and exclude other spaces and forms of life, especially working-class spaces. They do so not through darkness or obfuscation as in Mary Barton, but through the promotion of visibility to an absolute and overwhelming principle. This process involves a phantasmagorical blending of architecture and commodities, in which the commodity's mystifying and alienating character comes to be incorporated into the structure of the city. Glass and iron allow transparency to become heightened in these predominantly bourgeois spaces, but in such a way that new kinds of ideological enclosure are created, thereby taking to an extreme Lefebvre's illusion of transparency. This involves a confusion of interior and exterior which recalls what we saw in Dickens, but now operating less through processes of mobile ruination and restoration (though these are also present) than through the extension of the intoxicating logic of the commodity into a principle of architectural structure.

The multiplication of visibility and transparency brought about by these new forms of architecture is both described and enacted by Zola's use of literary montage, which anticipates cinema, as Sergei Eisenstein was the first to point out. For Eisenstein the Rougon-Macquart cycle was not only a single ecstatic whole built out of a series of montage effects (matching what Eisenstein sought to achieve in his films), but also ‘poetic and musical’, in the way Zola

This chapter examines spatial and architectural whiteness in the nineteenth-century city, taking it as a final example of invisible architecture in the period. I propose that such whiteness is both a precursor and a counterpoint to the white walls that would come to define modernist architecture in the early twentieth century. In line with a number of critics in recent decades, the chapter therefore reads the nineteenth century, or the ‘Victorian Age’, as neither hermetically sealed nor uniform, but rather as porous and temporally fractured, while still recognising that it displays recurrent features and patterns which cut across texts and spaces.

I begin from Mark Wigley's suggestion that the hidden logic of modernist architecture is to make decoration and the absence of decoration one and the same while claiming to erase ornament completely, and that this is exemplified by the white wall, where ‘having been stripped of decoration, the white surface itself takes over the space-defining role of decorative art’. I argue that in contrast to this erasing role within modernism, nineteenth-century whiteness is strikingly multiple and unsettled, alive with the contradictions which are typically submerged in the white walls of the International Style practised by Gropius, Le Corbusier and their contemporaries. The whiteness of the nineteenth-century city cleanses but also dirties, erases but also exposes, conceals ornamentation but also functions as ornament. Such whiteness is a compelling example of invisible architecture. Like the other forms of invisible architecture discussed in this book, it carries a powerful ideological force yet also retains a utopian aspect, seeming to offer in its blankness the hope of limitless possibilities. Though not itself a space, urban whiteness is nonetheless paradigmatic of the spaces and structures I have considered so far, operating as an aesthetic feature that is both fascinating and disturbing, at once dazzlingly visible and hauntingly empty. To begin to explore these contradictions, I turn first to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) and its celebrated chapter ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, which although not concerned directly with the city, acts as a point of departure for the issues I wish to consider.

In chapter 5 of Dombey and Son, Paul Dombey is christened in a ‘chill and earthy’ (DS 5.61) church that seems to anticipate his own untimely demise. Dickens quotes Hamlet's words to Polonius, ‘into my grave?’ (DS 5.61; Hamlet II.ii), in relation to it. In the manuscript version of the novel an addition appears, in John Forster's hand, describing the font as a ‘rigid marble basin which seemed to have been playing a churchyard game at cup and ball with its matter-of-fact pedestal, and to have been just at that moment caught on the top of it’. This note, whose status is uncertain, is not included in most editions of the novel from the original 1846 serialisation onwards. Yet it usefully points to a peculiarity of architecture in Dickens, that no matter how ‘rigid’ or ‘matter-of-fact’ it seems, it is nearly always infused with movement, even playfulness. The solid, practical font is imagined as being on the verge of instability, poised at the momentary midpoint of a repeated movement up and down, part of a child's game; a fort-da movement perhaps. This instability extends to the text itself, since it is unclear to what extent the description properly belongs to the novel, or to Dickens.

I take this paratextual addition as exemplifying the way architecture in Dickens is always infiltrated by its opposite, by anti-architecture.It is my argument in this chapter that we should read Dickens as expressing a new understanding of architecture that is dynamic, based on movement rather than stability, and therefore appropriate to the modern city. Focusing on Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, I read the railway and the river as forms of anti-architecture which both connect and divide urban space, and in doing so undo the conventional role of architecture as securing and stabilising the environments we inhabit. This anti-architectural tendency extends to the uncanny domestic houses of these two novels, so that what architecture does, and is, and its role within literature, are all called into question.

Invisible Architecture

What is invisible architecture? It is what holds the modern city together, but also what prevents it from appearing as a unified and knowable entity, since it means there is always some part of the city which is hidden. It is structure which traverses the transparent, the unseen and the mobile, yet is resistant to interpretation as a totality. Like the psychoanalytic unconscious, it cannot be grasped directly, though its existence can be inferred or projected. It organises city space by limiting and directing perception, especially visual perception. It typically conceals or represses what is unpleasant under capitalism, such as the connections between rich and poor, or wealth and waste, but it can also provide a space for the possible reimagining or reshaping of the city. It brings together the reactionary, paranoid, ideological and molar aspects of the modern city with its capacity for the utopian, fluctuating and destabilising, without simply collapsing or reconciling these things.

The contention of this book is that what I am calling invisible architecture plays a significant role in the literary and cultural imaginary of the years between approximately 1830 and 1910, in ways which only become apparent when the city is analysed as the meeting point of intersecting drives towards mobility, concealment and transparency. This was a period when cities in Britain and elsewhere seemed no longer graspable or comprehensible as a single whole (if they ever were), unless perhaps as a ‘mass’, a concept which unifies the city's population only to render it more unknowable. William Cook Taylor, whom Asa Briggs calls ‘an apologist of the new industrial system’, described northern English industrial towns in the 1840s as ‘an aggregate of masses, our conception of which clothe themselves in terms which express something portentous and fearful’. Raymond Williams notes that ‘the great city was […] so overwhelming, that its people were often seen in a single way: as a crowd, as “masses” or as a “workforce”’. For Charles Baudelaire, the modern city is ungraspable because it disallows totalisation, like modernity itself, which he calls ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.