Between the Wordless Novel and the Unpublished Sequence: Gyula Zilzer's 1926 Corpus as a Historiographical Problem

This article examines an unpublished corpus of 176 original drawings produced by Gyula Zilzer in Paris in 1926 as visual sequences for Nana and La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, both by Émile Zola, and proposes a historiographical problem: the corpus satisfies the formal conditions of the wordless novel as defined by Baetens and Frey (2015) — form and content — but not its editorial and distributional conditions, given that it was never published, never circulated publicly, and remained unknown to subsequent practitioners and theorists for a century. The article argues that this situation calls for a category distinct from the wordless novel: an autonomous visual narrative that realised the formal conditions of the genre without constituting itself as a cultural object. A further distinction is introduced: whereas the founding figures of the wordless novel (Masereel, Nückel, Ward) conceived original narratives, Zilzer derived two structurally integrated sequences from canonical literary texts by Zola, adding a dimension — the construction of autonomous visual architecture upon and in tension with a pre-existing literary corpus — that is absent from the founding works.