by Emile Zola
He had continued to write, by then engaged in a new series, Les Quatre Evangiles (The Four Gospels), consisting of Fécondité (1899; Fecundity) , Travail (1901; Work), and Vérité (1903; Truth), the last bearing largely on the Dreyfus case; his death interrupted the final volume, Justice. In his last years he also became an accomplished photographer whose scenes of city and country life are valuable documents of their time and apt extensions of his documentary novels. He was only sixty-two in September 1902—although physically and psychologically much aged by his sufferings—when he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A clogged chimney diverted fumes from the pellet stove into the bedroom as he and his wife slept; she recovered. Murder was alleged and investigated, but the matter was never resolved. At his funeral a delegation of coal miners accompanied the casket, gravely intoning “Ger-mi-nal” in cadence, over and over again.
Zola’s star has risen and fallen since his death. In the first half of the twentieth century he was one of the most widely read authors in the world, his name virtually synonymous with the struggle for social progress. He was translated into all languages and was a staple, especially, in the Soviet Union. His role in the Dreyfus affair doubly assured his stature—because of it he was even the subject of a Hollywood film, The Life of Émile Zola (1937), with Paul Muni in the part. But the 1930s were probably the peak of his posthumous career. After World War II, especially, his work acquired a reputation as turgid, well-meaning gruel. The New Left more or less consigned him to the dustbin of history, and litterateurs everywhere decided he was clumsy, laborious, didactic. It is true that even in his lifetime and among his supporters he was never considered a particularly subtle author, and his most fervent disciples would have found it hard to make a case for him as a prose stylist—a fatal deficiency in France, where style reigns supreme, where his older colleague Flaubert, the model of the stylist, sometimes hesitated for weeks over a choice of words.
Nana, however, shows how wrongheaded all such approaches were in regard to Zola, and effects a demonstration of his unparalleled strengths. Zola may not have parsed ambiguities or dealt in fugitive emotions—he did not work close up, with a single-hair brush, but on a large scale, with a palette knife (perhaps, actually, like his old friend Cézanne, he could be said to have worked with a brush in one hand and a knife in the other). The analogy to painting is not idly chosen, and it is not simply because of his close connection to the Impressionists, although in many ways he resembles less the starkly graphic Manet or the dreamily approximative Monet or even the dramatically essentialist Cézanne than he does Gustave Caillebotte, the Impressionist most devoted to depicting the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, which he framed as radically as with a camera lens. For that matter, while it has become a terrible cliché to say of a writer of the past that had he lived in our time, he would surely have become a filmmaker, with Zola it might actually be true.
Zola is at his best when staging crowd scenes and major conflicts. This is no small feat, especially when you consider how often great writers have avoided such things—in how many classic war novels, for example, the principal action is set offstage or viewed through a narrow and subjective focus. And while most nineteenth-century novels begin and end with a major set piece—one to introduce the characters and set them in motion against the backdrop, the other to tie up loose ends and release us and the characters from our mutual contract—each of Nana’s chapters is a set piece. The chapters pass in succession, like so many acts of a tragedy: the theater, the dinner, the country house, the horse race. The chapters immediately call up a visual analogy: They are wide-screen affairs, like movies shot in Cinerama or like the panoramic photographs Zola himself took around 1900. Although in truth there are plenty of closeups and flurries of montaged action, we are given the illusion that the camera, as it were, takes in the whole scene, all at once and unmovingly, while characters pass across its unblinking aperture. Zola excels at directing his characters’ points of view, listening to them talk while they take in the setting and the peripheral action surrounding them, and then following their gaze to some other characters some distance away. Upon being introduced by the commentary of the first set of characters, these become in their turn the focus of the author’s attention for a while before passing the baton to yet more people in some other corner of the setting. This provides for a powerful spatial illusion.
Zola’s method appears to all but eliminate the omniscient narrator—he is present at all times, of course, but Zola is so clever at inserting exposition into casual dialogue that it feels as though we are witnessing everything for ourselves without mediation. The direct authorial commentary, meanwhile, discreetly dissolves into the scene setting, since almost all of it is parenthetical, the most significant observations being either delivered by the characters in the course of apparently banal chitchat or else built into the fabric of the plot. The final chapter, for example, tells us everything we need to know about Zola’s attitude toward the Franco-Prussian War, but it does so incidentally, in hubbub rising up from the street while our attention is focused on Nana’s plight as she lies in bed in her hotel room. Like a great documentary painter (anyone from Bruegel to Courbet to Seurat) or filmmaker (perhaps Jean Renoir, who was the son of the Impressionist painter Auguste, an acquaintance of Zola’s, and who made a spectacular silent adaptation of Nana in 1926), Zola unfolds for his audience the entire social fabric of his setting, in lavish detail, and conveys exactly what he thinks about it all while pretending to be no more than passively subjected to it, as if it were weather, and keeping his eye on a few central figures, as if their actions were not crucially interwoven with and wholly dependent upon their background.
The story of Nana is simplicity itself—thanks largely to the movies, it has become a thumping cliché in the intervening century and a quarter, although it wasn’t yet one at the time. It is, classically, the story of the poor girl who uses her body to advance through society, nearly to the very top, before being finally betrayed by her fate, or her genes, or her hubris, or her lack of education, so that she falls back down, metaphorically or otherwise, to the muck of her origins. Meanwhile men of all shapes, sizes, ages, and stations have become besotted with her, all of them at some cost, whether to their money or their marriages or their dignity or their lives. Besides the obvious titillation factor, the story is so potent and durable because, like all the most mythopoetic stories (consider Don Quixote or Moby-Dick, for instance), its plot and its central metaphor are one and the same. Nana herself is a perfectly rounded, three-dimensional character, whose strength and generosity are as apparent by the end as her vanity and cruelty and selfishness, but she is also a metaphorical linchpin, the embodiment of the vapid decadence and dull hypocrisy of the Second Empire, whose fall she enacts in boudoir scale.
The Second Empire was a particularly ignoble passage in French history. Napoleon III was essentially a bounder who fancied himself a Caesar. Whereas his uncle, the first Napoleon, had at least the excuse that he had helped put an end to the carnage of the Revolution in its final throes—as well as the less defensible proposition that he had subjugated the better part of Europe and North Africa in a psychopathic drive of murderous greed easily assimilated to the collective vanity of a nation—the “little Napoleon” (as Victor Hugo called him) had nothing but his name to boast of. France was by then something of a modern country—Paris, at least, was arguably the most modern city in the world—and yet it was subject to imperial whim and beset by an idiotic ruling class that did not even have the alibi of tradition to excuse its follies and delusions. Zola, writing ten years after the action depicted, describing a time when he was an impetuous young journalist and the friend and champion of the Impressionists, is not concerned with his own milieu but seeks to represent the elite, the people who shut down his newspapers and oppressed his readers—the class that was, in effect, still in charge of France after Sedan and the fall of the empire and the Commune and its bloody suppression, for all that they were now opera
ting within an ostensibly republican frame, and that social laws were gradually ameliorating the lives of their subjects.
He brilliantly selects his characters to provide a cross section of the imperial bestiary without appearing schematic. There are the theater people, the prostitutes, the operators, the deadbeat aristocrats, the upright citizens who lose their minds in the presence of sex, the upwardly mobile courtesans, the church-intoxicated matrons, the cynical press hacks, and so on. All of these people are magnetized by Nana, loose meteorites who fall into her orbit, some coming into otherwise unlikely contact with others, the class order temporarily rearranged so that it becomes clear how little class standing has to do with any virtue but the mere possession of power. Nana’s power is, of course, temporary and provisional, the result of a genetic freak in concert with an odd combination of innocence and guile, passivity and willpower. She can effect a kind of misrule for an interval, and then she will fade away or be crushed. Her type came into being with the creation of the middle class, which allowed the illusion of class mobility. The mobility of the courtesan is false advertising; not only can she ascend only briefly, but in the process she has forfeited her ties to any other class. The myth is that she will marry a rich man and perhaps outlive him and inherit his property, and such a creature is indeed evoked in the book, but Zola carefully keeps the apparition ambiguous—we are finally unsure whether the woman Nana sees actually corresponds to the story she seeks to illustrate. Nana’s fate has an inevitability that comes with the job; consciously or not, we are aware from the first pages that we are about to witness the arc of a rocket.
Nana is a crepuscular novel. Its laughter is shrill, its lights are too bright, its frenzies are dangerous, its small moments of actual happiness are so obviously doomed they seem sadistically intended. An empire is about to fall, and although all things considered, that fall will only briefly reorganize society, the reader is aware before the end that the characters most likely to land on their feet are the very worst ones. All the amateurs, romantics, overreachers, and pretenders will be crushed. Zola’s scientific affectations, whether the alleged detachment of Naturalism or the obsolete genetic blather that makes its way into the narration, barely intrude upon the reader; his misogynistic puffing—his invocations of Nana’s poisonous effect on men—can be safely glided over, since it is clear he does not entirely believe it himself. Nana is too complicated a character to be useful as a moralistic blunt instrument, even if Zola seems unwilling to acknowledge this until the very end of the book. Nana is about power, and in that sense it is zoological, as well as cautionary. It is also a great illusion, an exhilarating work of total cinema, a whirlwind that does not let up, with a force undiminished by time or technological competition.
Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. He is the author of Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts and coeditor, with Melissa Holbrook Pierson, of O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Visiting Professor of Writing and the History of Photography at Bard College. He lives with his wife and son in Ulster County, New York.
Nana
CHAPTER I
At nine o’clock the Variety Theatre was still almost empty. In the balcony and orchestra stalls a few persons waited, lost amidst the garnet-coloured velvet seats, in the faint light of the half extinguished gasalier.a The huge crimson curtain was enveloped in shadow, and not a sound came from the stage behind. The foot-lights were not yet lit up, and the seats of the musicians were unoccupied. High up, however, in the third gallery, close to the roof—displaying figures of naked women and children floating among clouds, to which the gas imparted a greenish tinge—were heard the sounds of shouts and laughter above a continual hum of conversation, and a crowd of men and women, all wearing the caps of the working classes, were seated in rows reaching almost to the gilded festoons of the ceiling. Now and again an attendant would appear, fussily conducting a lady and gentleman to their seats—the gentleman in evening dress, and the lady slim and slightly stooping, and glancing slowly over the house. Two young men suddenly appeared in the stalls close to the orchestra. They remained standing, looking round about them.
“What did I tell you, Hector?” exclaimed the elder—a tall fellow, with a slight, black moustache. “We have come too early. You might just as well have allowed me to finish my cigar.”
An attendant passed by at this moment. “Oh! M. Fauchery,” she said familiarly, “it will not begin for half an hour.”
“Then why on earth do they say nine o’clock on the bills?” asked Hector, whose long, thin face assumed an expression of intense annoyance. “This very morning Clarisse, who is in the piece, assured me that the curtain would go up at nine, precisely.”
For a minute they relapsed into silence, as they raised their heads and gazed into the shadows of the boxes; but the green paper, with which the latter were lined, made them obscurer still. Below, the small boxes under the balcony disappeared in total darkness. In the balcony boxes only a very stout lady, leaning heavily on the velvet-covered balustrade was to be seen. To the right and the left, between high columns, the stage boxes, hung with drapery deeply fringed, remained empty. The body of the house, decorated in white and gold, relieved by pale green, seemed to disappear filled as it was with a misty haze arising from the subdued light emanating from the huge crystal gasalier.
“Did you succeed in securing a stage-box for Lucy?” asked Hector.
“Yes,” replied the other, “but not without a deal of trouble. Oh! there is no danger of Lucy’s coming too early—not she!” He stifled a yawn, and then, after a brief silence, resumed; “You are lucky, you who have never yet been present at a first night. ‘The Blonde Venus’ will be the success of the year. Every one has been speaking of the piece for six months past. Ah! my boy, such music—such ‘go’! Bordenave, who knows what’s what, kept it purposely for the time of the Exhibition.”b
Hector listened religiously. At length he hazarded a question: “And Nana—the new star who is to play Venus—do you know her?”
“Oh, hang it! are you going to begin that too?” exclaimed Fauchery, gesticulating wildly. “Ever since this morning I have heard of nothing but Nana. I have met more than twenty fellows I know, and it has been Nana here and Nana there! Do you suppose I know every petticoat in Paris? Nana is one of Bordenave’s inventions. She must be something choice!”
After this explosion he calmed down a little. But the emptiness of the house, the dim light that pervaded the whole, the opening and shutting of doors, and the hushed voices suggestive of a church, irritated him.
“Confound it!” he said, suddenly. “I can’t stand this, you know. I must go out. Perhaps we shall meet Bordenave below. He will give us some details.”
In the marble paved vestibule, where the box-office was situated, they found the public beginning to arrive. Through the three open doors all the busy throng on the Boulevards could be seen enjoying the beautiful April evening. Carriages dashed up to the theatre, and the doors were slammed noisily. People entered by twos and threes, and, after stopping at the box-office, ascended the double staircase in the rear—the women walking slowly with a swinging gait. In the glare of the gas were pasted, on the naked walls of this hall, whose meagre decorations in the style of the Empire suggested the peristyle of a card-board temple, some enormous yellow posters, in which Nana’s name appeared in huge black letters. Men were loitering in front of these bills as they read them, while others were standing about talking among themselves, and blocking up the doorways; whilst near the box-office a thick-set man, with a big, clean-shaved face, was roughly replying to some people who were in vain endeavouring to obtain seats.
“There’s Bordenave!” said Fauchery, as he and Hector descended the stairs.
But the manager had caught si
ght of him. “You are a nice fellow,” he called out. “That is the way you write me a notice, is it? I opened the ‘Figaro’c this morning—not a word.”
“Wait a bit,” replied Fauchery. “I must see your Nana before I can write about her. Besides, I made no promise!”
Then, to prevent further discussion, he presented his cousin, M. Hector de la Faloise, a young man who had come to complete his education in Paris. The manager weighed the young man at a glance; but Hector surveyed the manager with some little emotion. This then was Bordenave, the exhibitor of women, whom he treated in the style of a prison warder, and whose brain was ever hatching some fresh money-making scheme—a perfect cynic, always shouting, or spitting, or smacking his thighs, and possessing the coarse mind of a trooper! Hector was anxious to make a good impression on him.