by Emile Zola
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Émile Zola’s Nana through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
COMMENTS
The Nation
So far ‘Nana’ is indisputably M. Zola’s worst book. Curiously enough, the impression that it must leave upon every reader, whether blase or inexperienced, is that it is unreal and amateurish. This is unfortunate, for M. Zola has certainly never chosen a theme better capable of illustrating his great theory that there is no sunshine anywhere in life, and it cannot fail to be disappointing to so distinguished a moralist to make so slight an impression with so potent a subject. Compared with the conviction conveyed in such a sentence as “He knows not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell,” ‘Nana’ seems trivial. There are some “facts of life” which can be estimated quite accurately without experience of them, and it might be objected to this book that the misery of the life of a “Nana” is one; but it is a sufficient objection to it that, judged by M. Zola’s own standard, it fails in verisimilitude.
—February 19, 1880
Henry James
Does [M. Zola] call that vision of things of which Nana is a representation, nature? The mighty mother, in her blooming richness, seems to blush from brow to chin at the insult! On what authority does M. Zola represent nature to us as a combination of the cesspool and the house of prostitution? On what authority does he represent foulness rather than fairness as the sign that we are to know her by? On the authority of predilections alone; and this is his great trouble and the weak point of his incontestably remarkable talent.... Reality is the object of M. Zola’s efforts, and it is because we agree with him in appreciating it highly that we protest against its being discredited. In a time when literary taste has turned, to a regrettable degree, to the vulgar and the insipid, it is of high importance that realism should not be compromised. Nothing tends more to compromise it than to represent it as necessarily allied to the impure. That the pure and impure are for M. Zola, as conditions of taste, vain words, and exploded ideas, only proves that his advocacy does more to injure an excellent cause than to serve it. It takes a very good cause to carry a Nana on its back, and if realism breaks down, and the conventional comes in again with a rush, we may know the reason why.... Taste, in its intellectual applications, is the most human faculty we possess, and as the novel may be said to be the most human form of art, it is a poor speculation to put the two things out of conceit of each other. Calling it naturalism will never make it profitable. It is perfectly easy to agree with M. Zola, who has taken his stand with more emphasis than necessary; for the matter reduces itself to a question of application. It is impossible to see why the question of application is less urgent in naturalism than at any other point of the scale, or why, if naturalism is, as M. Zola claims, a method of observation, it can be followed without delicacy or tact. There are all sorts of things to be said about it; it costs us no effort whatever to admit in the briefest terms that it is an admirable invention, and full of promise; but we stand aghast at the want of tact it has taken to make so unreadable a book as Nana.
—from an unsigned review in The Parisian (February 26, 1880)
Gustave Flaubert
In my opinion Nana contains wonderful things: Bordenave, Mignon, etc., and the end, which is epic. It is a colossus with dirty feet, but it is a colossus.
Many things in it shock me, but no matter! One must be able to admire things one doesn’t love.
—from a letter to Mme. Roger des Genettes, translated by Francis Steegmuller (April 18, 1880)
A. K. Fiske
Critics have had their say regarding the latest product of that genius of the muck-rake, Emile Zola. Many of them have endeavored to find a justification for his opening of the sewers of human society into the gardens of literature. Much ability is displayed in this offensive work of engineering skill, and people are asked to pardon the foul sights and odors because of the consummate art with which they are presented. But intellectual power and literary workmanship are neither to be admired nor commended of themselves. They are to be judged by their fruits, and are no more to be justified in producing that which is repulsive or unwholesome than a manufactory whose sole purpose is to create and disseminate bad smells and noxious vapors. Such an unsavory establishment might do its work with a wonderful display of skill and most potent results, but the health authorities of society would have ample occasion for taking measures against its obnoxious business, while those who encouraged the introduction of its products into their households would be guilty of inconceivable folly, besides exhibiting a morbid liking for filthy exhalations.
But it is not alone in M. Zola’s literary talent that excuse is found for his work. It is said to lay bare a phase of human life whose existence is actual, and knowledge of which affords security and perhaps suggests remedies for its evils. The phase of life with which he deals in “Nana” is undoubtedly real, but is, unfortunately, not so far a realm of the unknown that an accurate exploration or a vivid portrayal of its characters and scenes is at all necessary or desirable. Those who are likely to make a salutary use of a knowledge of its secrets have no difficulty in obtaining it, and there is no reason for bringing its revelations into the family circle or the chamber of the schoolgirl. The life of the fallen among women is no deep mystery. It is well enough known in its glare and glitter, in its allurement and revelry, in its Circean fascinations and their besotting effects, in its coarse vulgarity and in its bestial pollutions. The whole Avernian descent from gay hilarity and defiance of doom to putridity and despair is a reality of the world’s everyday experience....
But, though these things are real, M. Zola’s delineations of them are not truthful. His work has been called “realistic,” and that has been paraded as a merit; but what is meant by this word upon which a new meaning is thrust to serve the purposes of criticism? People averse to analyzing take it to mean that the work in question portrays life and character precisely as they exist, without the color or the glamour which fiction is supposed generally to throw over its descriptions. But as applied to Zola’s work it means nothing of the kind. It means that he drags into literature what others would not touch because of its coarseness or its foulness. He displays no extraordinary power in painting scenes of actual life, in portraying human character or in fathoming the feelings or the motives of men.... M. Zola may know more of the life that he undertakes to portray than decent readers care to know, but men who go through the world with their eyes open, and are capable of making those inferences in regard to character and experience which surface indications suggest, know that this book is replete with exaggeration. It does not describe the real life of the class whose type is its central figure, with the sharp lines of truth. The picture is colossal in proportions and flaring in colors. It is no more in the tone of every-day reality than “King Lear” or “The Bride of Lammermoor.” This huge, fleshy Venus, with gross attractions of person and no touch of mental or moral charm, exercising a relentless dominion of lust over the rich and proud, the stupid and the brilliant, the unsophisticated and the experienced, is a daring figment of the imagination, as much so as the witch that lured the companions of Ulysses to their swinish fate.
—from a review of Nana published in the North American Review (July 1880)
Harper’s Weekly
A book not worth the reading, and in all respects not worth the writing, is Zola’s Nana, which the Austrian has forbidden the sale of, on account of a conviction that it is an outrage upon morality.
—August 9, 1884
Havelock Ellis
The chief service which Zola has rendered to his fellow-artists and successors, the reason of the immense stimulus he supplies, seems to lie in the proofs he has brought of the latent artistic uses of the rough, neglected details of life. The Rougon-Macquart series has been to his weaker brethren like that great sheet knit at the four corners, let down from Heaven full of four-footed beasts and creeping things and fowls in the air, and bearing in it the demonstration that to the artist as to the moralist nothing can be called common or unclean. It has henceforth been possible for other novelists to find inspiration where before they could never have turned, to touch life with a vigour and audacity of phrase which, without Zola’s example, they would have trembled to use, while they still remain free to bring to their work the simplicity, precision, and inner experience which he has never possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of the novel.
—from Affirmations (1898)
Ben Ray Redman
“Nana” is, I firmly believe, a very bad novel. The real tragedy of the book, though not the one the author intended, is the transformation of a woman into a symbol. At the outset Nana is a perfectly credible trull, unscrupulous, voluptuous, shameless, and vigorous; but her life, for the reader, has scarcely commenced before she starts to change slowly from a full-blooded animal into a symbol of evil.... “Nana” could never have been written by a man who possessed a shred of humor: it is grotesque.
—from The Nation (August 1, 1923)
Roland Barthes
Nana is truly an epic book; not only because of the admirable excess of the descriptions, but also because of the very tempo of the work, the familiar tempo of catastrophes. Zola wishes to describe a degradation, a collapse, and the whole movement of his narrative bows to that intention.
—from the Bulletin Mensuel (June 1955)
QUESTIONS
1. Does the character Nana seem convincing to you? Is she “realistic”? One critic says that early on she “starts to change slowly from a full-blooded animal into a symbol of evil.” What do you think?
2. A critic for Harper’s Weekly described Nana as “an outrage upon morality.” But one can imagine another critic finding fault with it for being just the opposite—too moralistic. Zola himself made claims of scientific objectivity. Do any of these positions do justice to the novel? Could it be that all of them—scientific, amoral, moral—apply, but only to separate passages?
3. Which, in this novel, is the most powerful shaper of human character: heredity, the environment, or the historical moment?
For Further Reading
OTHER WORKS BY ÉMILE ZOLA
L’ Assommoir. 1877. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Zola’s novel appears in other editions with the title translated as The Drinking Den, The Dram Shop, and The Drunkard.
Germinal. 1885. Translated by Havelock Ellis; introduction and notes by Dominique Julien. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.
The Dreyfus Affair: “J’Accuse” and Other Writings. Edited by Alain Pages; translated by Eleanor Levieux. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Zola—Photographer. Compiled and edited by François Émile-Zola and Massin; translated by Liliane Emery Tuck. New York: Seaver Books, 1988.
BIOGRAPHIES
Brown, Frederick. Zola: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. The best and most up-to-date life in English.
Hemmings, F. W. J. The Life and Times of Emile Zola. New York: Scribner, 1977.
Josephson, Matthew. Zola and His Time. London: Victor Gollancz, 1929.
Schom, Alan. Émile Zola: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.
Vizetelly, Ernest. Émile Zola: Novelist and Reformer. 1904. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971.
BIO-CRITICAL WORKS
Bédé, Jean Albert. Émile Zola. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.
Berg, William J., and Laurey K. Martin. Émile Zola Revisited. Twayne’s World Author Series. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Émile Zola: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 2004.
Friedman, Lee Max. 1937. Zola & the Dreyfus Case: His Defense of Liberty and Its Enduring Significance. New York: Gordon Press, 1973.
Howells, William Dean. Émile Zola. Digireads.com, 2004.
Knapp, Bettina L. Émile Zola. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980.
Walker, Philip D. Émile Zola. New York: Humanities Press, 1968.
Wilson, Angus. Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels. New York: William Morrow, 1952.
CRITICAL WORKS
Berg, William J. The Visual Novel: Émile Zola and the Art of His Times. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.
Carter, Lawson A. Zola and the Theater. 1963. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Gural-Migdal, Anna, and Robert Singer, eds. Zola and Film: Essays in the Art of Adaptation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.
Petrey, Sandy. Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
WORK CITED IN THE INTRODUCTION
Mitterand, Henri, and Jean Vidal, eds. Album Zola. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
a Type of chandelier used in the mid-nineteenth century in which the branches were capped by gas jets.
b The fourth major Exposition Universelle, or World’s Fair, held in Paris in 1867, attracted 11 million visitors. This mention of the exposition establishes the date when the book starts.
c Important Parisian newspaper; founded in 1826 as a gossip sheet on the arts and published irregularly until 1854, when it began to appear weekly, it became a daily in 1866, and still exists today.
d Wide, straight streets cut through the heart of Paris in the urban reconfiguration carried out by Baron George-Eugène Haussmann between 1853 and 1870; the reference here is to the concentration of boulevards in the center of the Right Bank.
e The French franc was equivalent to about 20 U.S. cents at the exchange rate of the time.
f King of France from 1830 to 1848.
g A yodel, or a song marked by yodeling.
h Grenadine or a similar concoction, diluted with soda water.
i Seventh-century king of France; he was a quasi-mythic figure and the subject of a popular song.
j Proverbial rural mail carrier.
k Yearly fair; at the time, Saint-Cloud was a rustic suburb of Paris.
l Old spelling of “clarinet.”
m Large military parade ground on the Left Bank, site of five Expositions Universelles (World’s Fairs) and eventually of the Eiffel Tower, built for the exposition in 1889.
n The legislature, at that time not elected but composed of members of the nobility.
o Active volcano in Sicily.
p Glassed-in shopping arcade, built in 1800 and the first public space in Paris to be illuminated by gas, in 1816.
q Native of Wallachia, a principality in southeastern Europe now incorporated into Romania.
r Gold coin, also called a Napoleon, that was worth 20 francs.
s Variant of “pomade,” a hair-dressing ointment.
t Card game resembling pinochle, but played with a larger deck.
u Coin equivalent to 5 centimes, or the twentieth part of a franc.
v Messenger.
w Member of the legislature.
x Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), unifier of Germany, future chancellor of the German Reich, and a foe of France.
y That is, he was in the retinue of Maximilian, the Austrian archduke chosen by Napoleon III to be emperor of Mexico; Maximilian was deposed and executed by a popular insurrection in 1867.
z The coup d’état by which Napoleon III seized the throne of France occurred on December 2, 1851.
aa Game resembling badminton.
ab Royal palace as of 1564; abandoned by royalty after the construction of Versailles, then the center of power during the Revolution; later the officia
l residence of both Napoleons; partly burned in 1871, in the final week of the Commune, and finally demolished in 1882.
ac Adelina Patti (1843-1919), an Italian soprano.
ad Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1816; The Barber of Seville), an opera by Gioacchino Rossini.
ae Cloak made of or lined with fur.
af Clear soup with a chicken base.
ag The Paris stock exchange.
ah That is, being the complaisant consort; after the husband of Mary, whose son Jesus Christ was, according to Christian belief, fathered by God.
ai The choice is between a Bordeaux wine and a Burgundy.
aj In Alsace, an eastern province of France, the local language has a strong infusion of German.
ak Full-length mirror that pivots within a frame.
al Side of the stage farthest from the prompter’s box.
am This endearment is also baby talk for “penis.”