Nana (novel)
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Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Emile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which was to tell "The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire" (Becker 96).
Nana tells the story of a young prostitute, the novel's titular character, who rises from humble beginnings to single-handedly consuming much of the Parisian elite. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), another of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the end, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution.
Nana picks up where this left off. The first scene is a play in which Nana has been cast as the lead; Bordenave, the owner of the theatre, insists on calling it a "bordel," and it fits the scene. Nana is a terrible actor and a terrible singer, but, claims Bordenave, "Nana has something else ... that makes up for everything else" (Zola 6). Just as the crowd is about to dismiss her performance as terrible (which it is), young Georges Hugon shouts: "She's wonderful!" From then on, she owns the crowd, and, when she appears naked in the third act, Zola notes that "Nana was still smiling, but it was the piqued smile of a devourer of men" (Zola 25).
The rest of the novel then catalogues the men she destroys variously: Philippe Hugon, Georges' brother, imprisoned after stealing from the army, his employer, for Nana; Steiner, a wealthy banker who is ruined after hemorrhaging cash for Nana's decadence; Georges Hugon, who was so captivated with her from the beginning that, when he realized he could not have her, stabs himself with scissors in anguish; Vandeuvres, a wealthy owner of horses who burns himself in his barn after Nana ruins him financially; Fauchery, a journalist and publisher who falls for Nana early on, writes a scathing article about her later, and falls for her again and is ruined financially; and Muffat, whose faithfulness to Nana brings him back for humiliation after humiliation until he finds her in bed with his elderly father-in-law. Becker explains: "What emerges from [Nana] is the completeness of Nana's destructive force, brought to a culmination in the thirteenth chapter by a kind of roll call of the victims of her voracity" (118).
Nana was received with outrage in its time, as were most of Zola's novels. And, while it is held up as a fine example of writing, it is not especially true to Zola's touted naturalist philosophy; instead, it is one of the most symbolically complex of his novels, setting it apart from the earthy realism of L'Assommoir or the more brutal realism of La Terre (1887). (However, it was a great deal more realistic than contemporary novels of the demimonde.) Nana's death is made to coincide with the downfall of the Second Empire, and Zola often slips into the sensational to deepen the symbolic downfall of the Empire.
Nana is especially noted for the crowd scenes, of which there are many, in which Zola proves himself a master of capturing the incredible variety of people. Whereas in his other novels -- notably Germinal (1885) -- he gives the reader an amazingly complete picture of surroundings and the lives of characters, from the first scene we are to understand that this novel treads new ground.
Nana became popular, in spite of the opprobrium it garnered. Edouard Manet was so taken by it that he named a painting (http://www.abcgallery.com/M/manet/manet34.html), showing a young girl ogled by a wealthy man, Nana after the novel.
Nana has been widely and excellently translated into English.
References
- Becker, George J. Master European Realists of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1982.
- Zola, Émile. Nana. Colette Becker, ed. Paris: Dunod, 1994. Selections translated by Chris St. Pierre (that's me).