Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [11]
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 operating 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