Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [239]
5 (p. 436) During the day the Corps Législatif had voted for a declaration of war: This dates the scene exactly, to July 19, 1870. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who was then in the process of uniting the disparate duchies and principalities of Germany into a single state, actively welcomed war with France, both to exhaust his country’s nearest rival and to annex the German-speaking French provinces Alsace and Lorraine. He was too smart to declare war himself, however. When a member of the Hohenzollern family—a relative of the German emperor—was proposed as king of Spain, France took the fatal step. One military defeat followed another in quick succession, and the war was over by January, with France decisively trounced.
Inspired by Nana
One of the most ambitious projects in Western literature, Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, a cycle of twenty novels, was published between 1871 and 1893. Nana is the ninth novel in the sequence, which is subtitled The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire. The first book, Les Fortune des Rougon (1871; The Fortune of the Rougons or The Rougon Family Fortune) , introduces the powerful Rougons and the lower-class Macquarts. Zola was deeply fascinated and philosophically driven by social determinism; he believed that human character was shaped by heredity, environment, and the cultural moment. He coined the term “naturalism” to describe this approach to literature, and it quickly became a movement of which Zola was the acknowledged leader.
In the Rougon-Macquart books, Zola places his characters in different socio-economic and professional contexts—including the Provençal countryside, a laundress’s working-class neighborhood, the Parisian art scene, and the bleak battlefield at Sedan in 1870—and documents their behavior and development. Though the results are deeply imaginative, Zola regarded his novels as “experiments.” Rather than a creative excursion, each book is akin to a study in which the author records his observations with strict, even scientific, exactitude. Zola’s cycle pays homage to French fiction writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), who is widely credited with introducing realism to literature. Balzac’s titanic series La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) comprises roughly ninety novels and novellas. Conversely, Zola’s almost detached approach to his fiction runs counter to that of Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in his seven-part cycle À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), in which the narrator’s subjectivity determines the course of the honeycombed narrative.
The novels of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, in order of their appearance, are:
La Fortune des Rougon (1871; The Fortune of the Rougons or The Rougon Family)
La Curée (1872; The Kill)
Le Ventre de Paris (1873; The Belly of Paris or Savage Paris)
La Conquête de Plassans (1874; The Conquest of Plassans) La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret)
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876; His Excellency Eugène Rougon)
L’Assommoir (1877; The Drinking Den, The Dram Shop, or The Drunkard)
Une Page d’amour (1878; A Page of Love or A Love Affair)
Nana (1880)
Pot-Bouille (1882; Restless House)
Au Bonheur des dames (1883; Ladies’ Delight or A Ladies’ Paradise)
La Joie de vivre (1884; The Joy of Life or Zest for Life)
Germinal (1885)
L’Oeuvre (1886; The Masterpiece)
La Terre (1887; Earth or The Soil)
La Rêve (1888; The Dream)
La Bête humaine (1890; The Human Beast or The Beast in Man)
LArgent (1891;