Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [240]
La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle or The Collapse)
Le Docteur Pascal (1893; Doctor Pascal)
After the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Zola wrote two shorter series: Les Trois Villes (Three Cities: Lourdes, 1894; Rome, 1896; Paris, 1898), the first two comprising a scathing attack on the Catholic Church; and Les Quatre Évangiles (1899-1903; The Four Gospels) , the last volume of which was left unfinished at Zola’s death.
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