Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [242]
—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