Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [7]
By the fall of 1871 and the winter of 1872, when the first two volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series finally appeared, a month apart, Zola’s opinions had gotten him banned from the Parisian newspapers altogether—for the following four years his views on the passing scene would be reserved for the reading public of Marseilles—but he had become a much greater presence in the literary and artistic circles of the city; he now numbered among his friends Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Stéphane Mallarmé, Alphonse Daudet, and the Goncourt brothers. The third volume, Le Ventre de Paris (1873; The Belly of Paris), made an impression for its meticulous documentation of the great produce market Les Halles, a place every Parisian knew but few among the reading public knew intimately. Although Zola was inspired by the painters, and wished to give an account of Paris that would match the immediacy and visceral power of one of the urban canvases of Monet or Degas, the book also marked the birth of an enduring archetype: the journalist-novelist, who painstakingly works up a subject from firsthand research, sometimes in the process issuing less a novel than an illustrated thesis.
The seventh installment, L‘Assommoir (1877; The Dram Shop or The Drunkard) went even further, and can be considered both the first major work of naturalism and Zola’s first authentic masterpiece. Based on firsthand observation as well as on research by sociologists, L’Assommoir depicts the lives in the Parisian slums of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the marginal, bound together by alcohol. Where previous literary treatments of poverty and dissolution in France had sentimentalized and moralized, L‘Assommoir takes a nuanced view of its characters, who are rounded and memorable. L’Assomoir judges, but with sympathy and understanding, and it knows that blame for the worst of its characters’ behavior can be directly attributed to the inequalities of capitalist society. As a result, Zola was branded a socialist and a communard, terms not taken lightly then, a mere six years after the defeat of the insurrection. That did not, however, keep the book from a resounding popular success. The attraction was, naturally, prurient. The book exuded sexuality, of a sort that its readership would view as primordial, and there were many ancillary pleasures, such as its use of French slang, called argot, which had been around since the Middle Ages but studiously avoided by upper-case Literature. The government banned the sale of the book in train stations, but that had little effect on its runaway success, which can best be viewed in the light of its spin-offs: a play that ran for 300 performances, popular songs, pipes in the shape of characters’ heads, dishes printed with vignettes of major scenes.
One of the book’s minor characters, who appeared near the end of the story, was a little girl named Anna Coupeau, known as Nana. The daughter of Gervaise Macquart, who already had three sons by a previous relationship, and an alcoholic laborer named Coupeau, she was predestined for a life of waste and a miserable end, it appeared. Three years later, in 1880, Zola brought out the ninth in his series, Nana, which told the remainder of the story of Anna Coupeau. Besides the sketch in L‘Assommoir, the character had another source as well: Manet’s 1876 painting, also entitled Nana, which shows a young actress in deshabille in her dressing room, turning away from applying her makeup to look directly at the viewer with an assured, slightly calculating gaze, as a stout older suitor in top hat and tails sits waiting on a couch, bisected by the edge of the frame. Zola assembled her character from a series of prominent actresses and courtesans of the day, used various bits of gossip to inform the plot, pursued