Introduction
For about a hundred years, novelists were seized with the desire to replicate the entire world. Beginning with Honoré de Balzac in the early nineteenth century and ending rather less memorably in the first few decades of the twentieth century with the likes of Jules Romains and John Galsworthy, this tendency saw the production of sweeping multi-volume series in which societies were sectioned up into thematic units and teeming masses of characters were assigned sociologically appropriate fates by their godlike authors. Balzac, who set the tone and the challenge, composed his Comédie humaine of some ninety novels and novellas, grouped together primarily according to their settings: private life, provincial life, city life, country life, military life, and so on. Characters sometimes overlapped from one book to another, and stories embryonically suggested in one volume would be fully developed in another. Balzac’s intention was to account for the entirety of life in France in his time, with all of its contrasts and variations. Although Balzac lived and wrote during a time of herculean production by writers of fiction, few followed his lead at first. While novelists all over Europe might comfortably issue two or three triple-decker epics a year, many ranging broadly in their focus all across the surface of their time, none was inclined toward Balzac’s systematic chronicle of society, not even Dickens, who came the closest.
It was not until two decades after Balzac’s death in 1850 that his heir presumptive announced himself. In 1871 Émile Zola published the first installment in what was to be a twenty-volume series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, an examination of the whole of French society through the lens of the family named in the collective title. Zola intended to go Balzac one better in the way of rigor. His chronicle would be founded on strict scientific principles derived from the work of Charles Darwin and his disciples. Mere realism was no longer sufficient; a methodical, experimental procedure was required, as firmly controlled and emotionally detached as the protocols that attended laboratory work. Each volume would depict one aspect of French life in all its breadth, would be meticulously researched, would be planned out to the last iota with nothing left to chance or inspiration. “Naturalism,” as this style came to be known, was to be as pitiless and comprehensive as photography, with no concessions made to piety, aesthetics, or received ideas. And it did effectively challenge conventional thinking about the role of literature—in some cases about society itself—so that it came to be associated with political radicalism, and regarded in some quarters as nothing better than pornography. Even if the works that have held up the best after a century or more have done so despite their extraliterary claims, naturalism in its time was crucial in confronting readers with aspects of society they were inclined to avoid.
Émile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840. His father, François, who was born Francesco Zolla in Venice, arrived in France right after the July Revolution of 1830, to make his mark and his fortune as an engineer. He was brilliant, and was unquestionably in the right place at the right time for the fulfillment of his talents and energies. The culmination of his enterprise was to be the construction of a system of canals and tunnels to bring drinking water to the city of Aix. Unfortunately, in early 1847, when the work was in its initial stages, he contracted pneumonia and died, at the age of fifty-one. His investment in the scheme was immediately parceled up among the other investors. His wife and child were left just enough money to send Émile to the local collège, where he spent a reasonably happy adolescence running around with his friends Louis Baille and Paul Cézanne, who was to become a great painter, although neither he nor Emile showed any particular promise at the time. After Émile’s maternal grandmother died when he was an adolescent, the remainder of the family—he, his mother, and his grandfather—moved to Paris, where they lived in penury. Émile proceeded to become entranced by the wonders of the city to the detriment of his studies. After failing his oral examination—he never earned his secondary degree—he spent several years living the bohemian life in all its most traditional aspects: unheated garrets in miserable neighborhoods, lack of food and clothing, all-night debates with his companions on artistic and philosophical subjects. At his lowest ebb, he occupied a furnished room in a hotel otherwise populated by prostitutes, and threw in his lot with one of them, who pawned his last overcoat for him. This period was to prove significant when, almost two decades later, he set out to write Nana.
Finally, when he was nearly twenty-two, his luck began to turn. First he pulled a high number in the draft lottery, virtually exempting him from military service, and then a friend of his father’s got him a job at the Hachette publishing house. It was a lowly position in the shipping department, but he was able to turn it to considerable advantage. He got to know many of the most important writers in France, running errands for them and otherwise ingratiating himself. Since the lineup included the two most fearsome critics in the country, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine, he had obtained for himself a powerful set of connections for his future career. Now that he was solvent and adequately lodged, he did not disdain the lowlife among whom he had earlier been consigned, but methodically explored alleys and dives and concert saloons, sometimes in the company of his friend Cézanne, who could not force himself to become a full-time Parisian any more than he could remain in the countryside for longer than a few months at a stretch.
Zola began to publish: a collection of tales, a study of Don Quixote, an increasing number of newspaper and magazine contributions, both criticism and fiction, and eventually, in 1865, his first novel, La Confession de Claude. Around this same time, partly as a result of his friendship with Cézanne, he came to know and befriend a group of young painters who found themselves at odds with the prevailing aesthetic as dictated by the powers who controlled the Salon. Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Cézanne all had their works rejected by exhibition juries composed of the art establishment of the day, men like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Ernest Meissonier, neoclassical painters of battle scenes and overupholstered nudes. Zola became spokesman for the painters, writing numerous articles about them for the press and an entire short book about Manet, and he figures among the painters in two tableaux showing members of the group—the Impressionists, as yet unnamed—gathering together in studios. Nevertheless, his life remained precarious. Even as he was serializing his first major work, Thérèse Raquin (1867), he supported himself by setting type for a provincial newspaper, while Alexandrine Meley, his mistress—whom he later married—was still wrapping books at Hachette.
What initially made his name, oddly enough, was not his writing but the great portrait of him by Manet, exhibited in the 1868 Salon, in which he appeared as the very figure of dynamism and modernity—seated at his desk, fierce in his bi-colored beard, talismanically backed by Chinese and Japanese prints and a copy of Manet’s own scandalous nude Olympia. Meanwhile, Taine had written to him, “I believe that the future of the novel consists of the story of the will, struggling and winning its way through the chaos and upheavals of society” (Mitterand, Album Zola, p. 98; see “For Further Reading”). The notion did not fall on deaf ears. Zola had been reading Balzac, after all. In 1868 he signed a contract with the Lacroix publishing house for a cycle of ten novels, The Story of a Family, to be delivered at a rate of two volumes a year and annually compensated at 6,000 francs; eventually there would be twenty books, published over twenty-two years, at a steadily increasing rate of pay. Zola had been researching feverishly in libraries, particularly on the subject of heredity. He drew up a family tree in order to get a visual grip on his collective subject, carefully distributing the clan around all the major divisions of society, which he saw as consisting of four principal worlds—workers, tradespeople, bourgeoisie, and nobility-and “one world apart: whores, murderers, priests, artists” (Mitterand, p. 99).
He set to work at his usual feverish pace, but his rhythm was immediately thrown off by events. The regime of Napoleon III was weakening then, and republican forces-among whom Zola figured—were increasing in strength, but their rise was countered by ever more repressive measures. Newspapers, including virtually all the ones to which Zola contributed, were suppressed for varying periods, while the most direct assault on the liberty of the press came when the journalist Victor Noir was shot and killed by a member of the Bonaparte family. Meanwhile, industrial strikes raged around the country. As is frequently the case when regimes find themselves imperiled, the panacea came in the form of war, in this case against the Prussians. In the summer of 1870, crowds gathered in the streets of Paris, shouting, “To Berlin!” By September, however, after its decisive defeat at Sedan, on France’s eastern frontier, the empire had fallen and the emperor was a prisoner in Germany. From September 19 to January 28, Paris was besieged by the Prussians, a brutal war of attrition that saw numerous deaths from famine and disease. Zola first fled to the south, but he could not keep himself away from power and intrigue; besides, he was broke. So he traveled to Bordeaux, site of the provisional government, and tried for an official post, but the best he could obtain was a temporary handout. He returned to Paris in the spring of 1871, this time equipped with an assignment as parliamentary correspondent for a newspaper. Shortly thereafter, the government moved to Versailles, and an insurrection—which was to become the Commune—broke out in Paris. Zola blithely commuted between the two camps, which were at war with one another, eventually being suspected by each of sympathy for the other. He lived through the bloody repression at the end of May, when the forces of Versailles invaded the city, and tried, with little success, to urge clemency for various Communards sentenced to death or exile.
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 his research by simply being who he was by then: a man of the world and an attendee at the theaters, receptions, salons, and restaurants of le tout Paris. The notoriety of his book exceeded even that of L’Assommoir—the first printing consisted of 55,000 copies, an outrageous figure for the time. It was immediately adapted for the stage and launched songs and caricatures and denunciations.
By that time, the Naturalist school had been formally constituted, with Zola presiding over a coterie of slightly younger writers, of whom Joris-Karl Huysmans and Guy de Maupassant became the most prominent. Besides writing a series of critical works—Le Roman experimental (The Experimental Novel), the bible of Naturalism, was published in 1880, and the following year saw the publication of no fewer than four volumes of critical essays—he was issuing novels in the Rougon-Macquart series at a clip of nearly one per year. Pot-Bouille (1882; Restless House), the tenth, took the facade off a fashionable apartment building, unraveling the tangled lives within. Au Bonheur des dames (1883; Ladies’ Delight or A Ladies’ Paradise) , the eleventh, chronicled the life of a large department store. The thirteenth, Germinal (1885), was an uncompromising exposition of the misery of coal miners, and it galvanized the European labor movement. The fifteenth, La Terre (1887; Earth or The Soil), was his chronicle of the peasantry; its relative frankness about sexuality and bodily functions was enough to cause some of the more delicate Naturalists to separate themselves from their master. La Bête humaine (1890; The Human Beast or The Beast in Man) , the seventeenth, was inspired by Zola’s turn at jury duty; it is a study of homicidal pathology, set against the background of the railroads. The nineteenth, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle or The Collapse), his novel of war, was in its time the greatest success of the whole series.
His energy did not flag. After completing the Rougon-Macquart series he immediately embarked on Les Trois Villes (The Three Cities): Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), and Paris (1898), the first two of which targeted the Catholic Church. Although Zola had at one point accepted an assignment from the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, causing a flurry of denunciations by the socialist press, he was by then unambiguously identified with the left; it was a period of sharply polarized political divisions that extended into nearly every aspect of French life. Clearly, although he was the country’s preeminent novelist and had been unopposed in that rank since the death of Flaubert in 1880, he would never be elected to the Académie Française. He had a broad base of popular support, but few allies at the top; although he was a rich man, his candor and moral resoluteness set him apart and made him anathema to the power brokers.
Thus it was that in 1898 he embarked upon the most significant episode of his life, which was only tangentially connected to literature. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a career officer, was accused of spying for the Germans, convicted, and sent to the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana. Very soon indications began to turn up that Dreyfus had been falsely accused, targeted because he was Jewish. The incriminating documents had, it appeared, been forged by a certain Major Esterhazy. Zola, who examined the evidence, became convinced of Esterhazy’s guilt and Dreyfus’s innocence. After Esterhazy was cleared by the military of any wrongdoing, Zola wrote an open letter to the president, Félix Faure, published on the front page of the newspaper L‘Aurore and given the resounding title “J’Accuse ... !” Zola directly accused the government of conspiracy in having tried and sentenced Dreyfus on the basis of forged evidence while deliberately concealing the existence of exculpatory material. In response, the government accused Zola of libel; his trial featured a parade of superior officers who accused him, in effect, of treason. Zola was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. He appealed, but the appeal languished, and in the meantime he was constantly attacked by anti-Semites and the right (the overlap between those two designations was nearly one hundred percent). The attacks occurred in the press, although they undoubtedly would have been physical had Zola been sufficiently imprudent to show himself in public, and they consisted of every possible form of insult, one journalist taking it upon himself to besmirch the life and career of Zola’s father and employing forged documents to make his case. When it appeared that Zola’s appeal would fail, his friends counseled voluntary exile, and he went off, under a pseudonym and leaving his family behind, to voluntary exile in England. It was nearly a year later that the Cour de Cassation, the highest appeals court in France, finally reversed Dreyfus’s conviction. Zola then returned, although his own sentence was never formally voided.
He had continued to write, by then engaged in a new series, Les Quatre Evangiles (The Four Gospels), consisting of Fécondité (1899; Fecundity) , Travail (1901; Work), and Vérité (1903; Truth), the last bearing largely on the Dreyfus case; his death interrupted the final volume, Justice. In his last years he also became an accomplished photographer whose scenes of city and country life are valuable documents of their time and apt extensions of his documentary novels. He was only sixty-two in September 1902—although physically and psychologically much aged by his sufferings—when he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A clogged chimney diverted fumes from the pellet stove into the bedroom as he and his wife slept; she recovered. Murder was alleged and investigated, but the matter was never resolved. At his funeral a delegation of coal miners accompanied the casket, gravely intoning “Ger-mi-nal” in cadence, over and over again.
Zola’s star has risen and fallen since his death. In the first half of the twentieth century he was one of the most widely read authors in the world, his name virtually synonymous with the struggle for social progress. He was translated into all languages and was a staple, especially, in the Soviet Union. His role in the Dreyfus affair doubly assured his stature—because of it he was even the subject of a Hollywood film, The Life of Émile Zola (1937), with Paul Muni in the part. But the 1930s were probably the peak of his posthumous career. After World War II, especially, his work acquired a reputation as turgid, well-meaning gruel. The New Left more or less consigned him to the dustbin of history, and litterateurs everywhere decided he was clumsy, laborious, didactic. It is true that even in his lifetime and among his supporters he was never considered a particularly subtle author, and his most fervent disciples would have found it hard to make a case for him as a prose stylist—a fatal deficiency in France, where style reigns supreme, where his older colleague Flaubert, the model of the stylist, sometimes hesitated for weeks over a choice of words.
Nana, however, shows how wrongheaded all such approaches were in regard to Zola, and effects a demonstration of his unparalleled strengths. Zola may not have parsed ambiguities or dealt in fugitive emotions—he did not work close up, with a single-hair brush, but on a large scale, with a palette knife (perhaps, actually, like his old friend Cézanne, he could be said to have worked with a brush in one hand and a knife in the other). The analogy to painting is not idly chosen, and it is not simply because of his close connection to the Impressionists, although in many ways he resembles less the starkly graphic Manet or the dreamily approximative Monet or even the dramatically essentialist Cézanne than he does Gustave Caillebotte, the Impressionist most devoted to depicting the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, which he framed as radically as with a camera lens. For that matter, while it has become a terrible cliché to say of a writer of the past that had he lived in our time, he would surely have become a filmmaker, with Zola it might actually be true.
Zola is at his best when staging crowd scenes and major conflicts. This is no small feat, especially when you consider how often great writers have avoided such things—in how many classic war novels, for example, the principal action is set offstage or viewed through a narrow and subjective focus. And while most nineteenth-century novels begin and end with a major set piece—one to introduce the characters and set them in motion against the backdrop, the other to tie up loose ends and release us and the characters from our mutual contract—each of Nana’s chapters is a set piece. The chapters pass in succession, like so many acts of a tragedy: the theater, the dinner, the country house, the horse race. The chapters immediately call up a visual analogy: They are wide-screen affairs, like movies shot in Cinerama or like the panoramic photographs Zola himself took around 1900. Although in truth there are plenty of closeups and flurries of montaged action, we are given the illusion that the camera, as it were, takes in the whole scene, all at once and unmovingly, while characters pass across its unblinking aperture. Zola excels at directing his characters’ points of view, listening to them talk while they take in the setting and the peripheral action surrounding them, and then following their gaze to some other characters some distance away. Upon being introduced by the commentary of the first set of characters, these become in their turn the focus of the author’s attention for a while before passing the baton to yet more people in some other corner of the setting. This provides for a powerful spatial illusion.
Zola’s method appears to all but eliminate the omniscient narrator—he is present at all times, of course, but Zola is so clever at inserting exposition into casual dialogue that it feels as though we are witnessing everything for ourselves without mediation. The direct authorial commentary, meanwhile, discreetly dissolves into the scene setting, since almost all of it is parenthetical, the most significant observations being either delivered by the characters in the course of apparently banal chitchat or else built into the fabric of the plot. The final chapter, for example, tells us everything we need to know about Zola’s attitude toward the Franco-Prussian War, but it does so incidentally, in hubbub rising up from the street while our attention is focused on Nana’s plight as she lies in bed in her hotel room. Like a great documentary painter (anyone from Bruegel to Courbet to Seurat) or filmmaker (perhaps Jean Renoir, who was the son of the Impressionist painter Auguste, an acquaintance of Zola’s, and who made a spectacular silent adaptation of Nana in 1926), Zola unfolds for his audience the entire social fabric of his setting, in lavish detail, and conveys exactly what he thinks about it all while pretending to be no more than passively subjected to it, as if it were weather, and keeping his eye on a few central figures, as if their actions were not crucially interwoven with and wholly dependent upon their background.
The story of Nana is simplicity itself—thanks largely to the movies, it has become a thumping cliché in the intervening century and a quarter, although it wasn’t yet one at the time. It is, classically, the story of the poor girl who uses her body to advance through society, nearly to the very top, before being finally betrayed by her fate, or her genes, or her hubris, or her lack of education, so that she falls back down, metaphorically or otherwise, to the muck of her origins. Meanwhile men of all shapes, sizes, ages, and stations have become besotted with her, all of them at some cost, whether to their money or their marriages or their dignity or their lives. Besides the obvious titillation factor, the story is so potent and durable because, like all the most mythopoetic stories (consider Don Quixote or Moby-Dick, for instance), its plot and its central metaphor are one and the same. Nana herself is a perfectly rounded, three-dimensional character, whose strength and generosity are as apparent by the end as her vanity and cruelty and selfishness, but she is also a metaphorical linchpin, the embodiment of the vapid decadence and dull hypocrisy of the Second Empire, whose fall she enacts in boudoir scale.
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 it himself. Nana is too complicated a character to be useful as a moralistic blunt instrument, even if Zola seems unwilling to acknowledge this until the very end of the book. Nana is about power, and in that sense it is zoological, as well as cautionary. It is also a great illusion, an exhilarating work of total cinema, a whirlwind that does not let up, with a force undiminished by time or technological competition.
Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. He is the author of Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts and coeditor, with Melissa Holbrook Pierson, of O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Visiting Professor of Writing and the History of Photography at Bard College. He lives with his wife and son in Ulster County, New York.