oxford world’s classics NANA Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series with the sub title Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environ- ment on a wide range of characters and milieus. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902. Helen Constantine has published thirteen volumes of translated stories including Paris Street Tales, Paris Tales, French Tales, and Paris Metro Tales, with OUP. Her translations include Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, both for Penguin; Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and two more Zola novels, The Conquest of Plassans and A Love Story, all for Oxford World’s Classics. Brian Nelson is Emeritus Professor (French Studies and Trans- lation Studies) at Monash University, Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include The Cambridge Companion to Zola, Zola and the Bourgeoisie, and translations of The Fortune of the Rougons, The Belly of Paris, The Kill, Pot Luck, The Ladies’ Paradise, His Excellency Eugène Rougon, and Earth (with Julie Rose) for Oxford World’s Classics. He has also translated Swann in Love by Marcel Proust. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Translation in 2015. His most recent critical work is The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature (2015). oxford world’s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles — from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels — the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS ÉMILE ZOLA Nana Translated by HELEN CONSTANTINE With an Introduction and Notes by BRIAN NELSON 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Translation © Helen Constantine 2020 Editorial material © Brian Nelson 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1992 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998, 2009 New edition 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019042372 ISBN 978–0–19–881426–9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work CONTENTS Introduction vii Translator’s Note xxiv Select Bibliography xxv A Chronology of Émile Zola xxix Family Tree of the Rougon-Macquart xxxii NANA 1 Explanatory Notes 377 INTRODUCTION Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword Émile Zola (1840–1902) occupies a distinctive place in the great tradition of French (and European) critical-realist fiction. His main achievement as a writer was his twenty-volume cycle of novels Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), in which the fortunes of a family are followed over several decades. The various family members spread throughout all levels of society, and through their lives Zola exam- ines the changing social, sexual, and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century, creating an epic sense of social transformation. The Rougons represent the hunt for wealth and position, their mem- bers rising to commanding positions in the worlds of government and finance; the Macquarts, the illegitimate branch, are the sub- merged proletariat, with the exception of Lisa Macquart (The Belly of Paris/Le Ventre de Paris, 1873); the Mourets, descended from the Macquart line, are the bourgeois tradesmen and provincial bour- geoisie. Zola is the quintessential novelist of modernity, understood as a time of tumultuous change. The motor of change was the rapid growth of capitalism, with all that it entailed in terms of the trans- formation of the city, new forms of social practice and economic organization, and heightened political pressures. Zola was fas cin- ated by change, and specifically by the emergence of a new mass society. The power of Zola’s vision comes from his commitment to the value of ‘truth’ in art. This was above all a moral commitment. The novelist’s emphasis on speaking the truth was based on his conviction that the writer must play a social role: to represent the sorts of things — industrialization, the growth of the city, the birth of consumer cul- ture, the workings of the financial system, the misdeeds of government, crime, poverty, prostitution — that affect ordinary people in their daily lives. And he wrote about these things ironically and satirically. Nat- uralist fiction represents a major assault on bourgeois morality and institutions. It takes an unmitigated delight — while also seeing the pro- cess as a serious duty — in revealing the vices, follies, and corruption viii Introduction behind the respectable facade. The last line of The Belly of Paris is: ‘Respectable people… What bastards!’ The commitment to truth corresponded to a new integrity of rep- resentation. Zola opened the novel up to entirely new areas: the real- ities of working-class life, class relations, sexuality and the body; and his work embodied a new freedom of expression in their depiction. In his sexual themes he ironically subverts the notion that the social supremacy of the bourgeoisie is a natural rather than a cultural phe- nomenon; the more searchingly he investigated the theme of middle- class adultery, the more he threatened to uncover the fragility and arbitrariness of the whole bourgeois social order. His new vision of the body, entailing a greater explicitness of description, is matched by his new vision of the working class, combining carnivalesque images with serious analysis of its sociopolitical condition. In L’Assommoir (1877) he describes the misery of the working-class slums behind the public splendour of the Empire, while in Germinal (1885) he shows how the power of mass working-class movements had become a rad- ic al ly new, and frightening, element in human history. The attacks Zola sustained throughout his career for his purported obsession with ‘filth’ were largely political in nature — attempts by the estab- lishment to discredit him. He was a reformist, not a revolutionary, and the denunciation of social injustice and hypocrisy embodied in his fiction is implicit, based on an aesthetic of ‘objectivity’; but it is no less eloquent for that — Zola never stopped being a danger to the established order. It was entirely appropriate that in 1898 he crowned his literary career with a political act, a frontal attack on state power and its abuse: ‘J’accuse…!’, his famous open letter to the President of the Republic in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason. Nana Nana is probably the most famous character in Les Rougon-Macquart. The novel that bears her name, published in 1880, is the ninth volume in the series. It consists of a number of episodes, or tableaux, in the short but spectacular life of Anna Coupeau, the fourth child of Gervaise Macquart. We first saw her as a young girl in L’Assommoir (1877), her father an abusive alcoholic, her mother Gervaise reduced to a similar degraded state. She works as a milliner’s assistant and Introduction ix dabbles in casual street prostitution. She has a child by an unknown father when she is 16. Having escaped from the slums, in Nana she makes her mark first in the theatre, then enters the world of high pros- titution, becoming the most celebrated courtesan in Second Empire Paris, wreaking havoc among the upper classes with her rampant sexuality. The novel opens with a night at the Théâtre des Variétés in April 1867, just after the inauguration of the World Fair in Paris (the Exposition Universelle). Nana is 18. Zola describes in detail the per- formance of La Blonde Vénus, a fictional operetta modelled after La Belle Hélène by Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), in which Nana is cast as the lead. She is the talk of Paris, though this is her first stage appear- ance. When asked to say something about her talents, Bordenave, the theatre manager, explains that a star does not need to know how to sing or act: ‘Nana has something else, for heaven’s sake, and something that makes all the other stuff superfluous’ (p. 6). At first the audience laughs, thinking her performance terrible, until a youth, Georges Hugon, cries out, ‘Très chic!’ From then until the end of the play, Nana is in control of the audience, especially in the third act when she appears on stage virtually naked, in the flimsiest of veils, rousing the spectators to a frenzy. No one was laughing any more, men’s intent faces were straining for- ward, their noses thin, mouths quickened and dry. It was as though a puff of wind, very gentle but charged with a dull sense of foreboding, had passed over. Suddenly the woman was emerging from the child, causing unease, bringing that madness of her sex, opening up unknown desire. Nana was still smiling but it was the knowing smile of the man- eater. (p. 24) In the course of the novel Nana destroys all the men — aristocrats, high government officials, army officers, bankers, journalists — who pursue her, leaving a trail of bankruptcy, humiliation, and death. Symbol of profligacy and excess, she feeds insatiably on her lovers while remaining serenely indifferent to them. Her most notable vic- tim is Comte Muffat de Beuville, Chamberlain to the Empress, an ageing and extremely devout aristocrat, whom she subjugates com- pletely, forcing him to undergo every kind of indignity. In a famous scene, she makes him wear his Court uniform, then take it off, and trample and spit on it.