Nana (novel)

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Nana
Édouard Manet, Nana, 1877
AuthorÉmile Zola
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench
SeriesLes Rougon-Macquart
GenreNovel, Theatre-fiction
Publication date
1880
Media typePrint (Serial, Hardback & Paperback)
Preceded byGerminal 
Followed byLa Terre 

Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series.

Origins

A year before he started to write Nana, Zola knew nothing about the

Anna Deslions, Delphine de Lizy, and Hortense Schneider, upon which Zola drew in developing the character of his title character. Yet it was Valtesse de la Bigne, painted by both Manet and Henri Gervex, who most inspired him; it is she who is immortalised in his scandalous novel Nana.[1]

Synopsis

Nana tells the story of Nana Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class prostitute during the last three years of the

French Second Empire. Nana first appeared near the end of L'Assommoir
(1877), Zola's earlier novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, where she is the daughter of an abusive drunk. At the conclusion of that novel, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution.

Nana opens with a night at the Théâtre des Variétés in April 1867 just after the Exposition Universelle has opened. Nana is 18 years old, but she would have been 15 according to the family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts Zola had published years before starting work on this novel. Zola describes in detail the performance of La blonde Vénus, a fictional operetta modeled after Offenbach's La belle Hélène, in which Nana is cast as the lead. All of Paris is talking about her, but this is her first stage appearance. When asked to say something about her talents, Bordenave, the manager of the theatre, explains that a star does not need to know how to sing or act: "Nana has something else, dammit, and something that takes the place of everything else. I scented it out, and it smells damnably strong in her, or else I lost my sense of smell." Just as the crowd is about to dismiss her performance as terrible, young Georges Hugon shouts: "Très chic!" From then on, she owns the audience. Zola describes her appearance only thinly veiled in the third act: "All of a sudden, in the good-natured child the woman stood revealed, a disturbing woman with all the impulsive madness of her sex, opening the gates of the unknown world of desire. Nana was still smiling, but with the deadly smile of a man-eater."

In the course of the novel Nana destroys every man who pursues her: Philippe Hugon is imprisoned after stealing from the army to lend Nana money; the wealthy banker Steiner bankrupts himself trying to please her; Georges Hugon stabs himself with scissors in anguish over her; Vandeuvres incinerates himself after Nana ruins him financially; Fauchery, a journalist and publisher who falls for Nana early on, writes a scathing article about her later, and falls for her again and is ruined financially; and Count Muffat, whose faithfulness to Nana brings him back for humiliation after humiliation until he finds her in bed with his elderly father-in-law. In George Becker's words: "What emerges from [Nana] is the completeness of Nana's destructive force, brought to a culmination in the thirteenth chapter by a kind of roll call of the victims of her voracity".[2]

Zola has Nana die a horrible death in July 1870 from

Second Empire
.

Reception

Nana Title Page of the original French Edition

The novel was an immediate success.

Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt
were full of praise for Nana. On the other hand, a part of the public and some critics reacted to the book with outrage, which may have contributed to its popularity.

Flaubert wrote Zola an effusive letter praising the novel in detail. He reported which pages he had marked by turning down their corners and praising specific passages ("everything about Fontane, perfect!"). In summation he wrote: "Nana tourne au mythe, sans cesser d'être réelle". (Nana turns into myth, without ceasing to be real.)[3]

As a counterargument to Zola's depiction of the significance of heredity and environment, Alfred Sirven (1838-1900) and Henri Leverdier (1840- ) wrote a novel called Nana's Daughter: A Story of Parisian Life (1880). Published in both French and English versions, it told the story of Nana's daughter, who rises from "the gutter" and overcomes her background to become a respectable lady.[4]

Later references

Édouard Manet, who was much taken with the description of the "precociously immoral" Nana in Zola's L'Assommoir gave the title "Nana" to his portrait of Henriette Hauser before Nana was published.[5][failed verification] The word "nana" has become, in contemporary French, "a mildly rude French term for woman, comparable to broad".[6] Niki de Saint Phalle called a series of her sculptures "Nanas". They were " bulbous, archetypal maternal figures like Mexican piñatas painted in bold colors and decorated with crisp, cartoon outlines".[6] She explained that her title evoked the prototype of the female: Eve! Aphrodite! Nana de Zola! Inusable! Increvable! (Eve! Aphrodite! Zola's Nana! Everlasting! Indestructible!).[7]

Adaptations

English translations

  • Nana (1884, tr. unknown for H. Vizetelly, Vizetelly & Co.)
  • Nana (1895, tr. Victor Plarr, Lutetian Society)
  • Nana (1926, tr. Joseph Keating, Cecil Palmer)
  • Nana (1953, tr. Charles Duff, William Heinemann)
  • Nana (1964, tr. Lowell Blair, Bantam Books)
  • Nana (1972, tr. George Holden, Penguin Books)[8]
  • Nana (1992, tr. Douglas Parmee, Oxford University Press)[9]
  • Nana (2020, tr. Helen Constantine, Oxford University Press)[10]

References

  1. OCLC 924600273.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
    )
  2. ISBN 9780804420464
    .
  3. ^ "Gustave Flaubert Correspondence". Édition Louis Conard. 15 February 1880. Retrieved February 26, 2016.
  4. ^ Sirven, Alfred; Leverdier, Henri (2011). Nana's Daughter: A Story of Parisian Life. Nobu Press. In French the title was La fille de Nana, réponse au roman naturaliste de Zola or La Fille de Nana, roman de moeurs Parisiennes. Sirven and Leverdier co-authored several works. One was a reply to Dumas. Another, Le Jesuite rouge, contended that the Jesuits organized the Paris Commune to create Jewish martyrs and thereby sympathy for the Jews in France.
  5. ^ Barnes, Julian (15 April 2011). "Edouard Manet: Symphony in off-white". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  6. ^ a b Johnson, Ken (23 May 2002). "Niki de Saint Phalle, Sculptor, Is Dead at 71". New York Times. Retrieved 27 February 2016.
  7. ^ Niki de Saint Phalle. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum. 1967.
  8. ISBN 978-0-14-044263-2
    (1972)
  9. ISBN 978-0-19-283670-0
    (re-issue 1999)
  10. ISBN 978-0198814269
    (2000)
  • Zola, Émile: Nana, translated with an introduction by George Holden, Penguin Classics, London 1972

External links
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