Nana (novel)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following important information is missing from this article or section:
Review, Reception - Loaf Guard ( Discussion ) 16:11, 19 Sep. 2012 (CEST)
Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Cover of the first edition of Nana (1880)
Nana (Edouard Manet)
Nana
Édouard Manet , 1877
Oil on canvas
154 × 115 cm
Kunsthalle Hamburg

Nana is a novel written in 1880 by the French naturalist Émile Zola . It is the ninth title of the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle , which he describes as “histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire” - the natural and social history of a family in the Second Empire.

To the novel

In terms of content, Nana ties in directly to the seventh novel in the “Rougon-Macquart” series, Der Totschläger (French: L'Assommoir ). Nana is the daughter of the laundress Gervaise Macquart and the drinker Coupeau from the novel Der Todschläger published in 1877 . In his literary work with Nana after Ein Blatt Liebe ( Une page d'amour in French ), Émile Zola turns back to his comprehensive collection of the natural and social history of French society during the Second Empire. With the novel, Zola wanted to portray the decline of society through the promiscuous goings-on of the noble society, which is not limited to its own circles, but also includes prostitutes from the street, whose behavior is no different from that of married women. Zola showed not only the depravity and decadence of the protagonist, but also that of the upper class of society. The former street whore gains social prestige - talentless, but with a flawless body - by posing naked on stage in the role of "blond Venus".

“As early as the second verse, the people in the auditorium looked puzzled. Was that a bad joke? Had Bordenave made it into his head to expect the audience to do this? Never before had a singer sung so outrageously wrong, dared to perform with such an untrained voice! "

- Émile Zola : Nana

Zola describes the audience as a mixture of people from literary Paris, the financial world, journalists and writers, stock market people who were accompanied by ladies of the demimonde rather than decent women. The men come to the theater because they wanted to see the cocotte Nana on stage - after all, almost everyone present already knows her in his / her way. The targeted spread rumor that she would appear naked also ensures that the premiere of “blond Venus” can take place in front of a sold-out house.

“Already in the second scene Diana agreed with the god that he should pretend a journey to clear the field from Venus and Mars, and no sooner was Diana alone than Venus appeared. A shiver washed through the auditorium. Nana was naked. She was completely naked and displayed her nakedness with calm boldness, in the secure self-esteem of the omnipotence of her fleshly splendor. Only thin veils enveloped them. [...] "Thunder!" Said Fauchery to La Faloise, nothing else. "

- Émile Zola : Nana

Nana's history

Zola's figure Nana appears for the first time in Manslaughter , the seventh volume in the cycle of the “Rougon-Macquart” series. Here Zola talks about the living conditions of the people in the working-class district of the Rue de la Goutte d'Or , where Nana grew up. Nana's character predisposition is conditioned by the milieu from which she comes. Do not forfeit, as their parents, drunkenness - the murderer puts Zola Nana's life instead as prostitutes , which will rise in the sequel to the acclaimed operetta star. Zola writes in a justification for his 1877 novel:

“At the end of drunkenness and idleness there is the loosening of family ties, the rubbish of the close coexistence of the sexes, the progressive forgetting of decent feelings, then the solution is shame and death. That is simply morality in action. "

- Émile Zola : The murderer

The happiness of the small family, which is based on the social advancement that Nana's mother Gervaise earned with her small laundry, only lasted a few years. After Nana's father Coupeau broke his leg in an accident at work and was bedridden for several months, he was unable to return to a regular working day. He spends his days drinking in a liquor shop - where he becomes friends with his wife's first lover, the former hatter Lantier (from whose relationship two illegitimate sons originate, with whom Lantier left Gervaise with a lot of debts at the time) and that he promptly sets up accommodation in the laundry. Little by little, Coupeau drinks up all of the family's savings and income. The mother Gervaise now also starts drinking regularly.

Nana - now at the working age of 14 - is persuaded by her parents to take a job as an artificial flower maker and thus do her part to support the family. However, she only learned the craft incompletely because, as Zola suggestively writes, her contribution to the production of the flowers is limited to rolling the stems. After the laundry has to be given up and costs are forced to move to a tiny apartment within the same apartment block, the tone and manners within the family quickly become more aggressive. As father and mother beat each other, they attack the daughter, who soon won't return to her parents' apartment. Lantier meets Nana on his nightly forays into the prostitute milieu and informs Gervaise and Coupeau about the immoral activities of the neglected daughter.

“This child is sly,” he continued. “Imagine she gave me a hint with colossal audacity that I should go after her. Then she stowed her old one in a café somewhere ... Oh, great, the old one! Except the old one! - And she met me again in a front door. A real snake! Nice, plays the decorative doll and licks you off like a puppy! Yes, she kissed me and wanted to know how everyone is doing ... In short, I was very happy to meet her. "

- Émile Zola : The murderer

The parents are not only shocked that their daughter Nana is working as a prostitute and people in the neighborhood could talk about her, but rather the idea that she could be financially better off than the two of them, jealous resentment. They decide to find Nana in Paris at night and look for the daughter in the dance halls of the district, where she is finally found. At this point Zola gives an outlook on Nana's career, which he will portray in the follow-up novel. Instead of on a professional theater stage that attracts distinguished men, Nana in the blackjack is still dancing half-naked in a dirty dive bar in the midst of the crowd jostling around her. The parents recognize the dancing daughter, lasciviously rocking her hips and breasts, who provocatively lifts her legs and skirts and shows everything. Her dress looks run down, the flounces on her skirt are torn. No scarf covers her shoulders, in a mere corsage she offers herself to the drunkards in the audience. The father rudely interrupts the performance - Nana has to go back to her parents.

content

At the beginning of the novel, Nana has developed from the insignificant, average street whore from the black man into a more important courtesan , who was offered the title role in the operetta “Die blonde Venus” by the director of the Théâtre des Variétés . For Nana, this means a tremendous social advancement, especially since she has the opportunity in the theater to get to know rich and important men of noble society who are able to secure and expand this advancement. The Director Bordenave, which is in the dubious reputation of a pimp who issues on stage women purely exhibition purposes, accepted the unrestrained pandering backstage in the auditorium and the Foyer. Again and again he draws the attention of inexperienced interlocutors to the customs of his house by completely unabashedly calling the operetta theater a brothel .

Nana initially lives on the second floor of a large new house on Boulevard Haussmann . Only two rooms of the numerous rooms are decorated with both ostentatious and shabby trinkets, which makes it easy to see that a whore lives here who has arrived at a point where she also has to accept dubious customers. Her son Louiset, whom she had when she was sixteen, is staying with her aunt, who can use the cost of the child's meals.

At the premiere, Nana didn’t convince because of her musical talent, but her shameless and shameless interpretation of "blonde Venus" is reason enough for the audience to overlook her poor acting and singing achievements and to cheer her unrestrainedly. The operetta is performed over thirty times; the entire Parisian society - including the highest nobility and functionaries - made a pilgrimage to the Théâtre des Variétés to see Nana naked on stage. The erotic effect of the “blond Venus” is described as so strong that the simple street whores only need to wait for the performance to end in order to find suitors in the alleys around the theater. Meanwhile, Nana aims to win the rich banker Steiner over as a lover, which ultimately succeeds. Nana not only receives gifts from the banker in the form of luxurious clothes and expensive jewelry, she also manages to improve her living conditions; In addition, Steiner buys her a good in the country that she can freely dispose of. In childishly impatient anticipation, she lets a performance of "blonde Venus" burst and instead of playing, she has fun on her newly acquired country estate. Thereupon Nana loses her role in the operetta and only has to concentrate on her role as courtesan and mistress . In addition to the banker Steiner, she also charms Count Muffat - he and the numerous other lovers, whom Nana never denies, turn the door handle on the way to her. As in the small apartment on Boulevard Haussmann, it is the job of the maid, Zoé, that the men do not meet each other while they wait for their mistress to be free again. Having reached the zenith of this existence, Nana has become tired of her lifestyle and the men who hang permanently on her skirt. She falls head over heels in love with her former colleague Fontan and decides to scrape together her savings and start a new life. The two begin a monogamous , middle-class life in a small apartment on Montmartre , which ends in a violent relationship in which Nana - as she did with her parents - has to fear that one day she will be beaten to death. She keeps fleeing to her friend Satin, whom she still knows from earlier times, when the two of them were looking for men, fearing the customs police, strolling along the Parisian boulevards. After Fontan unexpectedly threw Nana out of the shared apartment, she comforts herself in the arms of her friend. She begins a lesbian relationship with Satin. During a police raid on a cheap hotel, the two must fear being registered as street whores. Nana manages to escape through a window, Satin resignedly allows herself to be arrested by the police and the two lose sight of each other.

The run-down and worn-out whore and former operetta diva Nana manages to get back together with Count Muffat, although she had harshly humiliated him at the time. The Count is so addicted to Nana that it is only important to him to own her for himself, which Nana initially promises him. A house, servants, stables and appropriate equipment await them in return. From now on she indulges in unparalleled luxury that the Count has to finance for her. Little by little it becomes too difficult for Nana to keep the numerous other lovers secret from the Count, and Muffat is so dependent on her that he has no choice but to tolerate the goings-on of his mistress. Satin has also reappeared. She lives with Nana and the two continue their relationship as it was before the police ended. They live out their love unabashedly; Muffat and the other lovers are no more than a necessary evil for the two women to finance their livelihoods.

Finally, Nana got it into her head that she wanted to play a leading role in the new production again at the Thèâtre des Variétés. She forces Count Muffat, who finances the theater, to get them for her. She threatens to end the affair if he fails to secure the role of the virtuous wife in the new play. Muffat initially doubts whether the well-known courtesan can credibly portray the role and fears for his reputation. She gets the role, but makes numerous enemies in the theater. In addition, as a virtuous woman, she is far less convincing than she succeeded in the erotic depiction of "blond Venus". As a result, Nana quickly loses interest in acting.

In order to finance Nana's lavish lifestyle and her constant greed for gifts, Count Muffat has now completely exhausted herself financially. But the measure is only full for him when he catches his old father-in-law naked in her golden bed. He leaves her and seeks consolation in his faith. With his wife, Countess Sabine, he has long been marriages of convenience - the Countess lives her affairs in a similar way to her husband.

Nana has lost her financier and she can no longer survive in the theater, which is why she is forced to leave Paris. Following the call of a rich man, she goes to Russia and only returns to Paris a few years later. She falls ill with smallpox and waits to die in a hotel. Due to the risk of infection, only Rose Mignon, her former competitor in the theater, dares to visit her. Nana dies lonely in a hotel room. On the same day the Franco-German War breaks out.

“Perhaps you put a little too much into the symbolic interpretation when you say that the decayed body of Nana is the death throes of France during the Second Empire. But obviously I wanted some kind of reference ... "

- Émile Zola : Letter to Van Santen Kolff

reception

Émile Zola worked since 1878 on the novel Nana - the ninth from the "Rougon-Macquart" series. Since Zola had to conduct extensive studies for the individual chapters and also had to write his weekly theater chronicle, he made slow progress with the novel. The work was published between October 16, 1879 and February 5, 1880 in the daily Le Voltaire as a feature novel; It was enough for Zola to be a few chapters ahead of the newspaper print. Le Voltaire promoted the publication of the novel with a wide-ranging campaign: advertisements in the daily newspapers, posters, advertisements with inscriptions on the back and firelighters in tobacco shops encouraged people to read Nana . Zola had been a well-known and controversial author since the publication of The Blackjack , while Nana was received with violent polemics. Zola's voyeurism was made fun of, he was accused of knowing nothing about the demi-world and of having created a “Parisian novel for the provincials, but a provincial novel for the Parisians” ( Aurélien Scholl ) with the type of the secondary whore Nana . The author responded to accusations of ignorance, which also alluded to Zola's withdrawn, rural lifestyle in the Médan area , with a long article published by Le Voltaire on October 28, 1879.

"As for my sources of information, they are all natural: I have seen, I have listened."

- Émile Zola : Nana

Polemics and criticism of the (initially) serialized novel, in addition to the rumor that emerged in the spring of 1879 that Nana was a key novel, contributed to the great success of Nana in bookselling . In Charpentier appeared Nana on 15 February 1880 with a circulation of 55,000 copies as a book. The entire edition was out of print before delivery, which is why the publisher had another 10,000 copies printed.

Influences from the world of operetta

“They are so after me that I don't dare to risk the slightest detail,” wrote Zola on November 22, 1879 in a letter to Mrs. Charpentier. From Zola's preliminary studies it appears that he has carefully dealt with the milieu of the novel. Zola was basically familiar with the stage world from the performances of his own pieces - but the Théâtre des Variétés was alien to him. Ludovic Halévy should prove to be a useful mentor. The writer and librettist Jacques Offenbach's most famous operettas provided Zola with anecdotes about the operetta actresses Anna Judic and Hortense Schneider and the courtesans Anna Delions , Valtesse de la Bigne and Delphine de Lizy . As can be seen from Zola's notes, some of the female characters in Nana are clearly modeled on Halévy's stories. Like Anna Judic, Rose Mignon, Nana's acting colleague and competitor, lives in a friendly relationship with her husband, who brings up their two children, takes care of their business, chooses roles and at the same time tolerates and controls their lovers. Zola has noted an episode from the life of Judic in which her husband fights with his opponent backstage. The actress - in costume, on the way to the stage - is admonished by Offenbach not to miss her appearance.

"Mignon was furious about his wife's new love affair and upset because he had to watch how this Fauchery didn't contribute anything to the household other than a questionable advertisement [...]"

- Émile Zola : Nana

Another episode based on Ludovic Halévy's anecdotes is the one in which Nana drinks champagne with the Prince of Wales in her dressing room. During a performance of Offenbach's operetta The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein , the Prince of Wales visited Hortense Schneider in her box, in which other actors in the performance - in costumes - were.

"And nobody smiled at this strange mixture, this real prince and heir to the throne, who drank the champagne of a comedian so comfortably and felt extremely comfortable in this gods' carnival, which played in this exuberant masquerade of royalty, in the midst of a people of dressing women and easy-going women, of old, hardened stage bunnies and showmen of women meat. "

- Émile Zola : Nana

Offenbach's greatest audiences such as Die Schöne Helena can be traced back to actresses such as Hortense Schneider. “La Snédères” erotic and provocative nudity on stage also had a German-speaking counterpart. In Vienna, Marie Geistinger gave Offenbach's Helena , who, like her French colleague, was not afraid to use her body in an erotic way. Contemporary witnesses report that Marie Geistiger - like Hortense Schneider and Émile Zola's Nana - stood naked on stage in beautiful Helena .

Théâtre des Variétés

“At nine o'clock the auditorium of the Théâtre des Variétés was still empty. Only a few people sat on the balcony and downstairs on the ground floor and waited completely lost between the garnet-red velvet armchairs in the weak light of the chandelier, on which a few sparse lights were still burning. [...] "

- Émile Zola : Nana

Ludovic Halévy also familiarized Zola with the customs behind the stage at the Théâtre des Variétés . In order to be able to depict the theater building in his novel in a credible manner, Zola made sketches of the rooms, for example. In his notes he also dealt with considerations about the artist's entrance, the cloakrooms, the auditorium, the sets, the theater entrance and the question of how an actress applies make-up. The hall of the Théâtre des Variétés is described in detail in the first chapter of the novel, while Zola records his observations behind the scenes and the artist's boxes in the fifth and ninth chapters. On February 15, 1878, Zola and Halévy attended the premiere of Niniche ( Alfred Hennequin and Albert Millaud ) at the Théâtre des Variétés. The novel Nana begins in the Théâtre des Variétés; Zola's heroine makes her stage debut here in the role of Venus in the operetta “Die blonde Venus”. Zola's “Die blonde Venus” is a parody of the operetta The Beautiful Helena by Meilhac and Halévy based on music by Jacques Offenbach, who for her part travestates themes and heroes of ancient Greece; Hortense Schneider played the leading role.

"This carnival of the gods, Mount Olympus, which was dragged through the excrement, a whole religion, a whole poetry that was distorted into ridicule, all of this was a hit for the audience."

- Émile Zola : Nana

Operetta novel

Zola has set his novel Nana in the operetta milieu. His novel is a credible testimony to the conditions under which operettas were played in Paris in their early years. He describes the theater, for example through Count Muffat, as a privately financed form of music theater, where eroticism is staged freely and uninhibitedly exaggerated into the grotesque and funny, which is illustrated by the description of Nana's appearances. Without these parodic elements, such permissive representations on the stage would not have been possible for reasons of theater censorship, as the reception of Offenbach's operetta The Beautiful Helena testifies. Just as the world of bon vivants is a regular audience at Offenbach, so Zola describes the audience at the Théâtre des Variétés. The pornographic aspect of early operetta productions is emphasized by Zola not only by the fact that the director Bordenave speaks of his house as a brothel, but also by describing the men as so excited by the performances that they - unless they can afford any of the actresses can - satisfy a girl from the street. In order to be less at the mercy of the strict French moral police (Zola describes that too), operetta theaters were often used for dome purposes. It was easy for rich men to get to know interested women here. In addition, it was not uncommon for street whores to pretend to be a stage performer in order to evade registration as a prostitute and the resulting restrictions. In the novel, Zola does not negotiate the questioning of a hetero-normative worldview on the subject of the operetta - in the relationship with Satin, however, Nana experiences a selfless and erotic love that she never experienced in any of her heterosexual relationships or could have known from her parents' environment.

Edouard Manet's painting

Tintamarre magazine claimed that Édouard Manet's painting Nana from 1877 was inspired by Zola's fictional character of the same name. However, the novel appeared in sequels only two years after the picture was completed. Manet could have known Nana from a chapter in the novel The Blackjack .

Film adaptations

expenditure

Radio play / audio book

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zola, Nana, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1st edition May 1976, p. 23.
  2. ^ Zola, Nana, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1st edition May 1976, p. 38.
  3. ^ Zola, Nana, Berlin: Structure 2007, p. 5.
  4. ^ Zola, Nana, Berlin: Structure 2007, p. 429.
  5. ↑ Cf. Rita Schober: Afterword. The prostitute novel in naturalism. In: Emile Zola: Nana. 1st edition, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich May 1976, p. 582.
  6. ↑ See Henri Mitterand (ed.): Emile Zola. France mosaic of a society. Unpublished sketches and studies . Paul Zsolnay, Vienna / Darmstadt 1990, p. 278.
  7. ^ Zola, Nana, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1st edition, May 1976, p. 152.
  8. ^ Zola, Nana, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1st edition May 1976, p. 167.
  9. ↑ See archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.operetta-research-center.org
  10. ↑ See Emil Pirchan, Marie Geistinger: the queen of the operetta, Vienna: Frick 1947.
  11. ^ Zola, Nana, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1st edition May 1976, p. 5.
  12. ^ Zola, Nana, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1st edition May 1976, p. 30.
  13. ↑ See archived copy ( memento of the original dated February 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.operetta-research-center.org
  14. ^ Pierre Courthion: Manet , p. 102.
  15. ↑ About the writer, translator and editor Armin Schwarz see notes from Peter Groenewold and keyword search at booklooker .