11.15.01 - 9:15 p.m.

i just finished reading nana by emile zola. it was another one of the books i picked up at the used book sale at the museum way back in september and promised myself i would read them because:

1. they were cheap!

2. they are (for the most part) classics, aka, books i probably should read sometime.

the funny thing about those books that i think i should read sometime is that i generally end up enjoying them. not all, mind you, but most of them. what the hell, i guess i'm a little more weird than i thought. nana wasn't something that i had specifically heard of before, but the only things i'd ever read by zola were excerpts or maybe short stories in anthologies, and it had been a long time since i'd read those. so i just randomly picked it up and randomly read it.

hmmm. it took about two weeks for me to read it. that's longer than it takes me to read some more contemporary books, but it was a pretty long book anyway. what surprised me about nana - what surprises me about many of the so-called classics (but shouldn't, since i read them and like them) was how thoroughly realized the central character was (for the most part) despite zola's stated intention to write large something of a morality play about the downfall of the empire of louis napolean, with its luxuries and its wild underworld all tinged and undercut by the sometimes puritanical ecstasies of the religious catholics. i don't know why i always end up with this idiotic sense that people in past centuries were somehow children when it came to seeing outside of or beyond their limited social circles/socioeconomic perspectives.

it's a ridiculous notion, probably in part influenced by the 'revolution' of modernism and post-modernism, the idea that somehow anything therefore 'pre-modern' was essentially cro-magnon, but it isn't an intellectual notion. it's more of a bizarre little gut feeling, an emotional sense of history as ever-progressive rather than the cycling of a hundred thousand billion lives, all with their own pacing, growth, and revelations. bah.

i still can't shake it, even when i analyze it. i was childlishly delighted to find that zola's nana was so well-realized as a crafty, tempermental, good-natured courtesan - and better than nana, really, were the portraits of characters he drew from real life at the time, thinly disguised by new names and little more. of course, in his zest to lay bare the frenzied lengths to which men would go to satisfy their craven lusts, how much they would spend - how much they would waste - how easily they would all all ruin themselves, he went so far overboard that i think he ended up by drowning his otherwise pretty good story in a frenzy similar to that of his male characters. the last few chapters were too whirlwindish, and after all the careful, accurate-ish accounting of a single night at the theater, swallowing whole fortunes and whole months in a frenzied paragraph of condemnation and obliteration was sufficiently excessive so as to destroy the power of his story.

so, part of me wonders if zola gloated about his "poetic justice" ending. if he crafted this whole closely observed, carefully realized world of the theater, and the courtesans and the streetwalkers and the lesbians and the streets, and the men who move between the demimonde and the respectable world with ease, but give little enough of themselves to either - or too much of their material selves, and too much of their spiritual selves, but still nothing?

bah. i dunno. i don't think zola lets anyone off the hook. the men are responsible for their own degradation at nana's hands - but is she somehow a force of nature and therefore unstoppable, making them her victims? except, the men are the only ones with any real role-freedom. they can move as easily as they like between the two worlds. they have the inheritances and they make their own choices, and they are not confined to a single, inevitable role as the female characters - respectable or otherwise.

i wonder if emile zola saw that part of his world? hmmmm.