Autumn 1989
Volume 16, Number 1
A major preoccupation of the novel is the undressing of the courtesan Nana. One could even say that a major dynamic of the novel is stripping Nana, and stripping away at her, making her progressively expose the secrets of this golden body that has Paris in thrall. The first chapter of the novel provides, quite literally, a mise-en-scène for Nana's body, in the operetta La Blonde Vénus.When she comes onstage in the third act, a shiver passes over the audience, for, we are told, she is nude. Yet, we quickly discover, not quite nude: she is covered by a filmy shift, under which her splendid body lets itself be glimpsed: se devinait. "It was Venus born from the waves, having only her hair as a veil."2 The denuding of Nana progresses in chapter 5 when Comte Muffat and the Prince make their way backstage to her dressing room (her undressing room). They surprise her naked to the waist, and she then covers herself with a bodice, which only half hides her breasts. Despite the repeated references to Nana as nude, it is only in chapter 7, at the very midpoint of the novel, that Nana is finally completely naked. In this scene, she undresses before her mirror while Comte Muffat watches, especially looking at her looking at herself. Thus, she is fully unveiled, frontally in the mirror, and from the backside in Muffat's direct view. And yet, as we shall see in a moment, even the completely naked woman's body bears a troubling veil.
Let me return now to Nana's stage nudity in La Blonde Vénus.The operetta in which she apears--something on the order of Meilhac, Halévy, and Offenbach's La Belle Hélène--parodies Greek myths, mainly that of Venus, Vulcan, and Mars--a myth about unveiling, about the nude body made spectacle. If it begins on a "pasteboard Olympus," by the second act, the narrator more specifically and severely, sees it as the upside-down world of "carnival": "Oympus dragged in the mud, a whole region, a whole poetry stymied. . . . Legend was trampled on, images of antiquity smashed" (N, p. 40). We are decisively in the postsacred world that Mircea Eliade has described as the realm of "degraded myths": Nana is a kitsch Venus. We are in fact at a moment when the postsacred world is celebrating its new myths of industrial progress. La Blonde Vénuspremieres when it does to capitalize on the influx of visitors who have come to Paris for the opening of the Exposition Universelle of 1867, that display of manufactures, arts, and luxury articles that marked the apogee of Second Empire industrial and political power, and secured Paris's reputation as the capital of luxury and pleasure.
. . . .If we move beyond the Exposition Universelle of 1867 to subsequent paintings of the same type that are in fact closer to the date of publication of Nana, we find that Cabanel's Vénus of 1875 (fig. 4), which prompted Zola to write: "He is a genius of the classical who permits himself a pinch of face powder, something like Venus in the peignoir of a courtisane."6 Or, for a few more examples, consider Bouguereau's [ . . . . ] own version of La Naissance de Vénus of 1879 (fig. 6), exhibited while Nana was appearing serially in Le Voltaire. Zola commented of Bouguereau that he was "the apotheosis of elegance; an enchanting painter who draws celestial creatures, sugared bonbons tha melt under the glance."7
Nana in her original presentation seems to me to belong very much to the prettified eroticism of these popular salon paintings. She is not, as presented, a figure like Toulouse-Lautrec's (somewhat later) music hall ladies and cocottes: she is too pretty and healthy for that. Nor is she one of Degas's dancers or actresses viewed from the wings or in the intimacy of the toilette: she is too staged for that, a representation of a representation, a consciously created and self-creating sex object. When we reflect that the nudes of Cabanel and Bouguereau prepare twentieth-century calendar art, we realize that Nana is presented as a kind of Second Empire pinup. In other words, her aesthetic, or so it seems at this point in our argument--is not Zola's. Nana herself indeed explicitly disassociates herself from the aesthetic of the novel in which she figures when she censures a novel she's read about a whore; she displays "an indignant repugnance for this kind of filthy literature, which had the pretension of rendering nature; as if one could show everything! as if a novel shouldn't be written to give the reader a pleasant experience! . . . Nana . . . wanted works that were tender and noble" (N, p. 339). Nana nude is a kitsch Venus, as the contemporary caricaturist Gill recognized in his drawing (fig. 7) entitled "La Naissance de Nana-Vénus," which bears the caption: "Motif à tableau pour les Bouguereau futurs."8 Zola recognizes her and stages her as a kitsch Venus, but without his endorsement; indeed, he does not in general endorse this created character, whom he deplores, but also finds troubling, less easily dismissed than the salon nudes whose eroticism he so vigorously denegates.
. . . .Returning to Nana, one is tempted to argue that the whole novel is conceived precisely to provide a motif de nu, a motivation for the denuding of Nana that the text so much insists on. One could imagine an argument, in a kind of parody of some of the analyses done by the Russian formalists, that would show the entire theme and plot of the novel as motivating devices for stripping Nana bare, so that finally, by the midpoint of the novel, she can be looked at in a way that naturalizes her nudity. One could say that Zola's solution here is closer to that of Olympia than that of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: filles and courtisanes, after all strip by profession. Thus, if Zola wished--as he said in a letter--to write a poème du cul,he has found a better motivation than Claude in his misdirected desire to paint the "mystical rose" of the woman's sex.
. . . .If the unrepresentability of Nana's sex speaks of a deep thematic concern of the novel--Nana's inaccessibility to the male--this may in turn tell us something about the subtending dynamics of Zola's novel. Consider, in this regard, the explicit comment on the power of Nana's sex late in the novel by Mignon, one of the theatrical crowd, when he visits the sumptuous townhouse in which Muffat has established Nana, and where she has accumulated the offerings of scores of lovers. Mignon is impressed by this "magisterial monument" to Nana's force. He finds himself thinking, in comparison, of vast engineering projects he has seen: a "cyclopean" aqueduct near Marseille, the new port of Cherbourg, and the palace built by an industrialist who had created a monopoly in sugar refining. But all that pales in comparison to what Nana has accomplished, and how she has done it. "She, it was with something else, a dumb little thing that everyone laughed at, a bit of her delicate nudity, it was this nothing, shameful and so powerful, whose force moved the world, that all alone, without workers, without machines invented by engineers, she had shaken Paris and built this fortune under which dead men slept. 'Ah! in the name of heaven, what a tool!' exclaimed Mignon" (N, p. 453).
This makes explicit, first of all, the male view of the female genitals as nothing, yet at the same time the object of an anxiety resolved in pejoratives ("une petite bêtise") and nervous laughter. Then, with the contradictory logic of the phantasmic, it goes on to make this nothing everything, Nana's sex a lever whose force can lift the globe ("dont la force soulevait le monde"): an antiphallus more powerful than the male member. Her sex is all the more powerful in that it is a mechanism that remains hidden. More than a machine, it is a motor, a steam engine, as all the imagery of heat, hot vapors, and pressures associated with Nana suggests.26 We are given to understand that the whole dynamic of the narrative in Nana derives from, emanates from, her sex, which is perhaps ultimately why her sex cannot be directly represented. That is, the puissance motrice of the text is a puissance occulte, a hidden source of energy that can be known only in its effects, not in its generative principle. It is significant that by the end of this next-to-last chapter, Nana's sex becomes allegorized, very much in the manner of the "mystical rose" of Claude Lantier's painting: "her sex rose and shone upon its supine victims, like a sunrise lighting up a field of carnage" (N, p. 457). This kind of allegorization will be severely criticized by the novelist Sandoz in L'Oeuvre, but the novelist Zola finds it the only way to represent the true, which is to say the dynamic, meaning of Nana's anatomy.
. . . .If stories are written by the woman's sex--rather than by the most obviously instrumental phallus--then they are all by definition secret stories whose dynamic and force can be known, and felt in their effect, but never their hidden source.
It is time to try to conclude. I have been interested in narrative representations of unveiling the female body. These narratives must sooner or later reach the problem of unveiling the female sex, which they find to be itself a veil, perhaps from the anxiety that its final unveiling would reveal there is nothing to unveil. Je sais bien, mais quand même, runs the infantile response to the perception of anatomical difference. That is, the little boy knows that the woman is not simply a castrated male but is unable to rationalize the difference other than through the absence of the thing.28 And the narratives I have discussed turn on more or less infantile scenarios of the male perception of the woman's body. At the same time, there appears to be a recognition that hidden within the absence is that which really makes the difference. That which is hidden is the source of narratives, both in the male's desire to penetrate, to possess, to master, and in its own generative capacities, which can never be known, only reacted to. As "A un dîner d'athées" suggests, the woman's sex writes stories whose address is undetermined. As Nanamakes clear, the woman's sex is the most powerful of occult narrative motors.
. . . .There is something of a conflict between Zola's artistic aesthetic, which is predicated on the need to strip bare, to denude, to break the academic mold and let in plein air,and his ideal aesthetic of the woman, which is more sentimentalized, reassuring. It conceives the feminine as essentially innocent, barely, not quite willingly or quite consciously, entering the world of adult sexuality. In his representations of women, this conflict takes a certain toll, hedging his denuding of Nana, for instance, with images of fear, bestiality, and subversion of society by a sexually ungoverned proletariat. Nana's nudity is never completely representable because its final denuding is part of a scenario that brings uncertainty and fear. But these reactions are accompanied by fascination, and the implication that what is finally unrepresentable and unknowable, Nana's sex, is also the source of stories, the motor of narrative, the place from which emanates the narrative dynamic.
2. Émile Zola, Nana(Paris, 1977), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated N.
6. Zola, "Lettres de Paris: Une Exposition de tableaux à Paris" [Le Salon de 1875], Oeuvres complètes,12:930.
7. Zola, "Lettres de Paris: L'ecole fraincaise de peinture a l'exposition de1878," Oeuvres complètes,12:985.
8. My thanks to my colleague Martine Reid for bringing this caricature to my attention.
26. On the importance of the steam engine and thermodynamics in Zola, see Michel Serres, Feux et signaux de brume, Zola(Paris, 1975).
28. See O. Mannoni, "Je sais bien, mais quand même," Clefs pour l'imaginaire ou l'Autre Scène(Paris, 1969), pp. 9-33.
Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The author of The Melodramatic Imagination(1976) and Reading for the Plot(1984), he is currently working on a study of narrative and the body, tentatively called "Storied Bodies."