NANA, OR THE IMMOLATION OF A QUEEN. A READING OF ÉMILE ZOLA’S NOVEL NANA

According to Éléonore Reverzy, Nana’s character in Émile Zola’s eponym novel “does not reach, like Renée, the status of „the scapegoat“ (Reverzy 2007: 83). Yet we propose a reading of the novel Nana using the methodology of anthropology and sociology of religions (Durkheim, Frazer, Mauss, Girard, Tarot) in order to prove that Nana, on the contrary, does possess the double and reversible status of a sacred being, status which can be suddenly reversed from the pure to the impure. That latter status of the sacred impure is the one society attributes to a scapegoat. The crowd’s repeating and crying of Nana’s name creates the collective effervescence at the beginning of the novel, where the enthusiasm and the excitement of Nana’s future public prove the festive character of the evening which makes Nana an actress, promotes her as a successful demi-mondaine and a real social phenomenon of the French Second Empire. Or, the origins of a festivity are of religious nature, there is a sacrificial rite in the centre of it, and we analyze its elements in the novel. In fact, the very expression “demimondaine” connotates the woman being not at all or not quite the member of the fashionable society, yet living as one, et seeing its members, and that marginal position is again that of a scapegoat. The figure of a victim is, according to René Girard, Višnja Romaj and Camille Tarot, a mediator between two worlds, those worlds being considered to be of radically different nature and status. Besides the effervescence collective, we find in the novel other elements of a sacrificial rite, such as the privation, the consecration – Nana being first consecrated the goddess of love in the Variety show theatre, then the queen of Paris at the Longchamp horse race; and the execration, symbolized by the hideous face of the dying Nana. And finally, the Second Empire world having been portrayed by Zola as a profoundly corrupt and decadent one, its disappearing is a necessary condition to the regeneration of the society. That is why Nana, the scapegoat portrayed as embodying its corruption and decadence, had to be put to death. However, it is too late for the Second Empire to be regenerated : the progressive non-differentiation of the society makes the sacrificial process ineffective, and the death of the Golden fly, instead of evacuating the violence latent in the society, marks its escalade announced by the vote of war and the warmongers descending the Parisian boulevards. The rise of the violence will be only temporarily stopped by finding the substitute victim: those very Parisian men going to war against the Prussians „alike herds led to a slaughterhouse in the night“.