This explains the occasional reference in Père Goriot to the future life of one of its characters, as for example when Balzac writes of Rastignac that “the self-possession which pre-eminently distinguished him in later life already stood him in good stead” (p. 129). Rastignac appears in more than twenty of the novels in La Comédie humaine, a vast tapestry of characters whose lives are interwoven in different ways at different periods. (When one considers the incidence of recurrence of other characters from Père Goriot—the Baron de Nucingen appears or is mentioned in thirty-one stories, Bianchon in twenty-nine, Delphine in seventeen, Gobseck in thirteen, Madame de Beauséant in ten, etc.—one begins to get an idea of the complexity of the social tableau Balzac painted.) The interweaving is crucial: Balzac is less interested in individual characters than in the relations that bind them together at different moments in their lives. Fascinated by the social bond in its manifold forms, Balzac wrote novels and stories that abound in the representation of alliances, friendships, associations, groups, gangs, families (and pseudofamilies, such as the boarders at the Maison Vauquer). Although he is known as the creator of some of the most compelling characters of nineteenth-century fiction (including Rastignac and Vautrin from Goriot), and in spite of the fact that he wrote in an era of unprecedented individualism—the era of individual rights and bourgeois liberalism that came fast upon the revolutionary turmoil of the late eighteenth century—one could perhaps argue that Balzac’s work demonstrates that there is no such entity as the individual ; there is only the collective, shared existence of humanity (the boardinghouse in Père Goriot is a fine example of this commonality) , along with a thoroughly modern sense of the precariousness of the very categories of individual, self, and identity, which Balzac approaches with skepticism. The method of recurring characters is designed precisely to allow for the representation of a vast social panorama in all its multiplicity as well as the successive and different selves (or “incarnations,” as he liked to say; see La Dernière incarnation de Vautrin [1847; The Last Incarnation of Yautrin] ) for a single character who is anything but an individual.
“From being individual,” wrote writer and critic Barbey d‘Aurevilly of Balzac’s fiction, “the novel became social. Where there had been a man, there was a whole society.” In order to represent the whole of society—“the whole hotchpotch of civilization,” as he writes in his second preface to Père Goriot-Balzac needed a more elastic form than the novel as it was then conceived. For if the novel at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century excelled in depicting the psychology of an individual character (classic examples would be Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s Oberman or Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe) , it was not capacious enough to inscribe the social heterogeneity—the multiple and increasingly interconnected strata of society—that for Balzac formed the essence of the modern, post-Revolutionary experience. Balzac’s method freed him from the formal limitations of the novel and allowed him to represent the vicissitudes of a large group of characters considered over a long period of time. The technique could moreover be applied retrospectively, as it were, since with each new edition of his works, Balzac had the opportunity to alter the names of characters, selecting a known name from the ever-expanding community of La Comédie humaine. Hence, in the original edition of La Comédie humaine there are twenty-three recurring characters; in subsequent editions, there are as many as fifty.1 The vastness of the scale on which he was working (there are upwards of 2,500 characters) led him into numerous errors, confusions, and contradictions among the novels: contradictions in physical appearance; inconsistencies in civil status, character traits, or behavior (the cynical gambler Rastignac of The Wild Ass’s Skin is for some readers difficult to reconcile with the Rastignac of Père Goriot, who in the manuscript is named Massiac until his meeting with Madame de Beauséant and the Duchesse de Langeais [p. 78] ); uncertainty of place or date of birth (Rastignac is from Gascony in The Wild Ass’s Skin and from the Charente in Père Goriot and Lost Illusions) ; differences in the spelling of proper names; characters who come back from the dead; posthumous children, etc. (Lotte, “Le ‘retour des personnages’ dans La Comédiehumaine”; see “For Further Reading”).
None of these minor imperfections seems significant when set beside the enormous achievement of La Comédie humaine, which gives us an unprecedented view of “the whole society,” a world of shifting social relations peopled by familiar and ever-evolving characters. But what is remarkable about Balzac’s oeuvre is that the representation of this “whole society” is achieved not just in and through the totality of La Comédie humaine, but in each of its most accomplished novels, including Père Goriot. “Such a gathering contained,” writes Balzac of the boarders of the Maison Vauquer, “as might have been expected, the elements out of which a complete society might be constructed” (p. 24). Had Balzac written only this one novel, he would arguably have attained his objective of presenting the whole of society. For in Père Goriot we find in nucleo the portrait of a broad swath of society: young (Rastignac and Bianchon, Delphine and Anastasie) and old (Goriot, Michonneau); rich (the Restauds and the Nucingens, rich in a Parisian way), richer still (Madame de Beauséant), and poor (the boarders of the Maison Vauquer); good (Bianchon) and evil (Vautrin); good and evil together (Vautrin again); coming from various walks of life (functionaries, students, bankers, investors, criminals, policemen) ; of various sexual orientations. We find also the very Balzacian inscription of the rise and fall of these characters on a minutely calibrated social scale (Rastignac is clearly on the way up; Madame Vauquer, “née de Conflans,” has already come down a ways; Poiret and Michonneau by the end take a step further down the ladder by lodging at the Buneaud’s, etc.). And we find all of Paris, from the Faubourg Saint-Marceau to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, from the depths of the Catacombs, where the novel opens, to the heights of Père Lachaise, where it comes to a close.
Does this swerve away from the individual and toward a more encompassing vision of society as a whole explain the rather odd, almost imbalanced structure of Père Goriot? For it is inadequate to say that Père Goriot is simply the story of Goriot, a retired vermicelli dealer, and his two daughters. The novel tells this story, but it is one among several that this multifocal work relates. And Goriot, although his name provides the title for the book, seems a remarkably passive figure (his essence is to suffer), absent, moreover, for long stretches of the story and altogether less central to the narrative than other characters, such as Rastignac or Vautrin, who vie for the reader’s interest. Yet neither of these latter really qualifies as a protagonist either. Rastignac, present in almost every scene, seems oddly removed from the action, much more of an observer—and Balzac describes him as such (p. 127)—than a player, while Vautrin, surely the most appealing character on account of his dynamism, his intelligence, his mystique, emerges rather late as a key figure and exits early. There is, in sum, an absence of narrative unity in Père Goriot that is related, I think, to the shift in narrative emphasis from the individual to the collective: The notions of protagonist, hero, and even main character owe their existence to the very idea of the individual that Balzac leaves behind, such that we find ourselves before a centerless fiction in which all characters are invested with equal weight. All the characters in Père Goriot are round characters; none is flat, to use E. M. Forster’s terminology. If we were to say that there are multiple protagonists in this novel, we would simply be saying that Balzac tells the story of the many and not of one.
For similar reasons, there are no secondary characters in Balzac. Certainly, there are characters who appear less frequently than others, who say little, who have subordinate roles in a technical, statistical sense. But these are saved from the novelistic fate of secondariness by virtue of the vitality with which Balzac imbues them. There is at work here a sort of “uniform illumination,” to borrow a phrase that Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, applied to the writings of Homer. “Everyone in Balzac, even the doormen, has spirit
,” wrote Baudelaire. “All the souls there are weapons loaded to the gills with will.” It is this “will”—this drive or energy that Balzac likened to a fluid that exists in a finite quantity inside us and that we use up, like fuel, every time we act or think—that Balzac wants to narrate, and that is the property not of one or of the few but of all. It is will that shapes a plot, a narrative, a story. What makes Balzac’s fiction so compelling is that all his characters are, potentially, storied characters. Balzac seems to make reference to this idea early on in Père Goriot when presenting the dramatis personae of the Maison Vauquer. Of Victorine Taillefer he writes: “A book might have been made of her story” (p. 21). The statement could apply to any one of the characters in the narrative, and indeed does apply to several. “A book might have been made of her story”: This is as true of Victorine Taillefer as it is of Madame de Beauséant (that book being La Femme abandonnée [The Abandoned Woman, 1833] ) , as it is of the Duchesse de Langeais (see La Duchesse de Langeais, 1834), or the Baron de Nucingen (The Firm of Nucingen, 1838) , or the money-lender (Gobseck, 1830), or Vautrin (The Last Incarnation of Vautrin), and so on and so on. Had Balzac lived long enough (he died at fifty) and been inclined, he could and would have made a book of the stories of the others too (of Madame Vauquer, for example, of the mysterious Mademoiselle Michonneau, etc.). Balzac’s books thus give the impression of being infinitely extensible in all directions, multiplexes opening up onto new vistas on all sides.
Balzac was a storyteller, and he saw the world as a vast network of interconnected stories: No one is without a story. No one, and perhaps no thing, for things in Balzac are as telling as bodies and faces. A chair—its period, the degree of its polish, its upholstery, its hue, where it was bought, to whom it belongs, to whom it has belonged, where it is placed in a room, its relation to other furnishings in the room—can tell us much about a person, for in Balzac there is a continuity between people and the things that surround them.2 Madame Vauquer’s torn petticoat, to quote a classic example, “discovers the cook [and] foreshadows the lodgers” (pp. 15-16) . It is as though things, like people, are subject to the laws of phrenology and physiology that so fascinated Balzac; as though, reading Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Kaspar Lavater, Balzac intuited the transhuman potential of the theory whereby the external (cranium, facial traits) reveals the internal (character).
Such a creative understanding and application of science (or here of pseudoscience) would be in keeping with Balzac’s overall approach to various branches of human knowledge. His two intellectual mentors—Georges Cuvier, the zoologist whose lectures Bianchon attends (as did Balzac), and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the naturalist to whom Balzac dedicated Père Goriot (as well as the collected Comédie humaine)—shared the conviction that an organism cannot be studied independently of its milieu. A basic scientific premise, but one whose consequences had not been applied to the literary study of the human species—and a premise that led Balzac to place unprecedented importance on the representation of the material world. In exposing the general conception of the Comédie in the foreword to the whole, Balzac explains why things matter. The idea for La Comédie humaine, he writes there, “came from a comparison between Humanity and Animality.” “There is but one animal.” “The Creator used one and the same pattern for all organized beings. An animal is a principle that takes its external form, or to speak more precisely, the differences in its form, from the milieu in which it happens to develop. The Zoological Species result from these differences”—an idea Balzac transposes to the study of humanity: “Does not society make of mankind, according to the milieu in which his being has unfolded, as many different men as there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier, a worker, an administrator, a lawyer, an idler, a scholar, a man of State, a shopkeeper, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a priest, are, although more difficult to grasp, as considerable as those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal, the ewe.”
Balzac thus proposes to do for society what Cuvier, Saint-Hilaire, and especially Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, the great classifier of all knowledge in natural history, had done for animal and plant life. But Balzac’s task is much more complicated than Buffon’s, for several reasons. Buffon, for example, once he had described the lion, dispatches with the lioness in a couple of sentences, since for him the lioness is the female of the lion and nothing more. With the human species things are quite different: Women are as various in their forms as are men. Moreover, all sorts of irregularities of alliance must be accounted for in humans. As Balzac writes in his foreword, “The wife of a merchant is sometimes worthy of being the wife of a prince, and often the wife of a prince is not worth that of an artist.” In either case the wife, being every bit as complex as her man but differently so, demands an equally detailed treatment, thereby doubling the labor of description falling to Balzac. Furthermore, in cataloguing the animals, Buffon had not to deal with the issue of social mobility. Among humans, nothing is more common than shifts in the social hierarchy: “The shopkeeper can certainly become a peer of France, and the noble descend to the lowest social rank,” and the reasons for such ups and downs must be considered. And finally, while the habits and behavior of animals remain fairly constant through the ages, the chronicle Balzac undertakes must acknowledge that “the habits, clothes, words, domiciles of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper are entirely unlike and change at the will of civilizations.”
Hence, the task is not just twice as extensive as that carried out by Buffon, but three times, for to the portrayal of all types of men and women must be added the representation of all types of things: “Thus the work to be done should have a triple form: men, women, and things, that is to say, people and the material representations that they give of their thought: in the end, mankind and life” (foreword to La Comédie humaine) . To place things—the “material representations” that collectively make up the milieu—on the same level as humans was a radical gesture, and Balzac’s preoccupation with the material sharply distinguishes his novels from those of the late Romantic era. Take a novel such as Adolphe (1816), by Benjamin Constant, and you would be hard put to find in it a single, material object. Ninety-nine percent of the nouns are abstract nouns referring to the emotions and sentiments of the protagonist, which the novel dissects in painstaking detail. Balzac introduces his readers to a new kind of novel in which we have full and immediate access to the material conditions of existence as a matter of course. This world is made up of things: shoes, mud, gloves, bread, francs and louis, wallpaper, bedsheets, food.
Balzac had an eye for things, not just because he was born into a society of bourgeois consumers (although he loved to shop) but because the representation of the material world was integral to his narrative plan. Things and characters are corollaries in Balzac’s fiction: One could no more study a man without looking at the objects by which he is surrounded than one could study a plant without considering the soil in which it grows. Instead of penetrating deep into the hidden interior of a character, Balzac looks at the relationship between the character and his or her environment. The truth of the human subject, Balzac seems to be saying, lies not in mysterious inner realms, but much closer to the surface, in that subject’s relation to the material world. No recesses, no soul, no depth, just an infinitely expanding, substantive universe that gives an overall and characteristically Balzacian impression of denseness. (“Between us,” wrote Balzac to Clara Mafféi in November 1838, “I am not deep, but very thick.”)
“What a great man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write,” wrote Gustave Flaubert. Deploring Balzac’s lack of style was something of a national literary pastime in the nineteenth century. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential literary critic of his era, laments “an incoherent, exuberant vocabulary in which words boil and emerge as if by chance,” and complains about “long sentences without commas that make one run out of breath.” The novelist Émile
Zola writes of Balzac’s “messy creativity.” Marcel Proust finds distasteful “the vulgarity of [Balzac’s] language,” which his occasional attempts to cover up only worsen: “Whenever he tries to hide his vulgarity, he develops a vulgarian’s refinement”.3 In a similar vein, Gustave Lanson, the first significant university critic, wrote that “faced with fields and woods,” Balzac “has the emotions of a traveling salesman.” In his at-the-time authoritative Histoire de la littérature française (History of French Literature, 1894) he opined that Balzac “was a vulgar type, robust and exuberant” before assailing the novelist’s tastelessness: “At first a notary’s clerk, it was there that he picked up the idea and the taste for those odious jokes he so liberally showcases in his novels” (in Vachon, Honoré de Balzac: Memoire de la critique, p. 320).
With the exception of Sainte-Beuve, none of the authorities cited above doubted Balzac’s greatness for a moment. Their reactions reveal a continued fidelity to classical norms of style—to ideals of lucidity, clarity of expression, and elegance inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—that Balzac tended to disregard. The first to mount a defense of the Balzacian sentence was Ferdinand Brunetière. A disciple of Lanson, he saw in the breathlessness of Balzac’s style a masterful imitation of life’s rampant surges: “[Life] is the movement that upsets the straight line. It is confusion, disorder, illogic, irregularity.... One seizes it for a moment, one gives an imitation of it, only by making oneself as changing, as supple, as undulating as it is. This is what Molière, Saint-Simon, and Balzac tried to do” (quoted in Vachon, p. 369). Citing the highly introspective, first-person novels René (1802), by François-René de Chateaubriand and Adolphe, by Constant, Brunetière argues that Balzac substituted “for this type of personal, egotistical novel, the novel of others” (p. 379). Balzac’s novels break with that whole genre of literature known as the psychological novel, the novel of self-disclosure—in France, the roman d’analyse—with those highly intimist, intensely analytical narratives of passionate, melancholic young men and (occasionally) women. The style of the psychological novel owes much to classicism, even when describing the limits of human experience, lucidity, restraint, and elegance of form are de rigueur. The new “novel of others” envisaged by Balzac demanded a different style altogether because, instead of a single, harmonious narrative voice (the selfsame “I” telling its tale), we find in Balzac a genuine polyphony—a plurality and indeed a heterogeneity of voices of all types and from all classes. This is a necessary consequence of the shift from a “personal” or “egotistical” novel to one that looks outward and toward the other. Privileging observation over speculation, the outside over the inside, his fiction escapes from the tyranny of psychology and from the Rousseauist idea of a unique and original Self whose essence literature is meant to disclose. As an anthropologist (rather than a sociologist), he is close to another Rousseau, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau Founder of the Human Sciences,” in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss.