Balzac et la comédie des signes. Essai sur une expérience de pensée (review)

Balzac at (sur)face value

If you want to appreciate the inventiveness of Boris Lyon-Caen's book on Balzac and see for yourself that it is not just another book on the giant of novel writing, don't begin with page one or with the first chapters. Go right to the rather brief chapter V on Spinoza and the young Balzac's truncated attempt to translate the Dutch philosopher's book on ethics. These notes were only published in 1990, and have not yet been used for a historical, theoretical and analytical approach to Balzac's Comédie humaine.

Lyon-Caen is able to do so in the larger context of his reading of the Comédie, building up to this chapter in the initial chapters and drawing the consequences that spring from it in the following ones, not in a repetitive series of quotes, but by practicing a reading that reveals new aspects of Balzac's work. In the Spinoza chapter he points to Balzac's early interest in a materialistic philosophy, and also to a concept of the material world that is productive when it comes to the production of meaning in texts. The central insight can be boiled down to the statement that substance does not reveal itself in the world, but as the world: meaning and matter are co-substantial. What is not materialized, not made corporeal, incarnated, is not and cannot, eo ipso, carry meaning. But as meaning, the material and corporeal reality is more than its mere presence. This co-presence of meaning and matter as a clue to Balzac's œuvre is the heart of the matter in Lyon-Caen's thought-provoking book.

The basic axiom is, then, that the surface of the phenomenal world, in all its dimensions, is both the beginning and the end of Balzac's whole enterprise and, hence, also the necessary point of departure for the reading practices through which we interpret him. Therefore, on a theoretical level the book is an attempt, on this basis, to develop a notion of surfaces that can comprehend the complexity of a fictional world the size of Balzac's.

Surfaces comprise human bodies, the layout of the city, cultural and natural objects and, not to be forgotten, the text itself, all of them kept together, intertwined, opposed, exchanged, contradicted – in brief: made dynamic – by way of a number of textual strategies contained in metaphors, syntactic devices, points-of-view and visualizations. These devices make us attentive to reveal, not what essential idea lies behind surfaces, but what they mean as they are. The surface cannot be penetrated, only interpreted. What does this particular process of materialization mean in this particular context? That is the question.

Apart from readings of faces and body expressions (well-known to any reader of Balzac), of the synthesis of bodily appearance and environment (also part of the familiar interpretative resources in relation to Balzac), and of the vested descriptions of street and cityscapes, Lyon-Caen uses his approach to create a link to Flaubert's use of verbal platitudes. In the long section on the merging of verbal and social superficiality and stupidity, comprising chapters VI to VII, the analysis of the petit-bourgeois type in Balzac and of any narrow-minded character takes on a new dimension together with a new interpretation of Balzac's allegedly clumsy style. In a serious and convincing analysis, these features are seen as a genuine part of the material textual fabric, which both shows them and refers to them in the same gesture.

The theoretical background for Lyon-Caen's ruminations are, and admittedly so, Deleuze and the late Barthes with an echo of Nietzsche. But the book is not applied theory or philosophy, let alone the work of a dogmatic disciple. It is a book about reading, which it itself practices in...