Le Héros balzacien: Balzac et la question de l'héroïsme (review)

This volume, the twelfth in the 'Collection Balzac' under the general editorship of Nicole Mozet, examines the relevance and the role of the hero in one of the least obviously 'heroic' sections of La Comédie humaine: the Scènes de la vie privée. At first sight, given 'le pesant règne du Même' of post-1830 France (p. 11) and the concomitant displacement of the epic by the novel, both hero and the heroic seem to be historical and literary anachronisms: 'L'époque rend l'héroïsme impossible et fait des héros "classiques" des figures d'un autre temps, littéralement déplacées et donc sans nécessité' (p. 30). In a series of chapters on, particularly, Le Père Goriot and Le Colonel Chabert, Ebguy shows, however, how Balzac exploits this apparent obsolescence to (re-)construct the hero and the heroic: particular characters are differentiated by being labelled solitary or sublime (Madame de Beauséant, Thaddée Paz), incompatible with their milieu (Augustine Guillaume, Chabert), and, perhaps more importantly, gradually and painstakingly created by the text itself (Rastignac becomes, if not a fully-fledged traditional hero, at least a hero of the novel). Balzac's texts can, therefore, be seen as exercises in the creation of heroes who represent and yet resist contemporary society: they are both universal, like the traditional hero, yet also atypical since in isolation, in opposition. Being both universal and yet atypical, and thus in a sense complete, Balzac's heroes can represent and yet also displace a whole variety of positions, values, and meanings — history (Chabert embodies but also reconstructs the past), narrative (the novel has epochal if not epic dimensions), and ethics (the moral ambiguities of Goriot, Vautrin, and Rastignac). Balzac thus uses the seeming fantomatic obsolescence of the hero to make anachronism uniquely poignant and meaningful: Chabert, the marquis d'Espard, and even Vautrin, who is forced to refashion himself for a new present and a new future. In this sense 'le "héros" donne le temps: on peut toujours croire que le revenant reviendra une fois encore' (p. 213). By combining temporal and spatial inertia — the all-too-frequent 'hébétude' of Rastignac — with ceaseless movement and intrusiveness — Chabert's wanderings followed by his sudden appearance in Derville's chambers — the Balzac hero combines seeming unheroic passivity with the ability to replace that passivity by unprecedented action — and language: Chabert finally tells his story and the frequently silent 'enfant' Eugène finds a voice: 'À nous deux maintenant!' At the same time, then, as reworking and reconstructing the hero, Balzac enables his heroes to rework history, ethics, narrative, and the world: 'Le roman dramatique balzacien vit précisément de l'écart (temporel, spatial, sémantique) qu'introduit le héros' (p. 243). By using the figure of the hero to reinterpret the Balzac text in the same way as Balzac reworks heroism to reconfigure the world, Ebguy has done a signal service to both the (here predominantly male) hero, to Balzac, and to his readers.