For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism (review)

The cover page of Armine Kotin Mortimer’s study identifies two points of entry into the Balzacian corpus. The (slightly misleading) title presents the book as a thematic analysis, focusing on the themes of love and money, or the ‘Prime Movers’ of Balzac’s fictional universe. The (more accurate) subtitle reveals the wider scope of the work: Mortimer seeks to explore the ways in which Balzac ‘builds his particular brand of realism’ (p. 5), by examining an array of texts from La Comédie humaine and by demonstrating Balzac’s use of a series of rhetorical devices. While her analysis moves freely from ‘content’ to ‘form’, the principal premise on which her argument rests is that ‘content’, in Balzac, always speaks about ‘form’, or, in her preferred terms, ‘mimesis’ figures ‘semiosis’: ‘Balzac show[s] his hand [. . .] by embedding in his narratives the explanation of how they come to us’ (p. 73), and his texts include in their stories ‘the structures of [their] own semiotic processes’ (p. 61). Mortimer explores the multifarious ways in which representational and reflexive concerns are combined in Balzac’s œuvre, with several chapters of the book tracing rhetorical or semiotic strategies across La Comédie humaine and focusing on topics such as the parallels between self-narration, ‘phoniness’, and the ‘fakery of imitation’ (Chapter 5); Balzac’s tendency to conclude his texts with present-tense narration (Chapter 19); or to subvert narrative closure in revising his works (Chapter 20). The principal virtue of Mortimer’s approach lies in the fact that reflexivity is presented as an integral part or a built-in feature of realism, rather than as an element that undermines representation and creates tensions within the realist text, as is often the case with studies of realism. In examining Balzac’s realism, Mortimer chooses to describe its operations rather than attempt to provide a restricted definition of what realism is. However, the fact that Balzac is a ‘realistic’ writer seems to be taken as a given; the term is often used in a loose way and is identified with Balzac’s writing practice in general. Balzac’s ‘particular brand of realism’ is not linked to its context as a period term or to the practice of other nineteenth-century realists (references to other authors, such as Poe, Stendhal, or Shelley, are made on the basis of intertextual affinities). The exploration of Balzac’s realism in isolation can be seen to weaken some of Mortimer’s claims: for instance, the nuanced analysis of the language of sex in La Comédie humaine (Chapter 18) fails to convince the reader that Balzac has ‘invented’ it, since no evidence is adduced that the allusive diction examined is specific to Balzac. These reservations aside, For Love or for Money is an important contribution to Balzacian studies, and the meticulous close readings it contains bring out the reflexive implications of all elements of Balzac’s writing, from the plot and the fictional characters to textual variants and Balzac’s revisions of his earlier works.