Balzac and the Literature of Belief

Balzac and the Literature of Belief Tobin Siebers B ALZAC’S ETUDES PHILOSOPHIQUES HAVE PRESENTED a special problem for critics of fantastic literature, and this in spite of the fact that most recent approaches to the fantastic have been devotedly “ philosophical.” By philosophy, of course, Balzac means pre­ cisely the opposite of what modern critics mean. Philosophy, for Balzac, refers to metaphysics and especially to the natural philosophy of Mesmer, Swedenborg, and Saint-Martin. Balzac’s philosophy is primar­ ily a philosophy of belief, whereas the philosophy most important to those structuralists and poststructuralists who established the fantastic as a theoretical terrain remains a discourse of skepticism. The emergence of structuralism, indeed of the idea of structure itself, was directed against metaphysical ideas. One need turn only to Lévi-Strauss’s attack in Le Totémisme aujourd’hui on Durkheim’s “ totemic illusions” to witness structuralism’s early rejection of belief as a pertinent topic for anthro­ pological (or any other) investigation. No wonder, then, that literary critics cannot read those texts most insistent on the necessity of belief. These stories resist the current dis­ course of skepticism in radical ways by committing themselves to religious, moral, and superstitious ideas; and critics of the fantastic must invent ways to elude them. Most often, these stories are relegated to the realm of the “ marvelous.” But this is still symptomatic of a pattern of avoidance, for the “ marvelous” is unreadable as well. It has become, in French letters, a kind of ghetto in the study of supernatural narratives, similar to that of “ fantasy literature” or “ science fiction” on the Ameri­ can scene. Those critics interested in popular literature and fairy tales inhabit the ghetto of the “ marvelous,” while the “ serious scholars” con­ centrate on the art tales of the nineteenth century properly defined as the “ fantastic.” No critic worth his or her salt writes on the marvelous today. It is too unphilosophical. It is ironic that modern theory cannot accept a literature of belief. This disability places it one step beyond the level of skepticism that made the fantastic possible in the first place, for one could not write a super­ natural narrative until skepticism had done its work. Only the rise of skepticism could make the creation of a supernatural narrative by an VOL. XXVIII, NO. 3 37 L ’E s p r i t C r é a t e u r author plausible. Indeed, the Romande fantastic is characterized by the desire to believe and to make others believe what can no longer be believed. Modern critics, however, believe only what they are supposed to believe. Whence the problem of Balzac’s Etudes philosophiques.' They offer a major obstacle both to critical skepticism and to recent defini­ tions of the fantastic because they insist that their readers believe what they no longer find credible. Le Livre mystique is perhaps the site of the greatest resistance to Balzac today: in what language can the critics describe the angelic spirit of Séraphîta, the ecstatic catalepsy of Louis Lambert, or the mystic theology of Professor Siéger in Les Proscrits? Adieu offers its own challenge in the spectrum of faith coloring Stéphanie’s face in death, and the fascinating perfection of “ La belle Noiseuse” in Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is literally beyond description.2 Finally, the fantastic events of L ’Elixir de longue vie and Jésus-Christ en Flandre tempt commentators to respond with clichés: “ satanic,” “ Hoffmannesque ,” “ Faustian,” and “ evangelical.” Not surprisingly, recent critics of the fantastic either do not mention the Etudes or offer little serious analysis.3 For Rosemary Jackson, the contes philosophiques are “ Faustian” and almost like fairy tales. Balzac’s studies are many things—sardonic, polemical, ecstatic, and flamboyant—but they are hardly the stuff of fairy tales. Todorov examines only La Peau de chagrin and Louis Lambert. La Peau de chagrin supposedly kills the fantastic with its indirect allegories. Louis Lambert plays out an allegory of the self in conflict over external and internal powers. But what is an allegory in Todorov’s view? Allegory always means the presence of an interpretation repulsive to structural analysis. Allegorical stories present a metaphysics...