Balzac et Bianchon by Alexandre Mikhalevitch (review)

In Balzac et Bianchon Alexandre Mikhalevitch picks his way through La Comédie humaine by tracing out the turns and returns of its inimitable doctor, Horace Bianchon. In so doing, he raises a series of questions about how to follow the trajet of a single character; about what might be at stake in compiling a ‘pseudo-biographie du personnage’ (p. 285) through a multi-volume work characterized as much by its incongruities as by its structures of coherence and repetition. Mikhalevitch is keenly aware that, among the dense and sometimes incoherent expanses of La Comédie humaine, any straightforwardly biographical approach is ‘anti-balzacienne par excellence’ (p. 81). And so his treatment of Bianchon is as playful as it is exhaustive, insistently probing the validity and the constraints of a chronologically structured biography, and thus how one might — whether as author or as critic — go about the task of narrating a fictional life. From the outset Mikhalevitch points to the paradox of the case of Bianchon, whose ‘face intime’ is never revealed, whose physical appearance and intimate details, such as his family background and sexuality, remain undescribed, and yet who reappears in no fewer than thirty-one texts of La Comédie humaine. Mikhalevitch begins, in his first section, by contrasting Bianchon in his earliest and final guises — in Le Père Goriot (1834) and L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine (1848) respectively. He then works back, in the second and third sections, to investigate Bianchon’s medicine and politics under the Restoration and the July Monarchy; lingers again over that image of ‘Horace Bianchon terminal’; then moves finally on to a ‘caroussel de thèmes’ in a more probing consideration of Bianchon’s defining inconsistencies. Perhaps the most pertinent of these is the poor fit of Bianchon’s social cynicism with his empathy and moralism: his role as ‘instance morale’, even (and most suggestively) as ‘instance psychique (à forte connotation de sur-moi)’ (p. 288). Invariably sidelined as a minor character, acting as an auxiliary, counterpart, or companion, Bianchon is tentatively coloured here as the author’s double; the voice closest (at least politically) to channelling Balzac’s — expressing Balzac’s distaste for the political blindness of Restoration France and his nostalgia for the organic social structures of the Ancien Régime. And yet Bianchon is also a fantasy creature of ‘réussite sociale et matérielle, réussite qui échappa toujoursà son créateur’ (p. 194), a social arriviste under the July Monarchy, capable of insinuating himself into its dominant social systems. Mikhalevitch’s grasp of such inconsistencies, and awareness of their centrality to Bianchon’s character and to Balzac’s own political thrust, is the mainstay of this deftly organized work. It is in this sense that Balzac et Bianchon, as its title suggests, has as much to do with an attempted narration of Balzac as of Bianchon. Mikhalevitch explores the life not of the fictional character, nor of the author, but rather of both; in their moments of tension and of synchrony.