Faire vrai: Balzac et l’invention de l’œuvre-monde by Dominique Massonnaud (review)

As Dominique Massonnaud states in her Introduction, she has written a description of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine as ‘une “œuvre-monde”, fondée sur une poétique du “vrai”’ (p. 23). The book is not easy to read, on the one hand because of the jargon and, on the other, the plethora of quotations, each of which is set in its context. Massonnaud’s admirable erudition sometimes blurs the focus on Balzac. Nevertheless, firmly in the tradition of great French Balzacians, she has gone on to provide an excellent, superbly documented summary and integration of scholarship bearing on the organization of Balzac’s magnum opus. Like Max Andréoli’s Le Système balzacien: essai de description synchronique (Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1984) and my own Balzacian Montage: Configuring ‘La Comédie humaine’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), she understands that Balzac organized La Comédie humaine in an original way. For her, Balzac’s work is a cross between memoir, epic poem, and the popular panoramas, presenting a mosaic of chronological reflections of major characters moving across the Restoration/Monarchie de Juillet world. The interstices of the creations, the reappearing themes, characters, and settings, and the integrative power of French history allow the reader to experience Balzac’s world as a unity. Massonnaud focuses on Balzac’s links with predecessors such as Voltaire and Saint-Simon, and contemporaries such as Vigny, Stendhal, Jouy, and Mercier, not to mention foreign authors like Scott and Cooper, recently translated and significantly inflecting the contemporary French novel. Balzac acts especially as ‘un historien du présent’ (p. 57). Indeed, as Massonnaud recognizes, he is both novelist and historian. His sensitivity to detail quickens his world with life, while he exploits the ambiguity of the eighteenth-century word ‘histoire’, which may be translated as ‘history’ and ‘story’. With many shrewd insights into reappearing characters and character types, chronologies, and themes, Massonnaud also recognizes the novelist’s interest in Buffon, Cuvier, and Saint-Hilaire. As she says, Balzac’s ‘espèces sociales’ are considerably more than ‘un jeu de mots sans enjeux’ (p. 161). Massonnaud also points to the concept of ‘tableau’ to suggest that there is a thematic taxonomy that overrides sequence and the microstructures of youth, old age, politics, justice, and war. As an example, she points to the unification of collections in La Peau de chagrin. Similarly, the unique characteristics of Balzac’s continuing narrator join with a single object to strengthen the connections. Otherwise, encyclopaedias and art expositions influenced the novelist, since like mosaics they illustrate the fragmentary aspect of reality. Massonnaud follows the various influences more or less chronologically, and knowledgeably. All had impact on the novelist. Balzac successfully provided the reader with the opportunity to bring substantial unity to his work despite texts that move from one étude, scène, story, or passage to another, as texts were extensively rewritten, as genres shifted, and as Balzac exploited the amusing and the serious, invention and analysis, fiction and science, imagination and observation. La Comédie humaine stands as a gigantic text in which everything moves, creating significant disturbances to frames and taxonomies, although without affecting the unity of the whole.