Balzac avant Balzac (review)

Who was Balzac before La Comédie humaine? Who was the Balzac who wrote feverishly for a decade before signing a novel with his own name? The present volume returns to these questions with a welcome reappraisal of Balzac's œuvres de jeunesse, ranging over pseudonymous novels, codes, physiologies, theatrical dramas and philosophical treatises from the period between 1819 and the publication of Le Dernier Chouan in 1829. Together with a series of recent articles in L'Année balzacienne and the critical edition of Premiers romans edited by André Lorant, what distinguishes this collection from previous studies of Balzac's early career, however, is its refusal to consider his youthful essays merely as a training ground for the celebrated fictions that had still to follow. Instead, the aim is to examine them, both individually and collectively, as texts which present their own unique challenges to literary criticism. The volume is divided into loosely defined thematic categories. The opening chapters by Nicole Mozet and Marie-Bénédicte Diethelm revisit Balzac's childhood, and the images of maternal comfort that are a recurrent obsession in Sténie, most obviously, but also in Jean-Louis and Clotilde de Lusignan. The second and most substantial part of the volume comprises four essays dealing with questions of authorial identity and the narrative Self. Through his careful reading of works including the 1825 Traité de la prière, José-Luis Diaz traces the young Balzac's ambition to enrich 'son activité d'écriture d'un commentaire sur l'écrivain qu'il veut devenir' (p. 47). With infectious enthusiasm, Diaz also shares his discovery that two early texts, including one here re-entitled Discours sur le génie poétique, were first conceived as entries for the Académie française competitions on eloquence in 1820 and 1821. Both Christine Marcandier and Joëlle Gleize seek to extend the discussion of matters metatextual by focussing on the Balzacian pseudonym, Horace de Saint-Aubin. The ludic nature of the œuvres de jeunesse is illustrated by Balzac's apparent determination to hide behind his alter ego before casting off this authorial mask and using it as fuel for the creative imagination. This process culminates, we are told, in 1836, with the Vie et malheurs de Horace de Saint-Aubin, and an account of the eponymous writer's despair at having failed to replicate the success of a fellow novelist, identified immodestly by Balzac's apprentice, Jules Sandeau, as the author of the Scènes de la vie privée. The final section of the volume is less cohesive, though this does not detract from its inherent interest or overall quality, with chapters on Balzac's early contacts with the theatre (Michelot, Bara), his experiments with the historical novel and imitation of Sir Walter Scott (Déruelle), and his first attempts at the portrayal of scientific endeavour (Barel-Moison). An extensive and up-to-date bibliography of critical literature, supplemented by a chronology of Balzac's career to the end of 1828, complete a stimulating work that libraries will wish to acquire, and that will hardly disappoint specialists for whom the familiar, grey-covered volumes in this series are testimony to the continued dynamism of Balzac Studies.