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  • Balzac, l'aventure analytique
  • Andrew Watts
Balzac, l'aventure analytique. Edited by Claire Barel-Moisan and Christèle Couleau. (Collection Balzac). Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2009. 272 pp. Pb €26.00.

From the first Physiologie du mariage in 1826 to the 1846 edition of Petites misères de la vie conjugale, the Études analytiques span the most productive phase of Balzac's career. These works, however, have often been dismissed as secondary to 'le bel ensemble romanesque' (p. 5) that towers over them. The present volume aims to redress this critical imbalance by exploring the nature of Balzac's analytical ambitions, and the extent to which the projects nurtured within the experimental space of the Études analytiques came to underpin his literary enterprise as a whole. Whilst this subcategory of La Comédie humaine contains mostly products of improvisation and journalistic expediency, these works, as Barel-Moisan and Couleau explain in their introductory remarks, testify to Balzac's enthusiasm for observation and understanding, as well as to his euphoria at attempting to make sense of a nineteenth century in constant evolution. The first of seventeen intricately researched essays focuses on the origins and early usage of the term 'analytique' in French intellectual discourse. Tracing the progress of an analytical tradition through Descartes, Laplace, and Fourier, José-Luis Diaz reflects on Balzac's determination to give poetic form to a profoundly scientific activity. Analysis is not merely a clinical undertaking, Diaz suggests, but a creative force that, both within and beyond the Études analytiques, threatens to consume the very realities it seeks to represent. The danger of over-analysis is a theme to which Pierre Laforgue returns in the [End Page 106] second cluster of essays, which examine the analytical cross-fertilizations between the Études analytiques and the wider context of La Comédie humaine. As Laforgue demonstrates, Balzac's determination to combine analysis and fiction would reach a point of critical tension in 1838-40, when his portrayal of middle-class life, in Les Petits Bourgeois, became so mired in opening exposition that the subsequent narrative was stifled and ultimately aborted. Far from succumbing to similar disappointment, the editors of this collection have ensured that their material advances smoothly towards a discussion of the aphorisms, maxims, and parodies that form the basis of Balzac's analytical technique, and often show him caught between irony and seriousness. The latter position is neatly illustrated by Joëlle Gleize, who argues that the blend of science and playful anecdote that characterizes the Théorie de la démarche owes much to the hybrid discourse with which Brillât-Savarin had already experimented in his 1825 Physiologie du goût. Alongside their reading of the technical apparatus of analysis, the final two parts of the volume probe the multiple subjects to which Balzac applied his analytical method, ranging over movement and gesture (Jacques Neefs), alterity and difference (Owen Heathcote), and fashion (François Kerlouégan). The result is a work that, despite some very minor repetitions, will make an excellent addition to university libraries, as well as appealing to specialists and those interested in nineteenth-century literature studies more generally. The book is, furthermore, well integrated into a series through which the Groupe international de recherches balzaciennes, an organization committed to its own 'aventure analytique', continues to provide invaluable critical insights.

Andrew Watts
University Of Birmingham
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