Les Opérations financières dans le roman réaliste: Lectures de Balzac et de Zola (review)

Caveat emptor! The title of this book seems to suggest a broader corpus than Hélène Gomart in fact analyses. The focus is in fact almost entirely on two texts: Balzac's César Birotteau and Zola's L'Argent. This point might be pure pedantry were it not indicative of one of the principal shortcomings of this work: it is in severe need of good editing and proofreading. The frequency of typographical errors in books published by Champion is becoming rather tiresome, but irritates less here than does frequent repetition. The paragraph which begins on p. 327 is perhaps the worst offender in this regard. The substantive point of the paragraph – that the frequent use of prolepsis parallels the nature of the financial speculations described in the texts, while at the same time removing all suspense and warning readers against being seduced by it – is restated something like a dozen times. Some of these restatements add significant nuances, but several are just clutter. The argument would benefit from ruthless editing here and throughout the book. Matters are not helped by the structure of the work: 90 pages on César Birotteau, 185 on L'Argent, and a 46-page comparative section. The advantage of being able to focus on the texts in isolation is offset by a certain amount of redundancy. It could also be argued that the structure makes it difficult for the reader to keep sight of the core arguments, especially as the approach varies from the historicist to the psychoanalytical via a range of other perspectives. It might therefore have been advantageous to organize the study into a series of comparative chapters, each based on a particular theme or critical perspective.

But what of the argument itself? Gomart proposes many insightful observations and readings. She advances two hypotheses in the introduction: firstly, that the development of financial devices and their representation in fictional texts with a financial theme are interdependent; and secondly, that 'une écriture financière' exists and that it facilitated novelistic creativity. The hypothesis that Realist texts reflected economic change is perhaps not conceptually daring – Gomart duly acknowledges long-established readings of the Realist novel as reflecting the broad themes of the capitalist revolution – but her focus is innovative in focusing on the literary representation of the detailed workings of medium to long-term financial transactions rather than the impact of broader socio-economic developments. Her case studies, anchored in sound knowledge of the historical development of financial practices in France, confirm the first hypothesis and add nuances such as the idea that the two novels postulate financial knowledge as somehow different to the other forms of knowledge explored elsewhere by the authors.

The second hypothesis perhaps leads to the more thought-provoking conclusions. Gomart is often persuasive in relating specific textual devices employed by the authors to the theme of financial speculation. She notes for example intriguing parallels between the increased access to the financial domain which led to greater public interest in its intricate workings, the idea that both authors could be said to have regarded writing for this market as a form of financial speculation, and the way in which each author could be said to have employed financial imagery as a form of metanarrative. She proposes an interesting reading of César Birotteau based on the protagonist's circulatory difficulties on three inter-related levels: those of ideas, money, and his own blood. She argues forcefully that the frequent use of the formal device of prolepsis in these financial novels can be related to themes of financial speculation, although as Gomart points out the narrative prolepsis makes it clear that rags rather than riches will be the eventual outcome of these transactions. However, she pushes the case too far for this reviewer in suggesting that the evolution of financial...