Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola (review)

In Real Time, David Bell offers a thought-provoking exploration of the effects that increasingly rapid modes of travel and communication had on nineteenth-century narratives. Examining everything from horses to the optical telegraph, Bell persuasively argues that the speed we tend to associate with the railroad and later technologies in fact came into being much earlier. The movement of both people and messages picks up, Bell asserts, during the period between the Revolution and 1850, and the unprecedented velocities that result alter the pace not only of life, but also of literature. Bell's aim is to demonstrate how this new speed and the means of communication and transport that give rise to it shape nineteenth-century fiction.

Real Time achieves this aim by elucidating the implicit and explicit roles of speed and technology in a number of texts, beginning in chapter 1 with Balzac's Ursule Mirouët. Highlighting parallels in Balzac's fictional world between the complex network of familial relations and that of roads and stagecoach relays, Bell demonstrates that one must master the latter in order to master the former. These observations extend to La Rabouilleuse, as Bell establishes a general correspondence between the increased rapidity of road travel and that of social circulation in Restoration society. He delves into the history of military combat as well in order to point to the "traffic jams," impasses, and accidents, both real and figurative, that take place as characters disputing an inheritance or speculating on the ever-changing stock market attempt to outpace and outmaneuver one another.

Chapter 2 further elaborates these arguments concerning the nexus of genealogical, communication, and travel networks in Balzac's fiction. Taking up Un Début dans la vie, Bell looks at the depiction of the rise of the bourgeoisie during the Restoration through the lens of stagecoach travel, focusing on its role in determining the fortunes of key characters. Turning next to Les Chouans, Bell highlights the function of roads as communicational networks as well as symbols of a new, post-Revolutionary France. Here and elsewhere, his discussion draws on Paul Virilio's observations concerning military strategy and speed, this time in order to make a distinction between the open road and the dead-end spaces at the center of the battle Balzac depicts between republicans and Breton rebels. Bell concludes this chapter with a discussion of Le Père Goriot—a classic novel of mapping, as he demonstrates—although the connection between Rastignac's navigational efforts and the study's overall thesis concerning speed seems tenuous.

Chapter 3 is devoted to the question of horsemanship and the invention of the optical telegraph, both of which figure prominently in Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen. Through analyses of nineteenth-century debates on horse breeding and riding techniques as well as the uses of the optical telegraph, Bell makes a compelling case for reading Lucien Leuwen as a "diptych on speed" reflecting the notions of its era. Moreover, these notions seem quite modern. The cultural importance of the telegraph, developed between 1792 and 1852, becomes especially clear. Bell's research illustrates how much it contributed to a general expectation of rapid communication, at the same time that it ushered in a new system of coded communication with organized methods for error correction—methods vulnerable to manipulation, as historical records and realist narratives bear out. With its necessarily succinct, clipped transmissions, the telegraph also introduced a new style of prose utilized for literary effect in Lucien Leuwen and other texts.

Bell takes up Dumas's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo in chapter 4, addressing the astonishing rapidity of the travels it describes by comparing figures from the book with historical records on the speed of horses, stagecoaches, and other modes of transport. Here again, the rapid circulation of both people and information is at stake, and Bell makes a provocative argument concerning the latter. He discerns a method of "data compression" at work, citing Faria as an expert...