Les Operations financieres dans le roman realiste: Lectures de Balzac et de Zola (review)

A former student at Paris's École Supérieure de Commerce, Hélène Gomart capitalizes on her knowledge of the financial world in this in-depth analysis of Honoré de Balzac's César Birotteau and Emile Zola's L'Argent. Gomart sets herself apart from her colleagues by adopting a microeconomic approach in her study of each novel's financial transactions, rather than the macroeconomic perspective assumed by prior critiques. She analyzes the consequences that the financial transactions entail for the novel's characterization, narrative style and structure, thereby going beyond the simple conflation of financial transactions with general historical trends. Because Balzac and Zola were writing about financial processes that had just recently come into existence, they were in the unique position of inventing a mode of writing to effectively incorporate the new subject matter. In her book, Gomart aims to identify and investigate the chief characteristics of this new "financial genre." She seeks to demonstrate how the financial transactions that are depicted in each narrative determine its structure: affecting the notion of time, space and action in each novel, as well as the narrative voice, the inter-character dialogue, and the physical and mental state of the characters.

By beginning her study with Balzac's César Birotteau, Gomart strives to characterize what it means to adopt a new mode for writing about the financial in the years preceding the rise of the French stock market, la Bourse. As an increasingly complex economy develops, so too must the method used to write about it. Gomart dedicates the second section of her work to outlining the effects of the stock market's growth on the literary approach used to characterize it in Zola's L'Argent. Three methods of analysis dominate Gomart's original reading of Balzac and Zola: (1) a study of each text's stylistic figures and literary devices; (2) a Freudian critique of the characters and their relation to one another; and (3) the l'homme et l'auteur approach, in which the literary act is linked first to the circulation of bills and then to stock market speculation. I find the latter two analyses unconvincing, especially considering the strength of the first.

Balzac's story of César Birotteau, an expert perfumer ruined by the racketeering and hatred of a former employee, takes place during the period immediately following the vote of Paris's major financial laws of 1816 and just prior to the 1826 inauguration of the modern seat of la Bourse, Brogniart palace. Balzac and his protagonist both witness this financial revolution, living through extreme changes in the way in which fiscal matters are conducted. Past critics have noted that, through Balzac's novel, the reader is introduced to the various options available to finance the development of an industrial or commercial enterprise during the Restoration. However a macroeconomic study is not what interests Gomart. What Gomart demonstrates is that the impossibility for the merchant of 1820 to obtain credit from the bank forces César to circulate bills in order to finance his commercial endeavors. In the novel, loans are thereby defined as a form of circulation.

Money is meant to circulate, but in César Birotteau, the drama is that it does not. Balzac thus uses the way in which he writes about the financial to set up an opposition between the actual financial situation and an ideal one. For César, money is inaccessible, and Balzac writes of the difficulties in making it circulate in the private and public sectors. Gomart demonstrates that the text establishes a circulation of metaphors of fluidity in which the compared element, credit, is never achieved. Words are transferred instead of funds.

Gomart sees circulation as the financial model in Balzac's narrative; It is, in fact, the chief paradigm of César Birotteau, visible not only in the physical exchange of money and bills...