Balzac et le temps: littérature, histoire et psychanalyse (review)

Mozet approaches the themes of time and history in Balzac's work from several different perspectives, including feminism and Freudian psychoanalysis. She describes the novelist as being caught between a past that is now completely closed off and an uncertain future. Balzac found his inspiration in this precarious temporal position. His vast project of writing the novels that became La Comédie humaine was set into motion by the Revolution of July 1830. The final departure of the Bourbons marked a definitive break with France's monarchical past. The attempt to revive that past during the period of the Restoration had proved a failure, and the new modern era of the triumphant bourgeoisie had arrived for good. Balzac felt great nostalgia for the lost past as well as disdain for a prosaic and mediocre present with its unbridled individual ambition and materialism. The irony is that this same frustration is what inspired Balzac to write. He was fascinated by the very society he deplored and made it his mission to capture the underlying poetry beneath its outer ugliness and seeming ordinariness.

Mozet also delineates a temporal progression within Balzac's oeuvre. 1840 represented as much of a turning point for him as 1830. During the last ten years of his life he conceived the idea of uniting his novels under one title and wrote the preface that presented the general themes that gave his comedy its structure. The fact that he called his series a human comedy rather than a divine one like Dante indicates his ultimate acceptance of a secularized modern world that had lost its old spiritual certainties.

Moreover, the novels written during the 1840s, like La Cousine Bette, now deal directly with the July Monarchy still in progress instead of the temporally sealed off society of the Restoration looked at from the vantage point of the era that replaced it. It was also during the final decade of his life that Balzac sought the same success in the theater that he had already achieved in the novel.

Mozet's book offers many insights into individual works by Balzac. She traces the theme of "filiation," the passing on of a heritage from fathers to children, in several novels and shows how new ways of establishing continuity had to be found in a society that had known so much upheaval since 1789. As an artist, Balzac tried to create a kind of continuity in literature through his use of recurring characters. The worldly career of Eugène de Rastignac illustrates another sort of filiation. He rejects the paternal mentoring offered by Vautrin (and later accepted by Lucien de Rubempré) and looks upon Père Goriot instead as something of a father figure. More importantly, he becomes a kind of son and business partner of his mistress's husband, Baron de Nucingen, and even marries their daughter eventually. Mozet describes a revealing parallel between the careers of Père Goriot and Napoleon, their periods of success and decline occurring within the same time span. 1793 marked the beginning of prosperity for both, while both die in 1821. She also demonstrates the metaphorical link between the final abandonment of Madame de Beauséant and the definitive exile of Charles X.

La Vieille Fille receives a good deal of attention. Mozet sees in the success of the crude bourgeois Du Bousquier in winning the hand of Rose Cormon a microcosm of the reigning vulgarity and materialism of contemporary society. In his courtship of the spinster, he beats out the elegant but ineffectual Chevalier de Valois, who symbolizes an Ancien Régime that may evoke nostalgia but no longer has any relevance.

La Peau de chagrin is obsessed with time running out, a sentiment shared by its author as he attempted to reconcile his titanic literary ambitions with his precarious health. Eugénie Grandet, on the other hand, deals with time that is arrested and immobilized. Mozet views this novel in a...