Theatre in Balzac's La Comedie humaine (review)

Dickinson, Linzy Erika. Theatre in Balzac's La Comédie humaine. Faux Titre 181. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Pp. 374. ISBN 90-420-0549-1

Out of some fifty dramatic projects conceived by Balzac in the course of his career, only nine were eventually completed. A single play, Mercadet ou Le Faiseur, premiered posthumously in 1851, was his only commercial success, although La Marâtre (1848) found favor with the critics. Yet the theatre exercised a fascination on the author of La Comédie humaine, as Balzac's omnibus title would suggest, and it is principally the motif of the stage, rather than his belated and meager productions for it that forms the basis of Linzy Dickinson's comprehensive study.

Since the theatre of the nineteenth century, aside from a handful of principally Romantic plays, remains somewhat of a minority interest even among dix-neuviémistes, Dickinson begins with a well organized exposition of the situation confronting an aspiring playwright from the 1820s until Balzac's death. Of particular interest and relevance for her thesis are the descriptions of the economic circumstances of the theatre, including the venality of the system where success is "bought" through the claque and through actors' subscriptions to periodicals where their performances are reviewed as well as the relatively elitist character of this supposedly popular art form (only ten percent of Parisians could afford to attend even the cheapest houses regularly). Despite this fact, the theatre was during this period perhaps the only real social melting pot where different classes could be thrown together, a characteristic that Balzac would exploit to his advantage in his novels.

Dickinson's thesis sees economic determinism as the principal thrust of the two major Balzacian treatments of the theatre, on the narrative level describing the corruption of the worlds of the stage and press and on the discursive level as metaphor for the circumstances that impel play-acting and illusion. Constant change, reversals of fortune, frantic activity, and fear of failure characterize the representation of this world, notably in Un grand homme de province à Paris (1839, incorporated into Illusions perdues in the Furne edition of 1843). More widespread are the references to theatricality and the world-as-stage trope, which of course Balzac inherited rather than invented. An appendix lists references subdivided by category to some of these principal stage metaphors analyzed in the course of the study. Dickinson clearly has had the patience to assemble an impressive, detailed command of the texts she treats, and her use of this material is admirable for the lucidity of its organization and exposition.

It is precisely the virtue of such solid and methodical scholarship that, unfortunately, reveals the weakness of the project itself. Dickinson has set out to answer a question, whether an examination of Balzac's personal experiences with the theatre or his reading of classical and contemporary plays can be said to illuminate a reading of his narratives. While she has meticulously documented those influences, her analysis of the pervasive maskings and dissimulations in the Balzacian universe underlined by the use of theatrical terminology or even melodramatic devices does not finally add much to our understanding of these texts whose surface simplicity, the level at which Dickinson's discussion too often ends rather than begins, occults a much more complicated vision of society. Dickinson's impressive work can perhaps be most successful if it spurs further reflection on the complexities of the troisième dessous underlying the textual performances of the Comédie humaine.

Warren Johnson , Arkansas State University

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