Balzac dans le texte: Études de génétique et de sociocritique (review)

Working in the wake of Balzac scholars such as Barbéris, Duchet, and Mozet, Pierre Laforgue has written a series of essays on the historical dimension of Balzac's work, including, in the first essay, the way Balzac constructed himself as Balzac. Balzac first published under pseudonymous names such as Horace de Saint-Aubin and then had to transform himself into the Honoré de Balzac whose name authenticates La Comédie humaine. To trace this transformation Laforgue engages in some witty onomastics to show Balzac at once denying and affirming his early pseudonymous work as part of his constructing an image of himself. This included the probable dictation of the preface to the re-edition of those early works signed Saint-Aubin in which Balzac supposedly meets Saint-Aubin — a mystification that attests to the importance Balzac may really have attributed to these works he denied. (At least two of these early pseudonymous novels have recently been translated into English so that Saint-Aubin is now perhaps better known in the Anglophone world than in France.)

The next seven essays are studies that address specific points in specific novels so as to engage questions of historicity, rhetoric, and the genesis of meaning in Balzac. By "études de génétique" Laforgue means focusing on the way Balzac rewrote and rearranged various novels to develop a consistent reading of French history. "Sociocritique" means basically demonstrating a critique of social conditions reflecting the axiom that history is not simply mimetically represented in Balzac, but that historicity itself is inscribed in the novel's text — and this for the first time in history with Balzac's work. The seven essays are written with clarity and often with great insight, and will probably send readers back to Balzac in order to dust off, with pleasure, lesser-known works they have not read for some time, if ever.

The first essay traces out the development of the character named de Marsay, first found in La Fille aux yeux d'or, then subsequently in other works. Laforgue argues that de Marsay never achieves the grand status he might have achieved, given the burning way in which sex and politics are united in him; and that in de Marsay Balzac reaches a negative limit, which is his incapacity to write a great political novel (82). Readers may demur, especially since, I add, Laforgue himself shows in several of the following essays that Balzac is a great political novelist in his charting of the miseries of the Restoration and the degradation represented by the liberal monarchy. For example, in the next essay LaForge studies Balzac's last written novel, Un Début dans la vie to show that the meaning of a "debut" in life is given by the assimilation of Oscar, a young lawyer into "une France de médiocres, de personages en voie de cloportisation, de bourgeois, qui . . . ont perdu tout souvenir de ce que fut jadis la bourgeoisie à la fin du XVIII^e siècle . . ." (93). This splendid sentence describes Balzac's description of the negative politics of the liberal monarchy . . . though perhaps Laforgue has a different idea about what a political novel would be than this description of a nadir point in politics.

Laforgue next turns to a well-known favorite, La Peau de chagrin, to demonstrate the social irony developed by the trope of the ass's skin, the granter of all wishes, as it destroys its hapless owner. In the fifth essay Laforgue writes an insightful essay on Ursule Mirouët studying the types of irony in it, especially the romantic irony resulting from the lack of any master signifier that could give meaning to the world. Follows an essay on La Femme abandonée, a novel now available in a popular anthology for American universities; in this regard I note that it would be a good essay to assign students for an example of how...