L’Année balzacienne 2009 (review)

Under the rubric of ‘Matières et sensations’ eleven strong, well-argued articles in this volume show how Balzac’s characters interact with the so-called external world as it is mediated to them through their senses and as they seek to exploit it throughout their own narrative histories. In some cases the external world seems, at least to the well-off, relatively easy to access and manipulate (Shoshana-Rose Marzel on male dress), but elsewhere that world appears to invade and even destroy, as illustrated by Alex Lascar’s thorough study of ‘la boue balzacienne’ and by Danielle Dupuis’s intricate exploration of often pestilential odours, sometimes offset by perfume as ‘un puissant vecteur de poésie’ (p. 51). Given the potential invasiveness of the external world, characters’ survival depends on what Mireille Labouret sees as ‘du bon usage des sensations dans l’équilibre des personnages’, by recourse to different or complementary senses (such as sight, hearing, and touch), and by fusing material and spiritual worlds: ‘la spiritualisation des sens va de pair avec une matérialisation de l’esprit’ (Patrick Labarthe, p. 81). Fortunately, the seeming opposites of matter and spirit are further fused in Balzac’s use of the word ‘substance’ (Max Andréoli) and in the correspondences in L’Enfant maudit (Patrick Labarthe). Fortunately, too, both the decay (Aude Déruelle) and the fragmentation (André Vanoncini) of the objective world can impact positively on the resourceful or insightful character, prompting ‘la recherche du plein perdu’ (Déruelle, p. 31). Even more proactively, some Balzacian painters can exploit matter positively in the form of ‘pâtés de couleur’ (Adrien Goetz, p. 68). As is shown, moreover, by Scott Sprenger’s illuminating analysis of Pons’s ‘taste’, motivated by frustrated sexual energies and by repressed ancien régime Catholicism, different characters’ exploitation of their sensations depends on their physiology, their social position, and their history (Blanche Schmitt-Lochmann). After Stéphane Vachon’s agenda-setting mise au point on the state and promising future of Balzac genetic criticism, a second, Varia section continues with Florence Filippi on the actor Talma, whom she sees as ‘une sorte de protagoniste invisible’ instantiating characters’ initiation into Parisian society, Balzac’s fusion and confusion of the ‘real’ and the ‘theatrical’, and ‘la rivalité générique entre tragédie et roman’ (pp. 224, 226). While a similar rivalry may characterize Balzac’s relation to music, a shared structural unity and similarly violent affects/effects can, as Katherine Kolb demonstrates, be seen to characterize both Balzac and Beethoven in the former’s evocation of the Fifth Symphony in César Birotteau. Relationships of a different kind feature in the closing articles of the volume with Julia Chamard-Bergeron’s extended presentation of friendships in Illusions perdues and Igor Sokologorsky’s broad-brush account of ‘l’envers’ in Balzac. Although the first cluster might have benefited from a Balzac-style explanatory overview, and although some pieces in the second grouping could have been more tightly argued, the volume as a whole, particularly with its usual complement of reviews and bibliographical information, is testimony to the variety and vigour of Balzac research.