Quoin of the Realm: La Muse du département

Quoin of the Realm: La Muse du département Lawrence R. Schehr l’œil de la lettre tourné du côté du compositeur —“ Imprimerie,” L ’Encyclopédie Une oeuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix. —Marcel Proust I n this short article I would like to explore the ramifications of overand under-valuing the figures of printing, reading, and writing in Balzac’s somewhat neglected text La Muse du département. In this rather heterogeneously constructed work, Balzac posits a means of eval­ uating textuality without erecting this means into an extra-textual law of production. He does this, not by focusing on the value, but by seeing what is judiciously added to or subtracted from text: it is a novel about the printer’s quoin, meaningless in itself, but capable of imparting mean­ ing by locking the form in the chase and allowing printing to occur. Specifically, the determining functions for “writing” will be found between those seen for its mechanical fulfillment in printing and the total free-play of reading as understood in and against a value system.1 All readers of Balzac are familiar with his disquisitions on the print­ ing industry in Illusions perdues. The discussions of printing, the explanations of paper production, the strategies of marketing, and the machinations of the printing and publishing industries are essential to the plot of the novel: on the mechanical side, David Séchard is a printer looking for a new sort of paper to manufacture; at the corporate level, the plot involves a hostile take-over by the Cointet brothers. And in Paris, as Lucien de Rubempré tries to sell his novel and poetry, he meets various sorts of booksellers and publishers and learns how “ les livres étaient . . . une marchandise à vendre cher, à acheter bon marché.” 2In the Paris of burgeoning capitalism, it little matters what Lucien’s creative works contain, how good his novel might be, or how wellwrought his poems. For the booksellers of Paris his works have no essen­ tial intrinsic value but only an exchange value. Balzac uses printing to show how his two poets, David and Lucien, are victimized by a means of production that swallows up creativity. 78 F a l l 1991 SCHEHR Less well-known than Illusions perdues, but more subtle in its assess­ ment of the same motif of printing, is La Muse du département, a singular novel that weaves together the familiar Balzacian themes of unequal marriages, ill-fated love-affairs, and worldly success with a story about reading and writing. In the interest of brevity, I would ask the reader to assume that the standard Balzacian systems of social and monetary exchanges, changes of fortune, ideological biases, and gender politics are intact in this novel and that the specific interest is elsewhere. The novel is a hybrid, composed in part of some earlier texts that Balzac put together in order to produce his novel on rather short order.3 At times the novel may seem heterogeneous or badly stitched together: William Paulson calls it “ bricolé” ; Lucien Dàllenbach uses the word “ suture.” 4 Faced with that heterogeneity, readers have tended toward reading one part of the novel or the other. Patrick Berthier, who calls the novel “ un drame d’amour,” concentrates on the typical Balzacian novel of social and monetary matters: “ Balzac et l’argent: comment dire du neuf sur cet énorme sujet?” 5On the other hand, looking at a singular and fundamental scene, Dàllenbach, following Iser, relates reading the gaps in a text to a process whereby these gaps interrupt the process of reading and thereby help the reader “ re-member” the text.6 I think, however, that the parts can be related. The central scene of this comedy of manners concerns the speculative reading of some papers used as wrapping paper for a manuscript by one of the characters, Lousteau.7 In this scene, there is a discussion of the uses of spoilage and make-ready sheets. Problems of mechanical and authorial production are intertwined. Along with Lousteau’s explanation of the printing process, the characters also speculate on how to...