A “Corporama of Historical Facts”: Balzac and the Pre-Cinematographic Imagination

Baudelaire, in his essay L’Art Romantique, identifies in Balzac a “goût prodigieux du détail” [“an immoderate taste for detail”] a constitutional inclination “de tout voir, de tout faire voir, de tout deviner, de tout faire deviner,” [“to see, to make the reader see, to divine and make the reader divine everything”] (275). Seeing and imagining in Balzac, observing and surmising, go together, according to Baudelaire. The reader, who is presented with Balzac’s vision, is engaged in a constant investigation of the real that begins with but is not limited to a sheer presentation of reality. The reader participates in the author’s attempt to represent and at the same time to point to another reality, or another interpretation of the facts presented by the voice of the narrator self-fashioning himself as a “historian of manners” (Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes) or as a “doctor in social medicine” or yet again a “veterinary of social ills” (La Cousine Bette). The faculty of “divination” Baudelaire identifies in Balzac’s ocular realism may also suggest a mystical path of transcendence, so that realist and visionary poetics can be seen, together, as crucial to an understanding of the poetics of the Comédie humaine. The tradition of commentators of the Human Comedy following Baudelaire has often separated the realist inspiration from the visionary one. Interpreters highlighting Balzac’s realism include Zola, who recognized in him a predecessor with a “sense of the real,” Lukács, who famously distinguished Balzac’s non-photographic realism from the naturalist school of realism, and Engels, who claimed to have learnt more about economics from Balzac than from any economist.¹ Curtius’s Balzac, by contrast, is among the most comprehensive readings of the Comédie humaine that integrate the visionary elements, which Baudelaire did not miss, into the larger fabric of the whole cycle of novels constituting La Comédie humaine. Interestingly, readers like Curtius who are attentive to the visionary elements in Balzac are also the ones who posit a unity in the whole project of the Comédie humaine. Linking vision and transcendental intuition, as Baudelaire seems to do, allows readers to dismiss the impression given by the many fragmented references to art and literature dispersed in the text of the novels --or in the prefaces to each--of an erratic mind that is unable to theorize about representation and art; Curtius speaks of an aesthetics without the hesitations of critics like Flaubert, Zola, or Saint-Beuve in the nineteenth century and Faguet, Bardèche and, to some degree, Forest in the twentieth.²

Another important question that Baudelaire’s remarks raise, i.e. the means employed by Balzac “to make the reader see,” has produced a vast literature that attempts to chart the explicit and more implicit references to visual means of representation that enable the author’s vision. “Due to the frequent references to painters in Balzac, but also to the unquestioned prestige that the art form has maintained over the centuries, the art of painting has been the dominant mode of vision investigated by a long tradition of critical work, including the more comprehensive studies by Françoise Pitt-Rivers and Diana Knight, as well as the edited collection of essays Balzac et la peinture or the volume Le Musée Imaginaire de Balzac. Les 100 chefs-d’oeuvre au cœur de La Comédie humaine edited by Yves Gagneux.³ Balzac’s mimesis, according to the majority of these studies, is based in painterly conventions, to which Balzac refers explicitly when describing a landscape, an interior or a face that the narrators focus on in ways that often highlight its moral qualities as well as its immediate appearance. Some other critics like Anne Marie Baron have recognized in Balzac’s disposition of episodes, in the shifting of focus that his narrative voice operates, or in the fast-paced view an anticipation of the technology of cinema.⁴ Nineteenth-century visual culture, however, as the works of Max Milner, Werner Nekes and Jonathan Crary have indicated...