The Cambridge Companion to Balzac ed. by Owen Heathcote and Andrew Watts (review)

This volume is a testament to the strength of anglophone Balzac criticism. Twelve specialists of Balzac’s writing, based in Britain, Canada, and the United States, successfully rise to the challenge of at once introducing and renewing familiar themes and approaches. That Balzac is so buried under the weight of existing critical discourse makes this task all the more daunting, yet each essay wears its scholarship lightly and creates a brisk and original effect; Michael Tilby’s authoritative analysis of Balzac’s 1820s works, or Tim Farrant’s of Balzac’s shorter fiction as the key organizing principle of his creativity, are cases in point. Elizabeth Gerwin opens up the question of Balzac as social historian by refusing to separate the historical and scientific impulses driving his fiction; Ewa Szypula shows how Balzac’s correspondence, especially but not exclusively with Mme Hanska, functions as playground and training ground for his literary imagination; Allan H. Pasco takes ‘l’omnipotence, l’omniscience, l’omniconvenance de l’argent’ (a quote from La Maison Nucingen) as the conceptual heart of La Comédie humaine; while Owen Heathcote, focusing on suffering rather than solace as the outcome of passions — ‘whether spent (Benassis), misspent (Véronique), unspent (Henriette) or overspent (Les Paysans)’ (p. 139) — overturns the received view of the moral and political conservatism of the Scènes de la vie de campagne. Arguably, those contributors who devote chapters to Balzac’s most canonical novels had the hardest brief. David F. Bell proposes the eponymous peau de chagrin as an invitation to think beyond the constraints of the rationalist science of Balzac’s period; Armine Kotin Mortimer defends Rastignac’s mythical arrivisme through her insistence on contextualizing it; Sotirios Paraschas reads Illusions perdues as a self-reflexive novel that participates in the literary commodification that forms its subject matter; and Dorothy Kelly demonstrates that the ‘non-normative’ Cousine Bette is both ‘the creation and the victim of the patriarchal society that Balzac evokes’ (p. 125). In a final sequence on the reception of Balzac, Andrew Watts gives the ‘adaptive imagination’ (film, television, radio) a key role in the maintenance of Balzac’s ‘artistic afterlife’ (p. 173), while Scott Lee traces his strictly literary legacy from Flaubert through to Dai Sijie. The volume concludes with brief Epilogues by Chantal Chawaf and the late Éric Jourdan. For Chawaf, Balzac is an ‘Überwriter’, the death-defying creator of a visionary work ‘so true that actual society seems to be merely its inner double’ (p. 189). Jourdan, who died in 2015, claims of Balzac’s influence on him: ‘there is none’ (p. 196). And yet his very personal meditation continues: ‘It was not the official Balzac that interested me but Balzac’s hidden compartments, like the numbered strongboxes in instinct’s offshore accounts’ (p. 197). For Jourdan — and who could disagree? — ‘Balzac reveals himself piecemeal, in snatches unknown to himself’ (ibid.; original emphasis). It is why new generations will go on uncovering Balzac, and doubtless themselves in the process.