Balzac et la langue éd. par Éric Bordas (review)

Introducing this collection, the outgrowth of a 2018 conference, Bordas mounts a vigorous defense of Balzac's use of language, countering the sort of criticism voiced most famously by Flaubert and Proust. The Balzacian penchant for inventing words, for example, springs from "une poétique de l'énergie" (18) on the part of an author whose objective was never harmonious phrasing, but rather "la précision de l'instant de la pensée" (19). Balzac's language, in short, "reste toujours au service d'une représentation transitive directe des nouvelles choses de la vie sociale contemporaine" (24). Opening up these fourteen contributions, Gilles Siouffidocuments Balzac's participation in contemporary debates about the nature and role of literary language, while Takayuki Kamada surveys the relatively little genetic material that is available in this case. Both Joël Zufferey and Rudolf Mahrer explore projected revisions of La peau de chagrin for a special edition that never materialized. Taking up the issue of Balzacian neologisms, José-Luis Diaz sees them as the effort of a self-styled "historien des moeurs" (105), intent on representing faithfully a contemporary world in rapid evolution. With Romain Jalabert's look at the poetic efforts of the young Balzac, "esprit éclectique, imprégné de romantisme" (140), the focus shifts to a youthful lyricism that would find its mature expression and appropriate place, he suggests, in Le lys dans la vallée. Takeshi Matsumura probes the lexicographical features of Le péché vesniel, one of the early Contes drolatiques. Érik Leborgne, using the example of Gobseck, illustrates how the tailoring of idiosyncratic language allows a reader to better visualize a given character, while Agnese Silvestri does likewise, across a broader spectrum, in her treatment of "idiolectes" in Le cousin Pons. Vincent Bierce shows how Balzac, influenced especially by the ideology of Swedenborg, incorporates in works such as Séraphîta, or Louis Lambert "une importante réflexion sur la phraséologie métaphysique" (207). Jacques Dürrenmatt, in a lively manner, revisits the contrasting styles of Balzac and Flaubert. For the former, he contends, a given sentence "n'a pas de valeur en soi […]; elle ne la tire que de son énonciation dans un contexte ou un cotexte donnés" (236). Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand then surveys two critical assessments of Balzac's use of language, the first by Ferdinand Brunot at the end of the nineteenth century, the second, much less sympathetic, by Charles Bruneau some four decades later. It seems fitting that the closing contributions address the formidable challenge of translating Balzac. Marie-Christine Aubin illustrates the difficulty of conveying the idiolecte and sociolecte of individual characters by surveying adaptations in English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Mandarin of a scene from La cousine Bette. Takao Kashiwagi, a prominent Japanese translator of Balzacian texts, offers firsthand insight into the experience. A welcome feature, not always included in a volume of this nature, is a summary of each of the fourteen contributions, which prospective readers should find quite helpful. Whether or not partisans of Flaubert or Proust are ultimately won over, enthusiasts of Balzac will undoubtedly find much to their liking in this volume.