Honoré de Balzac Eugénie Grandet. Translated by Sylvia Raphael; introduced by Christopher Prendergast. (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2009) [ISBN 9780199555895].
Honoré de Balzac Old Goriot. Translated and edited by A.J. Krailsheimer. (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1992) [ISBN 9780192828583].
Eugénie Grandet (first published in 1833–1834) and Old Goriot (first published 1834) are regarded as key works in the Balzac canon, both as parts of The Human Comedy cycle and as works in their own right. Eugénie Grandet was admitted as a text on the French university syllabus in 1889 and thereby achieved ‘classic’ status. Old Goriot is, perhaps, more representative of Balzac’s grand project and was the first of his novels to use the technique of recurrent characterisation: that is, the serial reappearance of the same character in different novels.
We recommend that you acquaint yourself with at least two critical commentaries on The Human Comedy and a biography. The following is not a complete list but is intended to guide you to some of the more significant studies.
Bertault, P. Balzac and The Human Comedy. (New York: New York University Press, 1963) [ISBN 9780814700426].
Butler, Ronnie Balzac and the French Revolution. (London: Croom Helm, 1983) [ISBN 9780709932086].
*Festa-McCormick, D. Honoré de Balzac. (Boston: Twayne’s World Authors Series, 1979) [ISBN 9780805763836].
Hemmings, F.W.J. Balzac: an interpretation of la Comédie humaine. (New York: Random House, 1967) [No ISBN].
Hunt, H.J. Balzac’s ‘Comédie humaine’. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Intl., 1964) [ISBN 9780485120080].
*Lukács, György The Historical Novel. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) [ISBN 9780140550818].
Marceau, F. Balzac and his World. (London: W.H. Allen, 1967)
[ISBN 9780837179766].
Oliver, E. Honoré de Balzac. (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1965)
[ISBN 9780025928800].
Pritchett, V.S. Balzac. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973; London: Hogarth, 1992) [ISBN 9780701209872].
*Saxton, Arnold Honoré de Balzac: Eugénie Grandet. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Masterstudies, 1987) [ISBN 9780140771374].
*Auerbach, Eric Mimesis. Translated by W. Trask. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) fiftieth anniversary edition [ISBN 9780691113364]. See part of Chapter 18, ‘In the Hotel de la Môle’.
Bellos, David Honoré de Balzac, ‘Old Goriot’. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) [ISBN 9780521316347 (pbk); 9780521327992 (hbk)].
Hunt, H.J. Honoré de Balzac: a Biography. (London, 1957; reprinted and updated, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969) [No ISBN].
Maurois, André Prometheus: the Life of Balzac. (London: The Bodley Head, 1965) [ISBN 9780370003351].
Robb, Graham Balzac: a biography. (London: Picador, 1994) [ISBN 9780330332378].
* Highly recommended
Bellos, David Balzac Criticism in France. 1850–1900. The Making of a Reputation. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) [ISBN 9780198155300].
Brooks, Peter The Melodramatic Imagination. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780231060066 (hbk); 9780231060073 (pbk)].
James, Henry Notes on Novelists, with some other notes. (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009, first published 1914) [ISBN 9781115186001].
James, Henry The Question of Our Speech; the lesson of Balzac: two lectures. (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009, first published 1905) [ISBN 1117048810].
Kanes, Martin Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac. (Boston, MA: Hall, 1990) [ISBN 9780816188451].
Kanes, Martin Père Goriot: Anatomy of a troubled world. (New York: Twayne; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993) [ISBN 9780805785821 (pbk); 9780805783636 (hbk)].
*Levin, Harry The Gates of Horn: a Study of Five French Realists. (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963) [ISBN 9780195007275]. See Chapter IV on Balzac.
*Lukács, György Studies in European Realism. Translated by E. Bone with a foreword by Roy Pascal. (Pontypool, The Merlin Press, 1972, first published 1950) [ISBN 9780850361469]. See Chapters I, II and II.
McLaughlin, Kevin Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995) [ISBN 9780804724111].
Nochlin, Linda Realism. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) [ISBN 9780140132229].
*Petrey, Sandy Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola and the Performance of History. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989)
[ISBN 9780801422164].
Prendergast, Christopher Balzac, Fiction and Melodrama. (London: Edward Arnold, 1978; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978) [ISBN 9780713159691].
Prendergast, Christopher The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) [ISBN 9780521369770].
Pugh, Anthony Balzac’s Recurring Characters. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) [ISBN 9780802052759].
*Reid, James H. Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: the Temporality of Lying and Forgetting. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) [ISBN 9780521420921].
Schehr, Lawrence R. Rendering French Realism. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997) [ISBN 9780804727877].
Stowe, William W. Balzac, James and the Realistic Novel. (Princeton, NJ; Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1983) [ISBN 9780691065670].
Taine, Hyppolite Balzac. A Critical Study. Translated by Lorenzo O’Rourke. (New York: Haskell House, 1973) [ISBN 9780838316702].
* Highly recommended
The overall aim of this chapter is to inform and focus your reading of two of the early novels from Balzac’s The Human Comedy. The core texts belong to Honoré de Balzac’s (1799–1850) cycle of novels collectively issued under the generic title of The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine), published in 17 volumes between 1842 and 1848. Balzac’s aim was that, taken together, they should represent a comprehensive picture of the social and moral history of France in the early nineteenth century. As you might expect of such a prolific author, his work has generated an enormous amount of criticism. The bibliographies above represent a selection of some of the more accessible secondary material written in English.
The first two sections below provide a contextual discussion of Balzac. They describe the rationale behind the large project of The Human Comedy and Balzac’s place within the nineteenth-century tradition of Realist literature. The sections thereafter deal with the separate issues of:
The chapter concludes with a list of learning outcomes and sample examination questions.
Balzac documented the life of his times in his novels, and so you should make sure that you understand some of the important events in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French social and political history – an awareness of some of the key historical moments will actually enhance your enjoyment of the novels! Eugénie Grandet, for instance, describes the social and political changes that took place between the French Revolution in 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830, whereas Old Goriot is set in 1819–1820, just after Napoleon’s downfall. In Eugénie Grandet we see Balzac as a commentator on contemporary events; in Old Goriot, he is writing with the benefit of hindsight.
Familiarise yourself with some of the following key events in the history of France about which Balzac expected his readers to be well informed:
A useful book that puts Balzac in an historical context is Ronnie Butler’s Balzac and the French Revolution.
Before we consider in detail Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot, let us look first at the larger framework of The Human Comedy.
Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot were first published as part of a 12-volume series entitled Studies of Nineteenth-century Manners, subdivided into three groups: Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life and Scenes of Parisian Life. Both Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot appeared as part of Scenes of Private Life. The three Scenes were yoked under the general title The Human Comedy in 1841. Balzac’s aim for this vast, ambitious project was to echo Dante’s Divine Comedy (begun about 1307), and as a novelist he was concerned not so much with making stories as with providing an accurate account for his contemporaries of the kind of society in which they were living. In 1842, in his famous preface to The Human Comedy, he wrote that if French society was to be the historian then he was to be merely the secretary:
…by making an inventory of vices and virtues, by bringing together the main products of the passions, by depicting particular types of people, by choosing the principal events of society, by composing types by bringing together features from several different individuals, I would perhaps manage to write the history that so many historians forget to write, that of manners and customs.
He went on to say that his aim was ‘to create a world with its own parish registers’. And he claimed that the world he carried round in his head and put down on paper was more real, more interesting, than the world in which he was actually living. One of the most famous stories about him concerns Eugénie Grandet – both the novel and the character who gives it its title. In 1833, at the time when he was writing Eugénie Grandet, Balzac was at a Parisian café with some friends. They were debating the nature of French provincial society, when he suddenly interrupted the conversation and said ‘Yes, yes, all this is very interesting, but let’s talk about something more important. Who is going to marry Eugénie Grandet?’ This merging of the real and the fictional is one of the defining features of The Human Comedy project.
Balzac described French society in such detail and with such thoroughness that French readers of the time read his novels not just for entertainment but also for information. His novels were regarded as compellingly written narratives with strong characters and humour and as social documents. This was part of Balzac’s original scheme. He wanted to depict the different facets of French cultural life as realistically as possible, and he sought to describe all areas of social life – urban, provincial and rural. In the preface to Eugénie Grandet in 1833, Balzac claimed that in writing this novel he was filling a gap in the literature of his time by dealing with life in the provinces, and the way he juxtaposed life in the capital with life in the provinces was of particular interest to the contemporary reader. In his pursuit of ‘real life’ Balzac researched his novels. His descriptions of the provinces in the 1820s were often based on real places, as indeed some of his characters were based on real people. This Realism has inspired many French critics and scholars to try to map his fictional worlds against actual French locations. In the French editions there is much detailed information in the introductions and notes about which town Balzac is actually referring to.
Activity
‘Comédie’ in French denotes drama or theatre. How does Balzac set the stage for action in Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot? Look carefully at the opening paragraphs of the novels, and the way the author describes interiors and landscapes. To what extent does Balzac’s description of things serve as indexes to the inner lives of characters?
In the preface of 1842, Balzac drew an explicit analogy between his grand literary project and the classificatory disciplines of history and science. The organisation of his fiction under the overarching title The Human Comedy was an attempt to emulate the zoological sciences that grouped animals in terms of species and sub-species. The human world, in his view, was also composed of genres and sub-genres, comparable to the animal world’s division into ‘species’. (Note that Old Goriot is dedicated to a zoologist called Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.) In studying Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot, we must remember that they fit into a larger project, and they were intended to represent variations on the theme of human social life.
Activity
Consider the implications of Balzac’s adoption of a taxonomical (that is, classificatory) model for structuring his fiction. Think about the consequences that this might have for the structure of not only the entire Human Comedy but the structure of individual novels within the larger framework. What stresses does Balzac’s notion of a ‘grand scheme’ have for the writer in general? What narrative strategies might a writer employ to create a sense of unity and coherence? Think about the Aristotelian notions of time and place, and also the role and function of characters.
In the nineteenth century Realism reflected, in the most direct way, the new social and political conditions of nineteenth-century man and woman. The culmination of the Enlightenment in first the American and then the French Revolutions gave Western humanity the material conditions in which self-consciousness about issues like Realism became possible. The move towards political and social democracy in France was particularly significant for Realism, because art and literature also became democratised. The middle classes (which were rapidly growing in number) and the poor had been previously ignored, but in the nineteenth century they became important subjects for Realist writers and painters. Nothing was regarded as too ignoble or ugly to be painted. In Émile Zola’s novel The Masterpiece (1886), for example, the artist-hero, Charles Lantier, prefers to find inspiration in a pile of cabbages rather than the picturesque medievalism of the Romantics. So Realism gained strength in the nineteenth century and it was associated, particularly in France, with the expression of new, radical forces. Although Realist modes of writing were established before the nineteenth century, Realism as a conscious mode was not possible, because individual perceptions of external reality were bound up still with metaphysical systems of belief and faith.
The novels of Balzac reflect these social and political changes, and The Human Comedy can be read as his attempt to represent contemporary French society in all its manifestations – the worst aspects alongside the best. In Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot, Balzac is not interested in revisiting historical moments: his stories reside in the present, where he finds his inspiration and material. He tells the story of his own times and life in post-revolutionary France. He had what Linda Nochlin has described in her book Realism as an enthusiasm for giving a ‘truthful, objective and impartial representation of the real world, based on a meticulous observation of contemporary life’. Contemporaneity was, she maintains, the most crucial element in Realist writing and painting. The past was no longer seen as the sole subject for art. It had to be about the here and now – what was tangible and visible, and could be established by material fact.
Karl Marx admired Balzac’s novels because he said that Balzac understood class society. In Volume 3 of Das Kapital (1894), Marx described Balzac as ‘a novelist who is in general distinguished by his profound grasp of real conditions’. Balzac understood the social and economic shift away from the aristocratic in France to the mechanical and the bourgeois. He understood the nature of the underclass, the ‘Parisian catspaws’ as he described them, ‘who do not even know the names of those whose chestnuts they pull out of the fire’ (Old Goriot, Chapter 1). Balzac’s sensitivity to the details of French society, from the highest to the lowest echelons, probably inspired Somerset Maugham’s comment in Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954) that Balzac was a ‘vulgar little man’. This method of surveying and detailing the entire organism, the entire social spectrum, becomes a defining feature of writers, artists, philosophers and scientists right across Europe in the nineteenth century.
Activity
The Realist novelist is often described metaphorically as a doctor who examines the parts of anatomy to understand the whole. How successful do you think this metaphor is for describing the work of Balzac? You might like to consider Chapter 15 of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), where the reference to the processes of medical research may be taken as a metaphor for the approach of the Realist writer.
Balzac described his role as a writer in 1833 as that of a humble copyist, but this comment should not be taken at face value. The French existentialist writer and critic, Jean-Paul Sartre, made reference to the complex notion of Balzac’s Realism in his novel, Nausea (1938), where the main character, seated to dine at a provincial restaurant, is trying to read a passage in Eugénie Grandet concerning a conversation between Eugénie and her mother. He is, however, distracted from his reading by a conversation at a neighbouring table and is struck by the difference between the ‘real-life’ conversation – personal, fragmentary and incomprehensible – and the so-called ‘realistic’ conversation in the novel – structured and coherent. You might like to consider the notion of ‘realistic’ in relation to your own reading of these two novels by Balzac.
To what extent does Balzac transcribe in a literal sense his own life and times? How does he ‘shape’ his material into fiction? Is it useful to see his characters as life-like or larger than life? Some critics have described his approach as ‘imperialist’ rather than Realist. What do you think they mean by that?
Balzac’s novels teem with characters. You might find it useful, after reading the novels, to ‘map’ the characters against the narrative structure – make a list of them, noting when they appear and how they relate to one another.
In Old Goriot, for example, there are the microcosms of the Maison Vauquer and the fashionable parts of Paris. In the Maison Vauquer, there is a hierarchy of characters that corresponds to the physical structure of the boarding-house and the amounts paid as rent by the boarders – Old Goriot, Eugène de Rastignac, Mademoiselle Taillefer, Vautrin, Mademoiselle Michonneau, Poiret, Madame Vauquer, and others such as Bianchon, the medical student. In the fashionable areas of Paris, we meet Viscountess de Beauséant, Countess Anastasie de Restaud, Baroness Delphine de Nucingen, the Duchess de Langeais and various noblemen. In Eugénie Grandet, the story revolves around the town of Saumur, at the centre of which is the Grandet household consisting of Old Grandet himself, Madame Grandet, Eugénie, Nanon and, temporarily, Charles. Around this group are the satellite figures of the townsfolk – among whom the most prominent are the Cruchots and the Grassins, whose sole aim is to lay claim to Grandet’s enormous wealth. By mapping the characters and their environments in the way described above, thereby establishing their importance in the novel and their interrelationships, you will, hopefully, see the complex nature and comprehensive scope of Balzac’s writing.
Activity
Focus on the treatments of the servant figures in the novels – Nanon and Fat Sylvie. How does Balzac relate their social role to their function in the narrative structure?
The texture of Balzac’s writing is frequently created by contrast of one kind or other. Contrast was one of the main principles around which Balzac constructed his novels, and he made particular use of character contrast. In Eugénie Grandet, the callous indifference of the worthless Charles, who, we are told ‘provided… a strange contrast to the worthy provincials, who were already rather sickened by his aristocratic manners’ (Chapter 2), is juxtaposed against the devoted and trusting Eugénie. Look at Section 4 and study the comparison drawn between Grandet’s betrayal of the regional winegrowers and Charles’s betrayal of Eugénie. Indeed we might even point to a larger contrast between the moral behaviour of men and women in this novel. The miser Grandet lacks a moral sense and we see this in his behaviour and attitude to his wife. His nephew Charles also abuses the woman who loves him – he takes Eugénie’s money and departs. Only the women show a glimmering of human feelings, but they are a constituency without power (or money).
Activity
Do you agree with this view? Compare the presentation of female characters in both novels.
As well as arranging his characters in ways that invite comparison, Balzac uses character as a lens through which we view the vices and virtues of nineteenth-century French society. In Old Goriot, for example, Parisian society is shown to be greedy, corrupt and unjust through the thoughts and actions of greedy, corrupt and unjust individuals. As Diana Festa-McCormick claims in her book, Honoré de Balzac (1979):
Hardly a manifestation of the human condition is left unstirred; all desires, conscious and unconscious, licit and illicit, are given life within the hearts of the characters. We catch their expressions as we would in real life, through actions or words, a gesture, a revealing glance, the tone of a voice, a hidden tear, a smile or laughter. We discern the nuances as the student Rastignac himself learns to do. (p.78)
Activity
What does Eugène de Rastignac learn as he journeys across Paris, between the Maison Vauquer and Madame de Bauséant’s palace, in search of personal fulfilment and professional success?
Much has been written about the character of Vautrin (based on a real criminal who became the Chief of Police). He functions in a more complex way than other characters in Old Goriot in that he not only reflects the dysfunctional nature of urban life, but he also serves as the vehicle for Balzac’s own bitter feelings about French society. Vautrin is a figure of temptation and revolt rather like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but rather than against God, his revolt is against Man, and he uses Eugène de Rastignac in order to triumph and dominate.
Look at the long conversation between Rastignac and Vautrin in the garden (Chapter 2). Is Balzac presenting us with a modern Garden of Eden scene? Note the ways in which Vautrin criticises society, and consider in particular his advice to Rastignac about adopting the same unscrupulous means as society in order to win through. How do you think this relates to Balzac’s own views about the state of Restoration France?
The deathbed scenes in the novels are sites for melodrama, and you should think about the way that Balzac weaves together Realism and sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama. The combination of these elements accounted for the contemporary popular appeal of Old Goriot, although one critic observed that Balzac’s ‘passion for truth was often in conflict with his lust for marvels’.
Activity
Do you agree with this comment that there is a conflict between these two tendencies, or does Balzac effect a successful compromise?
Look carefully at the portrayal of the characters of Goriot and Vautrin, for example. Consider the aura of mystery that surrounds both these characters at the opening of the story, and then compare this with
the sensational and melodramatic death of Goriot and the arrest of Vautrin later on. How does the sensation, genre, mystery and melodrama surrounding the lives of these two characters contrast
with the realistic portrayal of Rastignac and the Maison Vauquer? How does Balzac gradually build a picture of Vautrin, one of his most celebrated characters, throughout the novel? Make a list of instances where Vautrin is seen though the eyes of others and where his character makes a more direct appeal to us through his own speech and action.
There is one final point about Balzac’s characterisation that must be made before we move on, and that is his innovative use of recurrent characters. One of the ways in which he attempted to interrelate his novels was by creating characters who would reappear across the whole œuvre. He first employed this technique in Old Goriot, and the characters in this novel who resurface across The Human Comedy cycle include Anastasie Restaud, Madame de Bauséant and Rastignac. Vautrin appears in several novels, including Lost Illusions (Illusions Perdues) and The Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans (Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes).
The opposition between the city and the country goes back at least as far as the Alexandrian poets of the third century BC, but it also became a preoccupation of French Realist writers and artists in the nineteenth century, including Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and Zola. They were interested in the effects of industrialisation and technology on traditional modes of life, and the role played by Paris as the cultural and economic centre of France. The difference between life in the capital and life in the provinces becomes a common theme in their novels. In Old Goriot, for example, Rastignac, a young man from the provinces, becomes corrupted by Paris, and in Eugénie Grandet, Charles Grandet arrives at Saumur from the capital and looks down his nose at his provincial relatives. In many ways, Balzac is conducting an experiment through his fiction. By placing provincial characters in the city and urban types in the provinces, we the readers are able to witness the effects of the environment on the individual. In Old Goriot, Paris itself is subdivided into rich and poor areas.
Activity
Make some notes on the way Paris and the provinces are portrayed in the novels. How does Balzac establish a tension between the different districts of Saint Marceau and Saint Germain in Old Goriot? What kind of appeal would his interest in provincial life have for the contemporary reader? How does Balzac characterise the existence of city dwellers in particular? How do other Realist writers of the period depict modern city life?
The exuberance of the money-making process, it can be argued, is the real subject of all Balzac’s novels. He was very interested in money, as were his readers, who looked to some of his novels as practical guides to understanding the complex notions of stocks, shares and equity.
The theme of money is explored in the greatest detail in Eugénie Grandet and the story of Grandet’s miserliness and its effects on all those around him. Grandet makes a lot of money by understanding the way society works, and his manipulation of finance can be read as an example of what happened in France after 1789 when land owned by the Church was nationalised and subsequently bought not by the poor landless peasants who worked on it, but by the rich in the towns. Through his purchase of such land Grandet makes his fortune, and the novel describes his obsession with wealth and his efforts to maximise profit at the expense of human life.
As a social Realist, Balzac lays bare in many of his novels the workings of a society increasingly dominated by commercial interests and the lustre of money. The opening description of Madame Vauquer’s boarders in Old Goriot, for example, sorts and grades them in terms of how much they pay or are worth. The ‘seven boarders were Madame Vauquer’s spoiled children, and she distributed her attentions and favours among them with an astronomer’s precision according to the sum of money each paid’ (Section 1). In Eugénie Grandet, the miser Grandet takes on some of the characteristics of the gold he covets, and we are given extensive descriptions of financial transactions. With the money he has acquired through the buying-up of land Grandet acquires government stock, and this allows him to speculate – he is extremely good at this, knowing when, for example, to sell his gold for paper money.
Activity
In what ways can we read the financial dealings of Grandet as an illustration of the financial growth and development of France in the nineteenth century? How is the handling of money used to symbolise character?
Both novels have at their centre monomaniac figures (Goriot and Grandet) whose decline and fall are described as relating to their neglect of family values and their single-minded pursuit of a single desire. Both stories end tragically. Goriot, like Shakespeare’s King Lear, is spurned by his daughters who unfeelingly squander his gifts in order to achieve a higher social standing. In Eugène de Rastignac he finds an alternative substitute son. There are many similarities between the story of King Lear and Old Goriot. Look at the final scenes where Goriot is slowly dying. The ravings of the old noodle merchant contain painful truths, which reveal to Eugène de Rastignac the imperfect but real nature of society. The monomania of Grandet is similarly overwhelming, but, unlike Goriot, he is incapable of loving his wife and daughter more than his wealth and power. Even on his deathbed he refuses to renounce his materialism. ‘Take good care of everything,’ he says to his daughter, ‘You will have to account to me for all of it in the next world’ (Chapter 5).
Activity
By what particular means does Balzac represent parental authority? How does the story of Old Goriot differ from Shakespeare’s King Lear? Are these moral tales? What do we learn through the characters of Eugène de Rastignac and Eugénie?
A major feature of Balzac is the extent to which he intervenes as author and narrator in his novels to address the reader, telling us what to think and how to read. Unlike his contemporaries, Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, Balzac did not cultivate a transparent narrative voice. Instead, he exercises an authority in his novels, urging us to see the world as he sees it. Unable to stomach Balzac’s self-assured rhetoric, the critic Roland Barthes claimed that reading the novels actually made him sick.
Activity
Find places in Eugénie Grandet and Old Goriot where Balzac makes his presence felt. Consider, for example, Balzac’s commentaries on the life of a young girl in Chapter 3 of Eugénie Grandet. What are we supposed to make of his intervention? Can you find other instances in the novels where Balzac asserts his views? How may we reconcile Balzac’s forceful intrusions with his assertion that he is a ‘humble copyist’?
You are obviously reading Balzac’s novels in translation, and it would be difficult to analyse some of the linguistic structures in detail, but you might consider Balzac’s use of language as either a way of revealing the interrelationships between individuals or as a kind of coinage, as something traded by individuals for certain benefits or material gains. This latter notion of language as a form of currency is an old one (think about the phrase ‘to coin a phrase’ for example).
Two particular episodes are worth noting in this connection. In Old Goriot, the conversational nuances of the French working class are played out hilariously by the boarders who, when together, often lapse into ‘talking rama’ (Section 1). ‘Rama’ is a verbal game that unites the boarders, who gain a certain coherence as a community through a shared language. This episode provides comic relief in the story, but it also demonstrates Balzac’s acute sensitivity to the world in which he lived. He was extremely attuned to the changing nuances of everyday speech. ‘Rama’, as Balzac states, refers to the recent inventions of the Diorama and Panorama – visual constructions that permit a comprehensive survey of a subject – both of which might be described as the model for Balzac’s own approach in surveying the entire structure of society.
In Eugénie Grandet, language is manipulated by Grandet the miser to achieve a certain result in a financial deal. In Chapter 4 he pretends to have speech and hearing defects with the intention of ‘wearing out the patience of his business opponent and of keeping him so busy trying to express Grandet’s thoughts that the opponent lost sight of his own.’ Language is used expertly here to buy time and hence to win a deal: it is, in effect, a literal example of ‘linguistic coinage’.
Are there other episodes where language is used in a particular way to reveal something about the nature of nineteenth-century French society?
By the end of this chapter, having studied the essential reading and some of the recommended critical texts, you should be able to: