Some Notes on Balzac

Eugénie Grandet > Les Chouans

I’ve been reading as much Balzac as I can for the past week and a half because I’m writing about how he might have influenced the American writer John William De Forest. Basically, it looks to me like De Forest’s most famous novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, is an attempt to self-consciously repudiate the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe and to construct the Great American Novel on the model of Balzac rather than Stowe. So I’ve gone through a lot of De Forest’s ouevre, tracing references to France and Balzac and Paris and so on, and now I’m reading Balzac (in translation, unfortunately, because in the American tradition I am an unsophisticated monolingual¹)

Anyway, encountering Balzac primarily after having become acquainted with his reputation is a very interesting process. I read Father Goriot for a class years ago, don’t clearly remember it, and haven’t really touched Balzac since. I started off with Colonel Chabert (I wanted to understand how Balzac approached military characters and themes), then started The Chouans, read “A Passion in the Desert,” and just finished Eugénie Grandet. (I thought “A Passion in the Desert” was great.) I still haven’t finished The Chouans because I find it dreadfully confusing and boring. I don’t know if I’m just reading a bad translation (I’m just reading the one I could find on Project Gutenberg) but it’s tedious going, full of characters that are not particularly memorable or distinct from one another engaged in spying-related subtleties and double entendres that I am, I suppose, too ignorant to really understand or appreciate.

Eugénie Grandet, on the other hand, has been wonderfully fun. The novel reads like a fairy-tale. Old man Grandet, the miser, is the most miserly miser you have ever read about; he cruelly abuses his wife, the meekest and longest-suffering of meek and long-suffering women. Charles is the dandiest dandy, and he ends up doing what dandies do (spoiler: break the hearts of innocent ingenues). Every main character, from Eugénie to Nanon, the family servant, is depicted in the most specific, crystallized, memorable terms. They’re all unforgettable characters because they are so emphatically possessed by their primary traits—in other words, because they are basically “flat,” non-“dynamic” characters. They flout what was supposed to be the realist demand for interiority, psychological realism, dynamism, “roundness.”² Here’s the narrator describing old man Grandet:

All engrossing passions increase in strength with time: and all who devote their lives to one overruling idea, so observers note, whether they be misers or simply ambitious men, cling with the whole force of their imagination to one symbol of their passion.

And so Grandet does, clinging to his love of gold until the bitter end. He’s so mythically thorough in his greed—it’s so unalloyed and pure—that he seems starkly unrepresentative of real life, in which even miserly people have some interests or impulses other than money. The plot is unapologetically melodramatic, and far more fun for it. The whole thing feels so compressed, as if Balzac had a ton of life-force (if I can get a little new-agey) that he managed to concentrate into a small and tidy container. The thing bursts with vigor if not subtlety. (Ten pounds of vigor in a five-pound bag?)

There are many ways in which Eugénie Grandet is a realist novel—its focus on portraying a “bourgeois tragedy undignified by poison, dagger, or bloodshed, but to the protagonists more cruel than any of the tragedies endured by the members of the noble house of Atreus”—but psychologically realist it certainly is not, at least not if we are to equate “psychological realism” as “portrayals of nuanced and complex psychologies” (which itself includes a host of assumptions about what people are “really” like, I suppose). I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.

There are so many assumptions that I’ve made about realism over the years: that it is staid, or obsessed with visual detail, or that realist characters are psychologically complex, or even that it consistently purports to represent “reality.” And the more I delve into the genre, the more I see that none of these things are universally true. There really is no unified or consistent genre called “literary realism,” it seems to me, even if we define the term very loosely, i.e. as a genre that tries to flout convention and cliché. For there are certainly realist clichés, perhaps chiefly the disillusionment or ruination of an innocent person. And for my money, as associated as Balzac’s name is with realism, Eugénie reads not as realistic in the late-nineteenth-century sense but as a delightfully painted, tragic bourgeois romance.³

1. cue the joke: If someone speaks three languages, they are trilingual. If someone speaks two, they are bilingual. If someone speaks only one, they are American.

2. It’s really baffling to me that Balzac was such a model for Henry James because they seem so very different in method and scope; I’ll have to read more Balzac, and James’s essay on Balzac, and maybe one of the monographs that have been written on the subject, before I can really make a judgment here, but if any readers have ideas, I’m curious.

3. I mean “romance” in the sense that Hawthorne meant it, not in the contemporary sense.