The method of recurring characters is designed precisely to allow for the representation of a vast social panorama in all its multiplicity as well as the successive and different selves (or “incarnations,” as he liked to say; see La Dernière incarnation de Vautrin [1847; The Last Incarnation of Yautrin] ) for a single character who is anything but an individual.

“From being individual,” wrote writer and critic Barbey d‘Aurevilly of Balzac’s fiction, “the novel became social. Where there had been a man, there was a whole society.” In order to represent the whole of society—“the whole hotchpotch of civilization,” as he writes in his second preface to Père Goriot-Balzac needed a more elastic form than the novel as it was then conceived. For if the novel at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century excelled in depicting the psychology of an individual character (classic examples would be Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s Oberman or Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe) , it was not capacious enough to inscribe the social heterogeneity—the multiple and increasingly interconnected strata of society—that for Balzac formed the essence of the modern, post-Revolutionary experience. Balzac’s method freed him from the formal limitations of the novel and allowed him to represent the vicissitudes of a large group of characters considered over a long period of time. The technique could moreover be applied retrospectively, as it were, since with each new edition of his works, Balzac had the opportunity to alter the names of characters, selecting a known name from the ever-expanding community of La Comédie humaine. Hence, in the original edition of La Comédie humaine there are twenty-three recurring characters; in subsequent editions, there are as many as fifty.1 The vastness of the scale on which he was working (there are upwards of 2,500 characters) led him into numerous errors, confusions, and contradictions among the novels: contradictions in physical appearance; inconsistencies in civil status, character traits, or behavior (the cynical gambler Rastignac of The Wild Ass’s Skin is for some readers difficult to reconcile with the Rastignac of Père Goriot, who in the manuscript is named Massiac until his meeting with Madame de Beauséant and the Duchesse de Langeais [p. 78] ); uncertainty of place or date of birth (Rastignac is from Gascony in The Wild Ass’s Skin and from the Charente in Père Goriot and Lost Illusions) ; differences in the spelling of proper names; characters who come back from the dead; posthumous children, etc. (Lotte, “Le ‘retour des personnages’ dans La Comédiehumaine”; see “For Further Reading”).

None of these minor imperfections seems significant when set beside the enormous achievement of La Comédie humaine, which gives us an unprecedented view of “the whole society,” a world of shifting social relations peopled by familiar and ever-evolving characters. But what is remarkable about Balzac’s oeuvre is that the representation of this “whole society” is achieved not just in and through the totality of La Comédie humaine, but in each of its most accomplished novels, including Père Goriot. “Such a gathering contained,” writes Balzac of the boarders of the Maison Vauquer, “as might have been expected, the elements out of which a complete society might be constructed” (p. 24). Had Balzac written only this one novel, he would arguably have attained his objective of presenting the whole of society. For in Père Goriot we find in nucleo the portrait of a broad swath of society: young (Rastignac and Bianchon, Delphine and Anastasie) and old (Goriot, Michonneau); rich (the Restauds and the Nucingens, rich in a Parisian way), richer still (Madame de Beauséant), and poor (the boarders of the Maison Vauquer); good (Bianchon) and evil (Vautrin); good and evil together (Vautrin again); coming from various walks of life (functionaries, students, bankers, investors, criminals, policemen) ; of various sexual orientations. We find also the very Balzacian inscription of the rise and fall of these characters on a minutely calibrated social scale (Rastignac is clearly on the way up; Madame Vauquer, “née de Conflans,” has already come down a ways; Poiret and Michonneau by the end take a step further down the ladder by lodging at the Buneaud’s, etc.). And we find all of Paris, from the Faubourg Saint-Marceau to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, from the depths of the Catacombs, where the novel opens, to the heights of Père Lachaise, where it comes to a close.

 

Does this swerve away from the individual and toward a more encompassing vision of society as a whole explain the rather odd, almost imbalanced structure of Père Goriot? For it is inadequate to say that Père Goriot is simply the story of Goriot, a retired vermicelli dealer, and his two daughters. The novel tells this story, but it is one among several that this multifocal work relates. And Goriot, although his name provides the title for the book, seems a remarkably passive figure (his essence is to suffer), absent, moreover, for long stretches of the story and altogether less central to the narrative than other characters, such as Rastignac or Vautrin, who vie for the reader’s interest. Yet neither of these latter really qualifies as a protagonist either. Rastignac, present in almost every scene, seems oddly removed from the action, much more of an observer—and Balzac describes him as such (p. 127)—than a player, while Vautrin, surely the most appealing character on account of his dynamism, his intelligence, his mystique, emerges rather late as a key figure and exits early. There is, in sum, an absence of narrative unity in Père Goriot that is related, I think, to the shift in narrative emphasis from the individual to the collective: The notions of protagonist, hero, and even main character owe their existence to the very idea of the individual that Balzac leaves behind, such that we find ourselves before a centerless fiction in which all characters are invested with equal weight. All the characters in Père Goriot are round characters; none is flat, to use E. M. Forster’s terminology. If we were to say that there are multiple protagonists in this novel, we would simply be saying that Balzac tells the story of the many and not of one.

For similar reasons, there are no secondary characters in Balzac. Certainly, there are characters who appear less frequently than others, who say little, who have subordinate roles in a technical, statistical sense. But these are saved from the novelistic fate of secondariness by virtue of the vitality with which Balzac imbues them. There is at work here a sort of “uniform illumination,” to borrow a phrase that Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, applied to the writings of Homer. “Everyone in Balzac, even the doormen, has spirit,” wrote Baudelaire. “All the souls there are weapons loaded to the gills with will.” It is this “will”—this drive or energy that Balzac likened to a fluid that exists in a finite quantity inside us and that we use up, like fuel, every time we act or think—that Balzac wants to narrate, and that is the property not of one or of the few but of all. It is will that shapes a plot, a narrative, a story. What makes Balzac’s fiction so compelling is that all his characters are, potentially, storied characters.