Instead of penetrating deep into the hidden interior of a character, Balzac looks at the relationship between the character and his or her environment. The truth of the human subject, Balzac seems to be saying, lies not in mysterious inner realms, but much closer to the surface, in that subject’s relation to the material world. No recesses, no soul, no depth, just an infinitely expanding, substantive universe that gives an overall and characteristically Balzacian impression of denseness. (“Between us,” wrote Balzac to Clara Mafféi in November 1838, “I am not deep, but very thick.”)

 

“What a great man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write,” wrote Gustave Flaubert. Deploring Balzac’s lack of style was something of a national literary pastime in the nineteenth century. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential literary critic of his era, laments “an incoherent, exuberant vocabulary in which words boil and emerge as if by chance,” and complains about “long sentences without commas that make one run out of breath.” The novelist Émile Zola writes of Balzac’s “messy creativity.” Marcel Proust finds distasteful “the vulgarity of [Balzac’s] language,” which his occasional attempts to cover up only worsen: “Whenever he tries to hide his vulgarity, he develops a vulgarian’s refinement”.3 In a similar vein, Gustave Lanson, the first significant university critic, wrote that “faced with fields and woods,” Balzac “has the emotions of a traveling salesman.” In his at-the-time authoritative Histoire de la littérature française (History of French Literature, 1894) he opined that Balzac “was a vulgar type, robust and exuberant” before assailing the novelist’s tastelessness: “At first a notary’s clerk, it was there that he picked up the idea and the taste for those odious jokes he so liberally showcases in his novels” (in Vachon, Honoré de Balzac: Memoire de la critique, p. 320).

With the exception of Sainte-Beuve, none of the authorities cited above doubted Balzac’s greatness for a moment. Their reactions reveal a continued fidelity to classical norms of style—to ideals of lucidity, clarity of expression, and elegance inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—that Balzac tended to disregard. The first to mount a defense of the Balzacian sentence was Ferdinand Brunetière. A disciple of Lanson, he saw in the breathlessness of Balzac’s style a masterful imitation of life’s rampant surges: “[Life] is the movement that upsets the straight line. It is confusion, disorder, illogic, irregularity.... One seizes it for a moment, one gives an imitation of it, only by making oneself as changing, as supple, as undulating as it is. This is what Molière, Saint-Simon, and Balzac tried to do” (quoted in Vachon, p. 369). Citing the highly introspective, first-person novels René (1802), by François-René de Chateaubriand and Adolphe, by Constant, Brunetière argues that Balzac substituted “for this type of personal, egotistical novel, the novel of others” (p. 379). Balzac’s novels break with that whole genre of literature known as the psychological novel, the novel of self-disclosure—in France, the roman d’analyse—with those highly intimist, intensely analytical narratives of passionate, melancholic young men and (occasionally) women. The style of the psychological novel owes much to classicism, even when describing the limits of human experience, lucidity, restraint, and elegance of form are de rigueur. The new “novel of others” envisaged by Balzac demanded a different style altogether because, instead of a single, harmonious narrative voice (the selfsame “I” telling its tale), we find in Balzac a genuine polyphony—a plurality and indeed a heterogeneity of voices of all types and from all classes. This is a necessary consequence of the shift from a “personal” or “egotistical” novel to one that looks outward and toward the other. Privileging observation over speculation, the outside over the inside, his fiction escapes from the tyranny of psychology and from the Rousseauist idea of a unique and original Self whose essence literature is meant to disclose. As an anthropologist (rather than a sociologist), he is close to another Rousseau, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau Founder of the Human Sciences,” in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

This is why reading Balzac is so thoroughly refreshing. Instead of the enclosed, musty space of a consciousness examining its Self (“my story is limited to my feelings and my thoughts,” says Chateaubriand’s René), we find a curiosity about others and about the world. In Balzac’s anti-confessional fiction there is nothing to disclose, no self to unburden. His novels do not depend upon what D. H. Lawrence, attempting to probe the underbelly of the whole of French literature, calls a “dirty little secret,” shared by the author and his characters, that the reader must decipher (see Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, pp. 46 ff.). Balzac’s fiction depends rather on mutation, flexibility, change, chance, becoming. “‘There are no such things as principles; there are only events,’” says Vautrin (p.