Honore De Balzac

  Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850) was a French novelist. Along with Flaubert, he is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European literature. His work, the bulk of which is collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, is a broad panorama of French society in the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848).

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Biography

Honoré de Balzac

Balzac's literary output began with chronicles and sketches on widely varied social and artistic topics. The journals to which he contributed were increasingly looking for short fiction, which Balzac was able to provide. A collection Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life) came out in 1829, and was well received: these were tales told with a journalistic eye which looked into the fabric of modern life and did not shun social and political realities. Balzac had found a distinctive voice.

He had already turned out potboiler historical novels in the manner of Walter Scott and Anne Radcliffe, on commission from publishers, but only under pseudonyms ('Horace de Saint-Aubin', for example, was responsible for the scandalous Vicaire des Ardennes (1822), banned for its depiction of pseudo-incestuous relations and, more importantly, of a married priest). With Le Dernier chouan, however (1829) he entered the mainstream as an author of full-length fiction.

This sober tale of provincial France in Revolutionary times was soon overshadowed by the success in 1831 of La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin), a fable-like tale delineating the excesses and vanities of contemporary life. With public acclaim and the assurance of publication, Balzac's subsequent novels began to shape themselves into a broad canvas depicting the turbulent unfolding of destinies amidst the visible finery and squalor of Paris, and the dramas hidden under the surface of respectability in the quieter world of provincial family life.

In Le Père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835), his next big success, he transposed the story of King Lear to 1820s Paris to rage at a society bereft of all love save the love of money. His novels are unified by a vision of a world in which the social and political hierarchies of the Ancien Régime had been replaced by a pseudo-aristocracy of favouritism, patronage and commercial fortunes, and where a "new priesthood" of financiers had filled the gap left by the collapse of organised religion. "There is nothing left for literature but mockery in a world that has collapsed" he remarked in the preface to La peau de chagrin, but the cynicism grew less as his oeuvre progressed and he revealed great sympathy for those whom society pushes to one side when the old certainties have gone and everything is up for grabs.

Along with shorter pieces and novellas there followed notably Les Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843), Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The Harlot High and Low, 1847), Le Cousin Pons (1847) and La Cousine Bette (1848). Of novels in provincial settings Le curé de Tours (The Vicar of Tours, 1832), Eugénie Grandet (1833), Ursule Mirouet (1842) and Modeste Mignon (1844) are highly regarded.

Many of his novels were initially serialized, like those of Dickens, but in Balzac's case there was no telling how long they would end up. Illusions perdues extends to a thousand pages after starting inauspiciously in a small-town print shop, whereas La fille aux yeux d'Or (Tiger-eyes, 1835) opens grandly with a panorama of Paris but ties itself up as a closely-plotted novella of only fifty.

Balzac's work habits were legendary — he wrote for up to 15 hours a day, fuelled by innumerable cups of black coffee, and without relinquishing the social life which was the source of his observation and research. (Many of his stories start with fragments of the plot overheard at social gatherings, before uncovering the real story behind the gossip.) He revised obsessively, sending back printer's proofs almost obscured by changes and additions to be reset. Even a sturdy physique like his paid the price of his ever expanding plans for new works and new editions of old ones. There was unevenness in this prodigious output, but some works which are really only work-in-progress such as Les employés (The Government Clerks, 1841), are of real interest.

Curiously, he continued to worry about money and status even after he was rich and respected, and believed he could branch out into politics or into the theatre without letting up on his novels. His letters and memoranda reveal that ambition was not only ingrained in his character, but acted on him like a drug — every success leading him on to enlarge his plans still further — and ahead of time, around 1847, his strength began to fail. A polarity can be found in his cast of characters between the profligates who expend their life-force and the misers who live long but become dried-up and withdrawn. His contemporary Victor Hugo exiled himself to Guernsey in disgust at French politics, but lived on to write poems about being a grandfather decades after Balzac's death. Balzac himself could not, by temperament, draw back or curtail his vision.

Bust of Balzac by Auguste Rodin, in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 1849, as his health was failing, Balzac travelled to Poland to visit Eveline Hanska, a wealthy Polish landowner in Wierzchownia, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years. They married in Berdyczów in 1850, and three months later, Balzac died.

He lies buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, overlooking Paris, and is commemorated by a monumental statue commissioned from Auguste Rodin, standing near the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard Montparnasse. "Henceforth" said Victor Hugo at his funeral "men's eyes will be turned towards the faces not of those who are the rulers but of those who are the thinkers." the funeral was also attended by Frederick Lemaître, Gustave Courbet, Dumas-perè and Dumas-fils et al.

Works

La Comédie humaine

La Comédie humaine consists of 95 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 48 unfinished works (or which exist only as titles). It does not include Balzac's 5 theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales, the Contes drolatiques (1832-37).

Main article: La Comédie humaine

Selected titles of La Comédie humaine:

• Gobseck (1830, a novella, one of Balzac's earliest successes)
• La Peau de chagrin (1831)
• Eugénie Grandet (1833)
• Le Père Goriot[1] (1835)
• Les Illusions perdues (I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843)
• La Cousine Bette (1846)
• Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847)

Plays

• Cromwell (1820)
• Ressources de Quinola (1842)
• Paméla Giraud (1843)
• La Marâtre (1848)
• Mercadet ou le Faiseur (1848)

Tales

• Contes drolatiques (1832-37)

Balzac's house in Paris. View from the Rue Berton.

Legacy

After his death Balzac became recognised as one of the fathers of Realism in literature, and distinct in his approach from the "pure" Romantics like Victor Hugo. La Comédie humaine spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France. In the 20th Century his vision of a society in flux, where class, money and personal ambition were the major players, achieved the distinction of being endorsed equally by critics of Left-wing and Right-wing political tendencies.

He guided European fiction away from the overriding influence of Walter Scott and the Gothic school, by showing that modern life could be recounted as vividly as Scott recounted his historical tales, and that mystery and intrigue did not need ghosts and crumbling castles for props. Maupassant, Flaubert and Zola were writers of the next generation who were directly influenced by him, and Marcel Proust acknowledged his influence.

In one of his last tales, Les comédiens sans le savoir (The Unwitting Actors, 1847) a provincial is rescued from a ruinous speculation by a boulevardier who asks him "Will you not now concede, my friend, that Paris is bigger than you are?". What Balzac had brought to fiction was the social context, a factor unrecognized by the Romantics, for whom the inner world of the individual was all that counted.

In the 1960s, the counter-culture unearthed two strange and mystical novels from Balzac's early years: the quasi-autobiographical Louis Lambert (1832) and Séraphîta (1834), in which an angel guides the gender-bending hero/heroine around the solar-system. Some academics have claimed that alchemy, animal-magnetism and other esoteric theories underlie Balzac's interpretation of society, and that his credentials as a Realist should be questioned. This idea, explored in particular by French critic Albert Béguin in his collection of essays Balzac lu et relu (1965), emerges from a remark attributed to Charles Baudelaire, who observed that Balzac's work was not so much 'observational' as 'visionary'. More recently, critics have conjoined these two models of a visionary and Realist Balzac to create a more nuanced version of his work. The critical literature on Balzac is moreover very large, and one can find almost any shade of opinion if one looks for it.

It is Balzac the observer of society, morals and human psychology who continues to appeal to readers today. His novels have always remained in print. His vivid realism and his encyclopedic gifts as a recorder of his age outweigh the sketchiness and inconsistent quality of some of his works.

Balzac in popular culture

• Balzac was something of a patron saint to the French New Wave. Balzac is the author whom Antoine Doinel reads in Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows), the 1959 film by François Truffaut. Doinel establishes a shrine to Balzac which he forgets about and which bursts into flames, angering his father. The 400 Blows is widely regarded as the first film of the French New Wave. Balzac as a subject of academic study reappears in Truffaut's 1964 film La Peau douce (The Soft Skin), in which adulturous protagonist Pierre Lacheney meets his mistress while traveling to give a lecture on Balzac. Balzac is also alluded to in the early works of Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. The latter director would make La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Nuisance) in 1991 which was inspired by Balzac's short story "The Unknown Masterpiece". Both story and film focus on a painter named Frenhofer. This would remain the closest thing to a Balzac adaptation ever completed by one of the French New Wave directors, prior to the 2007 release of Rivette's forthcoming picture Ne touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe) which is adapted from Balzac's novella "La Duchesse de Langeais" ("The Duchess de Langeais"), the second of the three works that comprise Histoire des Treize (History of the Thirteen). This book would figure prominently in Rivette's two Out 1 films of 1971 and 1972, as one element of the evidence to which the character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud constantly refers in his quest to uncover a conspiratorial cabal he suspects of interceding malevolently into Parisian life.
• Balzac also features as a friend of Alvin's younger brother Calvin in the Tales of Alvin Maker, a book series by Orson Scott Card. In these, he starts as the son of a clerk in Napoleon's court before leaving to study American society.
• The Russian television show Balzac Age, or All Men are Bast takes its name from Balzac's novel A Woman of Thirty. "Balzac Age" is a polite Russian way of referring to a woman who is getting older and may not be married.
• In the Oscar-winning 1977 film Annie Hall, the character of Alvy Singer (played by Woody Allen), upon completing sexual intercourse with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), quips, "As Balzac said, 'There goes another novel.'"
• In Sherlock Holmes' A Case of Identity, Holmes comments that a certain set of letters contain "[a]bsolutely no clue in them to Mr. Angel, save that he quotes Balzac once."
• In Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novel Murder On The Orient Express, one of the characters (Monsieur Bouc, the Wagon Lit Director) comments on the diversity of the train passengers by saying "If I had but the pen of a Balzac! I would depict this scene."
• In the South Park cartoon episode "Something You Can Do with Your Finger" Wendy sang a Miss Susie-type song with the line "The boss he wants to see you, so you can suck his... Balzac was a writer..."
• Balzac is also mentioned in the Meredith Willson musical The Music Man. In Act One the ladies of the town tell Professor Harold Hill that Marian the Librarian advocates "dirty books" (Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac); in Act Two the ladies admit to Marian, "The Professor told us to read those books, and we simply adored them all!"
• Mary, a character in the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, is an aspiring novelist. When her friends mention this, she quips, "Yes, I know, me and Balzac..."
• In Britpop band Blur's song, "Country House", about a reclusive upper-middle class man living a dreary, over-medicated life, a lyric includes, "He's reading Balzac/And knocking back Prozac/It's a helping hand/That makes you feel wonderfully bland."
• Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather (upon which the blockbuster movie is based) starts with a Balzac quote - "Behind every great fortune there is a crime."
• In an episode of the television show The Simpsons Homer and Marge have the following discussion:

Homer: Marge, name one successful person in life who ever lived without air conditioning.

Marge: Balzac!

Homer: No need for potty mouth just because you can't think of one.

Marge: But Balzac is the name!

• In a halloween episode of The Simpsons Dr. Frink exclaims Balzac before kicking his reanimiated father (voiced by Jerry Lewis) in the testicles to kill him
• Balzac is often cited as an exemplar of the Intuitive Logical Intratim type in the Socionics model of personality.
• In Charles Bukowski's poem "Piss And Shit," he says: "As far as shit goes, I'll have to refer you to Balzac... as for shit, I tell you fellows, Balzac had it all."
• In the HBO film Something The Lord Made a comment was made by Alan Rickman as Dr. Alfred Blalock when a comment was made by his assistant (Vivien Thomas, played by Mos Def) about the amount of coffee he was drinking, "Balzac once drank 300 cups of coffee in one day...then again, he died of a perforated ulcer..."
• In book 5 of the Suzumiya Haruhi novel series by Nagaru Tanigawa, the lead character Kyon commented of how he should crack jokes at himself as Balzac did regarding the unfairness of life.
• In Chronicles by Bob Dylan, Dylan states he likes Balzac and he is referred to as being funny and hilarious.
• One of Balzac's books, A Passion in the Desert, was the basis for a film with a similar name directed by Lavinia Currier and featuring Laurence Olivier Theatre Award winning British actor Ben Daniels. It was first released in 1997.^[1]
• Honoré de Balzac is mentioned throughout the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Chinese-born French author Dai Sijie (2000). A movie from the novel, titled, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, was written and directed by Dai in 2002.[2]

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