Balzac: a Nineteenth-Century Novelist with Lessons for America: A Nineteenth-Century Novelist with Lessons for America

By Arthur Kahn

Called the founder of the modern novel, Balzac received encomiums from numerous critics and writers. Henry James called him the greatest of all novelists.


Ideologically, Balzac championed the return in France of the pre-revolutionary rule of Church and Monarch, and in his novels, he assailed ever more aggressively the bankers who were seizing control of the government, the judiciary and the economy. This aspect of Balzacs investigations in his Human Comedy of the trends in French customs and manners during the half-century following the 1789 Revolution is illuminating for Americans struggling to survive in the profound depression prrecipitated by the maneuverings and manipulations of multinational banks and investment firms. Providing a clear and monitory lesson to Americans desperately seeking relief in a Depression Balzac demonstrates that profiteering, legal and illegal; and a general atmosphere of greed and materialism are inherent in the free enterprise system and unsusceptible to superficial reforms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 17, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453537480

Arthur Kahn

Impressed by Gyorgy LukÜs’s essays on the works of Balzac, Arthur Kahn turned to some of the French writer’s novels as models for his own 1954 Brownstone, a Novel of New York. He met LukÜs in Budapest in 1960 and again in 1963 and maintained a lively correspondence with him while translating several of LukÜs’s literary essays for a volume published in 1970 under the title Writer and Critic. In 2009, an 89 year old retired professor and the author of numerous books, Kahn completed the fifth volume of his autobiography (he had enjoyed a life of variegated experience). Although burdened by age and by a cardiac disorder, he undertook a project of homage both to Balzac and to the Hungarian philosopher and critic and completed the work just before his ninetieth birthday

Book preview

OTHER WORKS BY ARTHUR KAHN

Autobiography: THE EDUCATION OF

A 20TH CENTURY POLITICAL ANIMAL

I. The Kid Didn’t Whimper, 1920-1946

IIa. Resisting Truman’s Loyalty Oaths &McCarthyite Hysteria, 1946-1959

IIb. Exploring the Socialist Alternative: Diary of 9 months as guest of People’s Democracies, 1959-1960

III. Cultivating My Garden, Academia,: Anti-Vietnam War Activity, Rearguard Defense of Humanist Tradition. 1960-1983

IV. Arrival in Ithaca, Recapitulation and Reconciliation, The Final Years

Available at Amazon, eBay and bookstores or at

iUniverse.com                                                  AuthorHouse.com

Speak Out! America Wants Peace (1951)          On first Loooking into Homer’s Iliad

Brownstone, A Novel of New York (1954)          On first Looking into Homer’s Odyssey

The Education of Julius Caesar                          Byron’s Single Difference with Homer and Virgil

AIDS, The Winter War, A Testing of America      Translations

The Many Faces of Gay                        Writer and Critic, essays by Gyorgy Lukάcs

The Unrepentant: A Marxist Journalist Confronts the CIA’s Greek Junta

Experiment in Occupation (Penn State Univ. Press)

A Play: A POET GOES TO WAR

(A 2OIO thorough revision of The Life and Death of Lord Byron)

Balzac

A Nineteenth Century Novelist with Lessons for America

Arthur Kahn

Copyright © 2010 by Arthur Kahn.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

82014

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

In His Own Name: 1829-1834

CHAPTER TWO

After The Chouans, 1830-1831

CHAPTER THREE

1833-1835

CHAPTER FOUR

1836-1839

CHAPTER FIVE

The final years: 1840-1848

II

Balzac’s Artistry

CHAPTER SIX

The Evolution of the HUMAN COMEDY

CHAPTER SEVEN

Balzac’s Characters

CHAPTER EIGHT

Balzac and Capitalism

In Memoriam

Gyorgy Lukάcs

Angus Cameron

David Levine

INTRODUCTION

In the early 1950s I began collecting volumes of the Hungarian philosopher Gyorgy Lukάcs’essays on literature. Impressed by his praise of the French novelist, I purchased a set of Balzac’s works and used them as a model in composing Brownstone, A Novel of New York. In the sixties I twice visited Lukάcs in Budapest and thereafter maintained a brisk correspondence with him while engaged in translating from the German several of his essays for a book entitled Writer and Critic that was published in London and New York.

In the fall of 2009, at the age of 89, recalling my enthusiasm of a half century earlier, I bought the eighteen-volume, 1899 centenary edition of Balzac’s works edited by George Saintsbury and ordered copies of the Stefan Zweig and Graham Robb biographies as well as a copy of Lukάcs’ Studies in European Realism.

The translations in the Saintsbury edition are by different individuals and vary widely in quality. I frequently cite Zweig, Robb, and Lukάcs regarding individual Balzac works.

In his eulogy at Balzac’s funeral Victor Hugo proclaimed:

Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among the best . . . . All his books form but one book,—a book living, luminous, profound, where one sees coming and going and marching and moving, with I know not what of the formidable and terrible, mixed with the real, all our contemporary civilization;—a marvelous book which the poet entitled a comedy and which he could have called a history; which takes all forms and all style . . .—a book which realizes observation and imagination, which lavishes the true, the esoteric, the commonplace, the trivial, the material, and which at times through all realities, swiftly and grandly rent away, allows us all at once a glimpse of a most somber and tragic ideal. Unknown to himself, whether he wished it or not, whether he consented or not, the author of this immense and strange work is one of the strong race of Revolutionist writers. Balzac goes straight to the goal.

Graham Robb quotes from Baudelaire’s 1959 essay on Balzac:

All his characters are gifted with that ardor of life that animated him. All his fictions are as deeply colored as dreams. From the highest peaks of the aristocracy to the lowest depths of the people, all the actors of his Comedy are more greedy for life, more active and cunning in the struggle, more patient misfortune, more gluttonous in the gratification of desire, more angelic in devotion than they appear in the comedy of the real world. In Balzac, even the door keepers have genius. All his minds are weapons loaded to the muzzle with will. Just like Balzac himself!

Robb comments:

Baudelaire’s tribute . . . is the finest tribute of the Balzac who made himself at home in the minds and works of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Henry James and practically every novelist who came after him.

Émile Zola:

Balzac says that the idea of his Comedy derived from a comparison between humans and beasts . . . . as there are lions, dogs, wolves, so there are artists, administrators, lawyers, etc. But Balzac noted that his human zoology had to be more complicated, had to appear in triple form: men, women and things. The idea of reuniting all his novels by the reappearance of characters struck him. I want to realize what is lacking in ancient history: a history of customs, the depiction of types, accounts of dramas, archeology of furnishings, nomenclature of professions, definition of good and evil. Besides depiction, he wanted to show the rationale of the development of society. The writer had to take a stance in regard to morality, religion and politics . . . . Exploiting 3,000 characters Balzac wanted to provide a history of moeurs based upon religion and monarchism.

Henry James wrote four articles in praise of Balzac and declared of him:

I speak of him as a man of his own craft . . . who has learned from him more of . . . the engaging mystery of fiction than anyone else.

He characterized Balzac’s oeuvre as:

. . . one of the most inscrutable, one of the unfathomable, final facts in the history of art.

In his Studies in European Realism Lukάcs expresses his approach to literature generally and to Balzac in particular in the following statements:

True great realism depicts man and society as complete entities, instead of showing merely one or the other of their aspects . . . . realism means a three-dimensionality, an all roundness that endows with independent life characters and human relationships.

Art, precisely if taken in its most perfect purity, is saturated with social and moral humanistic problems.

The concept of the complete human personality as the social and historical task humanity has to solve . . . to depict the most important turning-points of this process with all the wealth of the factors affecting it; only if aesthetics assign to art the role of explorer and guide, can the content of life be systematically divided up into spheres of greater and lesser importance; into spheres that throw light on types and paths and spheres that remain in darkness.

For the inner life of man, its essential traits and essential conflicts can be truly portrayed only in organic connection with social and historical factors.

Balzac pursued this theme of the historical continuity of capitalist development in his portrayal of every class of French society . . . . not only the specific differences between the merchants and manufacturers of the pre-revolutionary period and of the period of growing capitalism under the restoration and the July monarchy but does the same in respect of all other classes of society, everywhere showing up the domination of life by the mechanics of capitalism . . . . the capitalist world of dog eat dog.

The overall conception of the process of capitalist evolution enabled Balzac to uncover the great social and economic forces which govern historical development . . . .

Upon reading the late nineteenth century contention of Hippolyte Taine, an internationally renowned French historian and critic, that Balzac was the greatest creator who has appeared since the days of Shakespeare, I resolved to investigate the validity of such a judgment.

This book is the result.

CHAPTER ONE

In His Own Name: 1829-1834

During the decade of his young adulthood dedicated to mastering his craft, Balzac composed a pretentious historical drama and religious tracts along with pot boiler novels and stories and articles for journals—all published pseudonymously. He also engaged in an intensive study of the works of Walter Scott and of James Fenimore Cooper, and in the late 1820’s, convinced he was ready to present himself to the world, he commenced work on The Chouans,an account of a 1799 Breton revolt against the French Republic. In a preface to the novel, the first to appear under his own name, Balzac expressed a broad purpose in its composition:

The great lessons which speak to us from the open book of history must now-a-days be depicted in a way that everybody can understand. This method has been followed for some years by writers of talent, and the author wishes to join their ranks. He has attempted in the present book to reproduce the spirit of an age and to bring to life an historical episode.

In the first sentence of The Chouans, Balzac establishes the historical setting:

In the early days of the year VIII, at the beginning of Vendémiaire, or towards the end of the month of September 1799, reckoning by the present calendar, some hundred peasants and a fair number of townspeople who had set out from Fougères and Ernée, in the morning to go to Mayenne, were climbing the mountain of the Pèlerine . . . .

Headed by a contingent of soldiers under a competent and loyal republican officer, the column is composed, with the exception of a few more presentable townspeople, of surly, impoverished, semi-barbarous peasants dressed in goatskins, barefoot and slovenly, conscripts drafted to fight the foreign foes seeking to overthrow the French Republic. Of this column, Balzac comments, A spectator initiated into the secrets of the civil discords which then were rending France would have readily picked out the small number of citizens in that company upon whose loyalty the Republic could depend, for almost every one who composed it had taken part against the Government in the war four years ago . . . . The republicans alone were in spirits as they marched.

Balzac defines the critical historical moment in which the events of the novel occur, by noting that leaders of both sides in the imminent struggle were anticipating a fundamental change in the political and military situation as a result of Napoleon’s recent election as First Consul. The Marquis de Montauran, dispatched by the exiled king, Louis XVIII, to rouse the Bretons to rebellion, is aware of the difficulty of his task. He admits that the heroic age of la Vendée is past. His fellow nobles are primarily motivated by the hope of winning positions of influence and power upon the restoration of the monarchy. The proscription of the princes and the overthrow of religion were, to the Chouans, Balzac remarks, simply pretexts for plundering excursions.

With the Republic beleaguered on all fronts, Fouché, a Jacobin who has metamorphosed into Napoleon’s police commissioner, dispatches Mlle. de Verneuil (Danton’s former mistress) to Brittany as a modern-day Judith to seduce and kill the royalist commander. In a dramatic scene Balzac shows a priest haranguing illiterate peasants to guerrilla war in support of the monarchists. The Republican Judith and the royalist Holofernes fall in love almost at first sight and, like a pair of infatuated adolescents betray their respective missions, taking foolish risks to consummate their love. In contrast, the Republican Hulot, his officers and men retain the idealism and heroism roused a few years earlier with the fall of the Bastille.

With adventures reminiscent of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Balzac develops suspense in the interplay of his characters. Despite the superficial portrayal of the heroine and occasional tedious descriptions, Balzac succeeded in winning acclaim with The Chouans as one of the leading French authors of the day. Stefan Zweig remarked that Balzac almost succeeded in creating a masterpiece with his first serious work of fiction:

The arrangement and coherence revealed for the first time the master hand of a great novelist; the scene was unfolded with great skill; the military details were full of movement; the characters of General Hulot and the spy Corentin were modeled directly from life; and his sense of the political background, which was to stamp the impress of their time so incomparably on the later novels, enabled him to draw the figure of Fouché, who exercised a lifelong fascination over Balzac, from the shadows in which this powerful counterspy of Napoleon had always deliberately lurked. Only the plot itself betrayed the former writer of sensational novels. The character of Mlle de Verneuil, transferred from his pseudonymous story Le guitariero, which had been published two or three years before, did not ring true.

Graham Robb observed that

Marxist critics pointed out . . . Le Dernier Chouan was a huge achievement . . . . Balzac had created a new type of historical novel in which . . . . the novelist revealed historical trends by using representative characters or ‘types.’ And this was why, in spite of Balzac’s sympathy for those characters whose ideas place them in opposition to the social order, the Chouans lose the struggle without much glory, stuck in an ideological rut, unable to adapt to the changing times, full of local color, no doubt, but colored, too, by blood which was uselessly spilled.

Lukάcs, indeed, expresses a similar view of the work:

For all his Royalist hostility to the French revolution, he never loses sight of the human and moral uplift which the revolution brought into French society. The simple human greatness and magnificent heroism he attributes to the Republican officers and soldiers is quite striking already in his early novel, Les Chouans . . . . Balzac the monarchist depicts his beloved nobles as a gang of gifted or ungifted careerists and climbers, empty-headed nitwits, aristocratic harlots . . .

Balzac was rarely working simply on one book at a time, and while composing The Chouans he was also engaged with an even more ambitious historical work: About Catherine de Medici. The three parts of the novel, which appeared out of order over a period of more than a decade, consisted of The Two Dreams (part three), completed in 1828 and published in a periodical in 1830; Ruggieri’s Secret (part two), in 1836 (Balzac claimed that he had composed it in a single night!); and The Calvinist Martyr (part one), in 1841. The entire work, in proper sequence, was included in the Human Comedy in 1846.

Of its composition, Saintsbury declares:

He had always considerable hankerings after the historical novel: his early and lifelong devotion to Scott would sufficiently account for that. More than one of the Oeuvres de Jeunesse attempts the form in a more or less conscious way: the Chouans, the first successful book, definitely attempts it; but by far the most ambitious attempt is to be found in the book before us . . . . though it is made up of three chapters written at very different times, it has a unity which the introduction shows to some extent . . . .

Balzac, though not exactly an historical scholar, was a considerable student of history; and . . . a constant thinker and writer on political subjects. We must add to these remembrances the fact of his intense interest in all such matters as Alchemy, the Elixir of Life, and so forth, to which the sixteenth century in general, and Catherine de’ Medici in particular, were known to be devoted . . . .

The personages, both imaginary and historical, appear at times in a manner worthy of Balzac; many separate scenes are excellent; and, to those who care to perceive them, the various occupations of the characters appear in the most interesting manner.

Saintsbury adds an observation pertinent not only to this work but to subsequent Balzac novels as well:

Interest of story is not . . . at any time Balzac’s main appeal, and he has succeeded in it here less than in most other places . . . . we may easily forgive him for not recognizing the ease and certainty with which Dumas trod the path. But we should be most of all thankful that he did not himself enter it frequently, or ever pursue it far.

In a preface to the novel Balzac expresses ambivalence as to his purpose, uncertain whether as a historian lecturing to rehabilitate his heroine queen and to warn of policies in his own day or an author modeling himself on Walter Scott to produce a suspenseful historical novel. He declares:

The reproaches flung at her by Calvinist writers are indeed her glory; she earned them solely by her triumphs. And how was she to triumph but by cunning? . . .

The opponents of power spent two centuries in establishing the very doubtful doctrine of freewill. Two centuries more were spent in working out the first corollary of freewill—liberty of conscience . . . .

And what is France in 1840? A country exclusively absorbed in material interests, devoid of patriotism, devoid of conscience; where authority is powerless; where electoral rights, the fruit of freewill and political liberty, raise none but mediocrities; where brute force is necessary to oppose the violence of the populace; where discussion, brought to bear on the smallest matter, checks every action of the body politic; and where individualism—the odious result of the indefinite subdivision of property, which destroys family cohesion—will devour everything, even the nation, which sheer selfishness will some day lay open to invasion.

A Balzac comment, cited by Lukάcs, about Walter Scott’s approach to historical subjects, applies to the Medici novel:

Scott does not depict the great historical events themselves; what he is interested in is the wherefore of those events; hence he gives no complete description of a decisive battle, no analysis of the strategy and tactics employed—he gives a picture of the human, social and moral atmosphere in both camps, presented in little everyday incidents which merge into more general action to demonstrate why it was inevitable that the victor should win the battle.

Balzac seems to have simply dashed off The Two Dreams section of the novel as a short story complete in itself, in which interest lies especially in its surprising conclusion (surprising conclusions occur in many of his subsequent novels and stories). Two men of inferior birth are out of place at a dinner in an aristocratic home an evening in 1786, that is, three years before the fall of the Bastille. The gentlefolk, one of whom is the rationalist playwright Beaumarchais, find it amusing to get the commoners drunk.

When the hostess asserts that she had a vision of Cleopatra, one of the bourgeois guests, a lawyer, tipsy from too much wine, responds that he had a vision of Catherine de Medici. Balzac comments:

For my part, till I have ampler information, I regard the apparitions of which Cardan and certain other thaumaturgists have spoken as quite possible.

He questions the queen on the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre of French Calvinists, which Catherine, who gave the order for the action, defends:

To give our power any vitality at that period, only one God could be allowed in the State, only one faith and one master . . . .

The queen warns, further voicing Balzac’s personal political views:

Can the superior men of your age still think that religion had really anything to do with that great trial . . . a vast revolution . . . which is still progressing, and which you may achieve . . . .

The result of the successes of the Reformers in their contest against the priesthood . . . was the destruction of the monarchical power . . . . the annihilation of Religion and Royalty, and over their wreck the middle classes of all lands were to join in a common compact.

The other commoner, a surgeon, announces that he, too, had a dream—of excising malignant sores from a patient’s leg, an operation, to which he suggests a political analogy.

The story ends with a surprising identification of the lawyer and the surgeon and a clarification of the political ramifications of the tale for France in 1840.

Of Ruggieri’s Secret (Ruggieri was an astrologer upon whose advice Catherine relied), Saintsbury remarked:

. . . we must remember that Balzac, though not exactly an historical scholar, was a considerable student of history; and that, although rather an amateur politician, he was a constant thinker and writer on political subjects. We must add to these remembrances the fact of his intense interest in all such matters as Alchemy, the Elixir of Life, and so forth, to which the sixteenth century in general and Catherine de Medici in particular, were known to be devoted. All these interests of his met in the present book . . . . written in 1836 (and . . . according to its author, in a single night . . . .

Politically, his object was . . . to defend the maxim that private and public morality are different; that the policy of a state cannot be, and ought not to be governed by the same considerations of duty to its neighbors as those which ought to govern the conduct of an individual . . . . But it was something of a mark of that amateurishness which spoilt Balzac’s dealing with the subject to choose the sixteenth century for his text . . . . it was precisely the abuse of this principle at this time, and by persons of whom Catherine de Medici, if not the most blamable, has had the most blame put on her, that brought the principle itself into discredit . . . .

Interest of story is not . . . at any time Balzac’s main appeal, and he has succeeded in it here less than in most other