Balzac, fictions génétiques. Par Pierre Laforgue

Abstract

This subtle, sophisticated, often witty, and consistently fascinating study is an outstanding contribution to Balzac studies. Pierre Laforgue follows Nicole Mozet in challenging the hegemony of the ‘final’ version of the Comédie humaine but denies priority to any single state of the text, instead locating the significance of Balzac’s writing in its perpetual fluidity. Starting from the author’s discernible slips (including the Freudian, appositely considered diegetically in relation to Étude de femme), errors, anachronisms, incompatible ‘facts’, contradictions, demonstrable absurdities, and abrupt descents into fictional extravagance, these examples of ‘disfonctionnements’ (p. 14) are seen as indicative of a constantly shifting creation, a perpetual locus of tension, paradox, and aporia. There emerges from Laforgue’s fine attention to genetic detail an unprecedented sense of the way individual works incorporate both traces of discarded versions and awareness of new possibilities that, if fully implemented (an impossibility in view of the constraints of the already written), would constitute a considerable redefinition of focus. The text thus becomes an uneasy compromise between actualization and the virtual that is, nonetheless, impregnated with plurality of meaning. This is demonstrated with justifiable conviction in the case of the elliptical La Grenadière and the contorted genesis of La Femme de trente ans that leads to an unresolvable contradiction in the attempt to have six separate stories crystallize in the form of a novel. (The first part of Illusions perdues is shown as less intractable to such generic transformation.) Balzac’s writing is seen also to traverse the boundaries between individual texts, revealing ‘des points communs de nature génétique’ (p. 16). These are especially visible in works produced in close temporal proximity, which, at the non-enunciated level of their ‘deep structures’ (not Laforgue’s term), present unexpected continuity at the level of the writing itself. This allows Le Lys dans la vallée to be seen both as conte drolatique and as genetically related to La Fille aux yeux d’or. Particularly valuable is the demonstration of Balzac’s struggle to accommodate the exigencies of fictional form and, in the face of defeat, his recourse (as in Ferragus) to an ironical treatment of the clichés of the roman noir. Laforgue also delivers a mortal blow to characters viewed as examples of ‘une entité constituée en elle-même’ (p. 38). They are understood here not in terms of the surface narrative, but in relation to their function and textuality. Thus, the subject of Le Père Goriot is not the title character, but paternity, which licenses a view of the novel as ‘fathered’ by Lord Dudley. An interlude, nonetheless tightly linked to Laforgue’s perspective, offers an illuminating consideration of François Truffaut’s reference to Le Lys dans la vallée in Les Baisers volés (1969). The concluding discussion proposes a novel analysis of the eponymous wild ass’s skin as ‘text’. Laforgue wears his knowledge of the Comédie humaine lightly. (His own slips and omissions are mostly venial, although he has the Pauline of La Peau de chagrin become Raphaël’s wife, p. 78.) A companion volume pursuing the wider implications of these specific case studies would nonetheless be equally welcome.