Balzac: Une Éthique de la description (review)

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David, Jerome. Balzac: Une Ethique de la description. Paris: Honore Champion, 2010. Pp. 305. ISBN: 978-2-7453-2039-1. Jerome David's book offers a remarkably complex inquiry into Honore de Balzac's turn to over the course of his career. Eschewing commonplace and reductive sign postings, David places the evolution of Balzac's oeuvre in the context of a wide range of discursive and artistic practices in order to demonstrate the extent to which the French writer's descriptions fulfill several functions: rhetorical, epistemological, political, and ethical. By doing so, he brings into question Balzac's almost instantaneous canonization as a classical author and purveyor of maxims as well as the tendency to correlate with third-person omniscience in the nineteenth-century novel. David's argument revolves around two central notions: the detail and, more importantly, the type. Details allowed Balzac to both echo and take his distance from the historical writings of Sir Walter Scott and Jules Michelet and the sentimental tradition. Their use reflects his embrace of a social definition of what it means to be human and his attendant belief in an ethics of description that hinges on historical and spatial specificity. For David, this perspective accounts in part for Balzac's decision to focus almost exclusively on French society and for the epistemological and literary cohesion of his works. Similarly, Balzac's type is both analogous to and distinct from a number of quasisynonyms and semiotically related terms, such as the classical allegory, the figura, the caractere, and the condition. In addition, David differentiates Balzac's type from the ways in which the concept was used in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century medical and scientific writings and in discourses on probability. Balzac's types are not ideal, universal, or statistically average. Nor do they represent a particular ideology. They are anchored in concrete and unique historical contexts that the novel is ideally suited to reproduce, or rather, that the novel allows reader and writer to recognize and identify together. Though Balzac's Comedie humaine and other works belong to the tradition of panoramic writing described by Walter Benjamin, they do not share some of the key traits associated with it, most notably a clear separation between narrator and narratee and the presumption of epistemological superiority routinely assigned to the former. Balzac's use of details and types, though it draws on a wide range of third-person and univocal writings, ultimately rests on a very different literary ethos, one that owes more to journalism and echoes his participation in the encydopedic and polyphonic Les Francais peints par eux-memes. …