Balzacian Evolution and the Origin of the Snopeses

Abstract

Malcolm Cowley's short essay William Faulkner's Human Comedy(1) probably created the Honore de Balzac-William Faulkner source study field by briefly suggesting organizational similarities between La Comedie humaine and Faulkner's oeuvre. After Cowley, scholars incrementally but steadily added plot, name, and thematic similarities; Philip Cohen provides a bibliography of their work, and his own contributions are the most thorough in the field.(2) Over-determination is always a potential danger in source study, however, and recently, while contributing more plot and name resemblances, Jacques Pothier has suggested that design similarities between the two oeuvres are attributable to Cowley rather than to Faulkner (123) and even doubts the Balzacian influence that Cohen sees in Faulkner's banker Flem Snopes: Would it not be vain to claim that Flem Snopes is inspired by Rastignac, du Tillet or Nucingen, rather than by Dickens's Uriah Heep? ... Flem is a variation on a type common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century novel ... when such characters can be read about in the novels of Balzac, Dickens, Twain, to name but a few (112). To trace Flem's acquisitiveness to Rastignac would be, of course, wrong, but Rastignac's relationship with Nucingen's wife and marriage to his daughter certainly afford parallels to Gavin Stevens' relationship with Eula and Linda Snopes, and to Flem's complicity in his wife and Manfred de Spain's liaison. Cohen observes that Faulkner's A Dangerous Man (Uncollected Stories 575-582) mentions Baron de Nucingen, Balzac's great financier, and that a character there his wife to have an affair just as ... Nucingen ... allows his wife [hers] with de Marsay and then Rastignac (Cohen 331). Variations on the phrase wife must be above suspicion appear several times in Faulkner's work, most notably in reference to Town's Manfred-Eula-Flem triangle, which A Dangerous Man appears to foreshadow. phrase was and is so well-known that Faulkner probably encountered it in a number of works, but I believe that his uses of it derive principally from the Comedie's The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau,(3) in which multiple biographical parallels between its protagonist and Julius Caesar(4) and Birotteau's own puns on Caesar/Cesar (15:14, 21, 130) make it clear that the perfumier Birotteau is a modern capitalistic incarnation of the Roman original (or avatar) and would have been plain to Faulkner. Part of the story's plot also would have been obvious to Faulkner: quite unlike Caesar's second wife, Cesar's wife rejects a man's amorous advances (du Tillet's) (46-47) but in the Comedie's turbulent motion leitmotif, Mme.'s commendable behavior dooms her husband because the spurned lover, playing the role of Brutus, vindictively devises Cesar's bankruptcy and therefore his eventual death. phrase also combines Balzac and Faulkner's posthumous motion (the past alive in the present) and genealogy leitmotifs and appears at least twice elsewhere in the Comedie: A Commission in Lunacy,(5) in which the exemplary magistrate Popinot is removed from a case because he erroneously appears to have violated the letter of judicial procedure--he is told wife must not be suspected (3:364); and the unfinished The Deputy for Arcis,(6) in which a character self-righteously exclaims, My friends, like Caesar's wife, must be above suspicion (30, pt. 1:349). Two general remarks regarding the design issue: Cowley's observations of certain patterns in Faulkner's work do not preclude strategic roles for those patterns (which emerge very early in Faulkner's work), and Cowley makes it clear that the generally ascendant sequencing of Collected Stories' contents and section titles are Faulkner's (Faulkner-Cowley File 115-120). At his death, Faulkner owned thirty of the thirty-three volumes in the Gebbie Publishing Company's Library Edition of Novels of Balzac (1897-1899), and since his own work occupies twenty-four volumes, anyone who wishes to investigate Balzac's influence on him must be familiar with fifty-seven volumes of primary text, thirty-three of which are translated, often poorly,(7) from French into English. …