La Lecture et la vie: les usages du roman au temps de Balzac

Abstract

This highly readable study offers, from the perspective of an historian or social scientist, an incisive analysis of letters addressed to Balzac and Sue by certain of their readers, both male and female. Although some of these letters have long been known, others are exhumed for the first time. Substantial extracts are reproduced in an appendix, while Judith Lyon-Caen's text necessarily incorporates extensive quotation. The originality of her project stems from her concern being not with the authors' works as such, but with the function they fulfilled for their readership. Literary specialists may initially find these letters unrevealing, such is their apparent naivety; their authors' tendency to blur the distinction between fiction and reality; and, in some cases, their doubtful veracity. Yet Lyon-Caen, while insisting that they are not literal ‘documents’ of social history (‘les lettres de lecteurs ne racontent jamais des expériences réelles de lecture’), makes a strong case for seeing them as indicative of the way the novels of Balzac and Sue were ‘used’ by their readers to construct a sense of self in post-Revolutionary society. Varied as they are in respect of their authors' literacy; the ways in which the two novelists are explicitly viewed; and what it was that the correspondents sought ostensibly to achieve, they are all shown to reveal the contemporary novel offering its readers ‘un parcours dans leur propre univers social’. Lyon-Caen skilfully extracts the sociological specificity of the discourses employed and sharply delineates the elements of contrast separating the otherwise similar ways in which readers used the works of her chosen writers. She also shows the clear division between the responses to Les Mystères de Paris of the philanthropic bourgeoisie and those of the socially and economically disadvantaged, mounting in the process an effective challenge to Habermas's claim that the French press of the period thwarted debate and self-awareness amongst its readers. The central analysis is preceded by a presentation of the context provided by letters addressed to earlier writers, notably Rousseau and Chateaubriand. A long opening section revisits the status of the French social novel in the 1830s and 1840s and the controversy it provoked. Although, here, both the broad outlines and certain of the details are familiar, the investigations of fiction and criticism alike are wide-ranging and take in some little-known material, for example Chapuys-Montlaville's parliamentary diatribes against the roman-feuilleton. (One might, nevertheless, take issue with the inference drawn from an instance of the label article being used to designate the episode of a serialized novel. This was frequent practice at the time and not the reflection of a readiness to see the work as social analysis rather than fiction.) The thesis is related throughout to an apposite selection of primary and secondary sources, not all of which will be familiar to the literary scholar, though reference is lacking to the work on Balzac's female readers by both David Bellos and Christiane Mounoud-Angles. The endnotes are admirably informative, yet this reader frequently felt the need for a bibliography and index.