Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola by David F. Bell (review)

Abstract

MLR, ioi.i, 2006 251 significance of the title, explaining the frame device of the Marquis de Renoncour as a higher-level narrator, and discussing the art of storytelling as an important im? plied theme, exemplified in the narratorial pact between Des Grieux and Renoncour. Scholar furtherdiscusses the problem ofunderstanding the enigma woven around the character of Manon and her legacy in subsequent literature. The edition also includes the apparatus of a select bibliography and a chronology of the life of Prevost. The translation follows the text of the 1753 edition, which included the episode of the ltalian prince. This episode casts furtherambiguity on the character of Manon, showing her at once to have a gratuitously malicious streak, while also enhancing her fidelity to Des Grieux. In a tale which can seem so fleeting and intangible, which plays with the reader's ability to grasp the true nature of events, a translation risks either missing the point or seeming too thin. Scholar's version has body and weight, without losing the pace, energy, and suspense of the story. Take, for example, the following emotive and colourful passage: Ce discours me parut si depourvu de sens, et de bonne foi que je ne pus me defendre d'un vif mouvement de colere. Horrible dissimulation! m'ecriai-je; je vois mieux que jamais que tu es une coquine, et une perfide. C'est a present que je connais ton miserable caractere. Scholar renders this as: This speech seemed to me so destitute of sense and sinceritythat I could not suppress a furtherfitofrage. What fearfulhypocrisy! I cried. It is clearer than ever you are nothing but a deceiving slut. At last I know your wretched character forwhat it is. (p. 102) The explanatory notes to the edition are thorough and helpful. The cover illustration, a detail from Watteau's Le Fauxpas, is engaging. University of Bristol Martin Calder Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola. By David F. Bell. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2004. viii+i57pp. $34.95. ISBNo2520 -2872-4. The firsthalf of the nineteenth century was an age of rapid, unprecedented change in the French transport and communications industry. As improvements were made to the country's roads, journey times were reduced significantly. By the end of the July Monarchy the mail-coach trip between Paris and Bordeaux had been cut to thirty-six hours, nine hours less than in 1830. The total length of France's canals was also increased during this period, while the onset of the railway revolution in the 1840s heralded radical new possibilities for overland travel. In this innovative study David F. Bell examines the relationship between these developments and representations of speed, distance, and travel in the nineteenth-century novel. Focusing on a varied selection of works by Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, and Zola, Bell considers the way in which contemporary advances in transport and communication are portrayed thema? tically, as well as the extent to which they shape the structures of the texts in which they are described. The firsttwo chapters deal specifically with Balzac, beginning with a lucid analysis of Ursule Mirouet, an under-discussed novel in which the dangers of stagecoach travel and the growing complexity ofthe road network are contrasted with the intricate web of familial relations spun around the fictional postmaster, MinoretLevrault . Bell's thesis that questions of speed and mobility can be seen as 'veritable organizing principles' (p. 10) of nineteenth-century literary discourse extends into 252 Reviews his treatment of Un debut dans la vie. It was Balzac who warned that the arrival of the locomotive would threaten many traditional businesses, 'et surtout celles qui concernent les differentsmodes de transport en usage pour les environs de Paris' (La Comedie humaine, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 12 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976-81), 1, 731). This threat was yet to materialize in the 1820s and 1830s, however, when the fictional Pierrotin rises from being a simple driver to become the owner of a stagecoach company. Ostensibly his success can be attributed to the acquisition of a faster coach. What underpins this achievement, though, is his willingness to protect another instrument of communication, a...