Real Time. Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola

Abstract

Reviewed by: Real Time. Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola Suzanne Guerlac Bell, David F. Real Time. Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Pp. 168. What interests David Bell in Real Time. Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola is the restructuring of perception that resulted from a direct encounter with nineteenth-century French realist fiction. In a first, deceptively simple gesture, Bell turns to the realist novel as a reflection of the real, asking it to provide "real insight into the way speed and communication were being woven into the fabric of social perception" during the 1830s and 1840s, the principal time frame of his study. He does so because, as he puts it, "novels highlight the effects of speed in particularly visible ways" (1), and because the novelists he treats here — Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas and Zola — are "four of the most acute social observers of their time" (1). In other words, Bell asks the realist novel to do its job: to tell us what things were really like. But things are not quite so simple, as Bell makes clear in the "loosely phenomenological description" (1) of this study. An unprecedented experience of speed or acceleration was not just one occurrence among many within the framework of the real. It touched that framework itself, transforming its very structure. To this extent, the new experience of speed problematizes the traditional notion of the "real" that the realist novel is conventionally taken to represent. Since the early twentieth century, important critics have identified modernity with changes in the nature of perception: Walter Benjamin, for one, but also Paul Valéry and, more recently, Paul Virilio. Real Time belongs to this critical tradition, one that strikes us as especially meaningful today. Our information culture is in the process of altering our own structures of perception. Multitasking across different frameworks of time and space has engendered a condition contemporary social scientists now label "partial attention." Real Time is in this sense a meditation upon our own situation, one in which, as Bell puts it, we find ourselves "caught in the dilemmas posed by speed and instantaneity almost every day, both in our movements (often vehicular and at high speed) and in our relation to information" (141). It not only tracks major developments in the nineteenth-century novel, but also explores "how we learned to live so fast" (141). As the table of contents suggests, Bell has chosen to organize his material systematically in terms of operations or functions associated with various features of communication systems – webs, intersections, performances, and velocities. But his study also moves forward in time, [End Page 168] from Balzac to Zola, and from the stagecoach to the railroad. In the literary trajectory of Real Time, speed not only accelerates, it produces more and more dangerous effects. Indeed, Bell's literary analyses, which explore the effects of speed on the social fabric, also perform a diagnostic function, identifying specific pathologies of speed — the title of the concluding chapter is "Speed Kills (Zola)" — and hence the pathologies of (post) modernity. Balzac provides the point of departure in novels where human travel and the movement of information occur at roughly the same speed, with people and their messages traveling together in coaches that negotiate a newly established system of roads. Soon, as Bell reveals through a reading of Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen, the telegraph outpaces the coach and information accelerates beyond the speed of travel. In Dumas' Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, speed reaches "its human limits, threaten[ing] mental ability and discernment," and creating "a space for disastrous (even murderous) accidents" (140). Real Time ends with a masterful reading of Zola's railroad novel, La Bête Humaine, in which speed engenders a madness "that is directly related to speed" (132). If Real Time itself strikes the reader as an accelerating narrative (as it did this reader) it is because the study effectively gathers intellectual momentum. By the time we reach the analyses of Dumas and Zola we have covered a lot of ground. Literary readings of Balzac and Stendhal have taught us to attend to the importance of coaches, crossroads and movements of...