La Peau De Chagrin Research Articles

Kroppens mening

“Embodied Meaning. Materiality, Representation and Money in La Peau de Chagrin, À rebours and Le Jardin des supplices” This article presents readings of three French novels from the nineteenth century, namely Balzac's La Peau de chagrin, Huysmans' À rebours and Octave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices. It examines issues of representation and meaning in relation to debt narratives and the use of bodies as a motif in relation to debt, and it argues that, in these novels, literary language and monetary representation displays parallel developments, exemplified through the shift from realist aesthetics to decadent literary style. The article ends by connecting a shifting representative function and related issues of meaning, to modern tendencies in literature, and the function of the human body in these narratives.

Balzac's Lives by Peter Brooks

Reviewed by: Balzac's Lives by Peter Brooks Martine Wagner and John T. Booker Brooks, Peter. Balzac's Lives. New York Review Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-68137-449-9. Pp. 266. The "lives" of the title are not those of Balzac himself (although the number of novels he wrote might make one suspect that he must have enjoyed more than one), but nine of his fictional creations. Chosen judiciously from the thousands that he brought to life, they paint a picture of "the emergent modern world, its nascent capitalism, its valuation of money above all else, its competition for social and political prominence" (4). In the process, naturally enough, they also fashion an "oblique biography" (1) of their creator, providing insight into his "inner world, its obsessions and fantasies, all that drove him in his writing" (8). Brooks begins with Rastignac, as he appears in Le père Goriot, to show how a character who is eager to learn and willing to adapt can reemerge in later novels. That also allows him to introduce Vautrin, who (as Jacques Collin) will have his own chapter in due course, and to note the discrete but crucial presence of Gobseck, the moneylender, who is the next subject. Just two of the characters who merit chapters are women: Antoinette de Langeais and Henriette de Mortsauf. Yet there is "a case to be made for a feminist Balzac," Brooks comes to suggest, at least one "who espoused with imaginative sympathy woman's condition" (75). Freudian theory, always an essential touchstone for Brooks, informs the treatment of a number of characters, such as Raphaël de Valentin, in Balzac's first real success, La peau de chagrin, where "the pleasure principle is inextricably bound up with its opposite, the death drive" (78). Chapters devoted to figures as different as Lucien de Rubempré and the enigmatic Colonel Chabert document Balzac's attentiveness to the rapid transformation of his contemporary world. When Brooks comes back to Collin, it is the role of "creator and manipulator of the lives of others" (131) that he highlights, as if the character might well have been a projection of the author himself. In a wide-ranging final chapter, Brooks muses in a more general vein about the fictional world populated by the sorts of characters he has singled out—particularly the monomaniacal types that obviously fascinated Balzac—and animated by the theatrical, often melodramatic mode that the novelist clearly preferred. "Madness is never far from the surface," he suggests, "because Balzac's whole enterprise is fundamentally mad, a pursuit of a total reckoning with the visible and invisible world" (232). This book will appeal to a broad readership, as titles of novels and quotations are in English translation. The presentation is essay-like, with relatively few notes; the writing straightforward and jargon-free. End material includes a judicious selection of critical studies, ranging from traditional [End Page 269] to more contemporary; a chronology of historical events from the Revolution to 1850, in which key points in Balzac's life are embedded; and an index. For anyone who loves French literature, a new book by Peter Brooks has always been a welcome event, and this one offers a very enjoyable reading experience. [End Page 270] John T. Booker University of Kansas Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of Sister Carrie

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of <i>Sister Carrie</i>

PLAISIR ET BONHEUR DANS LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN

The first best seller of Balzac, the novel La Peau de Chagrin (1831) features more than a fantastic story about a pact with the devil and the destructive consequences it brings about. In reality, the adventure of the young intellectual Raphaël de Valentin reveals a moral and ontological significance, relying on the choice between an active life of frivolous pleasures and a calm life of domestic happiness. In this paper, we shall examine how the tragic destiny of the protagonist derives from his confusion between enduring happiness and the ephemeral pleasure offered by a hedonistic lifestyle, all within the social context of the birth of capitalism in the early 19th century.

Tracing Squiggles: Laurence Sterne, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Honoré de Balzac

AbstractThis article examines the figure of an undulating line, or “squiggle,” printed initially in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and copied by two nineteenth-century writers: first, by the German E. T. A. Hoffmann, in a little-known fragment, and, second, more famously, by the French Honoré de Balzac as the epigraph to his novel La peau de chagrin. These three squiggles form a triangulated relationship of imitation across two centuries, three countries, and three languages. Through attention to William Hogarth’s line of beauty and Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomic contour lines, the article considers the history of the undulating line as a figure for reading. It suggests that, for Sterne, Hoffmann, and Balzac, the inclusion of a pictured line within text may be seen as a “reverse ekphrastic” maneuver, one that aims to reflect the movement of narrative in visual form. In this way, the “squiggle” is foregrounded as a new and concrete motif for comparative criticism on Hoffmann and Balzac, identifying a shared interest in Sterne, as well as in the relationship and entanglement of text and image.

La Peau de Weltliteratur

Abstract Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin is a window into a pivotal moment in the international circulation of the idea of Weltliteratur. Published just four years after Goethe coined the term, Balzac’s novel both instantiated and theorized the concept. To make this case, I first trace the novel’s transtextual dialogue with Goethe’s theater and theory. Then, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Gisèle Sapiro, I specify which tenets of Goethe’s model hold and which shift in that transfer. Heightened Eurocentricism speaks to a distinction between the French and German literary fields, mediated by the newspaper Le Globe. Increased skepticism toward the regime is mediated by Balzac himself, revealing a peculiar class of agents of Weltliteratur: conscious beneficiaries who remained, paradoxically, unwilling participants.

Balzac et la langue éd. par Éric Bordas

Reviewed by: Balzac et la langue éd. par Éric Bordas John T. Booker Bordas, Éric, éd. Balzac et la langue. Kimé, 2019. ISBN 978-2-84174-922-5. Pp. 324. Introducing this collection, the outgrowth of a 2018 conference, Bordas mounts a vigorous defense of Balzac's use of language, countering the sort of criticism voiced most famously by Flaubert and Proust. The Balzacian penchant for inventing words, for example, springs from "une poétique de l'énergie" (18) on the part of an author whose objective was never harmonious phrasing, but rather "la précision de l'instant de la pensée" (19). Balzac's language, in short, "reste toujours au service d'une représentation transitive directe des nouvelles choses de la vie sociale contemporaine" (24). Opening up these fourteen contributions, Gilles Siouffidocuments Balzac's participation in contemporary debates about the nature and role of literary language, while Takayuki Kamada surveys the relatively little genetic material that is available in this case. Both Joël Zufferey and Rudolf Mahrer explore projected revisions of La peau de chagrin for a special edition that never materialized. Taking up the issue of Balzacian neologisms, José-Luis Diaz sees them as the effort of a self-styled "historien des moeurs" (105), intent on representing faithfully a contemporary world in rapid evolution. With Romain Jalabert's look at the poetic efforts of the young Balzac, "esprit éclectique, imprégné de romantisme" (140), the focus shifts to a youthful lyricism that would find its mature expression and appropriate place, he suggests, in Le lys dans la vallée. Takeshi Matsumura probes the lexicographical features of Le péché vesniel, one of the early Contes drolatiques. Érik Leborgne, using the example of Gobseck, illustrates how the tailoring of idiosyncratic language allows a reader to better visualize a given [End Page 234] character, while Agnese Silvestri does likewise, across a broader spectrum, in her treatment of "idiolectes" in Le cousin Pons. Vincent Bierce shows how Balzac, influenced especially by the ideology of Swedenborg, incorporates in works such as Séraphîta, or Louis Lambert "une importante réflexion sur la phraséologie métaphysique" (207). Jacques Dürrenmatt, in a lively manner, revisits the contrasting styles of Balzac and Flaubert. For the former, he contends, a given sentence "n'a pas de valeur en soi […]; elle ne la tire que de son énonciation dans un contexte ou un cotexte donnés" (236). Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand then surveys two critical assessments of Balzac's use of language, the first by Ferdinand Brunot at the end of the nineteenth century, the second, much less sympathetic, by Charles Bruneau some four decades later. It seems fitting that the closing contributions address the formidable challenge of translating Balzac. Marie-Christine Aubin illustrates the difficulty of conveying the idiolecte and sociolecte of individual characters by surveying adaptations in English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Mandarin of a scene from La cousine Bette. Takao Kashiwagi, a prominent Japanese translator of Balzacian texts, offers firsthand insight into the experience. A welcome feature, not always included in a volume of this nature, is a summary of each of the fourteen contributions, which prospective readers should find quite helpful. Whether or not partisans of Flaubert or Proust are ultimately won over, enthusiasts of Balzac will undoubtedly find much to their liking in this volume. John T. Booker University of Kansas Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

The Fantastic (as) Negligent Orientalism in Honoré de Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin

This article begins by examining how depictions of the fantastic in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin rely on associations with the Orient. Extending Edward Said’s argument that the nineteenth-century French Realist novel expressed the West’s desire for imperial mastery over the Orient, this article argues that the fantastic elements in Balzac’s novel illustrate the failure to achieve this wished-for mastery. In fact, the misrepresentations and mistranslations surrounding the Orientalist interpretation of the eponymous supernatural talisman’s inscription cast doubt on the idea that European scientific thinking and Realist writing produce reliable knowledge about either Europe or the Orient. Finally, the misinterpretation of the talisman’s script prompts a discussion of the history of the arabesque, which provides a model for thinking about how Orientalist interpretation, as a series of misrepresentations, is intertwined with the mimetic practices of Balzac’s novel.

Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance, by John Haydock

<i>Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance</i>, by John Haydock

Balzac, fictions génétiques. Par Pierre Laforgue

This subtle, sophisticated, often witty, and consistently fascinating study is an outstanding contribution to Balzac studies. Pierre Laforgue follows Nicole Mozet in challenging the hegemony of the ‘final’ version of the Comédie humaine but denies priority to any single state of the text, instead locating the significance of Balzac’s writing in its perpetual fluidity. Starting from the author’s discernible slips (including the Freudian, appositely considered diegetically in relation to Étude de femme), errors, anachronisms, incompatible ‘facts’, contradictions, demonstrable absurdities, and abrupt descents into fictional extravagance, these examples of ‘disfonctionnements’ (p. 14) are seen as indicative of a constantly shifting creation, a perpetual locus of tension, paradox, and aporia. There emerges from Laforgue’s fine attention to genetic detail an unprecedented sense of the way individual works incorporate both traces of discarded versions and awareness of new possibilities that, if fully implemented (an impossibility in view of the constraints of the already written), would constitute a considerable redefinition of focus. The text thus becomes an uneasy compromise between actualization and the virtual that is, nonetheless, impregnated with plurality of meaning. This is demonstrated with justifiable conviction in the case of the elliptical La Grenadière and the contorted genesis of La Femme de trente ans that leads to an unresolvable contradiction in the attempt to have six separate stories crystallize in the form of a novel. (The first part of Illusions perdues is shown as less intractable to such generic transformation.) Balzac’s writing is seen also to traverse the boundaries between individual texts, revealing ‘des points communs de nature génétique’ (p. 16). These are especially visible in works produced in close temporal proximity, which, at the non-enunciated level of their ‘deep structures’ (not Laforgue’s term), present unexpected continuity at the level of the writing itself. This allows Le Lys dans la vallée to be seen both as conte drolatique and as genetically related to La Fille aux yeux d’or. Particularly valuable is the demonstration of Balzac’s struggle to accommodate the exigencies of fictional form and, in the face of defeat, his recourse (as in Ferragus) to an ironical treatment of the clichés of the roman noir. Laforgue also delivers a mortal blow to characters viewed as examples of ‘une entité constituée en elle-même’ (p. 38). They are understood here not in terms of the surface narrative, but in relation to their function and textuality. Thus, the subject of Le Père Goriot is not the title character, but paternity, which licenses a view of the novel as ‘fathered’ by Lord Dudley. An interlude, nonetheless tightly linked to Laforgue’s perspective, offers an illuminating consideration of François Truffaut’s reference to Le Lys dans la vallée in Les Baisers volés (1969). The concluding discussion proposes a novel analysis of the eponymous wild ass’s skin as ‘text’. Laforgue wears his knowledge of the Comédie humaine lightly. (His own slips and omissions are mostly venial, although he has the Pauline of La Peau de chagrin become Raphaël’s wife, p. 78.) A companion volume pursuing the wider implications of these specific case studies would nonetheless be equally welcome.

Incipit: The Nineteenth Century (Mis)Reading the Eighteenth

Incipit:The Nineteenth Century (Mis)Reading the Eighteenth William Paulson and Caroline Weber For the next installment of this dialogic series, the journal asked William Paulson (University of Michigan) and Caroline Weber (Barnard College, Columbia University) to reflect on in what ways the nineteenth century (mis)reads the eighteenth. They composed their initial essays without knowing who their interlocutor would be or what would be the content of the other person's essay; the ensuing exchange, by e-mail, took place in the order presented below. In the nineteenth-century historical imagination, the eighteenth century was often strongly identified with the philosophes and with the Revolution. As a result, when nineteenth-century thinkers strove to reconnect with a prerevolutionary past, or with ancestry and origins that they could view as authentic, they often excluded the eighteenth century in favor of earlier periods. This originally reactionary move could be put to more progressive uses insofar as it helped to account for a sense that key promises of the Revolution remained unfulfilled. It also became a contested move, with Jules Michelet proclaiming the eighteenth to have been the "grand siècle," and Gérard de Nerval integrating the eighteenth century into an otherwise typically romantic construction of French origins. The focus on philosophes and Revolution, rarely, however, took note of the nineteenth century's massive role in realizing the Enlightenment project of a secular and materially-oriented world. (WP) In my portions of this Incipit, I propose to concentrate on modern (nineteenthto twenty-first century) appropriations of key figures of and from eighteenth-century French history, and to consider the political implications of these rewritings. I understand "figures" primarily in the rhetorical sense, looking, for instance and for starters, at the evolution of the palace of Versailles as a trope of absolutist power and privilege. I will also consider changing conceptions of history and time as such, with a particular focus on the messianic temporalities of René de Chateaubriand and Walter Benjamin and on the ambiguous self-fashioning of President Emmanuel Macron. (CW) [End Page 147] Excising Enlightenment William Paulson "Ah! diable! . . . Mais c'est un vaste sujet . . ." This description of Raphaël de Valentin's "Théorie de la volonté" from La Peau de chagrin was the first thing that came to mind on receiving the journal's invitation to write on what the nineteenth century inherits and misreads from its chronological predecessor.1 With no word limit and a five-year grant, this topic could yield something like an old-time thèse d'état, reaching who knows what sorts of conclusions. So some rather brutal reduction and abusive generalization will be inevitable in what follows. I will attempt to describe a fairly dominant nineteenth-century pattern of excluding the eighteenth century from its historical antecedents. We are accustomed to think of the nineteenth century as the "century of history," an era when being a major thinker typically involved having a developmental philosophy of history, when writers were obsessed with looking back to ancestors and origins, to simpler or more authentic times, to oral traditions and folk tales, to the realm of childhood and mothers and the people. Yet to a great extent, the eighteenth century was excluded from this dive into the waters of things past: too closely identified with the Revolution, and thus with the wound that the quest for antecedents and traditions was supposed to heal. In its unfitness to provide the sought-for connections, the eighteenth century was often described as a time of decadence, rigidity, or artificiality, an intrusion or interruption in the organic development of society and culture. National origins were sought in the newly valorized Middle Ages, subjects for historical dramas in the Renaissance; the Romantics leapt over the previous century to define themselves in opposition to the "classics" of the reign of Louis XIV. That this schema is reactionary in its origin and its main thrust does not prevent it from being historically salient, or even from remaining pertinent today. It can fairly be said to have begun with Chateaubriand, in opposition to Madame de Staël, and it played a significant role in the early nineteenth century's self-definition, its...

Interior spaces as traces in Balzac\u2019s La Com\xe9die humaine

This article focuses on how Balzacian interiors and their dwellers signal a new experience and understanding of the past and the present that emerged during the Revolution and its aftermath. In this context, two interiors are analyzed: the interior of the Hôtel d’Esgrignon in Le Cabinet des Antiques and the antique shop passage in La Peau de chagrin. Both literary interiors in different ways embody traces of an “absent present” and constitute a solipsist mimesis of reciprocity between dweller and dwelling. These literary interiors signal fundamental aspects of a century that was marked by the loss of the past to history and by the experience of present time as but an elusive, fragile trace. Like the two sides of the same coin, this was also the time of vivification of absent images that are simulated, imitated in interiors of presentification, like the stereographic cabinet or the panoramic theatre. These interiors radicalize the traditional cabinet and its imagery, like Walter Benjamin’s typification of the window shop and the panoramic theatre would show. The Hôtel d’Esgrignon substantiates an absence-less presence with reality. Balzac conceives the mimetic relationship between the cénacle des antiques and its Hôtel as a sophisticated subtext that reveals the illusionary nature of the ambition to establish such an absolute present. Those who reside in the Hôtel constitute the object-like and lifeless parody of a dynamics of representation played out and that reveals the fundamental absence they stand for. In La Peau de chagrin, isolated objects are fragmented, eclectic bits and pieces of representations that are vivified, and not imitated, by imagination. The cabinet as a place that is the objects it arranges and shows, is internalized as a mental space of imagination, of hyperbolic possibilities of representational assemblage. The hybridity of its visitor is that of imagination itself being represented. Here, Balzac points forward to a literary development in which spatial settings, par excellence that of a vast, fantastic, endless space, will become an image of (literary) representation itself. This paper is published as part of a collection on interiorities.

Reading Rancière: Literature at the Limit of World Literature

This essay critically interrogates Jacques Rancière’s claim that the modern idea of literature found its own being when it became conscious of the “democratic petrification” of literariness in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I make two related points vis-à-vis Rancière’s argument: first, I demonstrate that he insufficiently imagines the knowledge paradigms informing this allegedly democratic petrification of literature and ignores vital shifts in history; and second, I argue that because of this initial poverty of imagination, Rancière fails to address the most crucial impediment to the regime’s reliance on reading as a “universal” strategy—i.e., colonial history and racial difference. While the metropolitan culture yields its innermost secrets to the hermeneutic eye of everyday literariness, the colonial other, shrouded in racial alterity, remains mysterious, illegible, and even invisible. Instead, I show through close readings of Honoré de Balzac’s novel La Peau de chagrin (1831), which also functions as the central text for Rancière’s theory, that the conditions of reading everyday life, and hence the new literariness, could emerge only under the strict orders laid down through these new disciplines like Orientalism and, behind them, by the coercive structures of colonial governance. My wager is that the new condition of readability was distributed beyond any one culture or one nation. Hence, the proper context for the emergence of the new idea of literature could only be described as early discussions and reflections on that typically supranational concept of the nineteenth century—i.e., world literature.

Figures of Feeling in Honoré de Balzac's La Peau de chagrin

In this article, I read Balzac's La Peau de chagrin as a novel of feeling, in which Raphael's act of telling his life story entails a sensory encounter with the narrative self. Beginning with the novel's emblematic epigraph, then following through a series of significant encounters within it, I show that Raphael, by putting his life into narrative, is forced to come upon himself as narrative object. Examining these encounters first through the vector of physiognomy, then through twentieth-century theories of play, and always paying particular attention to the visual aspects of touch and feeling, I read them as moments of corporeal mimesis which cast Raphael in a thing- or object-like state. This spectacle of mimesis, in which subject is cast as object, is aptly figured by the magical piece of skin at the novel's centre, the organ of touch, shrinking at the expression of desire and thus functioning as a visual measure for the compromised narrative life.

Reflections On Swift's Journal to Stella

Reflections On Swift's Journal to Stella Margaret Anne Doody The recently published Journal to Stella in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley 1710–1713), edited by Abigail Williams, is an exciting presentation of a work well-known, yet incompletely known—perhaps not completely knowable. Splendidly produced, this volume makes enormous amounts of information accessible to the reader, who can also turn to helpful appendices on political debates, other letters, and the "little language." Reproductions of epistles deal with complex questions of excision, obliteration, and revision. [End Page 49] Drawing on the work of major Swift scholars in recent generations, this Journal to Stella is yet highly distinctive. Ms. Williams's introduction is clear, engaging, and new. The notes supply copious information without garrulousness. Clearly printed, without hogging the page, these true footnotes ease continuous reading. What we call "the Journal to Stella" offers a diary-like progression of epistles, comments on the author's life addressed to highly specific persons, insistently specific as to circumstance. Swift's epistolary collection was to affect other writers of fiction as well as of fact. Perhaps it is too easy to relate Swift's Journal to a Bildungsroman told in the first person. Here is the story of the young (now not so young) man who goes to the great city and is plunged into new relationships and the hurly-burly of important public affairs. The whole resembles Balzac's La Peau de chagrin or Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale more than it does Tom Jones—all equally unwritten in 1710–1713. Swift invents representative turns of the self toward a presumed objectivity while recording the (foolish or bizarre) interiority of that objectivity. He makes fun of his own enthusiasm, ambition, and wonder even while he enjoys expressing these emotive attitudes because such naïve elements produce a play of open possibility, and of intensity. Swift (whose punning nickname "Presto" emphasizes a predestined turn for speed) notes that one can travel a dozen miles out of London to dine, and return that evening—not possible in Dublin. Swift's expressed admiration for the express enables him (wisely or petulantly) to withdraw his approbation at whim. Town becomes dull: "Wexford is worth two of it" (249). And this posture is also understood as posture, a sign of success. Studying this hero/antihero while creating himself, Swift also finds and perfects the comic model for his outstanding creation, Gulliver, the hopeful and abjectly social protagonist, explorer of new worlds. Playing at being impressed is a necessary preliminary to disillusionment. Swift also wants to be impressive—a man on the inside of the political scene, highly valued as wit and writer, moving to success by various routes. But there is a matching desire to puncture grandiosity. "An't I silly? Faith your letters would make a dog silly, if I had a dog to be silly, but it must be a little dog" (154). Like Boswell after him, Swift creates scenes and meetings with the great and the famous, setting himself up as the impressionable novice: "I was brought privately to Mr. Harley, who received me with the greatest respect and kindness imaginable.… I dined to-day at Mr. Delaval's, the envoy for Portugal, with Nic. Rowe the poet, and other friends; and I gave my lampoon to be printed. I have more mischief in my heart…" (27). Swift, famed sufferer from actual dizziness (Menière's disease), appreciates the dizzying careening through classes and spaces. He is overtly flattered at spending a large part of the day with Harley, who "after four hours being with him, set me down at St. James's Coffee-house, in a hackney-coach. All this is odd and comical, if you consider him and me. He knew my Christian name very well" (30–31). This flattered inductee into a new society is observed as a comic personage. The Swift of the Journal is already gaining a mastery of some of his effects. He arranges his anecdotes so as to question inflated self-esteem—including his own. It seems there was a downside to Harley's...

Le crédit dans la poétique balzacienne par Alexandre Péraud

Reviews 281 Péraud,Alexandre. Le crédit dans la poétique balzacienne. Paris: Garnier, 2012. ISBN 978-2-8124-0516-7. Pp. 401. 39 a. It is a critical commonplace that money is omnipresent in La comédie humaine. Yet this study draws a nice distinction between money and credit, arguing that the complex social relations engendered by debt and credit are central to the nascent capitalist economy of Balzac’s era, and also offer an apt figure for Balzac’s entire novelistic project:“Si le crédit est une convention où la confiance n’est qu’un simulacre, comment ne pas penser à la relation contractuelle que Balzac tente, inlassablement, d’établir avec son lecteur?” (26). This question is posed in the introduction, like a promissory note whose payment is deferred until the final chapter, in which an analogy of lecteur to créancier is elaborated. The concept of reader-as-creditor entails, for Péraud, a comparison of two very similar ways of marking time. First, the act of borrowing opens a span of time between the moment of indebtedness and the moment of repayment (or default), in which the debtor essentially pledges his/her own length of days within the“lifetime”of the loan, while the creditor agrees to wait: what Péraud terms an “engagement de soi” on the part of both creditor and debtor (318). Second, readers of La comédie humaine likewise engage their time for the length of the volume (s), accepting delays, digressions, and deferred revelations until their curiosity is “indemnified”at the story’s dénouement. Or, as Raphael declares in La peau de chagrin, “si tu ne peux me faire crédit d’une heure d’ennui, dors!” (322), speaking, Péraud argues, for Balzac himself. The value of this transactional model is that it offers an apt way to conceive the readers’active role in the creation of meaning in the text. However, readers who have limited time to invest in Le crédit dans la poétique balzacienne could profitably skip to the second chapter, in which Péraud presents the main points of his argument through a good close reading of a single work, La peau de chagrin. Readers with more time may also find value in the first chapter, which provides historical context by examining forms and functions of credit under the July Monarchy; or the third chapter, which elaborates a critical scaffolding through a semiotic analysis of narratives of debt and reimbursement throughout La comédie humaine,with references to Bakhtin, Ricœur, Greimas, and Derrida. Additionally, the bibliography is a useful resource for those interested in the volatile economy of 1820s and 1830s France. On balance, this study offers an engaging reading of individual works, and a compelling though complicated characterization of the overarching structure of La comédie humaine: it is altogether worthwhile. Arcadia University (PA) Kate M. Bonin ...

Balzac, fantastique fantaisiste? L’année balzacienne 2012 éd. par Michel Lichtlé

of the fan structures the project, which unfolds coyly, beginning with considerations of the various meanings of fantaisie, fantasque, etc. in the early to mid-nineteenth century, followed by an examination of the literary scene in which Musset débuted and quickly became a leading figure, and finally closing again with reflections on Musset’s literary life and legacy. One of the commonplaces of Musset criticism is that the author’s later work represents a poet in decline and is not worthy of notice. Ledda counteracts that view and takes into account all of Musset’s oeuvre, regardless of chronology or genre. As he argues in his introduction,“[i]nterroger la fantaisie, c’est [...] questionner les formes mineures et majeures de la littérature, c’est interroger la ‘situation’ des œuvres dans une aire géographique, intellectuelle [...] l’étude de la fantaisie permet de considérer la place de Musset dans l’histoire littéraire non en fonction de ‘dates-événements’, mais grâce à des notions esthétiques” (25). Ledda is largely successful in this enterprise, but it must be noted that readers not already in possession of an intimate knowledge of Musset may struggle to find their footing among the myriad allusions, some quite elliptical, to both major and minor works. This book was clearly a labor of love to Ledda, who is one of the leading scholars of nineteenth-century theater in France and has published a great deal on, among other topics,Musset’s theater.Although Ledda’s insights here are,as usual,globally convincing and evocative, they remain somewhat superficial, not unlike the “dandy” of his title. The first part of the book, the section outlining the evolving meanings of fantaisie and its semantic cousins, is the strongest and will be of interest to the widest group of scholars.The second section,which deals in part with Musset’s literary models,presents an original view of the author’s development and brings forth often overlooked influences . Comparatists, especially Germanists, will wish to consult Ledda on fantasy in particular and romanticism in general. The final section treats Musset as artist and it is in this part of the book that Ledda makes the best case for a reexamination of Musset’s later work. For all its stylistic idiosyncrasy, L’éventail et le dandy is a compelling work of scholarship and a significant contribution to Musset studies. University of South Alabama Susan McCready Lichtlé, Michel, éd. Balzac, fantastique fantaisiste? L’année balzacienne 2012. Paris: PUF, 2012. ISBN 978-2-13-0617-31-0. Pp. 419. 45 a. Featuring communications from the 2012 conference, this volume adopts a fresh approach to the iconic realist by highlighting the place of the creative imagination in his works. Many of the studies seek to clarify ambiguous terms, such as fantastique, fantaisie, fantasme, fantasmagorie, which enhances the interest of the collection. Launching the foray into Balzac’s literary imaginings, Bernard Vouilloux investigates the novelist’s early écriture fantaisiste, ultimately judging the writing style incompatible with a realist portrayal of society.Alex Lascar, on the other hand, considers la fantaisie 278 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 279 essential to Balzac’s oeuvre because, as “un outil de déstabilisation” (32), it calls into question meanings, facts, and the very notion of truth, thereby ensuring a more accurate depiction of life. Juxtaposing Balzac’s“fantaisie partielle de forme”in Lettres sur Paris and Musset’s “fantaisie de fond” in Revues fantastiques, Patrick Berthier and Sylvain Ledda bring to light “deux nuances d’un regard romantique” (60) in these creative visions. For his part, José-Luis Diaz underscores the subtle interplay of le fantastique et le réel in Sarrasine, Le chef d’œuvre inconnu, and La peau de chagrin, which to his mind mirrors the spread of social decay in Paris during the nineteenth century. Along similar lines, Brigitte Méra suggests that the novelist’s inventiveness offers an opportunity to“corriger et compléter le réel”(119). Other contributors to the collection pursue the moral and artistic ramifications of Balzac’s creative imagination. Régine Borderie, for example, calls attention to Balzac’s use of fantaisie, both for aesthetic purposes (especially...

NEW WORDS FOR OLD? BALZAC, NEOLOGISM, AND SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATIVE DISCOURSE

Balzac's lively interest in linguistic invention is related to the widespread fascination with neologism displayed by such contemporaries of his as Charles Nodier and Brillat-Savarin. His self-conscious espousal of lexical innovation in his early journalism is both satirical and creative, as may be seen from the continuity presented by La Peau de chagrin. It forms a core element in the evolution of a narrative discourse that advertises a keen awareness of the ambiguous status of its medium.

La estética del horror en tres relatos fantásticos de Honoré de Balzac

L’objectif de cette étude consiste à mettre en relief le thème de l’horreur dans l’œuvre d’Honoré de Balzac, notamment à travers l’analyse de trois récits fantastiques: La Peau de chagrin, Melmoth réconcilié et L’Elixir de longue vie. Ces trois récits s’insèrent dans les Études philosophiques, la partie de La Comédie Humaine où Balzac se propose de montrer les ressorts invisibles de l’homme et de la société. C’est dans les Études philosophiques que se manifeste le plus nettement une idée clé de toute l’œuvre de l’auteur: le pouvoir de la pensée qui, dans le fantastique balzacien, se révèle destructeur.

Une poetique de l'enigme: le recit hermeneutique balzacien

The present volume offers a convincing and extremely thorough appraisal of the representation of mystery in the work of Balzac. As the author observes in her introduction, ‘le récit à enigme est l'une des formes de prédilection du roman balzacien’. From the espionage attempted by Marie de Verneuil in Les Chouans, to the terrible secret that lurks in the sealed closet of ‘La Grande Bretèche’, mysteries abound in La Comédie humaine, engaging both novelist and reader in a hermeneutic quest for fictional truth. Tracing the evolution of the récit à énigme from its origins in classical tragedy to the gothic novels of Maturin and Radcliffe, this study probes the multiplicity of textual strategies with which Balzac exploited the potential of the mystery form. Lies and lapses of memory, as well as plotting, spying and romantic betrayal, all have a part in concealing and revealing secrets. To hold the key to a secret, we are told, is to wield power, and there are few more powerful than the fictional lawyer Derville, an expert déchiffreur and first-hand witness to the moral depravity that lies hidden inside some of the most fashionable houses in Paris. For Massol, however, it is the desire inspired by mystery that truly defines Balzac's notion of the enigmatic. His is a narrative voice that delights in tantalizing the reader with the promise of enlightenment and, ultimately, resolution. In the opening pages of La Peau de chagrin, selective focalization, and a desire to uncover the identity of the young man who has gambled away his last coin, thus serve to convince the reader of the need for an omniscient narrator. The real originality of Massol's thesis nevertheless lies elsewhere, most notably in her assertion that Balzac's ludic enterprise generates as many mysteries as it solves. This much is clear, she argues, in the case of Maître Cornélius (1832), in which the theft of the eponymous usurer's gold is attributed to his own somnambulism, a medical riddle to which not even the Balzacian Sphinx has the answer. Elsewhere, the proliferation of mysteries throughout La Comédie humaine is situated firmly within its historical context, revealing Balzac as a novelist who played self-consciously on the class ambiguities of the post-Napoleonic period, and the wider ‘unreadability’ of a rapidly changing society. Equally welcome are the sustained discussions of sometimes neglected works including Albert Savarus, Modeste Mignon and L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine. There is some disappointment in finding repeated reference to well-known episodes from the Balzacian universe (why Rastignac's peering through Goriot's keyhole should be mentioned on three separate occasions, with scant analytical variation on each, is a minor mystery in itself), but this is hardly sufficient to undermine the very favourable impression created by this substantial reference work.