Pere Goriot (4 page)

 

“What a great man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write,” wrote Gustave Flaubert. Deploring Balzac's lack of style was something of a national literary pastime in the nineteenth century. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, the most influential literary critic of his era, laments “an incoherent, exuberant vocabulary in which words boil and emerge as if by chance,” and complains about “long sentences without commas that make one run out of breath.” The novelist Émile Zola writes of Balzac's “messy creativity.” Marcel Proust finds distasteful “the vulgarity of [Balzac's] language,” which his occasional attempts to cover up only worsen: “Whenever he tries to hide his vulgarity, he develops a vulgarian's refinement”.
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In a similar vein, Gustave Lanson, the first significant university critic, wrote that “faced with fields and woods,” Balzac “has the emotions of a traveling salesman.” In his at-the-time authoritative
Histoire de la littérature française (History of French Literature,
1894) he opined that Balzac “was a vulgar type, robust and exuberant” before assailing the novelist's tastelessness: “At first a notary's clerk, it was there that he picked up the idea and the taste for those odious jokes he so liberally showcases in his novels” (in Vachon,
Honoré de Balzac: Memoire de la critique,
p. 320).

With the exception of Sainte-Beuve, none of the authorities cited above doubted Balzac's greatness for a moment. Their reactions reveal a continued fidelity to classical norms of style—to ideals of lucidity, clarity of expression, and elegance inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—that Balzac tended to disregard. The first to mount a defense of the Balzacian sentence was Ferdinand Brunetière. A disciple of Lanson, he saw in the breathlessness of Balzac's style a masterful imitation of life's rampant surges: “[Life] is the movement that upsets the straight line. It is confusion, disorder, illogic, irregularity.... One seizes it for a moment, one gives an imitation of it, only by making oneself as changing, as supple, as undulating as it is. This is what Molière, Saint-Simon, and Balzac tried to do” (quoted in Vachon, p. 369). Citing the highly introspective, first-person novels
René
(1802), by François-René de Chateaubriand and
Adolphe,
by Constant, Brunetière argues that Balzac substituted “for this type of personal, egotistical novel, the novel of others” (p. 379). Balzac's novels break with that whole genre of literature known as the psychological novel, the novel of self-disclosure—in France, the
roman d'analyse—
with those highly intimist, intensely analytical narratives of passionate, melancholic young men and (occasionally) women. The style of the psychological novel owes much to classicism, even when describing the limits of human experience, lucidity, restraint, and elegance of form are de rigueur. The new “novel of others” envisaged by Balzac demanded a different style altogether because, instead of a single, harmonious narrative voice (the selfsame “I” telling its tale), we find in Balzac a genuine polyphony—a plurality and indeed a heterogeneity of voices of all types and from all classes. This is a necessary consequence of the shift from a “personal” or “egotistical” novel to one that looks outward and toward the other. Privileging observation over speculation, the outside over the inside, his fiction escapes from the tyranny of psychology and from the Rousseauist idea of a unique and original Self whose essence literature is meant to disclose. As an anthropologist (rather than a sociologist), he is close to another Rousseau, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau Founder of the Human Sciences,” in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

This is why reading Balzac is so thoroughly refreshing. Instead of the enclosed, musty space of a consciousness examining its Self (“my story is limited to my feelings and my thoughts,” says Chateaubriand's René), we find a curiosity about others and about the world. In Balzac's anti-confessional fiction there is nothing to disclose, no self to unburden. His novels do not depend upon what D. H. Lawrence, attempting to probe the underbelly of the whole of French literature, calls a “dirty little secret,” shared by the author and his characters, that the reader must decipher (see Deleuze and Parnet,
Dialogues,
pp. 46 ff.). Balzac's fiction depends rather on mutation, flexibility, change, chance, becoming. “‘There are no such things as principles; there are only events,'” says Vautrin (p. 120). Vautrin is outlining a moral philosophy, but taken as an aesthetic statement his pronouncement sums up rather well Balzac's point of view as regards composition. Literature is an event. In writing, as in life, “ ‘you should cut your way through the world like a cannon ball'” (p. 128).

“Eugène had yet to learn that no one in Paris should present himself in any house without first making himself acquainted with the whole history of its owner, and of its owner's wife and family...” (p. 74). Eugène has a lot to learn at the outset of
Père Goriot.
The form of the novel closely resembles that of the bildungsroman, a genre in which an inexperienced young fellow sets out in the world and, in the process of completing a sometimes harsh apprenticeship, learns through experience something of its ways and wiles. Balzac hews quite closely to this form, commenting now and again on Eugène's progress (“In the past month Eugène's good qualities and defects had rapidly developed with his character” [p. 106]; “His education was nearly complete” [p. 266]). It is important to note, however, that Balzac's novel, while borrowing some of the formal elements of the bildungsroman, differs from the classical versions of this model in that the type of knowledge most prized here is not the humanist wisdom that is the hard-won fruit of experience, but rather the technical mastery of certain strategies for success. Eugène has to learn “the whole history” of the houses to which he seeks entry: This type of knowledge, the sine qua non of social success, is not wisdom but information. Knowledge in
Père Goriot
has little to do with self-enhancement or enlightenment and everything to do with social survival. The knowledge Eugène seeks and acquires has an immediate use-value; factual rather than theoretical, its value is strategic and expedient. “Rastignac made up his mind that he must learn the whole of Goriot's previous history; he would come to his bearings before attempting to board the Maison de Nucingen” (p. 93). The path to knowledge in these modern times leads not to the sage but to the informant (to M. Muret is a good example; see p. 96 et seq.).

Knowledge in
Père Goriot
is thus eminently practical. Certainly, there is knowledge to be had from the study of books and the law, but Eugène rejects this curriculum (“The student studied no longer” [p. 92] ) in favor of an encounter with Paris and Parisian society, an encounter that the novel seems to recommend. “Those who do not know the left bank of the Seine between the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Rue des Saints-Pères know nothing of life” (p. 105), writes Balzac. The streets of Paris become Eugène's schoolroom. And the salons, too. For it is at the elegant home of Madame de Beauséant that Eugène makes “a three years' advance in a kind of law which is not a recognized study in Paris, although it is a sort of higher jurisprudence” (p. 77).

What is it that Eugène must know in order to gain access to and succeed in the fashionable salons and private
hôtels
of Paris? First of all, as we have seen, he must be acquainted with the history of the houses (this in itself would have avoided his dreadful gaffe at Madame de Restaud‘s, which results in that house being closed to him). He must know that there are two Hotels de Beauséant, that of the Vicomte and that of the Marquis, and that these are located in the rue de Grenelle and in the rue Saint-Dominique, respectively. Beyond this, his “education” consists of a type of social grooming. For example, he must learn, and does learn, “‘not [to] be so demonstrative'” (p. 78). Like Lucien de Rubempré, hero of Lost Illusions, or any recently arrived provincial, he must lose his accent and adopt the language of the Parisians. And he must learn the language of love, even if in this post-Romantic epoch a lover's discourse amounts to nothing more than “stereotyped phrases” (p. 134). To know these things—customs and language—is to know Paris, and to know Paris is to know these things. “To know its customs, to learn the language, and to become familiar with the amusements of the capital” (p. 38), these should be the goals of the student, for a student in Paris is first and foremost a student
of
Paris.

 

On October 12, 1833, Balzac wrote to his sister, Laure: “And I am a
father
—that's another secret I have for you—and thanks to a lovely person, the most naive creature, who fell like a flower from the sky, who comes to me in secret, demands of me neither letters nor attentions, and who says, ‘Love me for a year, I will love you all my life. ”' The creature in question was Marie Daminois, a married woman, daughter of the novelist Adèle Daminois, and who bore Balzac a daughter, Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay (born June 4, 1834) . It is now known that Marie is the “Maria” to whom
Eugénie Grandet
is dedicated, and the title character of that novel appears to share some of her physical traits. Balzac seems to have had little to do with his daughter. He may have attended her first communion and occasionally come to play with her; in his will, he bequeathed to her a statuette of Christ on the cross (an ironic recognition of an unacknowledged child from the man who created Goriot, the “Christ of paternity” [p. 222] ) . Marie-Caroline died in Nice in 1930. She would not have known of the letter to Madame Eveline Hanska, Balzac's longtime correspondent and companion, whom he was to marry in the last year of his life, in which her father writes: “I love Anna [Madame Hanska's daughter] incomparably more than that little girl I see every ten years” (see Robb, Balzac: A Biography, p. 247).

More meaningful to Balzac, but occurring after the composition of
Père Goriot,
seems to have been his experience with Madame Hanska, who in 1846 was expecting a child by him, although the pregnancy did not come to term. Balzac in his letters makes reference to the vital force he feels at the idea of becoming a father: “It seems to me that I have life, courage and happiness enough for three in my heart, in my veins and in my head.”

There are several literary fathers who in Balzac's oeuvre precede and anticipate Goriot. Among these we might single out Ferragus, chief of brigands, and a father who in his intensity and paternal absolutism seems to foreshadow Goriot: “Is it I, I who breathe only through your mouth, I who see only through your eyes, I who feel only through your heart, is it I who would fail to defend with a lion's claws, with the soul of a father, my only possession, my life, my daughter?”
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But in truth nothing in Balzac's life or anything in his early works could anticipate the majestic portrait of fatherhood he offers up in
Père Goriot.
“Since I have been a father, I have come to understand God” (p. 140): From what source does Balzac draw such a vision of paternity? From the creative act itself? From his experience of the conception and engenderment of a work of art? Perhaps, for in at least one place
(Cousine Bette)
Balzac writes of “the insane joy of generation” that accompanies “the creations of Thought,” and likens the literary offspring to a child: “But to produce! But to give birth! But to laboriously raise the child, put it to bed gorged with milk every evening, to kiss it every morning with the inexhaustible heart of a mother, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in the most beautiful jackets which it incessantly tears ...” (cited in Picon, Balzac, p. 79). Balzac as a mother? The line between maternity and paternity is easily crossed: “Let each of us look around, and be frank with himself, how many Goriots in skirts would we see? Now, Père Goriot's feelings imply maternity” (second preface to
Père Goriot) .

 

The flow of information, the flux of life, the endless onward (but not forward) movement of “civilization” (which is a “battlefield” [p. 82] ) : This is the dynamic setting for
Père Goriot.
In this novel there is a complex of stories, and there is also the matter, raised in the opening pages, of the reader and his or her reaction to these stories.
Père Goriot
tells among others the story of the “egotism and selfishness” that characterize life in Paris under the Restoration. “It is one of the privileges of the good city of Paris that any body may be born, or live, or die there without attracting any attention whatsoever” (p. 288). Yet the story of the general indifference that surrounds the sufferings and demise of the “sublime” Goriot is at once the story of the indifference, egotism, and selfishness of the reader.
Père Goriot
begins with an indictment of the bourgeois consumer, comfortably reclining in the “cushions of your armchair.” “You will read the story of Pére Goriot's secret woes, and, dining thereafter with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of writing romances” (p. 10). But
Père Goriot
is not a romance, nor is it a fiction; it is a “drama” in which “all is true.” Balzac insists that his work has nothing to do with the still rather unserious new genre (the novel); it is a documentary of the cramped modem soul, a soul shown to be cynical, pitiless, insensible, gluttonous, scheming, and, perhaps above all, indifferent: