Pere Goriot (48 page)

Hideous as the performance appears when coolly stated, it must be admitted that the ladies have got into such terrible perplexities from tampering with the seventh commandment, that there is some excuse for their breaking the fifth. Whether such an accumulation of horrors is a legitimate process in art, and whether a healthy imagination would like to dwell upon such loathsome social sores, is another question. The comparison suggested with “King Lear” may illustrate the point. In Balzac all the subordinate details which Shakespeare throws in with a very slovenly touch are elaborately drawn and contribute powerfully to the total impression. On the other hand we never reach the lofty poetical heights of the grandest scenes in “King Lear.” But the situation of the two heroes offers an instructive contrast. Lear is weak, but is never contemptible; he is the ruin of a gallant old king, is guilty of no degrading compliance, and dies like a man, with his “good biting falchion” still grasped in his feeble hand. To change him into Goriot we must suppose that he had licked the hand which struck him, that he had helped on the adulterous intrigues of Goneril and Regan from sheer weakness, and that all his fury had been directed against Cornwall and Albany for objecting to his daughter's eccentric views of the obligation of the marriage vow. Paternal affection leading a man to the most trying self-sacrifice is a worthy motive for a great drama or romance; but Balzac is so anxious to intensify the emotion, that he makes even paternal affection morally degrading. Everything must be done to heighten the colouring. Our sympathies are to be excited by making the sacrifice as complete, and the emotion which prompts it as overpowering, as possible; until at last the love of children becomes a monomania. Goriot is not only dragged through the mud of Paris, but he grovels in it with a will. In short, Balzac wants that highest power which shows itself in moderation, and commits a fault like that of an orator who emphasises every sentence. With less expenditure of horrors, he would excite our compassion more powerfully. But after all, Goriot is, perhaps, more really affecting even than King Lear.

—from
Hours in a Library
(1874)

It was said of Trollope that he increased the number of our acquaintances without adding to our visiting list; but after the
Comédie humaine
one begins to believe that the only real people are the people who have never existed. Lucien de Rubempré, le Père Goriot, Ursule Mirouet, Marguerite Claes, the Baron Hulot, Madame Marneffe, le Cousin Pons, De Marsay—all bring with them a kind of contagious illusion of life. They have a fierce vitality about them: their existence is fervent and fierycoloured ; we not merely feel for them but we see them—they dominate our fancy and defy scepticism. A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. Who would care to go out to an evening party to meet Tomkins, the friend of one's boy hood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempré? It is pleasanter to have the entree to Balzac's society than to receive cards from all the duchesses in Mayfair.

—from the
Pall-Mall Gazette
(September 13, 1868)

[In “Père Goriot”] we are plunged into an atmosphere of greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame Vauquer's boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells! Compare it with Dickens's Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius....

It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half. In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac's recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to Dickens's own nature....

Balzac's work has a Shakesperian universality.

—from
Masters of the English Novel
(1909)

There is no evidence that Balzac knew that things exist in being perceived, or, to adopt the formula of a later idealism, that they exist in being thought; his powerful body, his imagination which saw everywhere weight and magnitude, the science of his day, made him, like Descartes, consider matter as independent of mind.

—from
The London Mercury
(July 1934)

In some of his novels Balzac interrupts his narrative to discourse upon all kinds of irrelevant matters, but from this defect
Old Man Goriot
is on the whole free. He lets his characters explain themselves by their words and actions as objectively as it was in his nature to do.

—from
Great Novelists and Their Novels: Essays on the
Ten Greatest Novels of the World and the Men
and Women Who Wrote Them
(1948)

1. Does Balzac mean us to understand that human character is produced by the material objects that surround us—that is, not by something internal to a person, but outside?

2. How does Balzac get us to care about the vicissitudes of an ordinary old man?

3. How would you characterize Balzac as a psychologist? Is he astute? Is he deep? Or is he relatively indifferent to the depth of psychology? Do any of his characters seem to have a subconscious ?

4. Do you find any evidence of a hidden moral, or theory about society, or any metaphysical or religious belief that organizes the particulars, especially the plot and the characters' fates, in
Père Goriot?

To discover the destiny of some of the characters introduced in
Père Goriot,
readers should pursue other novels in Balzac's cycle of
La Comédie humaine,
beginning perhaps with
La Femme abandonnée
(The Abandoned Woman),
La Duchesse de Langeais (The Duchess of Langeais), Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low
[also translated as
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life]),
and
La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin
[also translated as
The Magic Skin] ) .

Old Goriot. Translated by Marion Ayton Crawford. London: Penguin Books, 1951.

Père Goriot.
Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Père Goriot.
Translated by Burton Raffel. London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Castex, Pierre-Georges, ed.
Père Goriot.
Paris: Editions Garnier, 1960. The most complete edition available. Contains authoritative notes as well as many of the variants among the different early editions.

Vachon, Stéphane, ed.
Père Goriot.
Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995. An inexpensive edition with copious notes and an excellent dossier covering the history and reception of the work.

Robb, Graham. Balzac: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Readable and accurate.

Pritchett, V. S. Balzac. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. A lively biography by an acclaimed novelist, with numerous illustrations.

Bellos, David.
Honoré de Balzac:
Old Goriot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. An excellent monograph by a renowned critic and translator.

Brooks, Peter, ed.
Père Goriot.
Translated by Burton Raffel. Norton Critical Edition. London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. A good place to start looking at the vast corpus of critical material relating to
Père Goriot.
Includes essays by Balzac's contemporaries and other novelists writing about
Goriot
and about Balzac's achievement in general (Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, Zola, Proust, James, etc.), as well as other modern criticism (Michel Butor, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, and others).

Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism. London: Merlin Press, 1972.

Sijie, Dai.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.
Translated from the French by Ina Rilke. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Set during China's Cultural Revolution, this is the story of two boys, sent to a remote village for re-education, who discover a trove of Western classics in Chinese translation, including “Father Go.”

Ambrière, Madeleine. “Hommage à Pierre-Georges Castex.”
L'Année balzacienne
(1966).

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.

Balzac, Honoré de.
Histoire des Treize.
Edited by Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Editions Garnier, 1966.

Collins, Wilkie. My Miscellanies. In The Works of Wilkie Collins, vol. 20. New York: P. F. Collier, 1899.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Lanson, Gustave.
Histoire de la litterature française.
Paris: Hachette, 1894.

Lotte, Fernand. “Le ‘retour des personnages' dans
La Comédie humaine.” L'Année balzacienne,
1961.

Picon, Gaëtan. Balzac. Paris: Seuil, 1965.

Pugh, Anthony R.
Balzac's Recurring Characters.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

Vachon, Stéphane, ed.
Honore de Balzac: Memoire de la critique.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris, 1999.

Vidocq, François.
Memoires de Vidocq.
Paris: Editions Garnier (n.d.), vol. 1.