Balzac's Lives

May 25, 2020
Brooks (Reading for the Plot), a Yale professor emeritus of comparative literature, aims to uncover fresh insights into Honoré de Balzac in this enjoyable but puzzling work of literary criticism. He picks nine characters out of the estimated 2,472 in Balzac’s interlocking “90 or so” books and stories, collectively known as The Human Comedy, an epic depiction of post-Napoleonic French life. Asking what “these invented lives tell us about Balzac’s inner life,” Brooks explores, among others, Père Goriot’s Rastignac, an ambitious young man from the provinces who arrives in Paris to make his fortune; the morally complex moneylender Gobseck, who figures into both Père Goriot and, from a different angle, Gobseck; and The Duchesse de Langeais’s heroine, a love-spurned noblewoman who runs off to a Spanish nunnery. Unfortunately, Brooks gets so caught up in recounting Balzac’s creations that the writer himself gets lost. Only in the final chapter does Brooks recenter Balzac, discerning “certain obsessive patterns” in his work corresponding to his own early years: “boys are unloved and abandoned by their mothers, confined to boarding schools or student boarding houses, deprived of comfort, food, adequate clothing, and always of love.” Even if Balzac’s motivations remain murky, Brooks’s enthusiastic study makes a good case for diving into the author’s works.

July 1, 2020
Loosely connected biographical sketches of Balzac's central characters sandwiched between two chapters of insightful literary analysis. French novelist Honor� de Balzac (1799-1850) has had an inestimable influence on subsequent Western literature and culture. In his return to the inspiring fount of Balzac's The Human Comedy, Brooks, emeritus professor of comparative literature at Yale, delves into the inner lives of its main characters to illuminate the obsessions and fantasies that drove Balzac's writing. Unfortunately, after a provocative introduction to his approach in this "oblique biography," the author's retelling of the life stories of Balzac's main characters reads more like a set of CliffsNotes for The Human Comedy. In contrast, the final chapter of this book, "Living in Fictional Lives," reprises the originality of the introduction and features the discerning and perceptive scrutiny that the author displayed in his earlier analyses of Balzac, The Melodromatic Imagination (1995) and Realist Vision (2008). In closing Balzac's Lives, Brooks reminds us that Balzac's vast imagined social world derived from his being able to write down all that was in his head. But getting inside the head and illuminating the inner workings of one of the world's preeminent novelists is not the same as summarizing his characters' lives or even their dreams and daydreams. Rather, it may be enough to recognize, as Balzac himself knew, that "invented persons represent...life for us." As Brooks notes, "their lives are exemplary ways of being. Fictional characters give us as-if experiments in knowing the world." Just because Balzac projected himself into his characters and continually reinvented his own life through them, it does not necessarily follow that the characters are facets of Balzac's mind. As Brooks knows well, we read fiction to know the world, not the author. Balzac imagined a world of people with rich, intertwined stories. This retelling of these stories pales in comparison.

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