Human Comedy, Volume 13

Author: (French) Balzac/H. Fu Lei
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 1997-08-01
Features: Honoré Balzac (1799–1850) was one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century, a master of creating typical characters, and a universally recognized master of realism. Through 20 years of dedicated work, he created the miracle of the novel in the history of literature with La Comédie Humaine. He united over 90 novels of varying lengths into a complete and all-encompassing social portrait, which provided an "excellent realism of French society, especially of its upper class,"① transforming novels, once seen as mere entertainment, into works of documentary value. Balzac's entire oeuvre demonstrates his original and innovative practice and development of realist literary theory, greatly enriching and perfecting the art of the novel, ultimately elevating it beyond the realm of mere storytelling to become a highly expressive and entirely new form of art.
Balzac lived during the historical turning point in France's transition from a feudal to a capitalist society, personally experiencing major historical phases such as the Napoleonic Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, and the July Monarchy, as well as significant events like the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The complex contradictions and rapid, sustained social upheavals of this period brought unprecedented intellectual ferment, fostering the prosperity and development of 19th-century French literature and exerting a decisive influence on Balzac's creative work. All great writers reflect their time in their works, but Balzac's aspiration was to fully recreate his era. He was not content with depicting a single social aspect or creating a few typical characters but sought to complete "a series of works on 19th-century France," where "each chapter is a novel, and each novel represents an era." He brought thousands of characters to life on the page, forming a complete society and vividly recreating the history of France from the French Revolution to the complete dominance of the bourgeoisie by 1848. In his own words, this was "a customs history that many historians had overlooked."
Balzac boldly broke through traditional artistic boundaries and methods, almost infinitely expanding the subject matter of literature, allowing everything in social life that seemed alien to its poetic essence to intrude into the novel: financial and monetary affairs, debt litigation, bank insolvencies, and store inventory settlements—all were poetically depicted in his works. Characters from all trades and social strata could be found in La Comédie Humaine. Thus, it was not without exaggeration that someone said: "The more complex society is, the more complex the content of La Comédie Humaine; the richer life is, the richer its scenes." Moreover, Balzac attempted to further explore the causes of these social phenomena, analyzing their essence and significance. Early in his life, Balzac possessed a strong desire to grasp everything, understand everything, and explain everything. Before becoming a novelist, he aspired to be a philosopher; when he decided to use fiction to reflect contemporary history, he first thought of studying human society as Buffon studied the animal kingdom. For Balzac, writing was a means of researching and explaining the world. Therefore, beginning in 1830, he published his novels under titles such as "Private Life Scenes," "Philosophical Studies," and "Customs Studies." In 1841, inspired by Dante's La Divina Commedia (literally The Divine Comedy), he decided to title his works collectively La Comédie Humaine, metaphorically likening all the struggles and joys of human existence to individual plays performed on a stage.
In the La Comédie Humaine that began publication in 1842, Balzac divided the works into three parts: "Customs Studies," "Philosophical Studies," and "Analytical Studies." According to his own explanation, "Customs Studies" depicted contemporary French society; "Philosophical Studies" explored the causes of these social phenomena, seeking the hidden meanings within the numerous characters, passions, and events; and "Analytical Studies" analyzed the essence and roots of these causal relationships from the perspective of "the natural laws of humanity." Among these three parts, "Customs Studies" was the most extensive and significant. Based on the categories of subject matter, Balzac further divided it into six scenes: "Private Life," "Provincial Life," "Parisian Life," "Political Life," "Military Life," and "Rural Life." Balzac originally planned to write over 140 novels under the overarching title La Comédie Humaine, but he completed only 96, most of which belonged to "Customs Studies" and were primarily concentrated in the first three scenes. None of these 96 novels were masterpieces in isolation, but as a whole, they formed a magnificent and grand structure. In the history of French and European literature, no second such monumental structure exists. The protagonist of Le Père Goriot, Rapha?l, once said, "I feel that I have a certain idea to express, a certain system to establish, and a certain doctrine to elucidate." This was precisely Balzac's state of mind as he wrote La Comédie Humaine. To achieve the height he aspired to, he voraciously read countless philosophical, social, and scientific works from ancient and modern times, constantly comparing, analyzing, and synthesizing them; he delved into every corner of social life, uncovering people's inner secrets, observing the political and economic structures of contemporary society, the distribution of power and wealth, the mysteries of law, and the efficacy of religion with the meticulousness of a philosopher and scientist. He carefully dissected people's emotions, desires, and the motivations behind their actions, patiently exploring the internal connections of various social phenomena. In this turbulent and restless society, he discovered an unalterable law beyond human control: the rising dominance of the bourgeoisie and the decline and collapse of the aristocracy. Such a historical trend was the essential force governing all social life at the time. All conflicts, struggles, upheavals, and crimes in society, as well as the tragedies and comedies in family and personal life, were closely tied to this specific historical process.
Thanks to his overall understanding of society, Balzac was able to grasp the essential historical content from scattered, individual, and phenomena, thereby successfully depicting the profound changes in social life and the impact on people's destinies and souls during France's transition from a feudal to a capitalist society. As a result, Balzac's works surpassed those of his contemporaries not only in breadth but also in depth, earning him high praise from Marx and Engels. Balzac's superiority over ordinary writers lay in his being both a philosopher and a historian in one. His works transcended personal experiences and emotions, instead embodying a comprehensive analysis of society. In his novel La Défaite de l'Extrême-Orient, Balzac wrote, "The highest art is to incorporate ideas into images," and "a single word should contain countless thoughts, and a single scene should summarize an entire philosophy." Thus, he elevated the novel to the level of historical philosophy, achieving a depth that general literary works could not match. As a customs historian, Balzac was more powerful than true historians because he did not rely on abstract concepts but appealed to images. Everything that historians explained with concepts, he guided readers to feel through numerous typical characters and events. Therefore, the history he depicted with images often left a more profound and compelling impression than the history written by historians, making it more persuasive. Engels once said that from La Comédie Humaine, he learned "even more about economic details (such as the redistribution of movable and immovable property after the revolution) than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians of the time combined."
Shaping images and portraying typical characters in typical environments were Balzac's primary means of summarizing and refining life, as well as his main contribution to realist art. By combining character development with profound historical content, he created the most magnificent gallery of characters in the history of French literature. Balzac allowed his characters to reveal their personalities through action, making plot and setting descriptions serve the portrayal of characters. Even minor characters in his works were vividly individualized and lifelike, though somewhat exaggerated, yet firmly grounded in reality, making them feel utterly convincing and lifelike. Belyayev once marveled at the fact that none of the numerous characters in Balzac's novels were entirely identical. Zola admiringly remarked that in the face of Balzac's vivid and realistic characters, "ancient and Roman figures seemed pale and trembling, while medieval figures lay prostrate like toy lead soldiers." Balzac possessed the keen insight of an artistic master, able to quickly penetrate people's inner lives and capture their essential characteristics through brief encounters. This extraordinary artistic talent was fully developed by his rich life experiences. He was born into a family that had risen from peasantry to the bourgeoisie, with relatives who were mostly middle- and lower-class merchants, making him familiar with this class from a young age. After becoming a writer, he was accepted into the "upper class," giving him more opportunities to study the customs and traditions of the aristocracy. During his time studying law at university, he worked as a trainee in a law firm and notary office, gaining insight into the darker side of Parisian society. More importantly, during the decade before he gained fame, he engaged in various trades, experienced countless struggles and failures, endured the pains of business, bankruptcy, closures, liquidations, and debts, and suffered the harassment of bill collectors and the exploitation of usurers. Among his contemporaries, no one had a more direct and profound experience of the torment of money and the rule of materialism. No one accumulated as much in terms of life experience as he did. He was, as he himself described some of the geniuses he portrayed, "someone who had lived, struggled, and felt in Paris, this purgatory." He was not only the author of La Comédie Humaine but also an actor on this grand stage. Baudelaire called him one of the "most peculiar, interesting, romantic, and poetic" characters in La Comédie Humaine.① What he depicted in La Comédie Humaine was not only his observations but also his experiences and feelings—these personal experiences and feelings formed the most compelling chapters of the work.
Imagination is an indispensable quality for an artist, and it was one of Balzac's strongest gifts. He was not only an exceptionally clear-eyed observer but also possessed an intensely passionate and rich imagination. The ideas he formed through observation and reflection were quickly transformed into a variety of characters. These characters acted according to the logic of life in the writer's mind, seemingly not entirely under his subjective control. Balzac often lived in a world of hallucinations, constantly interacting with the characters he had created, to the point where he was tormented by them day and night. He and his characters fantasized, suffered, and struggled, sometimes confusing the fictional world with real life. He would eagerly report news about these fictional characters to his friends, as if they truly lived among them. It is said that when he was ill, he called the name of the famous physician Bienvenu in La Comédie Humaine, claiming that only this doctor could relieve his suffering. This extraordinary mental state was a manifestation of the artist's overdeveloped ability for figurative thinking. The reason his characters often seemed more vivid, realistic, and convincing than real people was largely due to his extraordinary imagination.
Balzac lived in the bizarre society of 19th-century Paris, exposed to a wide array of ideologies and philosophies, making his own thoughts highly complex. His mind was filled with conflicting doctrines and theories, and in his works, profound insights coexisted with absurdities, sharp analyses with ridiculous conclusions. He believed in the materiality of the world yet was deeply attracted to mysticism; he was essentially an atheist yet fervently promoted religion; his blueprint for social development did not transcend the framework of capitalist free competition, yet he leaned politically toward the legitimist party. But what mattered most was that as a writer, Balzac always considered it his duty to deeply understand and faithfully represent the objective world. His self-deprecating yet proud declaration, "French society is the historian, and I should only be its secretary,"① accurately reflects Balzac's realist creative attitude. Although Balzac lived in an era swept by Romanticism in France, and although he himself was a highly Romantic figure who often lived in a world of fantasy, and although his works contained many Romantic chapters, no matter how romantic or even absurd his expressive techniques, he remained rooted in the soil of real life, focusing on reflecting its essence. Thus, Plekhanov said that Balzac was a "realist in the deepest sense of the word."
Starting from his rich life experiences, Balzac achieved a clear understanding of the essence of contemporary society and the trends of historical development. He respected history and life, even when the logic of life led him to conclusions contrary to his own beliefs and wishes. Therefore, as Engels pointed out, although his great works were "an endless elegy for the inevitable collapse of the upper class,"② when he made the aristocracy act, "his satire was unprecedentedly sharp, his irony unprecedentedly biting, and the characters he often openly admired were precisely his political adversaries."③ Engels summarized this as "one of the greatest victories of realism"④. And precisely because of this, the legitimist Balzac, who claimed to write under the "eternal truths" of "royalty" and "religion," unexpectedly found that his works often substantiated certain scientific conclusions of Marxism.
Balzac is now a figure for Chinese readers, and this is the contents of the book: Customs Studies · Parisian Life Scene [IV] Mme. de Bettes