#36: The Human Comedy (selected stories), by Honoré de Balzac

Balzac was a maximalist. He is supposed to have written 90 novels before expiring at the age of 51. (One wonders how rigorously the term “novel” is defined for purposes of this census—for example, would the longish short stories in this volume be counted as novels?) Most of his work dealt with an interrelated constellation of characters and situations, and is known collectively as The Human Comedy. To write at such a pace is like keeping a huge fire going. You can’t be terribly choosy about fuel and you can’t really think twice about throwing whatever is at hand right onto the pyre. If Balzac were alive today he might be the “show runner” for some hour-long cable series, like Mad Men or Breaking Bad—that’s the person who runs the whole affair, writes and directs some of the scripts and keeps all the balls in the air. Except Balzac would probably try to write and direct the majority of the scripts himself. It would be a great show because the man had a kind of a crazy talent—he could play the different levels of society like a keyboard, from derelicts and pimps on up to princes and generals. He could do intimacy, and he could do sweeping panoramas—one of the stories in this volume, titled Adieu, depicts a scene from Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, in all of its magnificent horror. Never mind le mot juste, Balzac was about les mots, touts.

He was not squeamish about reaching for the lurid and the spectacular, either. One story, Sarrasine, deals with a man who falls in love with a singer who is revealed to be a castrato. (I first encountered Sarrasine long ago in Roland Barthes’ brilliant critical exercise, S/Z. ) Another, the aforementioned Adieu, depicts a woman who loses her mind after enduring great hardship. She regains it on the story’s final page under extraordinary circumstances—and then expires on the spot. In another, a woman enters a convent after her lover rejects her. The convent is on a stony island in the Mediterranean, and in the final scene the lover mounts an assault up the cliffs to the convent to claim her. Alas, she too has just expired from the intensity of it all, but he takes her away anyway, presumably leaving the other nuns to assume that she has been miraculously called up into heaven.

It isn’t all quite so over the top, but it is unfailingly extravagant and entertaining. I have read a couple of Balzac’s novels, and they were not nearly as lurid—perhaps the public expected short stories to be fantastic in those days—Balzac was a contemporary of Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps as well the people selecting tales for this volume went for more sensational tales.

Since beginning this blog I have had some less than satisfactory encounters with 19th century works—I’ve been kind of underwhelmed by George Eliot, Dickens, and George Meredith. Balzac—no problem.