A writer who runs through the Western literary scene
Honoré de Balzac died young at the age of fifty-one. Although he did not have a high life, he spent his life witnessing the drastic changes of the times.
Born at the end of the French Revolution, Balzac lived through the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbon Restoration, and the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
His rich life experience has given him the confidence to call himself a "scribe of society", and at the same time, his life is always immersed in a busy atmosphere.
Balzac
As Balzac's masterpiece, "The Comedy of Man" aims to show the glory and dirtiness of the entire French society he captured through words.
Balzac died in 1850, when he had completed more than ninety works in the Comedy of Man novel series, but the day of completion was still far away.
No one can blame Balzac for half-baking. The high production of more than ninety works in about twenty years, thanks to his eighteen hours a day of hard work, all relies on coffee to refresh.
Even manuscripts that have already been submitted to publishers are often retracted (or even greatly expanded), and he even drastically revises high-quality proofs, which is a huge expense for publishers.
Balzac manuscript, image source network
Balzac's obsessive-compulsive personality also spread to his writing style, and his work was filled with lengthy descriptions, digressions, and long explanations.
However, the grand narrative scale makes up for the lack of a refined brushwork, and Oscar Wilde has publicly stated: "We all know that the 19th century was mainly born in Balzac's pen." ”
Although Charles Dickens is also regarded by some readers as the great writer who "created the 19th century with words", Balzac was clearly more ambitious in comparison.
In The Comedy of Man, he created more than two thousand characters of all kinds, who came from all corners of society and were a wonderful epitome of 19th-century French society. His feast of stories includes confrontations between the rich, the privileged and the thief, and the conflict between the moneylender and the prostitute.
Eugenie Grande
By Balzac
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China Pictorial Publishing House
Publication date: 2015.10.1
These figures are flesh-and-blood, complex, and morally ambiguous, and it is difficult for readers to define them in terms of "black and white" norms.
Balzac's attentive observation of social diversity and the meticulous elaboration of his creations made him one of the pioneers of European realist literature.
The political theorist Friedrich Engels may disagree with Balzac's political views (the latter being ultra-conservative and royalist), but he nevertheless commented:
"I learned more from Balzac than from all other historians, economists, and statisticians."
A gradually formed yearbook of wisdom
Although Balzac firmly believed that the French Revolution had caused social unrest and moral disorder, it is undeniable that his family did benefit from this revolution.
Born into a peasant family in southwestern France, Balzac's father was a regular clerk in a local law firm, and during the French Empire and the restored Bourbon dynasty, he was mainly responsible for supplying the army with supplies.
Balzac, who had studied law, slowly developed into a writer on the basis of an allowance he received from his father, and began to start his literary career under various pseudonyms, with a large number of shoddy and profit-making works.
Balzac in the biographical film A Life of Passion for Balzac (1999).
It took him almost a decade to publish his first novel, The Snows Hotel, but his spending over the past decade kept him in debt for the rest of his life.
Set in Brittany during the French royalist counter-revolution, The Snows Hotel is also seen as the starting point for the Comedy of Man series.
Balzac wrote the preface to The Comedy of Man in 1842, which gave rise to the idea of a narrative framework for the entire series of stories.
In his preface, he talks about the moment when he was struck by inspiration, and the story was born in his mind, which felt like being in a fantasy dream.
This dramatic description is not true, because the narrative structure of The Comedy of Man is not something balzac acquired in a brief moment—the story is slowly accumulated and brewed over many years.
Poster for the film Betty's Cousin (1998), based on Balzac's novel
According to Balzac's sister, the turning point in The Comedy of Man was around 1835, a period when the author decided to have many of the characters recur in the book.
Recurring character images
In his early vision, he planned to create three or four thousand different characters in the story to build a rich and complete social landscape.
In fact, the number of characters in "The Comedy of Man" does not reach this scale, but this does not hide Balzac's brilliant light in the world of fiction.
Even more admirable, in order to make the novel coherent, Balzac repeatedly revised the names of the characters in his early works.
There is hardly a single narrative thread in the comedy of man's series, and the entire work has been called a "coherent and fluid chronicle" by the New York Review of Books.
"The Tall Old Man"
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Classic titles in the Comedy of Man series include Eugenie Grande, The Tall Old Man, Disillusionment, and Aunt Becky.
Like many of Balzac's other works, the novel The Tall Old Man was first published in a serial form and later compiled into a book, and it was also Balzac's first work "using coherent storytelling figures."
The elder Eugène de Rastigné in the philosophical novel Donkey Skin appears in this story as a "naïve law student", and Balzac also documents Rastigné's career progress in his subsequent novels.
Poster for the film of the same name based on Balzac's novel Donkey Skin (2010).
Recurring characters in several different stories include career criminal Vulture, loan shark Gobseck, and lawyer Danville.
Distinct creative themes
Balzac's most distinctive theme is the story of successful individuals in society and the role of money in shaping social relations.
He sees the human will as some kind of source of energy that can be squandered (or stored) in man's inner world, and many of his characters exhaust their own vitality in self-destructive behavior.
Overall, "The Comedy of Man" is a huge production that brings together love and betrayal, crime and madness.
Poster for the film Eugenie Grande (1994).
Balzac's social taxonomy in the literary world is similar to the taxonomy used by zoologists in the 19th century.
His novels can be broadly divided into three categories: "analytical research", that is, the study of the laws and norms that drive social development; "philosophical research", which focuses on the study of the deep logic and origin of human behavior; and "customs research", which aims to explore the intrinsic drive of various human behaviors.
The last category can be divided into six subcategories "scenes": private life, the conditions of the French provinces, the Parisian years, political careers, military careers, and rural life.
Poster for the TV series Balzac(1975) based on Balzac's work
In 1842, Balzac explained this structure in his first preface, the first time he formulated "human comedy" as the title of a series of novels.
It is widely believed that there is a great deal of insidious depictions of the Divine Comedy in The Comedy of Man, except that Dante focuses more on the "afterlife" and Balzac more on the "present life" (present).
His story sends a hidden signal that good people don't always get well-being (or success).
This illustration depicts a scene from the novel Eugenie Grande, which is considered by readers to be the best novel in The Comedy of Man
In 1845, Balzac began to write a catalogue of the collection of stories, but was never completed.
His health had been bad, and there was no doubt that chronic overload writing further damaged his health. Of course, his heavy debts also provide the impetus for continuous writing in disguise.
In 1850, Balzac married his long-time lover Evelyn Hanska. A month later, he died suddenly, and the debts he owed during his lifetime were eventually repaid by Evelyn.
Had it not been for financial constraints and the need to make a living by writing, would Balzac have been able to work hard?
In fact, he probably never considered bringing Comedy to an end.
This article is excerpted from Unfinished Masterpieces: 60 Regrets in Literary History
Unfinished Masterpieces: 60 Regrets in Literary History
Bernard Richards, editor-in-chief
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Publication date: 2021.5