Illustration by Grandville (J.-I.-I. Gerard), 1803–1847), in The Satirical Pictorial, 1830, Heidelberg University Library. Granville was one of the most famous satirical cartoonists of the 19th century and is known as the father of Surrealism. It is believed that one of the inspirations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is his animal faces and big-headed characters. Balzac contributed to The Illustrated Caricature and forged a deep friendship with Granville.
In 1842, the first volume of Balzac's Comedy of Man was published. Balzac constructed a world in which more than four thousand people were placed in a holistic order. Flaubert once commented: "His story is no longer literature, but statistics or ethnography." And the era when Balzac wrote "The Comedy of Man" was the era of "statistical mania" in Europe.
In 1830, the Paris Academy of Sciences, the zoologist Vier and Saint-Hilaire engaged in a series of debates around the basic form of animal composition, which caused a sensation throughout Europe, and the news reached Weimar, and Goethe, who was in his eighties, was very excited, and he considered it to be a more important event than the July Revolution. At the same time, the debate profoundly affected a young man who was just emerging in the Paris literary scene, and twelve years later, Balzac titled his series The Comedy of Man, and first talked about the event in the preface. It is probably difficult for today's readers to understand the inspiration of such biological debates for novelists, nor are they familiar with the achievements of Cuvier, a great man whom Balzac regarded as comparable to Napoleon, and we tend to immerse ourselves in the plot of the novel and pay little attention to the overall structure of the "comedy of man"... This may miss an opportunity to see a ripple in the fashion and intellectual history of the nineteenth century era, and perhaps we need to re-examine the Comedy of Man, the living fossils in the nineteenth-century psychogeological stratum.
"Balzac and the Characters in The Comedy of Man", Granville draws on a folding fan with a quill pen
Balzac's "unified pattern"
Although the victory in this debate at the Paris Academy of Sciences was biased in favor of Cuvier, Balzac, like Goethe, supported Saint-Hilaire. Unlike Goethe, who devoted himself to pioneering and studying "morphology", Balzac had no special study of paleontology, nor was he aware of the uproar that would be caused by the idea of "evolution" that would come with the advent of "species variability", but for the conception of the tome of the Comedy of Man, Balzac valued the meaning of Saint-Hilaire's "unite de composition" theory that animals have "the same structure" and have different forms because they adapt to their environment in order to survive. "The Comedy of Man" is to make "a comparison between the human and animal kingdoms", and human society is also "unified", which was a rather trendy idea at the time. As Meertz points out in The History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, one of the achievements of this century's thinking was the knowledge of "unity." The pursuit of unity and wholeness, the attempt to grasp the world as a whole, and give it order and meaning, is the atmosphere when "The Comedy of Man" was born.
Balzac constructed a world in which more than four thousand people were placed in a holistic order, and Balzac was aimed at the whole picture of the natural world represented in Bufeng's 36-volume Natural History, and the layout of The Comedy of Man, like That of Natural History, "divides human beings into various kinds of people according to the different circumstances in which human beings are active." It was a work that had never been done before, and probably never since, and Balzac had clearly recognized that the novelists before him had at most used their talents to portray one or two typical characters, to describe one aspect of life, and even the great Scott had failed to conceive of a system. The only wholeness comes from Dante's Divine Comedy, which is based on Dante's travels, which is the traditional ancient Greek narrative mode, but the detailed classification of hell, purgatory and heaven is modern, and Dante creates a three-dimensional space with a series of interlocking circles. The Divine Comedy is structural, and each typical character also represents a different situation of the individual in the system, and its intention is to inspire and warn. The title of Balzac's "Comedy on Earth" (La Com (E900) die humaine) is itself a tribute to la Divina Commedia, but balzac's three-story structure is pyramidal, and the pedestal "custom study" is already the whole type of man, which is a structure that is flattened on the earth and consistent with animals or everything in the world.
The three levels of the pyramid of "Human Comedy" are "effect", "cause" and "principle". The six "galleries" at the bottom belong to the "study of customs" and comprehensively reflect the current situation of French society. The six types have their own interests and meanings, and the history of the human mind and the history of society are intertwined to form the general history of society. The second layer is "philosophical research"—after reflecting the "effects", we can trace back to the roots and find their "causes". In the "Study of Customs", most of the Balzac novels that readers are most familiar with are in this range, such as "The Tall Old Man", "Aunt Beych", "Eugenie Grande", etc. write "typical personality", while in "Philosophical Research", it is written "personalized typical". The first and most important of the "Philosophical Studies" novels is "Donkey Skin", in addition to "Longevity Potion" and "Louis Lambert". On top of the "effect" and the "cause", there is also the "analytical study"—the principles that begin to be explored, the representative of which is the "Marriage Physiology".
Magazine articles written by Granville for Balzac, Georges San, and others, were published in 1842 under the title Scenes of Animal Private and Public Life: A Study of Modern Customs. (The same picture below)
Classification and observation of people
Balzac named the largest pedestal of The Comedy of Man "Customs Study" and argued that no one had passed on the "history of customs" in his country to future generations. In fact, In the Treatise on Customs, Voltaire, in addition to having ideas similar to the "common nature" of the various peoples of Vico, also began to write "customs" and "national spirit" according to the classification of races and nationalities. However, it is worth noting that Voltaire, in his companion article "The Age of Louis XIV", "The Age of Louis XIV", still follows the traditional mode of historical writing, and does not apply the common methods of "ethnography" and "naturalism" such as distinguishing regions, examining population, describing forms, and studying customs to the community. Balzac did so, and he set up the classification of the "Study of Customs" section according to two principles: one is the interweaving of geography and virtue: the scene of private life - the scene of provincial life - the scene of Parisian life, corresponding to the era of innocence - passion, calculation, ambition - fetish vices and indulgence; the other is to present a special life: the scene of political life - the scene of military life - the scene of rural life.
Classification is the trend of Balzac's time, and Mrs. Barzton in "Disillusionment" will "type", "personalize" and "synthesize" everything, unconsciously using an exaggeration that violates the laws of language, and showing her education in the provinces far away from Paris. The impact of overseas scientific travel and ethnographic research on the observation of foreign peoples from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century cannot be ignored, and in addition to the influence on specific ideas such as nature, equality, and freedom, it also brought about a classified, comparative, and networked knowledge system. And the designers of "Human Comedy" have also consciously adapted to this trend.
Classification is a diversity under consistency, and by Balzac's time, classification was able to be applied within France precisely because the people within the community at this time had also completed the "unification" like the animals studied by Saint-Hilaire. Felix Darwin, well versed in Balzac's intentions, pointed out in 1835 in his Introduction to the Study of the Customs of the Nineteenth Century: "By the nineteenth century there was nothing to distinguish the status of man. Zweig realized that Balzac's people were from a prototype, through a series of chemical reactions in society, some became the people who met at the top, and some were crushed by the wheels of the times. Unified people can be classified in society, under the framework of classes, write individualized characters, "customs research" focuses on the classification of the real world imitation, "philosophical research" is on the basis of classification, the production of "typical" - class representatives, through the exploration of their behavioral motivations, the class plays an exemplary role.
The purpose of classification is to "observe". In Plato's Statesman' Treatise, the pagans already use the division to examine human affairs, and distinguish between the "epitactic" and the "critical" techniques, which belong to the bystander. This bystander's perspective was also used by Aristotle in his classification of animals, a method that was first revived and gradually popularized in the study of natural history after the Renaissance. By the nineteenth century, "observation" had become the highest enthusiasm of the seeker—the mysterious old man with the donkey skin in Donkey Skin, whose only ambition was to observe, and to observe was to discover the essence of things, and thus to possess them in general. The object of observation has also shifted again from animals to man, from things to morality—"today, in morality, as in the field of precision science, what we in this century demand is facts and observations. Many of the characteristics of Balzac's novels also come from this requirement of "observation", his substitution of description for conversation, his meticulous description of scenes and things, and the use of certain naturalistic descriptions in the depiction of the characters, all of which give his novel a Rembrandt-style sense of extreme reality.
Order in the statistical sense
The premise of statistics is classification. The key to classification is to grasp one aspect of the object under investigation and ignore others, and ultimately divide and rule according to the "natural" or "constructed" categories. But classification is far from the end, "classification is a stopover between individual practical things that can be observed directly and completely abstract mathematical ideas." (A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World) and observation ultimately points to discovering rules and establishing order. The top-level "analysis and research" of "Human Comedy" is difficult to attribute to the novel, and "Marriage Physiology", "Social Life Pathology", "Elegant Life Theory" and so on are more like some kind of social research reports, both in terms of themes and writing. Balzac's time did not have the divisive disciplinary boundaries of today, and the young scholar who provoked the debate between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, alias "Merlot" in Disillusionment, became a member of the youth elite that Lucien had come into contact with in Paris. In this small circle, which included painters, doctors or biologists, poets, philosophers, politicians, etc., it was also the epitome of the idealization of the Parisian literary scene at that time, where various interests and professions intertwined, and various social and moral phenomena were also analyzed and studied here.
In these inconsistencies, we can focus on Balzac's reliance on mathematics. The Physiology of Marriage, or the Bitterness of Conjugal Life from an Eclectic Philosophical Perspective, is full of jokes — "Marriage is a battle to the death, and victory belongs to the most resourceful side." Balzac claimed that the book could give husbands such an intimate knowledge of their wives' mental activity through a detailed table of contents, "just as a logarithmic table would have made them aware of the results of a multiplier." He said the book was "a comedy within a comedy," a "mirror of human life," and it was in this book that Balzac paid a frantic tribute to his fellow rabelais, presumably hoping that his readers would do what he said in the preface to "The Legend of the Giants"—"it must be further explored in words that sound like pleasure at first glance." ”
The "Meditations ON THE SECOND" of the Physiology of Marriage, entitled "Statistics of Couples", begins by stating a strong statistical ethos in society at the time, "For nearly twenty years or so, the government was busy calculating how many hectares of forests, meadows, vineyards, and recreational land there were on French soil. Not only that, but the government also wants to know the number and nature of animals. So Balzac followed suit and began to count the number of "decent women" in France, and then, after using countless classifications that seemed wrong at the time and now, Balzac announced that a proposition had been mathematically solved—"In all of France, the number of women who can bring to elegant husbands the wonderful and elegant pleasures they seek in love is no more than four hundred thousand." ”
In fact, Balzac's use of statistics deserves to be taken seriously. Flaubert, in Bouvard and Pecuche, made a sharp comment about Balzac – "his story is no longer literature, but statistics or ethnography". 1820-1850 was the era of "statistical mania" in Europe, after Condorcet, Laplace and Kettler, the statistical spirit at this time has transcended the limitations of taxation and population and entered the field of political morality, social statistics was the darling of public discussion at that time, statisticians can understand the order of facts, discover social laws, and thus open up "new science" for social life. Alienated people must fall into some structure of modern society as a "quantity", and the protagonist of Donkey Skin, Rafael Valentine, appears as a man of the shape of a mallet and a dead heart, that is, a "man who is truly equal to 0 in society", how he changes from 0 to 1 in social statistics, which is a problem of modern society, Bentham is committed to dealing with this problem, and Balzac also gives his own answer in the novel.
"There has always been a genius who has been the secretary of his time." Fiction is a way for human beings to understand the world, and at the same time to promote the development of the world. With this statistical boom, the spirit of "geometry" upheld since the European Renaissance, that is, the method of proposing axioms and deducing the laws that govern human thought and behavior, was gradually replaced by empirical science with the spirit of "statistics" as the core. The method of fact-observation-control has also gradually moved from the natural sciences to the modern moral sciences. In the 1890s, Durkheim made statistics the basis of his social science research, but he had noticed Comte's fierce opposition to the use of statistics. After 1890, statistics was further disciplined and moved into more specialized fields of mathematics and methodology, and the foundation of later social science research was neither Comte's "positivism" nor "statistics", but closer to Mill's "anti-deductive method", but the spirit of statistics has pervaded modern society. The person and the world as the object of the statistics become the new objects of governance, and man's attitude toward fate is freed from the dichotomy of obedience/rebellion and becomes the "calculation" of probability.
Author: Shu Yun Institute of Politics and Public Administration, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
Editor: Chen Shaoxu
Editor-in-Charge: Junyi Li
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.