Balzac’s Lives - Peter Brooks (New York Review of Books, 2020)
A concise but probing look into Honore de Balzac’s fiction, Balzac’s Lives is an interesting and thoughtful book, both a welcome introduction for newcomers and a welcome pleasure for those already acquainted.
Despite a career that lasted roughly 20 years, Balzac wrote dozens of novels, populated with some 2,000 plus characters. But what sets his work apart from his peers - Charles Dickens, George Sand, etc - is the voluminous scope of his works, and the way they entange and intertwine. He called his project The Human Comedy and meant for it to cover the entirety of French life. And, like it would’ve been in life, his characters appear throughout books - sometimes re-emerging in new contexts, other times to show the other side of a story - giving his whole fiction a unique sense of life.
Peter Brooks focuses on nine characters and gives them capsule biographies, running down elements of the novels or stories they’re in and uses them as examples to illuminate various aspects of Balzac’s work: from the way he wrote about women to the role of fashion in his fiction to homoerotic undertones between characters. Brooks writes lucidly, explaining his readings and opinions in a way even newcomers to Balzac will find useful.
But, of course, it’s people who’ve devoted some time already to Balzac who will find this book most rewarding.
A few years back, Brooks edited and introduced NYRB Classics’ edition of Balzac’s shorter fiction - The Human Comedy: Selected Stories- and that’s a book that’ll come in handy for readers here. Obviously these are stories that Brooks likes and feels familiar with, and they’re discussed here, sometimes at length. However, Brooks never comes across like he’s written an extended introduction to his earlier book: he puts the stories in context, explaining how they interconnect and relate to each other before going on to explain deeper meanings.
For example, the story “Gobseck” is an interesting re-telling of Pere Goriot, but told from the money-lender’s point of view - someone who tried to help out, but was foiled by other people’s shady motives and greed. It makes a character who seems cold and callous seem more of a metaphor and icon, explains Brooks:
“He embodies the physicality, the indespibility, the abstractness and concreteness and necessity of money that runs through modern life. He is horrifying and amoral, yet the partisan of sound values. He is finally a kind of figure of destiny in the dawning age of capitalism: this is what it all comes back to.” (Pg 54)
Indeed, metaphors and signs are something Brooks looks for throughout Balzac’s fiction. He takes The Fatal Skin, a novel where the protagonist finds a magic skin that grants his desires but shrinks every time he uses it, and explains how it’s not just an allegory for sex, but that, for Balzac, “sex is a zero-sum game.” He then takes this concept and builds on it, showing how it’s also prevalent in other stories: how the mere desire for sex destroys Henriette de Mortsauf in The Lily of the Valley, a tale of unfulfilled passion and decline. To wit:
“The novel is as much or more about the ravages of repression as it is a tale of virtue rewarded… (Balzac) takes apart Henriette’s claim to virtue, not quite invalidating it… but showing it at the result of psychic compromises that take a devastating toll.” (pg 175)
Brooks especially shines when writing about the melodramatic stories of Balzac’s, recapping them with vigor. His chapter on Rubempre isn’t a substitute for reading Lost Illusions, but since some of the stories here are lesser known (A Harlot High and Low, Colonel Chabert), his recaps are useful to lay readers, and serve as welcome refreshers for those who’ve read them.
Early in the book, Brooks warns that he’s writing not a biography, but an “anti-biography,” that is he’s seeking deeper meanings in the fiction, and isn’t interested in retelling the life of the author. He does provide a bit of a thumbnail sketch late in the book, but this isn’t something for a reader looking for a by-the-numbers retelling of Balzac’s life. Instead, it’s a deep dive into fiction, one where Brooks is as likely to quote literary theorists like Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin as he is Freud or Henry James, depending on the point he’s trying to raise.
This insistence on theory makes Brooks' book somewhat argumentative instead of definitive: his readings ultimately come across as personal interpretations of stories he loves and has spent a lot of time thinking about. But as McKenzie Wark recently pointed out on twitter - I can’t find the exact tweet - critiques that invite discussion are more important than ones that offer a final judgement. And that’s what makes Balzac’s Lives so interesting: it opens the door to rediscover these 19th-century stories and read them afresh.
All in all, a wonderful piece of literary criticism, and one I enjoyed thoroughly. Recommended.