11 - Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850): ‘Realism’ and authority

Summary

Balzac's central position in the tradition of the European novel is incontrovertible. The author of the ninety-odd, linked novels and stories comprising La Comédie humaine, which sought principally, though not quite exclusively, to offer a panoramic depiction of public and private life in France since the Revolution of 1789, is the undisputed master of the ‘realist’ novel in France and has remained the inevitable point of reference for later French novelists, whether they be imitators or, as in the case of certain nouveaux romanciers of the 1950s and 1960s (though not Michel Butor or Claude Simon), committed detractors. Much as popular images of nineteenth-century France appear often to have been shaped by a reading of his fictions, so the format of the novel he inaugurated has become synonymous with the genre itself. While subject to periodic denunciation on grounds of inauthenticity, the ‘Balzacian’ stereotype has proved remarkably resilient, to the extent of obscuring the fact that the author's own compositions were innovatory exercises in artifice, rather than an unmediated reflection of the social and physical world they were concerned to depict. Yet it is undeniable that the author–narrator in Balzac's fictions is characterised by a belief in his own authority as the unrivalled source of knowledge, control and judgement.