Honore de Balzac: La Comedie Humaine

Baaaaaaaaalzac! It's funny for so many reasons.  One can hear Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn clucking it alongside Chaucher and Rabelais.  And let's not forget its giggle-inducing homophone.  It's a wonder, considering how long the name has been in my consciousness, that it has taken me so long to get around to reading this author.  At last I have, though, and glad I am that I did.  I found him to be not only an engaging and epigrammatic storyteller, but also a complete original, treating the subject of men and women in a way that I don't recall experiencing before.  An enjoyable mix of Hemingway's brutal honesty and George Eliot's vibrant philosophy.  One can see, of course, why Mrs. Shinn would have objected to the content--had she ever read it.

In The Human Comedy, Balzac does not shy away from the darkest sides of human love and sexuality; rather, he embraces them.  Even the most brutal aspects, however, are never treated brutally. The themes are straight out of (or rather into, considering timing) Bret Easton Ellis: revenge, rape, jealousy, lust, sadism, and even bestiality.  But the style and treatment are more Tennyson: the heights and depths of human spirit that drives those themes.  Even arguably the most substream of the stories, the (metaphorically?) bestial "A Passion in the Desert", ends with the stunning explanation for the allure of one's wild nature: "It is God without men."

This tension between the human and the divine only partly sets up Balzac's cosmology, however.  In "The Duchesse de Langeais", Balzac thoughtfully and systematically lays out the real structure of his universe: "What man, in any rank of life, has not felt in his soul an indefinable pleasure in a woman he has chosen, even dreamed of as his own, who embodies the triple moral, physical, and social perfections that allow him to see in her the satisfation of all his wishes?"(327).  Society, this third element of Balzac's trinity, has just as clear a voice in his stories as the other two.  It is only in "Langeais", though, that he fully unfolds his meaning.  Peppered throughout are subtle references through imagery--the triple sconces of the Duchess' cloister, the three masked figures of her vision--and explicit reference to the three divinities, though always wearing different masks.  In fact, the patten is so consistent that one could make a chart were one inclined to that sort of thing . . .

p. 291          p. 303          p.327         p.366
love             men             social         horse
music          principles     moral        bull
religion       things           physical    lion

Perhaps the most stimulating part of this cosmology is its ability to be simultaneously clear and vague.  There is no doubt that Balzac's intention is to set up a trinity; great writers never do this sort of thing on accident.  But there is considerable doubt as to the precise nature of the three elements.  Although the above chart draws a perfectly acceptable corollary between the various mentions of these elements, it is by no means the only possible one. Do things belong to the physical world? Or the social one?  What about men?  At times they operate according to their animal passions, at others according to their social constructs. One would assume that religion is a moral force, but in Balzac (in "A Passion in the Desert", for example) God is nature, and therefore well within the physical realm.  It is tempting, in fact, to construct a narrative wherein Montriveau of "Langeais" and the general of "Desert" are in fact the same person, the latter taking place during the former's trek across the desert (322-323).  One is further tempted to this reading by Balzac's constant acsription of animal qualities to the two lovers in "Langeais".  Montriveau even goes so far as to say to the Duchesse, "perhaps you are like the tigers in the desert, who lick the wounds they have first inflicted" (373).  Rather an irresistible reference to the general and his panther.

At any rate, the line between the members of Balzac's triumvirate is far too blurry to allow any parallel with the Catholic trinity.  It rather feels more like a threefold version of yin and yang, one constantly running into and becoming the other.  For him, the world is not run by a constant tension between light and dark; it is far from so binary.  It is, rather, the constant and blurry interplay between love, lust, and romance that drives all humans to behave in the way they do.