Reflections on Balzac's Standing in the English-Speaking World

All of us have gaps in our knowledge, and the contents of Balzac's Human Comedy were one of mine until relatively late. It has seemed to me that this was partly because we hear so little of him in the English-speaking world--and indeed it is probably telling that it was not a writer in English who directed me to Balzac as worthwhile, but French author Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in which he usefully drew on examples of nineteenth century literature to support his arguments about capital, income and wealth.

In considering that slighting of Balzac in the English-speaking world, Balzac's utterly unflinching vision of the stupidity, vulgarity, brutality of the money-ruled modern world clearly emergent in his own time, would seem to be of great importance. After all, brutal as Balzac's vision of life can be it is neither the cheap, mindless misanthropy of the confirmed nihilist, nor the even cheaper "look at how cool I am" edgelordism that is equally celebrated by Midcult-gobbling middlebrow idiots incapable of telling the difference between one and the other, but the genius and courage to see, acknowledge, and convey what others miss, ignore, cut out of the picture.

At the same time in the "Anglosphere" we seem to see a greater insistence than in other places on having Establishment poets in the pantheon and no others--and Balzac, even if pure Establishment in his personal politics (not merely Royalist, but Bourbon-supporting Legitimist!) was as an artist far too much the truth-teller to ever be considered that (with many of his particular truths, perhaps, especially unwelcome in a country where, as James Kenneth Galbraith remarked not too many years ago, the word "market" cannot be used in public without the speaker "bending a knee and making the sign of the cross").

Indeed, even in Balzac's own native land the makers of a recent film version of Lost Illusions could not stomach their own chosen material. While for the most part praising that adaptation as faithful to the original (which is far more than he was able to credit the adaptation of that other masterpiece by Balzac, Cousin Bette, with) David Walsh remarked in his review that the director, by his own admission, "found some of Balzac's writing 'harsh and punitive,'" and that the final film "'softened' the novel’s attitude toward certain figures," not least Madame de Bargeton, "and added a more hopeful conclusion."

Of this Walsh remarks that "[i]t's possible that something has been gained in the process, and perhaps something has been lost"--with the latter striking me as the more likely, and alas, also testimony to what we have been losing for so many decades in terms of the readiness to face certain truths, in culture as in life.