Thackeray and Balzac: A Few More Thoughts

Recently considering the comparison of Thackeray with Balzac I found it overdrawn on the basis of the novels by Thackeray I had read, particularly his most famous, Vanity Fair. I previously remarked how domestic and genteel the work was by comparison with Balzac's, but I don't think this exhausts the matter, with one aspect of this how things ended up with Becky. In his "delicate" telling (how far are we from a work like Cousin Bette, or The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans!) Becky neither attains the success of a Eugene de Rastignac, nor suffers the catastrophe of a Lucien de Rubempre, but just ends up somewhere in the middle at the end of a rather meandering narrative, with much relegated to a postscript. It is all rather lacking in intensity rather at odds with Emily Brontë's comparison of Thackeray with an Old Testament prophet, and it may well be that this is a matter of a faintness of social vision that tells us that, yes, the actors do behave selfishly and at times disgracefully, but in such a way that rather than it all seeming to be a matter of people responding to the crushing force of circumstances it can seem like the kind of thing a certain kind of mediocre mind delights in calling "human nature," and certainly gives no sense of being bound up with a society's being in a state of great transformation (in Karl Polanyi's view, the great transformation). It may be relevant here that Thackeray has not Balzac's interest in all strata of society (when Thackeray writes of people without money in Chapter 36 it is those who manage to live luxuriously on nothing at all, for a time anyway, that he concerns himself with, rather than the great majority who have nothing and truly suffer deprivation as a result), and that he also has not that author's interest in the "machinery of civilization" as Henry James called it (what would Balzac have done with the financial affairs which brought down John Sedley?), and what may be cause or reflection of all this, Thackeray's tendency toward an attitude of self-satisfied irony toward all he surveys (down to the very last page).

For all that I do not feel as if I wasted my time in reading Vanity Fair. But I do think that given what I personally look for in my fiction these days the book was definitely oversold.