FOR GRETEL
When the peasant comes to the city, everything says “closed” to him. The massive doors, the windows with their blinds, the innumerable people to whom he may not speak under penalty of seeming ridiculous, even the shops with their unaffordable wares—all turn him away. A plain-spoken novella by Maupassant dwells on the humiliation of a lower-ranking officer in an unfamiliar environment who mistakes a respectable dwelling for a bordello. In the eyes of the newcomer, everything that is locked up resembles a brothel, mysterious and enticingly forbidden. Cooley distinguished sociologically between primary and secondary groups depending on the presence or absence of face-to-face relationships: the person who is thrown abruptly from the one to the other experiences this distinction in the flesh, with pain. In literature Balzac was probably the first such paysan de Paris, or Parisian peasant, and he maintained that demeanor even after he knew very well what was what. But at the same time, the productive forces of the bourgeoisie on the threshold of advanced capitalism were incarnated in him. His response to being locked out is that of the inventive genius: All right, I’ll figure out for myself what goes on behind those closed doors, and the world will hear something then! The resentment of the provincial, who in his outraged ignorance is obsessed with the things he thinks go on even in the very best circles, where one would least expect it, becomes the driving force of exact imagination. Sometimes the dime-novel romanticism with which Balzac was commercially involved in his early days comes out; sometimes the childish mockery of sentences like this: “If one goes by the house at 37 Rue Miromesnil on a Friday around 11 in the morning and the green shutters on the second floor aren’t open yet, you can be sure there was an orgy there the night before.” Sometimes, however, the compensatory fantasies of the naive man are more accurate about the world than the realist Balzac is credited with being. The alienation that occasioned his writing—it is as though every sentence of his industrious pen were constructing a bridge into the unknown—is itself the secret life he was trying to discover by guesswork. The same thing that separates people from one another and keeps the writer isolated from them is what keeps the movement of society going, the movement whose rhythm Balzac’s novels are imitating. The fantastic and improbable fate of Lucien de Rubempré is set in motion by the technical changes, expertly described, in printing methods and paper that made the mass production of literature possible; one of the reasons Cousin Pons, the collector, is out of fashion is that as a composer he did not keep pace with so to speak industrial advances in orchestration. Such insights on Balzac’s part are worth their weight in research because they both derive from and attempt to reconstruct an understanding of the subject matter that research in its blindness tries to eliminate. Through his intellectual intuition Balzac realized that in advanced capitalism people are character masks, to use an expression Marx coined later. Reification is more terrifyingly radiant in the freshness of dawn and the glowing colors of new life than the critique of political economy at high noon. An employee of a funeral parlor in 1845 who resembles the spirit of death—in the hundred years since then no satire of Americanism, not even Evelyn Waugh’s, has surpassed that. Désillusion, or disillusionment, which provided the name of one of his greatest novels, Les illusions perdues, or Lost Illusions, as well as a literary genre, is the experience that human beings and their social functions do not coincide. With the thunderbolt of citation Balzac brought society as totality, something classical political economy and Hegelian philosophy had formulated in theoretical terms, down from the airy realm of ideas to the sphere of sensory evidence. That totality is by no means only an extensive totality, by no means only the physiology of life as a whole in its various branches, which was to comprise Balzac’s program for the Comédie humaine. As a functional complex, it becomes intensive as well. A dynamic rages in it: society reproduces itself only as a whole, in and through the system, and to do so it needs every last man as a customer. That perspective may seem foreshortened, too immediate, as is always the case when art presumes to conjure up in perceptible form a society that has become abstract. But the individual foul deeds through which people visibly attempt to steal from one another the surplus value that has already been appropriated invisibly make the horror graphic, something that would otherwise be possible only through conceptual mediations. In her maneuvers to acquire wealth through inheritance, the Présidente uses the shady lawyer and the concierge; equality is realized in the sense that the false totality harnesses all social classes to its guilt. There is truth even in the pulp literature at which literary taste and worldly wisdom turn up their noses: it is only on the margins that the things that go on in the pits of society, the underworld of its sphere of production, become visible—the things from which totalitarian atrocities arose in a later phase. Balzac’s time favored this kind of eccentric truth, primitive accumulation,1 an antiquated conquistadorian barbarism in the midst of the French industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century. In all probability the appropriation of heteronomous labor almost never occurred in complete accordance with the laws of the marketplace. The injustice inherent in those laws is multiplied by the injustice of every individual action, a surplus profit of guilt. Those versed in such things can find Balzac guilty of the bad psychology of the movies. There is enough good psychology in him. That concierge is not simply a monster; before she was stricken with their social disease, greed, she was what her fellow citizens call a nice person. Equally, Balzac knows how connoisseurship—the matter at hand—outstrips mere profit motive, how the forces of production outstrip the relations of production. At the same time, he also knows how bourgeois individuation, the proliferation of idiosyncratic traits, destroys individuals, the confirmed gluttons or misers. He senses that the maternal quality is the secret of friendship, and he knows instinctively how the slightest weakness suffices for the downfall of the noble person, as when Pons becomes entangled in the machinery of destruction through his gourmandise. Madame de Nucingen III using first names in front of an aristocrat to create the illusion that she is on intimate terms with her—that could come from Proust. But when Balzac really does give his characters puppet-like features, their legitimacy extends beyond the sphere of psychology. In the tableau économique of society, human beings behave like the marionettes in the mechanical model in the Castle of Hellbrunn. There is a good reason why many of Daumier’s caricatures resemble Polichinello. In the same spirit, Balzac’s stories demonstrate the social impossibility of good behavior and integrity. They sneer that anyone who is not a criminal will perish; often they shout it out. And so the light of humanness [das Humane] falls on the outcasts, on the whore who is capable of great passion and self-sacrifice and on the galley-slave and murderer whose actions are those of a disinterested altruist. Because Balzac’s physiological suspicions tell him that the good citizens are criminals; because everyone who strolls down the street unknown and impenetrable looks as though he has committed the original sin of all of society: this is why for Balzac it is the criminals and outcasts who are the human beings. This may be why he discovered homosexuality for literature; his novella Sarrasine is devoted to it and his conception of Vautrin is based on it. In view of the irresistible ascendancy of the exchange principle, he may have dreamed of something like love in its undistorted form occurring in a despised and inherently hopeless love: it is the false cleric, the bandit chief who cancels the exchange of equivalents, whom he believes capable of it.
Balzac had a special fondness for the Germans, for Jean Paul and Beethoven, something for which he was repaid by Richard Wagner and Schönberg. Despite his penchant for the visual, there is something musical about his work as a whole. Much of the symphonic music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reminiscent of the novel in its penchant for dramatic situations, in its passionate rise and fall, in its unruly abundance of life; conversely, Balzac’s novels, archetypes of the genre, are musical in their flowing quality, in the way they spawn figures and then swallow them back up again, in setting up and transforming characters who move along as in a dream sequence. If novel-like music seems to repeat the movements of the material world in the listener’s head, in the darkness, with the lights dimmed to show the contours of the material world, then the heads of Balzac’s readers spin as they turn the pages waiting eagerly for the continuation, as though all the descriptions and actions were a pretense for the wild and variegated sound that floods through his work. They provide the reader with the same thing the flute, clarinet, horn, and drum lines promised the child before he really knew how to read a score. If music is the world dematerialized and reproduced in interior space, then the interior space of Balzac’s novels, projected outward as a world, is the retranslation of music into the kaleidoscope. From his description of Schmucke, the musician, we can also infer what his Germanophilia was directed toward. It is the same in essence as the impact of German Romanticism in France, from the Freischütz and Schumann to the antirationalism of the twentieth century. But it is not only that the German obscurity in the labyrinth of Balzac’s pages, as contrasted with the Latin terrorism of clarté, embodies an amount of utopia equal to the amount of enlightenment the Germans, conversely, repressed. In addition, Balzac may have addressed the constellation of the chthonic and Humanität [humanness or humaneness]. Humanität is mindfulness of nature in human beings. Balzac tracks it to the point at which immediacy creeps away before the functional complex of society and comes to grief. But the poetic force that gives rise to the grim scherzo of modernity in him is equally archaic. The Everyman, the transcendental subject, as it were, who sets himself up behind Balzac’s prose as the creator of a society that has been magically transformed into a second nature, is a kindred spirit of the mythical “I” of classical German philosophy and the music corresponding to it, which derives everything that exists from itself. In this kind of subjectivity the human is given voice through the force of original identification with the Other which it knows to be itself, but this subjectivity is also always inhuman at the same time in that it is an act of violence that veers around and makes the Other subject to its will. Balzac attacks the world all the more the farther he moves away from it by creating it. There is an anecdote according to which Balzac turned his back on the political events of the March Revolution [of 1848] and went to his desk, saying, “Let’s get back to reality”; this anecdote describes him faithfully, even if it is apocryphal. His demeanor is that of the late Beethoven, dressed in a nightshirt, muttering furiously and painting giant-sized notes from his C-sharp minor quartet on the wall of his room. As in paranoia, love and rage are intertwined. In just the same way, elemental spirits play their pranks and help the poor.
The fact that the paranoid, like the philosophers, has a system did not escape Freud. Everything is connected, relationships govern everything, everything serves a secret and sinister end. But the things that are developing in the real society of which Balzac occasionally speaks, like the countesses who say “bien, bien” because they speak fluent French, are no different. A system of universal dependencies and communications is in the process of formation. The consumers serve the process of production. If they cannot pay for the goods, capital develops a crisis that wipes them out. The credit system links the fate of the one to the fate of the other, whether they know it or not. The totality threatens those who compose it with destruction by reproducing them, and while its surface is not yet completely tightly woven, it provides a glimpse of the potential for destruction. Familiar characters—the Gobsecks, Rastignacs, and Vautrins—reappear as passersby at the most unexpected places in the Comédie humaine, in constellations that only delusions of reference could think up and that only the Dictionnaire biographique des personnages fictifs de la Comédie humaine could make order of. But the idées fixes that imagine the same forces at work everywhere cause short circuits in which the overall process is momentarily illuminated. This is why the subject’s detachment from reality is transformed by obsession with it into an eccentric closeness.
Balzac, who sympathized with the Restoration, sees symptoms in early industrialism that are ordinarily ascribed to the stage of degeneration. In the Illusions perdues he anticipates Karl Kraus’ attack on the press; Kraus cites him. It is precisely the restorationist journalists whose situation is the worst in Balzac; the contradiction between their ideology and their a priori democratic medium forces them to cynicism. Such objective states of affairs do not sit well with Balzac’s turn of mind. The conflicts within the rising new mode of production are as intense as his imagination and are perpetuated in the structure of his works. The romantic and the realistic aspects form a historical composite in Balzac’s work. The financiers, pioneers of an industry not yet established, are adventurers from the genre of the epic, whose categories Balzac, born in the eighteenth century, salvages and imports into the nineteenth. Against the background of a pre-bourgeois order that is shaken but continues to survive, unleashed rationality takes on an irrationality similar to the universal nexus of guilt that that rationality remains; its first raids were the prelude to the irrationality of its late phase. The norms of homo economicus have not yet become standardized modes of human conduct; the hunt for profit still resembles the bloodlust of undomesticated hunters, and the totality still resembles the remorseless blind enchainment of fate. In Balzac, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” becomes the black hand on the graveyard wall. What Hegel’s speculation in his Philosophy of Right shrank from in fear, as did the positivist Comte—the explosive tendencies of a system that suppresses naturally evolved structures—bursts into flame as chaotic nature in Balzac’s enraptured contemplation. His epic is intoxicated with what the theoreticians found so intolerable that Hegel called up the state as arbiter and Comte called up sociology. Balzac needs neither, because in him the work of art itself serves as the authority that embraces the centrifugal forces of society in a sweeping gesture.
The Balzacian novel feeds on the tension between the passions of human beings and a state of the world that is already moving in the direction of not tolerating passion, which it considers a disruption of its activities. Under the prohibitions and frustrations to which, then as always, they were subjected, the passions become intensified to the point of frenzy. Unfulfilled, they become simultaneously deformed and insatiable, emotion-laden idiosyncrasies. But the instincts have not yet completely disappeared into social schemata. They fasten onto goods which are still largely unattainable, especially those subject to a natural monopoly; or, as avarice, lust for money, or promotion mania, they enter the service of an expansive capitalism which needs the additional energy of individuals until it is completely in place. The motto “enrichissez-vous” [get rich] sets Balzac’s characters dancing. Down into the twentieth century, the early industrial world turns the double meaning of the word “bazaar”—the bazaar of the Arabian Nights and the department store—against those who are not yet adapted to it (by chance the name of one of Saint-Simon’s most important disciples was pronounced the same way). People bustle around in front of it like agents and people hopelessly lost at the same time, agents of surplus value and Don Quixotes of a wealth from the expansion of which they hope to get something, like landed aristocrats without much work, soldiers of fortune storming the windmills of Fortuna, who knocks them down with the law of the average rate of profit. So colorful is the emergence of gray and so enchanting the disenchantment of the world; there is so much to be told about the process whose prose makes sure that soon there will be nothing left to tell. Like the lyric poets of that era, the epic poets plucked the flowers of evil in the place marked “Swamp of Capitalism” in the socialist People’s Atlas. However much the romantic aspect of Balzac’s work may derive, subjectively, from historical backwardness, from the precapitalist perspective of the person who looks longingly to the past as the victim of liberal society and yet would like to share in its rewards, it is still derived from social reality and from a realistic sense of form directed toward that reality. Balzac needs only to describe it with his soberly grim “This is how awful the world is,” and the catastrophic protuberances turn into a halo.
What German reader of Balzac, conscientiously turning to the French original, would not despair over the countless unfamiliar terms for specific differences between objects, terms he has to look up in the dictionary if his reading is not to flounder; until finally, resigned and humiliated, he entrusts himself to the translations. The craftsmanlike precision of the French language itself, the respect for nuances of material and workmanship in which so much of culture is sedimented, may be responsible for this. But Balzac takes it to extremes. At times he presupposes familiarity with whole technical terminologies in specialized fields. This is part of a larger context in his work. The reader is often drawn into that context with the first lines of a narrative. Precision simulates extreme closeness to the matter at hand and hence physical presence. Balzac uses the suggestion of concreteness. But it is so excessive that one cannot yield to it naively, cannot credit it to the ominous richness of epic vision. Rather, that concreteness is what its ardor suggests: an evocation. If the world is to be seen through, it can no longer be looked at. One can cite no better witness to the fact that literary realism became obsolete because, as a representation of reality, it did not capture reality, than that same Brecht who later slipped into the straitjacket of realism as though it were a costume for a masked ball. He saw that the ens realissimum consists of processes, not immediate facts, and they cannot be depicted:
The situation becomes so complicated because a simple “reproduction of reality” says less than ever about reality. A photograph of the Krupp factories or the AEG provides virtually no information about these establishments. True reality has slipped over into functional reality. The reification of human relations, that is, the factory, no longer delivers human relations to us.2
In Balzac’s time that could not yet be understood. He reconstructs the world from the suspicions of the outsider. In doing so he needs, in reaction, permanent assurance that it is so and not otherwise. Concreteness is the substitute for the real experience that is not only almost inevitably lacking in the great writers of the industrial age but also incommensurable with the age’s own concept. Balzac’s oddness sheds light on something that characterizes nineteenth century prose as a whole after Goethe. The realism with which even those who are idealistically inclined are preoccupied is not primary but derived: realism on the basis of a loss of reality. The epic that is no longer in command of the material concreteness it attempts to protect has to exaggerate it in its demeanor, has to describe the world with exaggerated precision precisely because it has become alien, can no longer be kept in physical proximity. A pathogenic core—euphemism—is already inherent in that more modern form of concreteness, as in Stifter’s technique or even in the linguistic formulas of the late Goethe, and later, in works like Zola’s Ventre de Paris, a very modern conclusion is drawn from it, the dissolution of time and action. Analogously, the drawings of schizophrenics do not create a fantasy world out of an isolated consciousness. Rather, they scribble the details of lost objects with an extreme precision that expresses lostness itself. It is that, and no direct resemblance to objects, that is the truth of literary concretism. In the language of analytic pyschiatry this would be called a restitution phenomenon. This is why it is so silly to equate realistic stylistic principles in literature with—as the Eastern bloc cliché would have it—a healthy, non-decadent relationship to reality. That relationship would be normal, in the emphatic sense of the word, where the literary subject exorcised the social horror by breaking through the rigidified and thereby alienated facade of empirical reality.
Marx cites Balzac in a remark on the capitalist function of money in contrast to the archaic hoard:
Exclusion of money from circulation would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery. Thus for instance Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents the old usurer Gobseck as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities.3
But the path that leads Balzac to that “profound conception of real conditions” to which Marx attests elsewhere4 runs in a direction opposite to economic analysis. Like a child, he is fascinated by the terrifying image and the foolishness of the usurer. The emblem of the usurer is the treasure with which he surrounds himself in infantile fashion. His foolishness is something that has developed historically, a precapitalist vestige in the heart of the freebooter of civilization. It is this kind of blind physiognomy, not theoretically oriented writing, that satisfies dialectical theory and grasps the central tendency. No legitimate relationship between art and knowledge is established when art borrows theses from science, illustrates them, and anticipates science, only to have science catch up with it later. Art becomes knowledge when it devotes itself unreservedly to work on its material. With Balzac, however, this work consisted in the efforts of an imagination that never rested until its products were so like itself that they also resembled the society from which they were in retreat.
Balzac is still, or already, free from the bourgeois illusion that the individual exists essentially for himself while the society, or the environment, influences him from the outside. His novels depict not only the superior power of social and especially economic interests over private psychology but also the social genesis of the characters in themselves. They are motivated first of all by their interests, interests in career and income, the hybrid product of feudal-hierarchical status and bourgeois-capitalist manipulation. In the process, the divergence between human destiny and social role becomes something unknowable. Those who by virtue of their interests function as the wheels of commerce retain certain characteristics which they lose in a later phase of development. Interests and interest-psychology do not go together. In Balzac the same people who, as captains of industry, ruin their competitors, using both economic and criminal means, ruin themselves when sex, for which their interests leave no time, overpowers them. Nucingen, elderly, brutal, and without conscience, clumsily succumbs to the very young Esther, who cheats him out of herself to the best of her ability, as a whore would, because she is the angel who vainly throws herself under the wheel of fortune in order to save her beloved.
The Duke of Rhétoré tries to win Lucien Chardon, who has become an overnight success as a journalist, over to the Royalist cause with the words: “Vous vous êtes montré un homme d’esprit, soyez maintenant un homme de hon sens” [“You’ve shown that you are a witty man, now be a man with good sense”]. With those words he has codified the bourgeois view of reason [Vernunft] and understanding [Verstand]. That view is the opposite of Kant’s teaching. Spirit, “esprit”—the “ideas”—do not guide, “regulate” the understanding; they impede it. Balzac diagnoses the health that is deathly afraid that someone might be too clever. The person who is governed by spirit instead of governing it as a means to an end, is concerned with the matter at hand as an end in itself. He is repeatedly defeated by those who are indifferent to the matter at hand, as in governing bodies; he merely delays them. They can devote their undiminished energies to tactics for accomplishing something. Contrasted with their successes, spirit becomes stupidity. Reflection that does not accommodate to given situations, demands, and necessities—lack of naiveté, that is—is too naive, and fails. Not only are bon sens and esprit not the same thing, they are antinomic. The person with esprit will scarcely grasp the desiderata of bon sens: “I have never understood the language of men.” But bon sens is always on the qui vive to ward off esprit as a temptation to idle speculation. What the psychologist Theodor Lipps called the “narrowness of consciousness,” which does not permit anyone full self-actualization in excess of the limited supply of his libidinal energies, guarantees that a person has only the one or the other, esprit or bon sens. Those who play the game without being adversely affected despise the anima candida, the pure spirit, as idiotic. The incapacity of human beings to rise above the sphere of their immediate interests, which is filled with the objects of pragmatic action, is not due primarily to ill will. The gaze that rises above what is closest at hand leaves it behind as something bad and hindered in its functioning. Nowadays there are many students who fear that theory will teach them too much about society: How are they then to practice the professions for which their studies are preparing them? They would get what they like to call social schizophrenia. As though consciousness had the task of making things easier for itself by eliminating contradictions whose locus is not in consciousness at all but rather in reality. As the reproduction of life, reality places legitimate demands on individuals and at the same time places itself and humankind in mortal danger through that same reproduction. Too much reason is harmful to an understanding concerned with self-preservation. Conversely, every concession to the operations of the dominant practices not only contaminates the spirit, which will not be swayed from its course, but halts its movement and stultifies it.
In a letter written to Margaret Harkness when he was an old man, a letter that, ominously, has been canonized in Marxist aesthetics, Engels glorified Balzacian realism.5 He may have taken it for more realistic than Balzac’s oeuvre reads seventy years later. This might relieve the doctrine of socialist realism of some of the authority it bases on Engels’ vote. More to the point, however, is the extent to which Engels himself deviates from what later became the official theory. When Engels says he prefers Balzac to “all the Zolas passés, présents, et à venir” [past, present, and future], he can only have been referring to those moments in which the older writer is less realistic than his scientifically minded successor; there are good reasons why Zola replaced the concept of realism with that of naturalism. Just as in the history of philosophy no positivist is positivistic enough for his successor but instead is labeled a metaphysician, so it is in the history of literary realism. But at the moment in which naturalism committed itself to a quasi-official recording of the facts, the dialectician moved to the side of what the naturalists now proscribed as metaphysics. The dialectician opposes automated enlightenment. Historical truth itself is nothing but the self-renewing metaphysics that emerges in the permanent disintegration of realism. In socialist realism as in the culture industry, it is precisely the faithfulness to the facade on the part of a method purged of Balzacian deformations that harmonizes with externally imposed intentions. Balzac’s storytelling does not allow itself to be diverted for a moment by such intentions: planning is confirmed by de-structured data, but in literature, what is planned is a political point of view. What Engels wrote is directed against this, and thereby implicitly against all the art tolerated in the Eastern bloc since Stalin. For Engels, Balzac’s greatness is demonstrated precisely in the depictions that run counter to his own class sympathies and political prejudices and repudiate his legitimist inclinations. The writer, like the Weltgeist, is one with the force of history because the force of original production that governs his prose is collective. Engels calls that the greatest triumph of Balzac’s realism, the “revolutionary dialectic in his poetical justice.”6 This triumph, however, was linked to the fact that Balzac’s prose does not yield to realities but rather stares them in the face until they become transparent down to their horrors. Lukács timidly pointed that out.7 Even less is Engels concerned, as Lukács immediately affirms, with “rescuing the immortal greatness of his”—Balzac’s—“realism.” The very concept of realism is not a constant norm: Balzac undermined that norm for the sake of truth. Invariants are incompatible with the spirit of the dialectic even if Hegelian classicism vindicates them.
In the form of a medium of circulation, money, the capitalist process touches and patterns the characters whose lives the novel form tries to capture. In the empty space between events on the stock exchange and the events crucial to the economy—from which the stock exchange is temporarily separate, either because it discounts the movements of the economy or because it becomes autonomous and follows its own dynamics—individual life crystallizes in the midst of total interchangeability, and at the same time, through its individuation, it handles the affairs of the overall functional complex: this is the climate surrounding the Baron Nucingen, a Rothschild figure. But the sphere of circulation, about which there were fantastic stories to be told—stocks rose and fell in those days like the floods of sound at the opera—also distorts the economics that Balzac the writer was as passionately involved with as Balzac the young homme d’affaires. The inadequacy of his realism ultimately derives from the fact that, for the sake of the picture he was painting, he did not penetrate the veil of money and in fact could scarcely have penetrated it even then. When paranoid fantasy runs rampant it is akin to fantasies in which one imagines that the machinations and conspiracies of financial magnates are the key to the social destiny that governs human beings. Balzac is one in a long series of writers extending from de Sade, in whose Justine the Balzacian fanfare “insolent comme tous les financiers”8 [“insolent, like all financiers”] appears, to Zola and the early Heinrich Mann. What is genuinely reactionary in Balzac is not his conservative turn of mind but his complicity with the legend of rapacious capital. In sympathy with the victims of capitalism, he inflates the executors of the judgment, the finance people who present the bill, to monsters. Insofar as the industrialists appear at all, they are categorized as productive labor in Saint-Simonian fashion. Indignation over the auri sacra fames is part of the eternal stock in trade of bourgeois apologetics. It is a diversion: the barbaric hunters are merely divying up the booty. Nor can this illusion be explained on the basis of false consciousness on Balzac’s part. The relevance of finance capital, which advanced the money for the expansion of the system, was incomparably greater in early industrialism than in later industrialism, and the practices of speculators and usurers varied analogously. The novelist can get a better hold there than in the sphere of production proper. It is precisely because in the bourgeois world one can no longer tell stories about the things that are decisive that storytelling is dying out. The deficiencies inherent in Balzacian realism already represent, in latent form, the verdict on the realistic novel.
What Hegel took for the Weltgeist, the great movement of history, was the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie. Balzac depicts it as a trail of destruction. In his novels the marks of trauma left on the traditionalist order by the economic rise of the bourgeoisie are the prophetic signs of the grim future that avenges on the new class the injustice that class inherited from the old class it toppled and then carried farther. This has kept the Comédie humaine young even as it becomes outdated. Its élan, however, its dynamic quality, is the fresh young élan of economic upswing. The boom is what gives the cycle its symphonic breath. Even its resistance to partisan politics is inspired by it. A Merry Book Despite Death and Tears, the subtitle that De Coster, who has many traits in common with Balzac (although he spoiled them by putting them in saccharine affirmative form) gave his chief work, could be claimed by Balzac, author of the Contes drolatiques or Droll Stories. The progress on the part of society as a whole that runs through the Comédie humaine does not coincide with the trajectory of an individual life. It casts a radiance on the victims of all the intrigues in a way that is no longer possible even for those who are fortunate, should they stray by chance into a narrative. The adolescent pleasure of reading Balzac is fed by the fact that an unspoken promise of justice on the part of the whole arches like a rainbow over all individual suffering. The material foundation for both the Rubempré novels is laid in the story of David Séchard’s invention. Provincial swindlers cheat him of its fruits. But the invention is successful, and after all the catastrophes Séchard, a decent man, still achieves a modest affluence through an inheritance. Ulrich von Hutten, who died persecuted and syphilitic and yet cried out that living was a joy, is like a prototype of Balzac’s characters, someone from the prehistoric bourgeois world whose crags and crevices the novelist, looking down from the mountain peak, recognizes.
Lucien de Rubempré begins as an enthusiastic youth with high literary ambitions. Balzac may have his doubts about the quality of talent in someone who makes his debut with sonnets about flowers and an imitation of Walter Scott’s bestselling novels. But he is gentle, vulnerable, everything that would later be called refined and introverted. In any case, he has enough talent to create a new kind of feuilletonistic theater criticism. He becomes a gigolo, the accomplice of the man who rescues him, a great criminal whom he later betrays. One who deals with spirit naively, without getting his hands dirty, is—in terms of the mores of the world, which he has not had anyone teach him—pampered. He refuses to separate happiness and work. Even in work and the efforts it requires, he tries not to sully himself with the things that anyone who wants to make something of himself must come to terms with. The marketplace differentiates with great precision between what is offensive to it as the intellectual’s spiritual self-satisfaction and what it treasures, the social utility which offends to its core the spirit that produces it; its sacrifice is rewarded in the exchange. The person who is not prepared to make this sacrifice wants to have it good anyway; this makes him vulnerable. The configuration of purity and egoism permits the world to enter the domain of the person who is ignorant of it. Because he refused to take the bourgeois oath, the world tends to cast him down beneath the level of the bourgeoisie, to degrade the bohemian into a venal hack, a scoundrel. He goes to the dogs more easily than the others without being fully aware of it, and the world regards that as justification for increasing the punishment. The gullible Lucien slides into relationships whose implications the intoxicated man only half understands. His narcissism imagines that love and success are meant for him personally when from the outset he is employed merely as an interchangeable figure. His desire for happiness, not yet curbed and shaped by adaptation to reality, disdains the controls that could show him that the conditions for its satisfaction destroy intellectual existence—freedom. The parasitic moment in him that disfigures all spirit gains the upper hand in him unawares: from what the bourgeois call idealism it is only a step to the wage slavery of one who, even if rightly, is too good to earn his living through bourgeois labor and blindly makes himself dependent on the very thing he shrinks from. Even the boundary between what is permitted and what constitutes betrayal becomes blurred for him. The only thing that strengthens awareness of it is the activity he considers beneath him. Lucien is incapable of distinguishing between corruption and his enthusiastic love affair with Coralie. But the naive man plunges into it too openly and too suddently for it to come out well; his shortcut is avenged as a crime, because it innocently confesses, so to speak, the things hidden along the jungle paths of bourgeois equivalence. The hangman’s noose beckons to the talent that dares to jump headfirst into the stream of the world instead of developing itself in peace and quiet. Antonio, however, has become Vautrin, the cynical moralist. He enlightens the youthful failure, who had not only to lose his illusions but also to become the abominable person about whom his illusions deceived him.
One of the finds made by Balzac the man of letters is the non-identity of the writer and what is written. Since Kierkegaard, the critique of that non-identity has been one of the defining motifs of existentialism. Balzac does better than that. He does not set the writer up as the criterion of what is written. His genius is too deeply steeped in craftsmanship, and the writer knows too well that writing is not equivalent to the pure expression of an allegedly immediate self, for him to confuse, anachronistically, the writer with the Pythian oracle whose voice resounds only with inspiration from its own depths. Balzac the Catholic was as free from the mustiness of this ideological view of the writer—the same view that was later used in the campaign against the literati—as he was from sexual prejudice and any kind of Puritanism. He grants thought the luxury of leaving behind the person who thinks it. His novels prefer to take the words of Mignon, the tightrope walker’s child in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, as their guideline: “So lasst mich scheinen, bis ich werde” [“Let me appear until I become”].* The whole Comédie humaine is one giant phantasmagoria, and its metaphysics is the metaphysics of illusion. At the moment in which Paris becomes the ville lumière, the city of light, it is a city on a different star. The conditions for recognizing it as such are social. They carry spirit high above the contingency and fallibility of the person who becomes its possessor; the intellectual forces of production are also multiplied by the division of labor, something the existentialists ignore. Whatever talent Lucien has blossoms hectically, in contradiction to what he is and to his ideals. By virtue only of what infuriated solid citizens consider the irresponsibility of the literati, he becomes a true writer for a few months. The nonidentity of spirit with those who carry it is both spirit’s precondition and its flaw. That nonidentity shows that spirit represents something that would be different only within what exists, which is what it detaches itself from; and by merely representing that different existence, spirit defiles it. In the division of labor, spirit both serves as the designated representative of utopia and hawks utopia in the marketplace, making it equivalent to what exists. Spirit is all too existential rather than not existential enough.