This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

B — Balzac

I believe in Balzac. Next to Cervantes and Faulkner, he is the novelist who has influenced me the most. And like all great writers, he has many dimensions. But there may very well be no other writer quite as deft as Balzac when it comes to articulating social reality—“Moi, j’aurai porté toute une société dans ma tête” (I will have carried a whole society in my head) — and, at the same time, creating a specter that serves as a harbinger of things to come: the story of the fantastic. Realistic and fantastic. His reality includes the reality of the imagination. His characters are ambitious social climbers but they are also the defeated, the humiliated. His obsession is money as well as terror and illusion. His passions are personal as well as collective. The études de mœurs (Le Père Goriot, Les Illusions perdues, Eugénie Grandet) live on alongside his philosophical studies (Louis Lambert, Séraphita, La Recherche de l’absolu).

“The novelist of energy and will,” as Baudelaire called him, is also the novelist of man’s constant battle with terror. The energy so prodigiously expended by Balzac’s arrivistes has its rewards — social status, money, fame. But it also leads to inevitable consequences — debilitation, old age, loss, surrender. . For Balzac, La Peau de chagrin — The Wild Ass’s Skin, the skin of pain — comes to symbolize the world of objects. It is the supreme object, the thing-in-and-of-itself, the possession that is able to accumulate more possessions through simple desire.

There is a price to pay for this: each time we desire something and discover that our desire has been granted, the skin dispossesses us of our own life and offers us, in exchange, final and everlasting possession: death.

The possession of things is a central theme for the social Balzac. But the loss of things is the central theme of the mythic Balzac — the myth being that of Tantalus, eternally condemned never to touch the fruits that are just beyond his reach. “Slender shadow, bloodless and cold, see, your own thirst torments you,” wrote Quevedo, tantalized by death. Balzac, however, moves both closer to and further away from the myth. Closer, we find social activity. Raphael de Valentin, the protagonist who acquires the wild ass’s skin as a kind of poisoned gift, is a gambler. His wager is that life and death are the only numbers worth playing in the casino of life. The roulette wheel of life and death gives and takes away the things we possess. And in Balzac’s social world, what you are is what you possess.

Like a grand opera, The Wild Ass’s Skin opens with a first act that unfolds in a gambling house, a place where monetary things are lost and won from one moment to the next. In the second act, which takes place in a money-lending house, a talisman saves Raphael from financial ruin. The third act is a prolonged orgy of property and death in which Raphael wins and then loses everything he has, all because of the magical object that he possesses and that possesses him.

Balzac’s genius resides in the tension between time and space in his novels. In The Wild Ass’s Skin, the skin itself is the symbolic narrative space. Raphael desires things, and the object-space grows smaller and smaller with each successive wish. But right along with the space, his time runs out as well. The hero’s will is annihilated by the fulfillment of his desires. There are few moments in fiction quite so terrifying — and absurd — as the moment when the banker asks him, “Do you want some asparagus?” to which the terrified Raphael cries out, “I want nothing!” Or later on, when he lashes out at the solicitous manservant, Jonathas, “Monster! Have you sworn to bring about my death?”

In this desperate novel, time and space, possession and dispossession, life and death become fused together amidst erotic passion. Sex is practically invisible in Balzac: Raphael desires the body of the courtesan Foedora but prefers the wild ass’s skin to the skin of Eros. Sexual desire could destroy the skin and thus destroy Raphael’s life. In Freudian terms, the wild ass’s skin would be the proof of a “triumph over castration.” It also possesses the fetishistic quality of being unknown and, as such, permissible. Nobody prohibits Raphael from keeping the skin because the object’s price is unknown. Nobody, in other words, can prohibit Raphael from being the owner of his own death.

The erotic surprise of this particular Balzac novel comes when we discover that sexual plenitude has been reserved exclusively for Pauline, the purest of heroines. This virginal woman of populist melodrama conceals and demands the most complete sexual surrender, and Raphael exhausts his destiny in his desire for her. The wild ass’s skin disappears and he dies — in a horrific final scene — gnawing at Pauline’s breast. It is not the cruel Foedora, but the sweet Pauline who kills Raphael because she cannot allow him to live without desiring her — or, in other words, she cannot allow him to die without desiring her. Separating Raphael’s dead body from Pauline’s breast proves to be an arduous task, for our hero continues to cling to her like a ferocious beast.

Two other works by the visionary Balzac have always struck me as particularly disturbing. In Séraphita, the he/she protagonist, who is sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, or rather half-man and half-woman, makes sexual ambiguity an unattainable and thus infinitely and hopelessly coveted object of desire. Wilfrid’s longing for Séraphita is as unattainable as Minna’s longing for Seraphitus. Wilfrid, in his desire for the woman Séraphita, runs the risk of finding himself in the arms of the man Seraphitus, and in the same way Minna may find herself embracing the body of the woman Séraphita. Once again, the Tantalus myth illuminates Balzac’s fantastic iconography, and Mme Potocka, one of the writer’s refined lovers and correspondents, is absolutely right when she tells him that with regard to Séraphita one must think in terms of a “creation” and not a “creature.” How can Wilfrid or Minna possess such a person if they do not understand that this is someone who is neither man nor woman but rather a creation in the fullest sense, a creation which demands that they — and every lover — surrender unabashedly to the movement of a soul in which we — characters and readers alike — risk our lives? This, we might say, is the difference between Séraphita and Orlando, the very lovely and innocent novel by Virginia Woolf, which plays such marvelous games with the constant metamorphoses of time and sex. But Woolf does not ask us to choose, nor does she choose anything herself. Orlando travels seamlessly through time, alone. Séraphita demands that we be something that we don’t want to be, while at the same time we fervently desire to be either Him or Her. Séraphita demands that we give up life so that we may possess it beyond the realm of sex. Séraphita demands eroticism.

Louis Lambert, Balzac’s most autobiographical novel, offers another illuminating prophecy. The young and brilliant Lambert is, in the words of Balzac, “a soul crushed under the weight of thought.” Flaubert was wrong when he read it as a nightmare and judged it to be the story of a madman. As mad as Nietzsche, because this Louis Lambert, even when locked away in a darkened room without uttering a word, is not mad. He has been defeated by the velocity of his thoughts, which move so fast that he is unable to express them verbally. Thought annihilates the thinker. Louis Lambert, then, is the most astounding harbinger of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Can literature defeat death? This is Balzac’s insidious question, and it accompanies many of his characters: Lucien de Rubempré and Eugène de Rastignac in their ambitious ascent of the social ladder; Père Goriot, the modern-day Lear who is victimized by the cruel vanity of his ungrateful daughters; Cousin Bette, who hatches her sinister plot so that vengeance may finally liberate her from the humiliation she has endured; and the great puppeteer of The Human Comedy, Vautrin — Abate Herrera/Collin/Trompe-la-Mort — who manipulates everyone else’s fate so that he himself may avoid confronting his own unbearable burden: his own destiny. These characters live in the company of ghosts, though none quite so intensely as Colonel Chabert, when he introduces himself in the home of his wife, who has remarried, having believed him to be dead. “Colonel Chabert,” he says. “He who was killed at Eylau.”

In response to a letter from the Duchesse d’Abrantes in which the noblewoman chastized Balzac for not coming to visit her often enough at her country home, the novelist simply replied, “Please don’t blame me. I work night and day. You may be shocked, rather, by the fact that I am not yet dead.”

The skin shrinks, but the novel grows. Balzac has given death a name. He has seen that possession gives life, but in the end takes it away. Yet he has only been able to do so insofar as he has been able to identify his novel as a text, a verbal structure that gives permanence and content to all the things that resist having permanence and content — that is, the brevity of life and material possessions.