Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Naturalist in Balzac: The Relative Influence of Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

2002; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frf.2002.0013

1534-1836

Richard Somerset,

Philosophy and Social Theory

The question of Balzac's scientific vision is not a new one. It is an issue which has been studied in its own right, and also in relation to more purely literary concerns. In a sense, it is not in fact possible to separate Balzac's "scientific vision" from his literary style, since the latter is in part determined by the former. For example, the question of whether Balzac should be considered a "Romantic" or a "Realist" author—one of the most fundamental stylistic questions faced by Balzac scholars—arises largely as a result of the explicitly scientific aspirations of La Comédie humaine. Balzac's formative years were the 1820s and 1830s, at the height of the "bataille romantique," and well before the "bataille realiste" of the 1850s. 1 But the peculiarity of his position is not just a question of timing; it resides more particularly in the fact that the ideas underlying his novelistic creation have much in common with a certain strand of "Romantic thought"—it is close to German Naturphilosophie—but his authorial voice is typically one of detached objectivity; which is to say that it is close to the style which would come to be called "Realist," and quite distinct from the voice of impassioned insight associated with the "Romantic" movement. He seems to combine a "Romantic" vision with a "Realist" style. The strangeness of this mixture is somewhat diminished by the tendency of its different elements to come to the fore in different parts of the cycle of novels. The first part of La Comédie humaine, the Études de moeurs, is meant to be an empirical survey of all of the different varieties of Social Being represented in nineteenth-century France, and it is here that Balzac's "Realist" style is most in evidence. In the second two parts, on the other hand—in the Études philosophiques and the Études analytiques—Balzac expressly presents his "Romantic" notions on the ultimate nature of mankind; and in these [End Page 81] sections he does in fact tend to use the voice of impassioned insight rather than the voice of objective Realism. This divide is not absolute, however, and aspects of Balzac's Romantic philosophy of the human being are very much present in the Études de moeurs, even though they are expressed here only in implicit terms.