Volume 20, Number 15 · October 4, 1973
Balzac Possessed
By John Bayley
Balzac
by V.S. Pritchett
Knopf, 272 pp., $15.00
S/Z
by Roland Barthes
Editions du Seuil, 280 pp., 21 F
The greatest propriétaire in literature has always made a contradictory appeal to those who travel light. And to a remarkable extent he has become an author's author. Proust and Gide adored him; Yeats was an addict of the Comédie Humaine; it was certainly the greatest single influence on the oeuvre of Henry James. What fascinates other writers about Balzac is probably the way in which he identified creation with greed, art with acquisitiveness; he made no distinction between inspiration and appetite, seizing everything that lay about him with infantile abandon, For him art was no problem, and this in itself makes him the artists' hero. Though the contemporary Hegelian consciousness, the spirit developing in alienation and solitude, is in a sense his own, it is surrounded today with every kind of formal block and impediment, often self-created, every barrier which the ironies of extreme self-consciousness can put in its way. Balzac's is the ego uninhibited by alienation: possession was all, and to possess he had only to put pen to paper.
Review, 1904 words
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