Roney on Gleize (2023)

In Balzac interrompu by Joëlle Gleize, the author takes a note from her subject in reassembling and reformulating various fragments she has written on Honoré de Balzac over the years to bring a new perspective to her work, both in its assembly and its form—unified between the covers of a single book. It is divided into five distinct parts: Balzac pseudonyme; L’Analytique et les Parents pauvres; “Immenses détails;” Publication, composition, montage; and Des lecteurs et leurs Balzac. Each part is further broken down into chapters, some of which number as few as ten pages, and those chapters contain further subheadings. I cite this structure to underscore the fragmentation of these writings, for which the homogeneity as a book at times appears superficial—perhaps, interrompu. The title of the work, Balzac interrompu, emphasizes the unfinished state of La Comédie humaine, interrupted by the author’s death in 1850 just after his long-awaited marriage to Evelyn Hanskà and only three short months following his fifty-first birthday.

Gleize’s research interests lay in everything surrounding literature: the act of reading itself, its conditions and effects, as well as the materiality of literary books and all the components of its institutional framework, production, and reception (285). Rather than analyze Balzac’s work, this book covers the reading of his oeuvre. She begins with his early-career use of a pseudonym while probing the commercial book market in a quest to garner enough success to lay claim to his own name. In part two, Gleize jumps to the end of Balzac’s career with his final publication of the two-novel series Les Parents pauvres: La Cousine Bette (1846–47) and Le Cousin Pons (1847–48), tying them to the prefaces that accompany his early, pseudonymous writings and to Pathologie de la vie sociale (1830, 1833, 1839). This method allows Gleize to establish a certain continuity throughout the author’s career in his perception of literature and theoretical approach to his writing. 

“Immenses détails” studies Balzac’s use of detail to educate his audience about society and encourage them to reconsider stereotypes; it also focuses on his simultaneous challenges to novelistic structure. This assertion harkens back to Allan Pasco’s earlier work, Balzacian Montage: Configuring La Comédie humaine (1991), in which he refers to Balzac’s innovative use of detail as “image structure” wherein image predominates over process and description over narration. Part four emphasizes Balzac’s attentiveness to the publication process, both in form and distribution, in his endeavor to broaden his readership. This ironically produces its own state of suspended completion in his literary production due to constant revisions and redistributions.

In the book’s final section, Gleize follows the influence and reception of Balzac’s work through time and the question of its modernity as viewed by subsequent authors and critics. Specifically, she looks at its reception during the movement of “le nouveau roman” and Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970), as well as its influence on Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884) and the symbolist movement. In addition, she provides an intriguing study of diverse editions of La Comédie humaine and the impact of various editorial choices on its chronological presentation. As evidenced by this overview, these writing fragments assembled by Gleize produce a multi-faceted perspective of all that surrounds Balzac’s historic career, covering both his early years as well as all that entails La Comédie humaine (1829–48) and its repercussions across time.

Gleize masterfully incorporates the influence of Balzac’s early career into the development, theoretical approach, and style of his final, if incomplete, literary monument. Her external perspective of Balzac’s strategic approach to publishing highlights his incessant quest to broaden his readership—diversifying his publication format to likewise diversify his audience. In this endeavor, Gleize echoes Balzac’s affinity for reissuing his literary product in an ever-evolving format: first serially through newspapers, later as individual books, and finally incorporated into his unified collection of La Comédie humaine. Though Balzac continued to revise and re-edit each subsequent edition, Gleize surmises, “j’ai préféré les rassembler sans les actualiser, en les datant du moment de leur première publication et selon leurs problématiques” (9–10). As a result, the book’s articles dating from 1993–2019 contain repetitions both in her analyses of the works in question and in her use of citations to buttress her theories, with some lacking the most current developments. In her review of the various editions of La Comédie humaine, for example, Andrea del Lungo’s powerful website E-Balzac remains absent. Nevertheless, this book provides and in-depth study of all that surrounds Honoré de Balzac’s literary production to add yet another layer to what is already known about his monumental career. This book will serve as an excellent supplement for Balzac researchers.