The Unknown Subject: About Balzac's Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu

Current critical thinking has revived the question of the subject in realist narrative, a problem that had been largely ignored by both traditional critics and structuralists. Balzac's Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu, as a specular mise en abyme of this problem deals with the question both thematically and structurally. The narrator attempts to subvert any subjective stance by proposing alternative ways of reading the work, among which are a dramatic model and a figural model. Yet the figural model, rather than occluding the subject, makes it even more evident, thereby underscoring its fundamentally disruptive and deconstructive position in realist narrative. (LRS)