Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 7 of 13

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)
La Comedie Humaine.
The Writer as a “Secretary” of Society, Towards a Psychology of Man.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 17, 1984

Transcript:

Okay I'm going to be more explicit. The– the 19th century is invisible. We don't see it. We don't see it because it has two horizons of blankness for us. There is a psychological unconscious horizon which blots out the inner effect of the times; there is a cultural blindness which blots out the implications of the times. So we have more affinity, psychologically, with the earlier times. We have a lot of affinity, for instance, Jung found in his practice that the unconscious of modern man, so-called 20th century man, seems to have an alchemical metaphorical base which goes back not to the Middle Ages so much but goes back to roughly the 16th century. So that 20th century man responds psychologically to motifs that are 16th century, which is why there's such a big to do about Shakespeare and so forth in our time. We don't have any living connection, most of us, with the 19th century. It exists as a nonentity. But the fact is is that the unconscious propensities which actually affect us are 19th century. They originate, their momentum comes from their. Also the culture that we inhabit, the buildings that we live in largely, the governments that we live under, all have their genesis in the 19th century. We like to think, because of the kind of ground up education that we're spoon fed all the time, that we originated in the 18th century or that we went through all kinds of travail in the 20th century and have modified such and such. But the 19th century is really the social structure in which we live.

The point being that it is a blind spot and the achievements of the 19th century could help us enormously if we could get to them psychologically and culturally. Part of the absurdity of the 20th century is due to the fact that the solutions to the modern dilemma were all mooted in the 19th century and then cast aside, forgotten. And so we are coming up with second-hand and third-hand speculations of what to do and nothing's effective because the effective solutions were offered in the 19th century already by persons who were not bowled over by the conditions, by the times, by persons who had come humanly into the dilemmas and had a more accurate assessment of what had happened to man because man had suffered a sea change– a sea change. Which is psychological poetic talk for saying that he had not just changed in one part but that the whole mix had changed. Not like a chameleon that changes colour, but like a butterfly that undergoes a metamorphosis. It is a different creature.

All of the individuals that we have taken thus far in the 19th century course grappled mightily with this problem and the individuals that we take for the concluding half also grappled mightily but in a somewhat different light. That is to say, instead of trying to figure out in terms of a history, or in terms of an economics, or in terms of a science, these individuals will apply themselves primarily to literature. And the reason for that application to literature, the reason for the swing to literature, is because of Honore de Balzac who was a monument to human intelligence and ingenuity. If you want to see a true appraisal of Balzac's character, review for yourself Rodin’s sculpture of Balzac. I think there's a copy here in Los Angeles. I think the County Museum of Art has a copy of it out in the grounds. Rodin with his magnificent appreciation of the rugged monumental form of the human body portrays Balzac wrapped in a cloak and only his leaning head looking heavenward with an expression of absolute determination to see through heaven to God himself to be able to penetrate by human intuition by force of will by comprehension of thought to the essence of the mystery. And to bring it back to himself where he could look down and he could tell everyone what was true and what was beautiful in the world.

Now Balzac is an extraordinarily misapprehended individual. He is in fact the typical example of the invisibility of the 19th century. You will almost nowhere find a book in the 20th century about Balzac that understands him. You will almost nowhere find in the 19th century a book about Balzac that understands him. There is a narrow wedge of comprehensible time running largely in the Edwardian period – between say about 1895, 1900 until about 1910 – when the conditions of the 19th century still obtained in the 20th century. But the maturity of the 20th century had risen up. But the hypnotic effect of the later 20th century had not taken over. That is to say, in between the 1890s and the First World War is a window of genius in Western culture. Those individuals who were alert and writing at that time saw, profoundly, the dilemma and the quandaries that modern man was heading into and the quandary and dilemmas that he had been embroiled in. And if we look at the writings of that time we find extraordinary genius. In this country alone we have William James and Honoré Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, Woodrow Wilson, Mark Twain, names and people that have been cast aside because they don't quite fit in anymore.

Balzac was seen at this time in this period very clearly. And in fact the American collected edition of Balzac published in Boston from 1890s to about 1905, was produced in all these leather volumes – forty volumes – at that time with extraordinarily accurate translations, penetrating introductions, his letters, the memoirs that did count the one by his sister, and this entire edition was published in Boston and since has languished. Almost nobody refers to it and you hear almost nothing.

In volume – and I'll refer to it because you can find this at The Whirling Rainbow – in volume 32 which is entitled, Memoir, there's a translation in here of his sister's memoir of their childhood, and the young Balzac, and it's the most accurate portrayal of him as a youngster. She emphasizes in here that Balzac was born May 16th, 1799. The Encyclopaedia Britannica lists it as May 20th. He was born May 16th, 1899. His father was a peculiar individual. His father in fact lived to be 83 and died only because he was involved in a mortal accident. His father's code throughout his whole life summed up in the word “healthfullness.” His father believed that man as an individual had a certain portion of vital essence and that if he conserved it if he nourished it If he protected it. His life span should be about 100 years, a little bit more perhaps.

So he spent all of his life conserving himself, portioning himself out articulating his life energy, his vital essence. In fact, because he realized that he was probably going to live beyond one hundred, he worked very hard as a young man, invested everything that he had wisely– much of his investment went to a certain bank and as the banks grew in the 19th century and as his investments grew he actually became a reasonably well-to-do individual.

Now Balzac and his family and everything were from the area of France around Tours and this Touraine peasant mentality provincial mentality coupled with the sense of mystical essence gave the young Balzac a very interesting head start in life. For him, psychical energy was just one of the simple facts of life, an existence, everyone must surely know about it. His mother was a vivacious intelligent woman who had lost a child just before Honoré was born. So when Honoré was born he was put with a wet nurse and the wet nurse raised Honoré for the first two, three, four years of his life. And his sister who was about two years younger and they would be brought into the family and given a chance to say good morning or good night to Mama and Papa and then whisked off. So Mama and Papa were somewhat a little distant, but loving nevertheless.

At the age of seven Honoré – who was named because he was born on Saint Honoré’s Day, which is not May 20th but is May 16th. Honoré was sent to a boys academy in Vendome and there he was considered by the so-called instructors and teachers to be somewhat below average and consequently in order to get him out of the way as they did in boys schools in those times they would put him in a punishment cell. Finally at the end of seven years of this regimen, Honoré went into a coma. They found him with his eyes open and he was staring blankly and he would not respond to anyone's voice. Later in life he would say of himself that he suffered from a congestion of ideas because when he had been in those punishment cells, day after day after day year after year, because he had been a fairly interested reader having nothing else to do, having an enormously capacious intellect, and a talent a hidden wild talent at psychical intuition on a scale that the great seers of antiquity would have been jealous of. Balzac had read almost every book in the school's library. He was pale and puny compared with the robust boy that had been sent to the school. But after being put out on– in the fresh air after being sent on long walks with friends and his mother. After a year Balzac's health came back, his robustness came back, but the experience crimped – as his father would say – his vital energies had taken away a lot of his life span.

Balzac would die at age 51, August of 1850 worn out. Somewhat sensing this, somewhat believing this, I rather suspect that Balzac realizing that he would have a limited span hurled himself courageously into the fray and did in fact burn himself out whether or not his vital reserves were deplenished or not. He lived a kind of life that simply exhausted him as Kazantzakis once wished in a letter. He wanted to live a life so torrid that when death came he would find nothing but bones and ashes. Balzac is the original wild man of society. He was put into another school for a couple of years. He was made a law clerk for three years. At the age of nineteen or twenty he finally decided that he would have to write. He was so filled, not so much with ideas, but with people. And at that age he didn't understand what– why he was filled with people, or what this meant, that he was filled with people. That is to say Balzac’s psyche and his photographic memory, his tremendous intelligence. He has unbelievable acquaintance with the world of literature and books had produced a unique specimen in the human species.

Balzac was a case of someone having several thousand personalities and only discovered that later in life when he began to write and found all of them alive in himself. The common theory of the litterateurs of the university bred deadwoods that teach literature, is that an author thinks out the ideas then thinks out the characters then thinks out what the characters would say and then goes to the paper and writes them down. Nothing could be farther from the case. The writer is, as Ray Bradbury once said, “grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged screaming and kicking to the blank page and is in awe of what comes out.” Or, as Dickens would observe – and we'll see Dickens next week – because he had a very similar experience, “The characters surprise you every day with what they will say and more with what they will do and even more with the fact that they seem to be alive in their own right.” Faulkner, when he read Balzac, closed the book one afternoon and wrote in a little letter to a friend, he said, “I have realized that characters cast shadows; that they are alive and possibly because they are more pure in their will and thought, more alive than we are.”

Balzac could not as a young man get all this out. He would in fact have to go through a lot of life. He found as a child that there was one experience that was indelible for him: a visit to his grandpa. His grandpa's genealogy, the fact that the man represented someone beyond his father back in time who was the son of somebody who lived even further back in time. The grandfather was a mysterious figure to him. The grandfather loved him, would hug the young Balzac and give him the kind of contact that children need. Balzac’s sister would say, young children don't thrive on ideas, they thrive on hugs and kisses. And grandpa, who would die a year and a half later, and little Balzac, Little Honoré was told that he would never be able to see his grandpa again that he'd gone, stretched mightily in himself to recover the man, to recover first the experiences that he had had, then to recover the man intact, then to recreate him and bring him back to life. All this lay fallow.

During the 1820s Balzac tried many other careers. He tried to be a printer. He tried to be a publisher, tried to be a businessman. And finally in 1828 he was on the verge of bankruptcy. And he quit trying to be something other than what he was. He set himself down. He had tried writing many times during the decade, but in 1829 he finally wrote a novel called Les Chouans, and it's a historical novel about the Breton peasants, and about the same time he wrote a book called The Physiology of Marriage which was sort of a French type of entertainment. The French love the witty explication of all the convolutions that marriage and married life and the war of the sexes and so forth would bring. And Balzac began to have a little bit of reputation.

His parents moved to Versailles, outside of Paris to the south. Balzac began seriously considering for himself that his career was going to be an unfoldment of capacities of human nature. That there was some mystical metaphysical talent that had been given him, had been developed in him. So he took an apartment in Paris. And for the next number of years Balzac began to immerse himself into his career. As he would call himself, he became the secretary of French society. He would sit for 16 to 18 hours a day, sometimes 20 hours a day. He had sort of a religious costume. It was a sheer white gown and he would sit at a plain blank table with his pen and his papers and alone in his solitude – he had been in solitude a lot as a youngster, it was nothing new to him – but what kind of solitude do you have when you are filled with characters? And he began to write, and he wrote torrentially. He would take breaks from time to time. He would put on his outrageous costumes – his hats, his capes. He in fact began composing for himself, very early on, a whole sequence of stories. He produced thirty stories that would fall into a sequence – he called them “droll stories,” translation that's droll stories. And there would be three sets of ten; thirty stories with prologues and epilogues. Somewhat like Boccaccio; somewhat like Chaucer; somewhat like Rabelais. But interesting in this regard, in this particular, Balzac was writing in the 19th century, in the early 1830s, and he set all of his characters back in the 16th century back in the heyday of French society. That is he transposed the chronological time by about three hundred years. It was unnoticed in the 19th century what a feat this was. He was considered a great writer, that this was some feat of the imagination, but it was never seriously entertained until the turn of the century by certain individuals who were psychically, as well as psychologically mature and aware, that this man had done an almost impossible task. He had transported himself three hundred years into the past and had viewed the lives of hundreds of individuals and had brought them back from time and put them on the page and recreated them. Because of the vivacious mentality and culture of 16th century France, what stands out to most people in the droll stories is the vulgar sexuality, the coarse language, the incredible plots, the humor. But what is going on all the time is that Balzac is recreating the essential vital essence of the life of those people and bringing them up into the 19th century, putting them onto the page so that a perspicacious reader at any time after can reconstruct and bring back to life those characters.

I want to break this kind of overall commentary by giving you a few pages of Balzac. So if you'll indulge me for about ten minutes, I'll give you some of Balzac and you can see the genius of the man. Just a little example. This is from the first droll story called The Fair Imperia. Here's a few short pages of The Fair Imperia. This is the young Balzac at his greatest who liked Balzac. Oh let's see: Henry James thought he was one of the greatest authors who had ever lived; Marcel Proust thought he was the greatest French writer who had ever lived; Faulkner figured he was on a par with Shakespeare. In fact, Balzac, late in his life said “I want to be the Shakespeare of the novel.”

This is towards the end. The Fair Imperia is a beautiful woman. She has attracted many individuals. A young priest is finally found his wherewithal to gain admittance. But as we will see he is interrupted because Balzac always portrays the social situation and the human situation as intertwined and he gives us, inadvertently but conscientiously with great purpose, a look at the essential nature of the times and its crisis of consciousness. In this case, as always, the crisis was then the way in which religious orders are destroyed by man's scheming mind. All this shown to us by an encounter in the hopeful boudoir encounter of a priest and the Fair Imperia.
26:29
“The night came; the little Tourainian, exalted with pride, caparisoned with desire, and spurred by his ‘alacks’ and ‘alases’ which nearly choked him, glided like an eel into the domicile of the veritable Queen of the Council – for before her bowed humbly all the authority, science, and wisdom of Christianity. The major domo did not know him, and was going to bundle him out again, when one of the chamber-women called out from the top of the stairs – ‘Eh, Monsieur Imbert, it is Madame's young fellow,’ and poor Philippe, blushing like on a wedding night, ran up the stairs, shaking with happiness and delight. The servant took him by the hand and led him into the chamber where sat Madame, lightly attired, like a brave woman who awaits her conqueror.”

“The dazzling Imperia was seated near a table covered with a shaggy cloth ornamented with gold, and with all the requisites for a dainty carouse. Flagons of wine, various drinking glasses, bottles of hippocras, flasks full of the good wine of Cyprus, pretty boxes full of spices, roast peacocks, green sauces, little salt hams – all that would gladden the eyes of the gallant if he had not so madly loved Madame Imperia. She saw well that the eyes of the young priest were all for her. Although [she] accustomed to the curl-paper devotion of the churchmen, she was well satisfied that she had made a conquest of the young priest who all day long had been in her head.”

“The windows had been closed; Madame was decked out and in a manner fit to do the honors to a prince of the Empire. Then the rogue, beatified by the holy beauty of Imperia, knew that emperor, burgraf, nay, even a cardinal about to be elected Pope, would willingly for that night have changed places with him, a little priest who, beneath his gown, had only the devil and love.”

“He put on a lordly air, and saluted her with a courtesy by no means ungraceful; and then the sweet lady said to him, regaling him with a piercing glance– ‘Come and sit close to me, that I may see if you have altered since yesterday.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said he. ‘And how?’ said she. ‘Yesterday,’ replied the artful fellow, ‘I loved you: to-day, we love each other, and from a poor sinner I have become richer than a king.’

“ ‘Oh, little one, little one!’ cried she, merrily; ‘yes, you are indeed changed, for from a [young] priest I see you have turned into an old devil.’ And side by side they sat down before a large fire, which helped to spread their ecstasy around. They remained always ready to begin eating, seeing that they only thought of gazing into each other's eyes, and never touched a dish. Just as they were beginning to feel comfortable and at their ease, there came a great noise at Madame's door, as if people were beating against it, and crying out.” ‘Madame,’ cried the little servant, hastily, ‘here's another of them.’ ‘Who is it?’ she cried in a haughty manner, like a tyrant, savage at being interrupted. ‘The Bishop of Coire wishes to speak with you.’ ‘May the devil take him!’ said she, looking at Philippe gently. ‘Madame, he has seen the lights through the chinks and is making a great noise.’ ‘Tell him I have the fever, and you will be telling him no lie, for I am ill of this little priest who is torturing my brain.’”

“But just as she had finished speaking, and was pressing with devotion the hand of Philippe who trembled in his skin, appeared the fat Bishop of Coire, indignant and angry. The officers following him, bearing a trout canonically dressed, fresh drawn from the Rhine, and shining in a golden platter, and spices contained in little ornamented boxes, and a thousand dainties, such as liqueurs and jams, made by the holy nuns in the abbey. ‘Ah, ah,’ said he, with his deep voice, ‘I haven't the time to go to the devil, but you must give me a touch of him in advance, eh! My little one.’ ‘Your belly will one day make a nice sheath for a sword,’ replied she, knitting her brows above her eyes, which from being soft and gentle had become mischievous enough to make one tremble.

‘And this little [chorus singer] is here to offer that’ said the bishop, insolently turning his great rubicund face towards Philippe. ‘Monseigneur, I am here to confess Madame.’ ‘Oh, oh, do you know the canons? To confess to the ladies at this time of night is a right reserved to bishops, so take yourself off; go and herd with simple monks, and never come back here again under pain of excommunication.’”

“ ‘Do not move,’ cried the blushing Imperia, more lovely with passion than she was with love, because now she was possessed with both passion and love. ‘Stop, my friend. Here you are in your own house.’ Then he knew that he was really loved by her. ‘Is it not in the breviary, and in an evangelical regulation, that you shall be equal before God in the valley of Jehoshaphat?’ she asked of the bishop. ‘Tis an invention of the devil, who has adulterated the holy book,’ replied the great numbskull of a bishop, in a hurry to fall to. ‘Well, then, be equal now before me, who am here below your goddess,’ replied Imperia, ‘otherwise one of these days it will have you delicately strangled between the head and shoulders; I swear it by the power of my tonsure, which is as good as the pope's.’ And wishing that the trout should be added to the feast as well as the sweets and other dainties, she added, cunningly, ‘Sit you down and drink with us.’ But the artful minx, being up to a trick or two, gave the little one a wink which told him plainly not to mind the German, whom she would soon find a means to [get] rid of.”

“The servant-maid seated the bishop at the table and tucked him up, while Philippe, wild with a rage that closed his mouth, because he saw his plans ending in smoke, gave the archbishop to more devils than ever there were monks alive. Thus they got half way through the repast, which the young priest had not touched, hungering only for Imperia, near whom he was already seated, but speaking that sweet language which the ladies so well understand, that has neither stops, commas, accents, letters, figures, characters, notes, nor images. The fat bishop, sensual and careful enough of the sleek ecclesiastical garment of skin for which he was indebted to his late mother, allowed himself to be plentifully served with hippocras by the delicate hand of Madame, and it was just at his first hiccup that the sound of an approaching cavalcade was heard in the street. The number of horses, the ‘Ho, ho!’ of the pages, showed plainly that some great prince hot with love was also about to arrive. In fact, a moment afterwards the Cardinal of Ragusa, against whom the servants of Imperia had not dared bar the door, entered the room. At this terrible sight the poor courtesan and her young lover became ashamed and embarrassed, like fresh cured lepers; for it would be tempting the devil to try and oust the cardinal, the more so as at that time it was not known who would be pope…”

It goes on. The Cardinal, who is a very powerful individual, decides that he's going to get rid of the priest first off. He writes out– he takes him into another room and he writes out a little note saying that I hereby make you possessor of a certain abbey. Now clear out and let me never see you here again. And so the man says, well in thanks to your Grace I will tell you how to get rid of the bishop if you don't mind. Tell him that you have just come from confessing a man with the plague who has just expired and he will leave. And the cardinal says well you're a rogue after my own heart.

So he gives him a thousand Francs to hasten him on his way. So the little priest ostensibly leaves. Imperia is infuriated that he would give up so easily the little priest because she really did like him. So she now is insufferable because the cardinal comes back. He chases away the bishop with the ruse of having confessed a man dying of plague. But then the fair Imperia says how dare you come in here carrying plague germs and wanting to just enjoy me and make it the last night of my life. And she pulls a dagger and the cardinal goes on his knees and she tells him to get out. And he says but I may be the Pope. She says I'm going to be a live goddess and not be killed by anybody including the next Pope. So she goes– the cardinal leaves and she goes in a huff to her chambers and she sees in her mirror slipping from behind one of the curtains the young priest who did not leave after all and she happy with the allure of her charms intact obviously and he happy with his cleverness doused the light.

This is Balzac. This is the young Balzac who was, when these stories came out, the rage of Paris. He was simply the lion the social lion. Everybody wanted to see him. And the more so because he buried himself with work for long long periods of time. In fact Balzac would absent himself sometimes for weeks sometimes for months on end and go traveling all over France and come back to Paris in the dead of night, go up to his place, and– and go to work. What he found in his capacity was that he was able to look at human beings with such penetrating intuition. And with his photographic memory and his tremendous literary talent, he was able he said to put himself into another person's skin. He was able to enter their life in an instant through this psychical intuition, through this ability to exfoliate in the writing out the creative attack on the page; to draw out of himself the hidden structure of that person. In fact he realized that with this talent he could in fact create something that had never been done before. Now Balzac was the first to write the traditional novel – where an omnipresent, omnipotent, observer narrates and lives through the action. He's the first ever to write a novel like that. He's the creator of that form. But he's the creator of a transcendental form beyond that which just sends the novel into insignificance.

He began composing, in his mind, in his experience, a vast work which eventually he would take a title from Dante, who wrote The Divine Comedy. Balzac would write The Human Comedy (La Comedie Humaine) and he projected in his experience that it would take about twenty-four volumes – twenty-four interrelated, interpenetrated novels of enormous extent, some of them four or five or six hundred pages. So he was thinking of writing, let's say, five hundred times twenty-four, about twelve thousand pages over a period of years in which the same characters would appear, but in one novel certain characters would be brought up to the fore, and other ones would be in varying backgrounds. Then in another novel the major characters here would go into varying backgrounds and others would be brought up so that eventually the reader canvassing these twenty-four volumes would come into possession of a complete record of human nature a slice of life complete, recreated magically, brought back into existence by the seer literature of Balzac so that man would have for the first time a laboratory specimen of society intact Alive and his experience could then approximate that of Balzac and be able to attune himself to human nature to be able to understand man and consequently himself as a part of an interpenetrating society. An interpenetrating civilisation.

Is this too much for you? Do you want to take a break? This is profound. Balzac realized that we cannot know ourselves in isolation. There is no methodology which the mind can imagine. Tarot, astrology, whatever it is Balzac investigated all of the occult methods. He spent years and years in mesmerism and every conceivable occult activity trying to find if there was in fact one that worked. And he found again and again that the problem was that we do not exist as an isolated phenomenon. We are not a thing. We are an interpenetration of others and a reaction of forces within ourselves to others. We exist inseparable from the milieu of our time from the population of other people. And the whole form of man is not man as an individual like the Renaissance thought like Greece thought. But man exists as a social pattern as a social phenomenon and no one exists in isolation from that. So in order to recover man, the essence of what man is one must recover intact, alive, the society, the culture, the civilization of any given moment, only then will we have the being, only then will we have the starting point from which we may then evolve a philosophy of human nature, a theory of human history a politics and a religion and whatever else we might have.

Balzac set to work on this and there was no one to whom he could confide except several women. Now Balzac found that his great empathy with human nature put him into contact with extraordinary women, women who were extraordinary in their sympathetic ability. The authoress George Sand was one of his closest friends. Balzac's relationship with women was extraordinary. He. It's not just the question of a man being a lover. It's a question of a man being able to be psychically a lifelong friend with a feminine consciousness, feminine personality in possession of her consciousness. And in this regard, as he began to write the novels, he began receiving letters from women all over Europe who recognized that Balzac was a companion, a compatriot in existence with them whose abilities and insights even transcended their own intuitive sympathetic grasp. One of these women was a Polish woman named Madame Hanska – Madame Hanska. She wrote to Balzac late in 1832, and he with his uncanny ability when he read her letter he read through her letter to her. That is to say he like some if I may use the vulgar phrase psychic bloodhound took this scent this trace and through the letter read her knew her as a person as a human being could recreate her. He wrote to her and said to Madame Hanska that she was an extraordinary person, extraordinary to him. He writes, at the end of his letter, he says, “certainly there are works in which I like to be myself but you can guess them. There are those in which the heart speaks out. My fate is to paint the happiness that others feel. To desire it in perfection but never to meet it. That is to say he was aware that he was no longer available to himself in an illusory sense or in a regular psychological sense, he was no longer able to be subjective to himself. He was no longer Honoré de Balzac, special and separate from humanity. He was really as he always said the secretary of French society. That is to say, he was speaking very profoundly and psychically by saying that Honoré de Balzac had transformed and had become a communal creature composed of some two thousand three hundred and fifty characters which he would create in the La Comedie Humaine. That's where Balzac is.

So he says, “my fate is to paint the happiness that others feel. To desire it in perfection but never to meet it. None but those who suffer can paint joy because we express better than that which we conceive than that which we have experienced. We express that which we conceive better than that which we experience.” Because the mind thought is not a phenomenon of the individual but is a phenomenon of the time and is a product of the interpenetration of human beings in their time and not the property of an individual in isolation. That there is no such thing as the isolated individual human mind.

Madame Hanska became a lifelong friend of Balzac. For seventeen years he wrote letters to her and there are seven hundred pages of letters to her. And finally, they met several times, they became lovers. In 1842 when her husband died a wealthy Polish landowner, Balzac wanted to marry her. She, sensing the peculiar unique nature of Balzac, the quality of ambiguity which he had to preserve in order to write refused to marry him not on the basis that she didn't love him but on the basis that she did not want to ground him. She did not want to bring him back out of that psychic milieu in which he was the Grand Eagle. One of the best writers of all time in this regard. Shakespeare was also a writer like this incidentally. He did not exist as a man. He existed as the characters which he created. Where is Shakespeare? He is in his plays nowhere else whereas Balzac he is in the characters of his novels. He is in fact hard at work throughout the 1840s because she promised him that she would marry him when he completed the Humaine– the Comedie Humaine so from 1842 to 1848. Balzac poured himself out torrentially. He wrote seventeen novels in those six years. Some of the greatest novels that have ever been written but more every one of those novels interpenetrated with each other so that the entire work was a unity. He would publish certain works and the critics would bewail it and Balzac occasionally would go into print saying nobody is reading me. This is not to stand by itself. This is a flowing and a penetrating part of something yet unfolding and coming to be. He wrote to Madame Hanska then, in 1840, he says:

“I have surmounted many miseries and if I have a success now they are all over. Imagine therefore what will be my agony during the evening when Vautrin is performed?” Balzac thought that perhaps she was not going to be close to him because he was so in debt. Balzac was indebted by tens of thousands of Francs almost all of his life. So he thought that if he wrote a triumphant play a drama for the theatre, produced it in Paris, that this in one fell swoop with its run would extricate him from debt. He never was able to affect that. There were many opportunities when wealthy women would offer to pay his debts but he realized that that would just ground him to this patron And beside that Balzac was busy – reminding you what I said at the beginning – he was busy burning himself out by extending himself to the utmost of his energy to encompass not just one personality fully but some two thousand three hundred and fifty personalities which he was creating and infusing with his own vital essence. His father might have lived a hundred years but Balzac lived thousands of lives all at once, in such detail that Balzac as a writer as a portrayer of detail is often compared to the Dutch realist painters where every detail is portrayed Balzac gives you the taste, sights, smells. Why? Because he's there. Because all he need do is look around, listen. Again and again, one is just overwhelmed by the luxuriant detail. Every character is portrayed in not just a thumbnail sketch but in the fullest possible portrait. One gets to know the Balzac characters. They are indelible.

Balzac, later writing to Madame Hanska in 1841, he says, “the affair of the publication of my great work under the title of La Comedie Humaine in which all my compositions will be classed and definitely, definitively corrected is about to begin.” This is 1841. “In order to travel I must leave four volumes ready with my publishers. Four compact volumes. The whole will be in twenty-eight volumes at four Francs with illustrations.”

So by now the comedy had grown to twenty-eight volumes. Then in 1844, writing again to Madame Hanska, and I'm just excerpting paragraphs out of seven hundred pages of detailed explication. He writes here, “Now I must talk health.” Just like his father. “Now I must talk health. You will not pardon me if I forget it in writing to you. I am well in spite of a slight grip but I think that I shall be able to master the enormous work which I must do now, between now and March 20th. Do not dwell too much upon my troubles and my toils. Do not pity me too much. Without this avalanche to sweep away. I should die.” What was in an avalanche. An avalanche of characters. Thousands of them. “Without this avalanche to sweep away I should die consumed by an indefinable ill called absence, fever, consumption, nerves, languor.” What [inaudible] has described in his [inaudible].

Why would he suffer this? Because he would suffer from the illusion that he was a single isolated individual, a person in his own right. And he knew that that was not true. And the more man tries to be a single human being in his own right the more the absurd feverish ennui malady besets him. We're very familiar in the 20th century with the absurd life. So, Balzac says do not pity me too much. I only live because this mélange, this avalanche exists. Otherwise I should perish, quite literally. Therefore he says, “I bless heaven for the obligations which misfortune has placed upon me. I do not count, as I think I told you, on a theater success to pay my debts. He had given up that idea by 1844. I count. I count only on the fifty folios of La Comedie Humaine.”

It had risen to fifty volumes by 1844. That's about twenty-five thousand pages on an average. “Which I have to do” – which I have to do – “and which will give me about fifty thousand Francs. It is true that I also expect to bring in a good conclusion to the affair of illustrating Eugenie Grandet and the Physiology, though these two things represent about twenty-thousand at least.”

Balzac set himself to an extraordinary adventure. I have to skip over. I was going to read you the wonderful introductions. He finally began to make a map of the Comedie Humaine and he decided that it would have to be in three segments, three vast parts. The first part, and this is a catalogue which was made in 1845. The Comedie Humaine would have three parts. The first would be a studies in manners, that is the mores and so forth. And the second part would be studies in philosophy which would go into the basic principles and causes and so forth. And the third part would be studies analytique, which would be not so much in terms of the manners and the and– and showing the characters for what they were doing or showing the characters more profoundly in what causes and motivations they had but the studies analytique would go into the bedrock bottom metaphysics of what human nature really was in its interpenetrating humanity as a unity. What exists? Not man, but only mankind, that's what exists.

The studies in manners or mores had six different sections. There were scenes from private life, there were scenes from provincial life, scenes from Parisian life, scenes from political life, scenes from military life, and scenes from country life. Almost all of the writings and novels that Balzac did in this torrential 1840 period, fall into the section on the manners. The second part, the Studies Philosophique, became so engrossing and penetrating to Balzac that he only did several works in this and I've selected the major one and I'm going to get to it regardless of the time because you need to have it. The third part, the studies analytique, was almost unattempted on his part. That is to say the ambitiousness of the Comedie Humaine taxed the capacity of even the torrential outpouring of Balzac.

In fact, as we will see, he began to fall ill increasingly in the late 1840s. He journeyed to the estate of Madame Hanska in 1846– 1847 and stayed for, let's see, from October 1847 until February of 1848, went back to Paris fell ill again, went back to her estates. All this time beginning to sense in himself a quavering. In order to make one last gasp because he intuited that he was in fact burning himself out. He wrote one of the most extraordinary works of all time. It is a part of La Comedie Humaine. It is a part in the section called Philosophic Studies. It is a novel, but it is a curious penetrating novel of the mystery of life. It is called, in its best translation, The Magic Skin. The Penguin Classics translation calls it the Wild Asses Skin. The Magic Skin. It is without any question one of the most important literary works ever done in any civilization. I would classify the– The Magic Skin probably on a level with Don Quixote or Moby Dick. It is important beyond saying. I have to skip over a little bit of it but I want to give you this.

Balzac was not a pessimist. This is from the introduction to The Magic Skin written in 1904. He was not a pessimist. He believed in human progress. In the general introduction, already quoted, he says,

“Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and aptitudes; society, far from depraving him, as Rousseau pretended, elevates and improves him; but self-interest develops evil tendencies in him and the natural remedy for them is religion.”

Society is where man exists as a being. His egotistic self-tendencies: the will and thought bent to oneself in isolation makes of the mind a destroyer. The Bhagavad Gita says the mind destroyer is the destroyer of the real. Just so. Balzac read the Bhagavad Gita. He was extraordinarily intelligent and extraordinarily well read. Balzac in The Magic Skin gives us the following; and this is– this is from the introduction. And then I'll give you four paragraphs which leap through The Magic Skin and give you some idea of the– the power with which he is doing this. And I hope that you'll go and find a copy and read this.

“Balzac’s philosophy included analysis of the consequences, not only of use, but abuse of the thinking power, and he wrote ‘The Magic Skin’ as a commentary upon one of the salient evils of modern civilization: the increasing tendency to excess generated by the headlong pace at which existence is carried on, and stimulated by the intenseness of competition, and the enhanced attractiveness of the objects of human desire.”

We are constantly being baited into isolation, baited into wanting to coalesce into some egotistical, avaricious being which doesn't really exist. And when we try to force it through will and thought to exist it becomes like a knife cutting the social fabric the very basis of its existence destroying the real. So, The Magic Skin deals with this and in the very first part – I'm just going to read you four paragraphs; you're going to have to go through it yourself.

The Magic Skin, he gives in the very beginning, a quotation from Tristram Shandy – Tristram Shandy – by Laurence Sterne which was the model that James Joyce used when he wrote Ulysses.

Chapter 233. Tristram Shandy is also a marvelous tour de force of human intelligence. And the chapter consists of a squiggle. Saying that there is nothing that we can say. It's so confused at this point that all we can do is make a squiggle and that's what that chapter is. We're dealing with very sophisticated people. We haven't gotten anywhere beyond this by 1984 – we're– we're not even up to this. Here's how he begins. Notice the quality of Balzac as he has matured from the droll stories. Notice the– the texture of Balzac's reality as it just scintillatingly comes out. He's like a shower of gold of observations, and it goes on and on and on and on until, as Proust and Henry James and Faulkner would attest to, one simply becomes alive to Balzac.

The first part of The Magic Skin is called The Talisman.

“Toward the close of October last, a young man entered the Palais-Royal, at the hour when the gambling-houses opened in conformity with the law, which protects a passion essentially taxable. Without much hesitation, he passed up the staircase of the hell which went by the name of ‘Number 36.’ ‘Monsieur, your hat, if you please,’ called out in a sharp, remonstrative voice, a pallid old man, who was squatting in a dark corner behind a railing, and who now rose suddenly, showing a face of an ignoble type. When you enter a gambling-house the law begins by depriving you of your hat. Is that meant as an evangelical and ghostly parable? May it not rather be a means of clinching an infernal bargain by [extracting and] exacting something of you as a pledge? Can it be intended to force you into a respectful attitude toward those who win your money? Do the police, lurking near every social sink-hole, insist on knowing the very name of your hatter, or your own if you have written it on the lining? Is it to take the measure of your skull and evolve some instructive statistics on the cerebral capacity of gamblers? On this subject the government is impenetrably silent. But you must plainly understand that no sooner have you made a step toward the green table, than your hat no more belongs to you than you belong to yourself; you are a stake, – you, your money, your hat, your cane, your cloak. When you depart from that hell, Play will show you, by a malevolent epigram in action, that it still leaves you something, by returning your hat. We may remark that if it is a new one, you will learn to your cost that in future you may wear gamblers’ clothes.”

You must wear gamblers clothes. He goes in. The gambling goes on. He finds that in thinking about things, that what he really needs is something to help him along. Very Faustian. And an old man with a beard and black cloak, skull-cap, takes him up certain darkened stairs into certain mysterious room and reveals to him, as the frontispiece illustration shows, a skin, a pelt, very ancient. And the box that it's in is sealed. And he looks and he recognizes that this magical anagram is Solomon's seal. And the old man, watching him carefully, breaks the seal and opens the box and takes out the magic pelt, and hands it to him and in it on it he has written a message and the message reads, in translation, “If thou possessed me thou wouldst possess all but thy life would be in my possession. God so wills it.”

In other words you have me and you can have anything you want but I have you.

“Wish and thou shalt obtain thy wishes but measure thy wishes by thy life. It is here at every wish of thine I shrink like thine days.”

In other words the magic skin is going to shrink because it's an index to his life, his vital essence. And every time he wishes it shrinks somewhat. And he gets what he wishes. But his life is ebbing away.

“Dost thou desire me? Take me. God will grant thy wishes. So be it.”

So he has the magic skin and he begins to live with this talisman. Just the sort of talisman man dreams in his isolation that he needs against others. What else would we wish for but advantage over others?

Part two, called The Woman Without a Heart. Yes a woman enters in. A woman who senses the dilemma, who senses the metaphysical implications, who falls in love with the man, and wishes to take him from this destiny, from this curse, from this quandary.

“Part II. The Woman Without a Heart.”

Just the opening paragraph; main character's name is Raphael.

“After remaining silent for a moment Raphael said, with a half-careless gesture: – ‘I don't really know whether the fumes of punch and wine have, or have not, something to do with a species of lucidity of mind which enables me at this moment to grasp the whole of my life as though it were a picture, where figures, colors, lights, shadows, and half tints are faithfully rendered. This poetic play of my imagination would not surprise me if it were not accompanied by a feeling of contempt for my sufferings and for my former joys. Seen from a distance, my life seems as though shrunken by some moral phenomenon. This long, slow agony which has lasted ten years, can tonight be reproduced by a few sentences, in which suffering is no more than a thought, and pleasure [but a philosophic] reflection. I now pass judgment; I feel nothing.’ ”

A critic poignantly would say that Balzac not only plumbed the depths of human nature but he touched rock bottom. He was able to feel nothing.

Part three is The Death Agony, and this is the third part of The Magic Skin – the final part. Just the first paragraph; the plot, the mythos, the movement of everything. As in all Balzac thickens congeals and comes to the point like a pack of sharks onto the blood trail.

“Early in the month of December an old man over seventy years of age, was going along the rue de Varrennes, unmindful of the rain, and gazing up at the doors of all the houses, looking, with the eagerness of a lover and the absorbed air of a philosopher, for the one belonging to Monsieur le Marquis Raphael de Valentin. An expression of anxious grief, struggling against the will of a despotic nature, was on his face, which was dried like an old parchment shriveling in the fire,”

All the way through the imagery of shriveling and shrinking just penetrates The Magic Skin and increasingly as it goes on everything contracts. Everything comes down to, as we'll see, a clatter. All of life congeals to a clatter.

His “old parchment face shriveling in the fire, and framed by long gray locks, now hanging in disorder. If a painter met this singular personage, who was lean and bony, and dressed in black, he would certainly, on returning to his studio, have put a sketch of him into his notebook with the inscription, ‘Classic poet in search of a rhyme.’ After making sure of the number of the house this living palingenesia of Rollin knocked gently at the door of a magnificent hotel. ‘Is Monsieur Raphael at home?’ ”

And then the last page. The old man is the man who gave him the magic skin you see. We're coming in at the torrid end of the novel.

“ ‘If I die, he lives!’ she cried, struggling to tighten the knot. Her hair hung loose, her shoulders were bare, her clothing in disorder; in this wild struggle for death, with tearful eyes and a flushed face and writhing in the anguish of her horrible despair she met the eyes of Raphael and augmented his delirium; he darted towards her with the lightness of a bird of prey, tore the shawl away, and tried to grasp her in his arms. The dying creature sought for words to utter the desire that possessed him, but no sounds came except the strangling death-rattle in his throat, –”

All language reduced to a death-rattle in his throat, shriveled to a death-rattle in his throat.

“...each breath he drew, more hollow than the last, seeming to come from his very entrails.”

The whole person is just coming out.

“At the last moment, furious at his own weakness, he bit her in the breast. Jonathas, terrified by the cries he heard, rushed in, and struggled to tear his mistress from the dead body to which she clung in a corner of the room. ‘What do you want [of me]?’ she demanded. ‘He is mine. I have killed him. Did I not predict it?’”

Balzac himself, near death, finally married Madame Hanska in March of 1850. He was constantly bedridden and in pain in Paris with her. And in August of 1850 he died, literally burnt out, literally shrunken and unraveled. And all that remained was about two thirds of the Comedie Humaine finished about one third projected. And the incomprehension not only of his time but of ours also.

Thank you.