LE PÈRE GORIOT, by Honoré de Balzac

These past days I have been reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In one of the chapters in which he discusses the weight carried by wealth inherited in contraposition to wealth earned by means of a salary, he brings up the speech of one the characters of the book (Vautrin) in which this person tries to convince Rastiganc that there is no point in pursuing a career as a judge if he wants to make good money: the only direct path towards opulence is marrying the heiress of a substantial fortune. Piketty brings up in several occasions 19^th century classics such as Le Père Goriot or Pride and Prejudice to talk about matters concerning revenues generated by capital, salaries, inequality, inflation (or rather lack of inflation) and the like. Le Père Goriot had been collecting dust in the shelf I keep for the “still-to-be-read” books, and, thus driven by a very prosaic curiosity, I embarked on the reading of one of Balzac’s most famous works.

I did not care much for the characters and their coming and goings. I was looking for the depiction of ruthless capitalism at its purest state. But, was really capitalism what I encountered? Where were the industrious entrepreneurs healthily competing and looking for their share of the market while aided by an invisible hand? Nowhere to be seen. Instead I came across a bunch of bon vivants whose wealth had been inherited and whose parents had accumulated it by suspicious means, to say the least, father Goriot included.

This is, by the way, the regular lot of the majority of the 19^th century novels. Many critics have pointed out that while Austen’s characters enjoyed themselves ball after ball or brooded over the intricacies of love and social acquaintances, millions were dying in the battlefields of Europe and thousands of slaves worked in the plantations sowing and harvesting the riches that paid those countryside mansions, carriages, jewels and fashionable dresses. This is of course no novelty. We all know that sometimes you have to intentionally overlook this world’s injustices to make the most of its pleasures. For me the difference was that this time I cared less about the personal experiences of the characters and much more about the nature of the society in which they live, which, let’s be honest, does not differ so much from the world we live in at the beginning of the 21^st century.

It is still unclear to me whether Balzac really intended to criticize the back then socially accepted fact that most people’s wealth came from inheritance or through well-chosen marriage. The question is, even if Balzac is honestly advocating for a fairer society, and not only testifying that 1819 Paris was far from the moral standards to be demanded of a pure and honest society, were his contemporaries really worried by the debauchery and idleness around them? Well, surely as much as our contemporaries are.

There is no doubt at any rate that 1830s people put up more than we do with the idea of a fortune gained by other means than hard work and sacrifice. Vautrin’s speech outlines a perspective, that of becoming rich by marrying a young lady, that was not totally undesirable to Rastignac’s eyes, much as he is a decent lad. He simply understands that in those days there was no shame in such a choice for a life. Vautrin is one of the most powerful characters of the book, for he incarnates what may be not its “core”, its intended message, but is at least its moral: that society is fundamentally made by hypocrites whose deeds betray their words.

Vautrin may be willing to crush someone’s life to get what he wants, but, then again, who is not? Is that member of the police services (apparently inspired on Vidocq) who eventually arrests him working for a more just cause by serving the interests of a state whose actions, whether by means of corruption or the law, sanction the immorality of the powerful and mighty? He certainly is not. To cap it all, Vautrin’s hinted sexual preferences suggest more than his degenerate vital drift, namely, society’s intolerance towards certain “sins” while others, such as bigamy or adultery, are not only put up with but openly celebrated.

Of course, such selfishness is embodied by Goriot’s daughters, whose total disregard for their father’s well-being or even health has become a paradigm of filial ingratitude. Balzac is too astute a writer to depict them as completely disagreeable ladies, a mere compound of the most regrettable traits in a full-grown personality. They are in fact too blinded by the own needs and the imminence of their petty problems to be aware of the pain they inflict on a third party. Sure, even though they are liable to be, and must indeed be held responsible for their irresponsible conduct, the question which cannot be evaded is the degree of responsibility borne by he who spoilt them by giving them all they wanted without the always advisable counterweight of the teaching that, however hard you believe it, your self is not the centre of the world.

This, of course, leads ultimately to Goriot himself. Traditionally regarded as the devoted father whose selfish daughters would not wave him goodbye by his deathbed. His fortune’s origins are more than doubtful. Once a wealthy man by means of his trade and left alone with his daughters after his wife’s death, is driven by an understandable craving for human love to grant his daughters every wish they uttered, thus spoiling them and ironically reaping only loneliness and rejection when they marry into the upper society. Poor Goriot, socially inept and looking awkward within certain social circles, is banned from his daughters mansions, or only allowed at odd times.

Certainly, if one had to condemn an excessively generous father or an unthankful daughter, the latter would seem to have committed the most outrageous crime, which goes even against one of the ten commands. But then again, Goriot’s sheer submission to his daughters’ whims and slights, his begging only for a drop of their attention turns him into a kind of moron incapable of judging the moral virtues or flaws of his daughters. He is, nonetheless, a lonely man and his lack of vision may be understood. But I do not comply with the traditional interpretation that has Goriot as the only victim.

Sure, no one here is a victim: Rastignac, perhaps the “cleanest” of all the book’s characters, pursues a life of luxuries and social success, albeit not to the extent of relinquishing his humanity; Vautrin is a criminal with no regard for any moral consideration, a cynic; Goriot’s daughters, as well as many other characters, have lost their capacity for compassion towards anyone other than themselves, and Goriot himself does not come unblemished out of a close scrutiny. Maybe the young Victorine, abandoned by her family and still a pure soul (by virtue of her very unhappiness?) will be left untouched after a moral judgement.

Ultimately, do we want pure characters? No, insofar as they are not to be found in real life and this is realism. Le Père Goriot is a comedy, a play, in which we see ourselves reflected, in which inequality, selfishness and an incapacity for long-term actions govern people’s lives. It is pretty obvious thay after two hundred years gone by things have not changed much. Back then they had wealthy inheritors, now we have super-executives.

LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN (THE MAGIC SKIN), by Honoré de Balzac

What I have here to deal with is not peanuts my lovelies. It is not my aim to repeat what has been written and said about the conception and classification of book that counts among the classics of world literature. It will suffice to mention in passing that it is one of the myriad of novels that, together, shape what was realized of that huge project called La comédie humaine, a realistic portrait of the mores and human types of the France of the first half of the 19^th century: its rebels, politicians and fishmongers, the bourgeoisie and workers, men and women of all sorts. Let’s hastily finish this brief introduction by saying that the book enjoys the privilege of having opened one of the three sections under which Balzac structured his novelistic world, that of “philosophic studies”.

By virtue of the labelling the book, I have managed to find my way within the maze of thoughts which assailed me during the reading and which I did not even bother to note down, out of sheer laziness, to prevent their being lost in eternal oblivion. Ah, those lost thoughts: we must grasp them and put them together into a discourse; that is the use of a narrative, to turn those fussy and chaotic ideas into a bunch of ready-made concepts to which we can resort when needed. So if someone, for example, inquires about my opinion on La Peau de chagrin, I know what to say, instead of acknowledging that I have forgotten most of it or, at best, that what survives is a mess of sensations, suggestions, vaguely formed ideas and recreations with no sense whatsoever. Luckily the Almighty invented literary critics and they came to rescue me in spite of my laziness by providing the key words around which, why not, this review will pivot: realism and philosophy.

Realism, that aesthetic alternative to the extremes and immoderations of Romanticism, a movement embodied by Balzac and Stendhal along with that good looking rascal, Gustave Courbet. Its precepts are more or less condensed in the following sentence: “I will paint (or describe) an angel when I see one”. The idea is to be faithful and loyal to reality as we perceive it and to recreate social ambiences and characters avoiding the emotional excesses of Romanticism, so far as possible. The problems being many, I will point at the main objection, namely, that which springs from the unavoidable truth that, whatever reality is, each individual perceives it subjectively and thus differently. Here it must be assumed that to describe reality is in itself a subjective act only limited by the necessity to express oneself using metaphors understandable to the readers; Balzac’s descriptions, at least in this book, are often made up of enumerations and analogies and, in certain passages, the use gives way to the abuse to the extent that all contact with the reality described is lost and the reader feels totally submerged in the writer’s mind, a subjective world at that.

Two other issues are at stake, namely, what’s the role within realism of the unlikely, the spiritual and even the supernatural? And, is a mere description of reality a tacit approval of the statu quo? The first of these issues can perfectly be addressed in La Peau de chagrin because the very name of the book is that of a mysterious piece of leather, or something of the sort, powerful enough to grant the wishes of its possessor. Unfortunately, as the traditional story goes and the monkey’s paw of the Simpsons will teach you (by the way, I know that it is based on a tale by W. W. Jacobs but I wanted to introduce some elements of “pop culture” into the review), as that story will teach you, all granted wishes bring a curse along with them. It doesn’t get more fantastic than that, I might say, but this aspect of the book is dealt with by labelling all that concerns it as oriental: the theme is oriental and the skin is probably that of an onager, an Asian donkey, thus placing the supernatural in the fringes of reality, in the world of the exotic, where either the rules that govern us may occasionally be violated or, perhaps, different rules apply. Certainly, in that episode of the book in which all the inventions of modern technology fail to destroy the skin, Balzac tacitly acknowledges that there is a more powerful reality, under or above that in which we live. But what matters is that the world in which that fictional element is introduced appears to us as recognizable and functional, that is, as realistic. The supernatural is only an excuse to introduce more serious matters.

This brings me to the second issue and tangentially also to the philosophical aspects of the book: are we dealing with a justification of the French society (should I say the Parisian society) of the 1830s. By no means, and this is so to the extent that some critics have gone so far so as to state that La Peau de chagrin may be read as a pre-Marxist criticism of the decadent world that emerged from the failed revolution of 1830, so beautifully depicted in Les misérables. Raphaël de Valentin’s obsession with grandeur and social success may easily be interpreted as a denunciation of the values of the bourgeoisie, although there is no depiction of the impoverished masses to serve as the counterpoint of that much wealth wasted in balls and orgies. Feodora, the embodiment of society and the lady our hero falls irremediably in love with, has been unmistakably portrayed so as to come across as egotistic and somehow hypocritical. At last, Mr. Valentin finds real love in the shape of a young and lovely lady, Paulina, who happens to become absurdly rich but manages to keep an innocent and pure heart. She is, of course, beautiful as hell and everyone thinks her irresistible, as well as Raphaël, whom all the girls love but Feodora. This is, by the way, a cliché that appears often in 19^th century novels. Especially when it comes to beauty, some authors don’t shy away from presenting young lasses and lads as irresistible, thus turning their love into a spectacle to be talked about and envied as everyone turns their eyes towards the happy couple when they show up at the opera.

Although in my opinion there is not clear political stance in the book, Balzac addresses in a modern fashion the old idea that the pleasures of society are not only frivolous but potentially dangerous as they may lead to a poisonous egotism: Raphaël is the victim in spite of his being blessed by the authentic love, which triumphs in the domestic scenes between him and Paulina, contrasting with that public love represented by Feodora, who, moreover, confesses herself incapable of loving anyone. However, in the end, egotism triumphs over all other feelings.

Is La Peau de chagrin a pessimistic book? Insofar as it may deal with social issues like injustice or the uneven distribution of wealth and power, I don’t think those matters are treated extensively enough to be conclusive. Insofar as it deals with the ancient struggle between pleasure and the destruction it brings along, I would not say so. Certainly, Raphaël is damned and driven to destruction. Authentic love does not seem powerful enough to save him because he is a monomaniac and he has found it when already too far into his way to the promised abyss. On the other hand, it is not clear to me that Raphaël is totally responsible of his destiny, since there was no escape from the very moment the skin became his possession. There is room, thus, for a different interpretation: that skin is as mysterious as our own skin, as existence itself, unexplained and miraculous; but it is also a curse, that of death. Whether we know it or not, we are an ass in its way to the slaughterhouse. Raphaël is granted a wish certainly not denied to us neither, the carpe diem of a serene life. Uncontrolled desire and its counterpart, obsessive hatred or for that matter denial, only accelerate our consumption into nothingness.