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.