Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Hello and welcome back to The Young Reader’s Review! It has been months since I have simply reviewed a novel so I have decided today to explore the world of one of my favorite and one of the most famous French novels: Le Père Goriot (which can be directly translated as “The Father Goriot”) written by the eminent Honoré de Balzac in 1835. Before beginning this book review, I just wanted to thank you for letting this blog reach five thousand reviews ( (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)و ) ! In order to celebrate this, I have created a Twitter account exclusively for this blog that is @thereadertweets (the widget containing the direct link is in the sidebar). 

Now, I invite you to plunge with me into nineteenth century France, a sphere of political turbulence, bourgeoning industrialization, and most of all, a sphere where reigns an epidemic fever for art in a society lost amid technological innovation and alternating governmental authorities. 

Le Père Goriot is probably the most distinguished constituent of the chain La Comédie Humaine. If you are acquainted with Honoré de Balzac’s works, you might know that he used a novelistic technique which constitutes of writing a wide array of novels linked by common characters who are mostly from the petite bourgeoisie (the equivalent of the middle class). All in all, Balzac brought to life more than two thousand characters. He named these connected novels La Comédie Humaine which can be metaphrased as “The Human Comedy”. Notwithstanding this, I wouldn’t say that these books comprises what you could call a series since you can understand each of the novels’ plot without having read the others- I would qualify it as an opus. Likewise, an interesting element of these novels is that the personages can alter in importance throughout the different fictions. For example, a main character of one novel will scarcely be mentioned or will only be a minor character in another (or won’t be alluded to at all). However, La Comédie Humaine was never concluded since Balzac was in point of fact not only extremely ambitious, but was also consequently a voracious worker who never had more than four hours of sleep every night and who preferred drinking coffee to eating a proper meal. Due to this, he died of physical and mental fatigue at the age of forty-nine (1799-1850). Nevertheless, he succeeded to write a prodigious amount of books in his short lifetime (about fifty novels) that have achieved an immense amount of public acclaim in his lifetime and that are still today part of the national French high school curriculum. His work has truly made its mark in French literature and we will see more in depth why later in this review. 

To be able to fully grasp and understand a literary movement, you need to be able to understand the historical context that influences the author and consequently, the oeuvre itself. Firstly, in 1848, exactly half a century after the French Revolution that has forever shaken France, another revolution takes place and establishes the Second Republic governed by Napoleon III. Notwithstanding this, in 1851, the last-mentioned overthrows the Republic with a coup and institutes an authoritarian regime (the Second Empire). But then, this turmoil does not subside: after the defeat of France against the belligerent Prussians in 1870, the Third Republic is pronounced! Yet, a parliamentary democracy is founded. Nevertheless, the power of the proletariat, the industrial Revolution, the progress of the sciences, the discovery of photography (brought into commerce in 1839) and the creation of banks and therefore the importance of money become new sources of inspiration for artists. 

This novel, Le Père Goriot, which takes place in Paris in 1819 relates the story of the relations between the boarders of the Vauquer pension which is kept by a Mrs. Vauquer. Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from Angoulême (commune in the south-west of France) who, it is important to note, can be considered to be an innocent adolescent in the beginning of the novel (this book can correspond to the bildungsroman genre), is the main character of Le Père Goriot and invites us to see and eventually judge nineteenth century Paris through his eyes. Vautrin, a young, Delphic and sardonic man exposes Rastignac to a world of immorality where corruption and criminality reign. You might be wondering why the novel is actually named Le Père Goriot if I haven’t even mentioned a man named Goriot yet. Well, father Goriot (Jean-Joachim Goriot) is a man who must be about seventy years-old who used to be a vermicelli-maker (vermicelli is a variety of pasta that form very fin threads). The reason why we insist that he is “Le père”, is because he was forsaken by his two daughters who were his absolute idée fixe: Delphine de Nuncingen and Anastasie de Restaud. They rely heavily upon their father for financial support. The other boarders at the pension deem this eccentric elderly man to be ridiculous most probably because of his unconditional love for his daughters that is unfortunately unrequited. The reason why his children left him was because they were ashamed of him since he availed himself of the French Revolution to become wealthy by dint of producing pasta. However, due to Goriot’s profuse affection for his daughters, the last-mentioned manipulate him pecuniarily and do not reciprocate this endearment. Moreover, Eugène de Rastignac struggles to enter the aristocratic and noble society and will be compelled to quickly mature and to grow out of his naivety in order to succeed. Also, what will happen when Vautrin’s shocking true identity is revealed and how will Rastignac react faced with the fraudulent world of this modern metropolis? 

Le Père Goriot was a pioneer of the Realism movement in France, one of the most prominent artistic movements in nineteenth century. We can find Realistic traces in seventeenth century and eighteenth century literature but this  This movement is usually considered to have been spurred with Gustave Courbet’s (1819-1877) Burial at Ornans (Enterrement à Ornans) in 1850. The unadorned rawness of this painting resulting from the realism of the depiction of death and contrasting with the style of the Romanticism movement (which took place in the beginning of the nineteenth century) shocked the public of the time. Yet, Le Père Goriot was published fifteen years before the exposition of this painting and is still widely considered (even though it is debatable) to be the fruit, or at least the pathfinder of the Realism movement.

Balzac, at the beginning of the novel, addresses the lector and then says “All is true”, which is a patent allusion to the fact that his novel should not be considered as being a product of debauchery nor as an attempt to scandalize. Opening the novel’s action with this quote immediately brings the reader to question the realism in the literary oeuvre in general and to what realism is. Also, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867, a personal favorite of mine), a famous French poet whose life and works were considered as infamous for the times, considered Balzac to be what he called a “visionary”. This would mean that Balzac’s works went beyond simply “material reproduction” but aimed to actually be a critique of society. Moreover, Realism means describing fictitious people in a way that their environment, interactions and actions seem as genuine as possible. But, in my opinion, Balzac seems to have gone farther than simply representing reality to expose the vices of society. His works can also be analyzed from a psychological point of view. For example, something that I find particularly captivating in his works is that we can notice that the characters’ surroundings replicate the personage’s situation, personality and even psychology. By way of illustration, there is an interesting and famous quote saying that Madame Vauquer is in fact the pension herself. We can note an extended use of a literary tool called the personification where the actual adjectives used to describe the furniture in the building could describe a person (such as “invalid” or “one-eyed”). We can consequently notice while reading the book the parallel alternations of the character and of its environment. The description of the surroundings therefore illuminates the psychology of the characters. 

Also, the scientist Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire’s (1772-1844) influence on Balzac’s oeuvres is conspicuous. This naturalist said that the surroundings in which we evolved play a salient role in differentiating zoological species. However, Balzac wanted to go farther than this theory and wanted to apply it to humans. Be that as it may, this is a larger-scale plan than it seems: there are just so many complex factors and associations of these factors that reside in humanity that this plan seems to be almost impossible. Nevertheless, Balzac strived to understand the implicit laws of humanity and of social interaction. Balzac often said that the strongest restraining law of mankind was, intriguingly enough, Christianity. 

Honoré de Balzac’s style is distinctive but is also a disputable and controversial topic among scholars. High-school students cannot resist the temptation of merely running their eyes over or even skipping some of the lengthier passages where the novelist depicts his descriptions over long, meticulously measured and juxtaposed sentences. Moreover, Marcel Proust, author of the longest novel to have ever been published A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (“In Search of Lost Time”), qualified his extended descriptions as sometimes being superfluous to the plot. I must say that Proust should take a look at his own writing style that is evoked in The New York Times as possessing (Shattuck, Roger (2000). Proust’s Way [Online]. W.W. Wharton & Company. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/shattuck-way.html ) “transcontinetal sentences” and a “motionless plot”. Personally, I have always enjoyed the way Balzac writes: it reminds me of a painter conscientiously pausing his brush upon his canvas so that in the end, he obtains an extremely realistic delineation of his thoughts; all those who gaze at the painting can perceive the same sensations as the artist did (if executed correctly).

Moreover, something that I find particularly captivating is the way Balzac articulates certain emotions through the bias of his sentence structure and paragraphs. For example, when Rastignac pays a visit to a countess (Anastasie de Restaud) whose beauty is made explicit, long, eloquent and cadenced sentences are used to mirror his entire body being imbued in this dreamlike languor provoked by this woman’s allure. In contrast to this, when Eugène is jealous of this countess’s paramour (Maxime de Trailles), the latter’s description does not follow the main character’s stream of sentiment but is written in a more methodical manner: the paragraphs progress logically and conjunctive adverbs are multiplied (A conjunction is as the Oxford Dictionaries say: “A word used to connect clauses or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause (e.g. and, but, if)”). In addition to this, Vautrin, who is an agile character, is often portrayed with the present of narration (this means that the present tense is suddenly used during a narrative in the past tense) which not only gives life to the text, but also echoes his dynamic temperament. 

Moreover, an interesting characteristic of this narrative is that Rastignac is not the narrator. Yes, Rastignacs’ opinions do appear to parallel the narrator’s and the point of view is internal but the third person is singular is used to address the protagonist. Furthermore, the relater does have his own personality and he clearly states his own beliefs even though the first person singular is not employed. He is therefore neither neutral nor impersonal since he does comment and judge certain situations. The latter also has a varied general culture: he will for example quote numerous times Shakespeare and Molière. Yet, Rastignac is what we could call the fictionist’s “delegate” since the relater is still reliant on him. What I personally find the use of an internal and not omniscient narrator to be brilliant since the last-mentioned can only recount what he hears or sees. Consequently, we have the impression that we are actually part of the narrative since we learn about the plot’s development synchronically with the narrator. This therefore arouses our curiosity since we not only do not have any insight on the upcoming startling turns of the plot but, if the narrator presents a conversation that the reader cannot fully comprehend due to lack of context, the lector will want to keep reading in order to appease their mind eager for more knowledge. 

I have always adulated the French Realist and Naturalist literary movement (Naturalism is a literary movement that is an evolution of realism and which adopts a more scientific approach to description). Every time I read a novel written by Balzac or by his fellows (Hugo, Stendhal, Maupassant, eventually and depending on who you ask, Flaubert…) I can truly imagine how it is to live in the nineteenth century in a way that history books just cannot depict. By reading and therefore experiencing the protagonist’s hurdles and obstacles (a main character who usually represents “the norm” of the time and who is quite plain such as Rastignac) we also unconsciously learn about the political and social difficulties of the time. But what is singular about Balzac? Well, I find that having well-nigh brought literary Realism back to life while enriching it in such an original way is remarkable. I cannot help but have a gargantuan amount of respect for Balzac for having undertaken such an ambitious project as La Comédie Humaine and, in the end, living and dying for his oeuvre. That is what you can call passion. 

That is it for my book review of Le Père Goriot! I hope that you have enjoyed it and that you will now be running to your local library or bookshop to be able to have it in between your hands. If you do read it please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below about what yours thoughts are concerning this novel (If you took pleasure reading this, The Lilly in the Valley is a personal favorite and Lost Illusions is very well-known). Thanks for reading and see you next time for another book review! d=(´▽｀)=b 

Copyright © 2017 Margaux Emmanuel