The Rougon-Macquart Cycle
What exactly did Balzac want to acheive with La Comédie
humaine, what were his specific objectives? Well, although Balzac
began writing novels in the 1820's it was not until the 1830s that his
conception of his role as novelist became more ambitious and more
systematic. He came to articulate the ambition of becoming the complete
French novelist. He saw himself as producing a total picture of French
society, a `history' more inclusive than any historian had ever achieved
or indeed attempted. Balzac wanted to depict a society stratified by
wealth and power. It should be noted here however, that, despite his
ambition, Balzac was never really concerned to depict the urban
working-class (this did not take place until the Naturalists attempted it
in the 1870's and 1880's). For the sum of his work he chose the title
La Comédie humaine, deliberately invoking comparison with The
Divine Comedy (La Divina commedia) of Dante. Balzac's work is
not a religious or metaphysical work - although there are elements of this
- but a human and secular work which aimed to encompass the broad sweep of
social types, the vast range of social situations and settings in the
post-Revolutionary France. Balzac is central to the development of a
Realist aesthetic in his fundamental belief in the project of representing
the social world in its entirety. The key concept here, and its one
discussed by the Marxist literary critic Georg Lukŕcs is that of totality
or a totalizing vision. We can briefly define the concept of totality as
the attempt to show man and society in their completeness, as a complex
network of interrelations. This totalizing impulse lies at the heart of
the classificatory system of La Comédie humaine (its divisions and
sub-divisions, its recurring characters etc.) and of Realist literature
and art in general.
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