Kunkel on Lost Illusions

Verbosity Blog reprints a salon.com article by Benjamin Kunkel on reading Lost Illusions, which gives a good sense of the novel's plot and continuing relevance. My sense of it is that not a lot of people read Balzac anymore. Here's a few reasons why: (1) the customs and obsessions of 19th century French society can seem distant from modern concerns if you don't pay close attention; (2) Balzac's narrative style is inconsistent and his narrators violate "traditional" objective conventions; (3) Balzac depicts just how shallow, money obsessed and devious people can become when compelled to live in a capitalist world of credit, debt, and investment. Reason number 3 is probably the biggest factor. There aren't a lot of heros in Balzac's world. There can't be. Everybody's too busy trying to keep up, get out of debt, or get ahead. For this same reason, more people need Balzac; those 19th century Parisians aren't as foreign as you might think, and readers might learn a thing or two about themselves. Balzac is arguably the first great novelist of the modern capitalist era, the first novelist to understand what was happening to people, the first one to "get it", how they were being shaped and victimized by social and economic conditions. He also realized that such people were worthy of his gargantuan imagination, that their apparently petty lives contained plenty of drama. Although much has changed, the fundamental conditions still apply, which is why his work continues to reverberate. I could say much of the same about Dickens too.