Beyond bibliomania : The multiple games of literary allusion played by Balzac

Résumé 0

This investigation begins by looking at the numerous allusions Balzac makes to the writings of Nodier, especially the latter’s Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux, which delighted him on its publication in 1830. In this particular case, it was more than just Balzac the journalist’s enthusiasm for a popular work by an author he readily acknowledged as being, in some respects, his mentor. Instead, Nodier’s writings were a central facet of Balzac’s experimentation with form and expression at the time. In its continuation of the self-consciousness that characterized the aesthetic of Rabelais and Sterne, Nodier’s eccentric composition in turn invited imitation. Balzac rose to this challenge in a number of ephemeral (and sometimes unfinished) texts he produced in the pivotal early 1830s. This imitative activity may be seen as providing him with a crucially important lesson, namely that writing, as practiced in the self-conscious tradition highlighted by Nodier, allots the reader a presence in the text, a presence that is of the utmost importance. Thereby, Balzac the reader is duly transformed into Balzac the writer. This engagement with the reader, not only in these examples of self-conscious writing but also in some of his prefaces in the same period, is seen to be multi-dimensional, just as Balzac the novelist and storyteller explicitly conceives of the reader as a multifaceted figure, the counterpart of his conception of himself as a Protean writer. Textual play of the same kind can also be seen to operate implicitly in the opening pages of Eugénie Grandet, at first sight a novel clearly set apart from works in the self-conscious tradition.