La Grande Bretèche (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Criticism of “La Grande Breteche” is usually incorporated in the extensive body of work about La Comedie Humaine in general. As editor and critic Martin Kanes observes, initial scholarship focused on the details of Balzac himself, on his “headlong, heedless plunging through life.” Soon, however, biographical criticism ran its course and more substantive questions about his work began to emerge. This is not to say that critics agreed with each other. Rather, from the moment of Balzac’s death in 1850 until the present, critics and readers have argued about the same questions. Kanes suggested that the essential questions about Balzac are these: “Was the master storyteller a brilliant social analyst? A philosophical thinker? A political commentator? A historian? A cultural anthropologist of sorts? Was he a realist? A Romantic? A visionary? A pre-Marxist Marxist? A pre-Freudian Freudian?” Though Kanes concedes that “In the end, Balzac criticism is paradoxical and suggestive because it is a response to a body of work that is itself paradoxical and suggestive,” he still identifies several major periods of Balzac criticism.

The first period of criticism on Balzac’s work began as soon as he began publishing under his own name and continued until his death. The chief concern of critics and readers of this period was, besides biographical details, whether Balzac was primarily a realist, a chronicler of his times, or primarily a philosopher whose fiction, in Kanes’s words, “was merely the vehicle by which he expressed a metaphysical view of man and the world.” This division among critics became consolidated during the second major period of Balzac scholarship. The period 1850 to 1900 is dominated by the Great Debate, as it has come to be known.

The third major period of Balzac scholarship, 1900 to 1950, departed from the two-sided debate of the previous era. Critics of this age became more concerned with the political dimensions of Balzac’s work and with its explicit literary qualities. By this time Balzac’s work had gained the attention of academics in America, and these scholars were often as interested in Balzac’s ability to render reality as they were in his adherence to literary standards.

The fourth major period of Balzac criticism extends from the 100th anniversary of his death to our own age. With the publication of a volume of critical essays to mark to centenary of Balzac’s death, the old debate over whether he was philosopher or a realist resurfaced. But new ways of thinking about literary texts in recent decades has enriched Balzac scholarship by adding feminist, marxist, and psychoanalytical perspectives as well, to name a few. Furthermore, as Kanes notes, a kind of metacriticsim has also developed: “criticism and analysis of Balzac scholarship and criticism itself.”

Balzac’s contribution to literature goes beyond academic criticism. He has also influenced and inspired other major writers of fiction. In French literature, his obvious successor is Marcel Proust, and he inspired a whole school of realists such as Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. Students of American literature will be interested to know that Balzac was a powerful influence on landmark American novelists Henry James and William Faulkner.