abandon all illusions
Reading Notes 1.4: Balzac's Lost Illusions
Welcome to my Substack. Here you’ll find articles on everything from literature and reading to how we engage with our world through art. Right now you can get an annual subscription for 25% off for a full year. The summer sale lasts for six weeks before returning to normal prices!
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And hello to all the new faces who have subscribed over the last week. If this kind of post interests you, stick around for my Recap of the French Novel, which will arrive in your inbox in a month. In addition to full access to this series, paid subs receive a PDF copy of my outlines and notes at the end of each reading section, so you can build a personal curriculum of your own. These posts are meant to be an outline or skeleton key to the history of the novel, not a study guide—however, they take a lot of my time and effort, so if it interests you, please do try out a paid subscription (you can trial for seven days before you decide!).
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Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
Emile Zola, Germinal
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That’s Me in the Corner, Losing My Illusions
I come to you heartbroken after England’s failure to make it to the finals of the World Cup. I can now return to my normal brain programming, though, because the last week I kind of (really) fell behind on reading. Can you blame me? It was intense.
So that means I have once again shifted my reading schedule. But the nice thing about quals, I suppose, is that at the beginning—before the real crunch time hits—you have the ability to shift things around until you finally lock in on something that works. So, next few weeks will be French novel, and after that we are doing what Napoleon failed to do and invading Russia—well, we’ll be reading some Russian novels. Spain can wait for now.
Okay, jokes and illusion-based puns over, let’s talk about this week’s novel, Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac. This one runs kind of long…Sorry!
Lost Illusions is just one stand-alone novel in Balzac’s gargantuan Human Comedy, which spans 91 completed and 48 uncompleted works. The man wrote a lot, but one of the really joyous things about this series is that despite characters from other books making appearances here and there, Lost Illusions, like Pere Goriot, can be read on its own—with no prior knowledge of the plots of the previous novels in the saga.
More so than The Red and the Black, I think this is French realism at its strongest. Balzac’s skill is, in Auerbach’s words, “capturing the present as history,” and he does that well here. What is at play here is the social world being presented in a way refuses to shy away from the harshness, vulgarity, and oftentimes disappointing aspects of life. I stand by my previous statement from a few weeks ago that the French do realism far better than the British.
I still haven’t quite nailed down exactly why, but I do think it has an awful lot to do with Victorian repression.
