There were great writers who took the craft as a general rudder for their entire lives. And from that idea, writing becomes an ambition that ends up transcending the character to reach humanity as a whole. Living around literature with the intention of filling it with all the emotions and ideas that can fit into the human being sounds pretentious. Balzac He tried it with great fortune, despite the fact that, of course, he could never finish his great work: The Human Comedy.
It is said of Balzac who was one of the first great royalists who glimpsed the still distant horizon of the twentieth century and understood the passage through the world of a writer as a parallel testimony to History. The subjective is what really testifies to what happened ..., everything else is a transcription or a dictation from the intentionality of those who manage to get hold of the patent of what happened.
What would our knowledge about ourselves be without Art or Literature? The mere idea anticipates a sensation of emptiness, of data and official stories, of humanity as a continuous sketch on a canvas in the end, poorly scribbled by disconnected strokes.
So if Balzac was one of the first realists of his time, after other previous labels of the romantics (for me there is not much difference as long as what is told starts from the subjective, the truly important of all human events).
If I understand any difference between labels, perhaps in this case it is a more crude intention about people's lives, perhaps trying to hold the soul to the ground, against the previous romantics (who, by the way, continued to write, not is that a current drags from the face of the earth to the other).
The paradox of all this of the currents is clearly reflected if we consider that one of the great influences of Balzac was Walter Scott, a great romantic ... or encompassing some fantastic creations with gothic overtones. Difficult to pigeonhole an author, impossible really in the case of Balzac.
Let's label, yes, for the sake of ordering everything. But we will not always be right. The matter is part of The Human Comedy, the great unfinished work of this French genius.
3 recommended novels by Balzac
The human comedy
A great work, the summum of his creation... Balzac considered writing the book of books, on a par with The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote or the Bible. And he touched it..., but life did not give him the strength to complete it. A sum of scenes between the essayistic and the literary. Philosophy and thought in front of (or about) characters and avatars of all kinds.
A total of 87 novels that started from the initial idea plus another 7 unforeseen ones (in large projects it usually happens that unforeseen events appear). The Human Comedy is a tremendously paradoxical work for Balzac, with it he sustained himself financially and from it new fronts emerge that need to be covered in his understanding to complete the work.
Despite not being finished, this volume is simply overwhelming for the reader. Its sum of scenes, its literary composition that addresses everything, its historical and intrahistoric overtones. The world of the XNUMXth century included in this heterogeneous composition.
Zapa skin
What I already told you. Not everything is uniform labeling like a factory serial product. In this initial novel by Balzac we find the hybrid of the fantastic and the realistic as a transition towards what would come later.
In Balzac's fantasy he found a fabulous space for philosophical meditation, because only in comparatively acceptable scenarios for a reader can a philosophy be proposed that is simply assumed from within. To look at the fantastic is to discover a scenario where everything is possible and where the reader is predisposed to thinking from the outside, without conditions or prejudices.
A novel in short that contradicts Balzac's own official essence or that at least throws a slap at all those who seek to put a unifying criterion first. Balzac was also fantasy and rambling. It is clear that his intention was not the mere entertainment or the solace of the soul, but to fantasize, he also fantasized.
Papa Goriot
This novel was incorporated into the Human Comedy volume, but has its own entity as one of the author's greatest novels. His portrait of the Paris of the time, of its very disparate scenarios between classes, of misery and politics incapable of governing the designs of the people. Humans can become monsters. From the misery, the frustration and the ambitions of unashamedly learning to survive, Goriot discovers that his daughters cease to be those wonderful beings of creation when they succumb to the underworld.
Eugène Rastignac slyly seeks his place among the wealthy classes, we discover with him how intelligence towards deception can end up making its way to the top. High society, its customs and pettiness. Raw realism of those private scenes that Balzac developed so masterfully.
