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Originally published in 1976.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691617473 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1540 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Balzac's Comedy of Words
By Martin Kanes
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1975 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06282-2
CHAPTER 1
Contemporary Theory and the Dissertation sur l'homme
The Dissertation sur l'homme, written in 1819, is a text of highest importance in the development of Balzac's thought. Although it is juvenile and pretentious in conception and execution, it attempts to deal with problems of staggering complexity that had been discussed for centuries: the mind-world relationship, the thought-word relationship, the soul-body relationship. It clearly emerges from the young man's voracious reading in philosophy, and can be viewed as his first attempt at serious theoretical writing. The difficulties were many. Psychology (or what would be so called today), was traditionally barely distinguished from "philosophy." It was marked by no scientific conceptions, and as a defined field of disciplined inquiry it hardly existed. The very word was a neologism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the innumerable dictionaries and compendia of the period, psychological material was distributed under the rubrics of philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, and was usually treated in terms of such abstractions as will, memory, imagination, and above all, soul.
Less amorphous but more stultified, linguistics was in an equally parlous state. It was practically indistinguishable from some aspects of what is today called psychology, and in some quarters tended to blend into theology. Grammar was one of the queens of pedagogy, to be sure, but it was normative grammar. The Dissertation is thus situated in a multiple and somewhat confused tradition.
How was Balzac's interest in psychology and linguistics first aroused? Where did he find his material? To what extent is the Dissertation a reworking of prior notions, and to what extent is it a piece of original thinking? In order to orient our analysis of the Dissertation, we must go back to Balzac's stay in Vendôme, and review briefly the education he received in the Mareschal and Dessaignes establishment. More liberal than most educators, even considered slightly subversive, the Oratorians used comparatively advanced methods. Many subjects were taught in French rather than in Latin, and the study of French itself, as a language, was developed to a relatively high degree. Mareschal was considered an expert in such matters, and a document in local archives describes him as a specialist in grammaire générale. His reputation rested to a great extent on his Essai d'une grammaire latine élémentaire et raisonnée, published in 1808 — that is, during Balzac's residence at his institution. This primer permits us to see how language was studied when Balzac began his serious education, for it reflects the two principal influences on Mareschal: the Port-Royal theory of grammaire générale, and its modification by post-Cartesian sensualism.
One can say without exaggeration that the Port-Royal Grammaire had made it almost impossible to maintain the distinction between thought and word. Arnauld and Lancelot had formulated the principle of an immutable logic translated by a language whose perfection was determined by its conformity with thought. To speak well meant that one thought well, language being but the carbon copy of a universal logic. Words then would signify the objects of thought that are, in their turn, either real things (substances), or manners of being (accidents). This implies, of course, that the original element of the thought-word-object triad is thought itself, and that the operations of the mind are projected outward toward the world. The primacy of thought also implied that a knowledge of selfhood might be experienced without the mediation of language — what André Cresson has called "Tintuition interne, immédiate." This was seen as a process by which the thinking being "cessera même de croire à l'apport du langage." This aspect of the original doctrine came to interest second-generation Cartesians very much indeed; one has merely to think of Malebranche, so often cited in Balzac's Notes philosophiques, and his interest in "pure understanding."
Many of these original Cartesian positions were reflected in Mareschal's book. He begins, with a ceremonious salute to Port-Royal and a succinct statement of its basic doctrine: "Nous parlons pour ex primer nos idées; nos idées s'expriment par des mots; il y a done autant de sortes de mots qu'il y a d'espèces d'idées." The statement is characteristically categorical. The human mind proceeds in a straight line; human reason is unchangeable. And so Mareschal writes, quite naturally, that nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and the ideas they represent exhaust all the possibilities of all languages, "parce que nous ne pouvons pas avoir d'autres sortes d'idées."
Nevertheless, Mareschal was writing in the early years of the new century, when the views of Arnauld and Lancelot had undergone modification. His deference to Port-Royal is counterbalanced by the acknowledgement of debts to Condillac, to Court de Gébelin, to Domergue, to Lemarre, and to the abbé de l'Epée. Although Mareschal makes no direct reference to John Locke, it is clear that one of his major sources is Condillac's volume of Grammaire from the Cours d'études écrit pour Ie prince de Parme, and, through this, Locke's Essay on Human Understanding. The Lockian double source of ideas — external sensation and internal combinations of sensation — was well known to Mareschal. "Un objet se presente a nous, il fait une impression; nous en conservons une image, l'idée," he writes, and he easily derives language from sensory impressions, apparently not perceiving any contradiction with the Cartesian principle of innate ideas: "Quand nous voyons un objet, quand nous pensons à un objet, nous en avons l'image ou l'idée: pour exprimer cet objet, nous Iui donnons un nom ... c'est un substantif." After the substantive, which is the direct designation of the object, Mareschal discerns its modes, thus obtaining the adjective, the verb, and the adverb. This is all he needs to establish human language in all its complexity. His book, of course, is but an elementary manual, which simplifies and often deforms quite subtle theories. But it was exactly here — in the domain of the practical — that Cartesian and sensualist theories could most easily be reconciled. Whether ideas were innate or derived from sensation, everyone agreed that words should translate ideas as precisely as possible, and that when the former were not clear the latter were also confused. If one were to believe Mareschal's book, the ability to write was merely a matter of training and perseverance; Balzac was soon to learn that the truth was not quite so simple.
As one looks at the Dissertation, it becomes quite apparent that it could not have been derived solely from the teaching at the school; and if the reservations expressed by the abbé Bertault on Balzac's supposed omnivorous reading in the school library are correct, then clearly the young man had to reeducate himself from the ground up at a later date. But the Dissertation is distinctly eighteenth-century in tone, suggesting that what Balzac did was to take the simple notions acquired in his childhood, and explore them at much greater depth. In order to judge the significance of the Dissertation and the Notes philosophiques in the context of linguistic theories, therefore, we must briefly reconstruct the various theoretical positions that Balzac must certainly have examined in detail at the end of the second decade of the century.
One of the first things he must surely have observed in his reading of John Locke is that Locke discusses language as a kind of afterthought. Like the Cartesians, Locke considers that words are signs of ideas, but he insists that they are arbitrary, not natural. Locke also insists on an extremely close tie between idea and word, since the latter can refer only to the former: "personne ne peut Ies appliquer immediatement comme signes à aucune autre chose qu'aux idées qu'il a lui-même dans l'esprit." Here, Locke is taking a strong position against what we shall designate as "naive realism," the principle that the word is the sign of the object. Within the mind, moreover, language is the medium whereby complex ideas are created and preserved. This leaves open the possibility that complex ideas can arise without reference to reality, and Locke cites the problem of the translator who cannot find in a given language complex terms corresponding to those in another language. There is even a great danger, according to Locke, in supposing that because we name an object, it exists outside of our minds. This is the essence of "naive realism, and leads, according to Locke," to all kinds of philosophical problems. For Balzac, it led to the preoccupations of the Dissertation and ultimately to La Peau de chagrin, which is largely concerned with this very problem.
In France, sensualism was chiefly expounded by Condillac, sometimes called the French John Locke. The great distinction between the two thinkers, and one that must have struck Balzac strongly, was that Condillac saw the question of language as primordial. His chief complaint about Locke was the Englishman's relative inattention to linguistic theory. Condillac saw that even if thought were anterior to words, a theory of language was an absolute prerequisite to any systematic philosophy, since only language enables us to reconstruct processes of thought. In this way, we approach the perplexing notion that language both reflects thought and creates it. Compared to the Port-Royal conception of language as the static mirror of a perfect logic, Condillac's conception was extraordinarily dynamic.
Condillac's thesis thus contains the possibility that language systems can create thought; that is, that they can determine world views. Had he pursued this tack more vigorously, he might have circumvented many problems in sensualist linguistic theory, and, at the same time, have suggested alternatives to its literary counterpart of naive realism. The crux of the matter was, of course, to explain how language could determine the development of the "art de penser." Such terminology might, after all, be simply a metaphorical way of avoiding the difficulties of the mind-world relationship. Other dissatisfactions with the sensualist position quickly developed as well. By proposing the concept of the mind as a passive recipient, Condillac found himself unable to explain the mechanisms of perception. This point interested Balzac very much, and he speculated upon it in some detail in the Dissertation.
Perhaps more important than any theories Condillac could have brought to Balzac is the distrust of language with which his work is riddled. If, in Locke's system, words signify only ideas, in Condillac even this relationship is placed under suspicion. If words can create ideas, they can be deceptive. This is the chief accusation leveled by Condillac against Descartes and Leibnitz. He criticizes Leibnitz's notion of force, for example, as a word empty of meaning. Condillac had put his finger squarely on the problem of naive realism; indeed, on worse — on freewheeling language that covers an intellectual void: "II semble que, pour soutenir nos conversations, nous soyons convenus tacitement que Ies mots y tiendront lieu d'idées ... chacun peut impunément parler sans avoir appris la valeur des mots. Voulez-vous apprendre Ies sciences avec facilité? Commencez par apprendre votre langue."
Rousseau, whom Balzac had also read, was a thinker scarcely to be avoided around the year 1820, and he was hung as securely as others on the horns of the word-thought dilemma. About halfway through the first section of the Second Discourse, he enigmatically remarks that language seems to have been necessary for language to have been invented (a paradox later picked up by his archenemy Bonald). Bonald used Rousseau to attack the sensualists, of course, but he turned Rousseau's paradox to account by observing that if thought and word were one, man could not have conceived of inventing speech — which had, therefore, to be of divine origin. From the divine origin of language, Bonald derived the infallibility of scriptural writing, and ultimately a whole theocratic political system. Although Balzac did not discuss Bonald's theories until much later, Catholic emphasis on the- centrality of language ("l'homme, intelligence fine, n'est connu que par sa parole," in Bonald's words), was a basic ingredient in his intellectual formation.
Rousseau himself was of no help to Balzac in this connection. A theory of divine origin seemed the only one that could satisfactorily account for the existence of human speech. Rousseau sagely declined to take up a definitive position, preferring to scrutinize the mechanism of language rather than its source. But he did emphasize an idea that was to become increasingly important in the stream of European linguistic speculation. This was the idea that language had its roots not in reason but in irrationality and the passions. According to this view, love, fear, hate, and other emotions first led men to verbalize, and clear articulation followed only when interpersonal persuasion became necessary. Rousseau thus took issue with the dominant eighteenth-century view that logical ideas preceded words, and underscored the then quite novel idea that language might not only be arbitrary, but irrational.
There were, finally, certain aspects of German linguistic thought that we must mention, not so much because they were specifically known to Balzac at this time, but because they were "in the air" and foreshadowed certain developments in his own work. His precise knowledge of German philosophy at this early date is difficult to establish, but was probably very sketchy and derived from handbooks and compendia. The Dissertation itself mentions no important German thinkers, although other manuscripts of this period do refer to Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and Fichte. Sténie, written shortly after the Dissertation, makes a few knowledgeable allusions to Spinoza and Fichte, and it is not improbable that Balzac gleaned something of these thinkers from Madame de Stael's De l'Allemagne. On the other hand, he seems not to have been directly familiar with the thinker who might have been most suggestive: Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Humboldt's linguistic speculations were close to Rousseau's: that man is man only because of language, and yet must already be man in order to discover language. Humboldt was concerned, of course, to act vis-a-vis Kant in much the same way as Condillac vis-a-vis Locke: that is, to point out the failure of the older man to account for language. Humboldt transformed Kant's a priori categories into linguistic ones, but since Kantian categories were themselves qualities of mind, Humboldt's transformation led directly to the doctrine of linguistic relativity. It also led to the concept of language as a determining factor of consciousness, to its "Funktionsfähigkeit." This was embodied in Humboldt's celebrated principle of energeia, the inner form of language, which was not "forma formata" but "forma formans," an expression of the inherent power to create forms. The drive toward form was, in Humboldt's view, the basic operation of language. Neo-Kantians, of course, saw energeia as the projection of the world by the mind, thus establishing the primacy of language over thought.
At times, recondite eighteenth-century arguments over the origin and nature of language seems to lie rather far from Balzac's ultimate concerns. Yet in the years from 1817 to 1820, when he had serious ambitions as a philosophical thinker, they were the main focus of his work. These issues will appear later, transformed as literary themes in the Comédie humaine, where their accuracy as linguistic theories will not be at stake. It is important that this distinction be kept in mind: we will be dealing not with a second-rate philosopher, but with a first-rate novelist.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Balzac's Comedy of Words by Martin Kanes. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Acknowledgments, pg. v
- Contents, pg. vii
- List of Abbreviations, pg. ix
- Introduction, pg. 1
- CHAPTER I. Contemporary Theory and the Dissertation sur I'homme, pg. 15
- CHAPTER II. From the Dissertation to La Peau de chagrin, pg. 41
- CHAPTER III. La Peau de chagrin and the Problem of Creativity, pg. 65
- CHAPTER IV. The Thought-Word Problem in the Comedie humaine, pg. 101
- CHAPTER V. Language and Characterization in the Comedie humaine, pg. 129
- CHAPTER VI. The Narrator and his Words: The Word-Event, pg. 167
- CHAPTER VII. The Narrator, The Reader, and the Abolition of the Veil, pg. 189
- CHAPTER VIII. Illusions perdues and the Word Game, pg. 219
- Afterword, pg. 261
- APPENDIX. The Text of the Dissertation sur Vhomme, pg. 265
- Bibliography, pg. 275
- Index, pg. 293