Honoré de Balzac - Legacy

Legacy

Balzac influenced the writers of his time and beyond. He has been compared to Charles Dickens and has been called one of Dickens' influences. Critic W. H. Helm calls one "the French Dickens" and the other "the English Balzac". Critic Richard Lehan says that "Balzac was the bridge between the comic realism of Dickens and the naturalism of Zola."

Gustave Flaubert was also substantially influenced by Balzac. Praising his portrayal of society while attacking his prose style, Flaubert once wrote: "What a man he would have been had he known how to write!" While he disdained the label of "realist", Flaubert clearly took heed of Balzac's close attention to detail and unvarnished depictions of bourgeois life. This influence shows in Flaubert's work L'education sentimentale, which owes a debt to Balzac's Illusions Perdues. "What Balzac started", says Lehan, "Flaubert helped finish."

Marcel Proust similarly learned from the Realist example; he adored Balzac and studied his works carefully, although he criticised what he called Balzac's "vulgarity." Balzac's story Une Heure de ma Vie (An Hour of my Life, 1822), in which minute details are followed by deep personal reflections, is a clear ancestor of the style which Proust used in À la recherche du temps perdu. However, Proust wrote later in life that the contemporary fashion to rank Balzac higher than Tolstoy was "madness."

Perhaps the author most affected by Balzac was American expatriate novelist Henry James. In 1878 James wrote with sadness about the lack of contemporary attention paid to Balzac, and lavished praise on him in four essays (in 1875, 1877, 1902, and 1913). In 1878 James wrote: "Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs perfectly together." He wrote with admiration of Balzac's attempt to portray in writing "a beast with a hundred claws." In his own novels James explored more of the psychological motives of the characters and less of the historical sweep exhibited by Balzac—a conscious style preference. "he artist of the Comédie Humaine," he wrote, "is half smothered by the historian." Still, both authors used the form of the realist novel to probe the machinations of society and the myriad motives of human behavior.

Balzac's vision of a society in which class, money and personal ambition are the major players has been endorsed by critics of both left-wing and right-wing political tendencies. Marxist Friedrich Engels wrote: "I have learned more than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together." Balzac has received high praise from critics as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Camille Paglia. In 1970 Roland Barthes published S/Z, a detailed analysis of Balzac's story Sarrasine and a key work in structuralist literary criticism.

Balzac has also influenced popular culture. Many of his works have been made into popular films and television serials, including Les Chouans (1947), Le Père Goriot (1968 BBC mini-series), and La Cousine Bette (1974 BBC mini-series, starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren; 1998 film, starring Jessica Lange). He is included in François Truffaut's 1959 film, The 400 Blows. Truffaut believed Balzac and Proust to be the greatest of French writers. He was also adapted into a character in Orson Scott Card's alternate history series The Tales of Alvin Maker; he is presented as a crude but deeply witty and insightful man. Chinese author Dai Sijie published Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress)(2000), in which a suitcase filled with novels helps to sustain city youths sent to the countryside for "re-education" during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was made into a film (adapted and directed by the author) in 2002. The Japanese rock band Balzac is also named in his honor.