ALL IS TRUE Shakespeare As epigraph to the first edition to Le Pere Goriot Balzac supplied a version of the Liar Paradox: "All is true" quoth the fiction.' This paradox, of course, lies at the heart of most realist manifestos, like the Goncourts' "Le public aime les romans faux: ce roman est un roman vrai" (6), or Dickens's "It is useless to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl is natural or unnatural, probable or improbable.... IT IS TRUE" to which he adds "It is emphatically God's truth" (lxv). In his address to the reader near the beginning of the novel Balzac repeats the fictional truth-claim which, like Dickens, he hedges by removing it from an empirical to an occult location: "Ah! sachez-le: ce drame n'est ni une fiction, ni un roman. All is true, il est si veritable, que chacun peut en reconnaitre les elements chez soi, dans son coeur peut-etre." (2) The "truth" being hidden, only the fictionist can produce a version of it, exposing in the process those private and communal fictions that wear for us, characters in the social drama, the appearance of truth. The italicized claim, says Victor Brombert, is a "signal of absolute referentiality. Yet it is precisely at this point that all is inverted and converted" (21). Le vrai in Balzac, Isabelle Michelot suggests, is achieved pragmatically by means of an opposing fiction (342). In the phrase "Comedie Humaine," drama serves as vehicle, "truth" as tenor, of a metaphor supporting Peter Brooks's comparison of Balzac's "truth" with that of Gustave Courbet's "allegorie reelle" (Realist Vision 92). The novel proceeds with an air of inclusiveness characteristic of realism, selecting as it goes the kinds of detail that express the multiplicity, the darkness, the mutability of the lower or phenomenal world. (Thus across the whole range of "realistic" art, from Dutch genre painting to film noir, darkness predominates over light, "low" over "high," with a kind of Platonic consistency that would turn the physical image into a metaphysical symbol.) The approach to the Maison Vauquer requires a physical descent ("Elle est situee dans le bas de la Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve"), the elements of whose description are repeated in a passage that converts place into picture, literal into allegorical, phenomenal into ideal truth: La rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve surtout est comme un cadre de bronze, le seul qui convienne a ce recit, auquel on ne saurait trop preparer l'intelligence par des couleurs brunes, par des idees graves; ainsi que, de marche en marche, le jour diminue et le chant du conducteur se creuse, alors que voyageur descend aux Catacombes. (51) The framing of the pension initiates its conversion into a synchronic model of Balzac's world, containing "les elements d'une societe complete" (62). The reader's exposure to this world of symbols, the work's diachronic form, is allegorized in turn as a descent into the underworld. The narrator is realism's Virgil, whose personal voice fades for the moment, leaving its Dante in the presence of a seemingly unmediated reality. What the passage mediates in fact is the relationship between concrete phenomenon and abstract idea. The descent motif imitates the process by which realistic notation is converted into allegory. It confers on the narrative a factitious ontology in which narrator and reader as spectators share a transtextual mode of existence antithetical to that of the naturalistic figures framed and suspended between them. The ontological fiction produces an impression of depth on the flat field of the text. Reader ("vous qui tenez ce livre d'une main blanche" [50]) and narrator, tourist and guide, framed picture and inhabitants of the Maison Vauquer are all represented on the same plane notwithstanding the impression of tactile space that pages of insistent realism have labored to establish. The "unity of a milieu" claimed for these pages (Auerbach 416) must therefore be seen as suppositious: it is the unity merely of a formal composition, a narrated "picture" of men, women, and things to which the illusionist (Maupassant's word for realist [16]) has given the appearance of "les personnes et la representation materielle qu'ils donnent de leur pensee" (Balzac, "Avant-Propos" CH 1: 9). …

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Realism and Trompe-l'œil in Le Père Goriot

Introduction: The Transforming Heroine: Becoming a Wife in the Austen Marriage Plot Chapter One Catherine Morland: Anti-Heroine to Heroine to Wife Chapter Two Juxtaposing Siblings and the Taming of Marianne Chapter Three The Silencing of Elizabeth Bennet Chapter Four Controlling Emma Chapter Five The Other Heroines Coda

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The transforming heroine: becoming a wife in the Austen marriage plot

In this article we explore two of British crime fiction writer James Hadley Chase's novels in connection with Forster's [Aspects of the Novel] distinction between flat and round characters, later c...

Aspects of Characterisation in James Hadley Chase's Crime Fiction: Multiple Perspectives

London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aethetic

Sue Bridehead, along with other characters in and some readers of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, finds something about Arabella irresistibly attractive, even though both Sue and the readers have every reason to dislike Jude's coarse, selfish, troublesome wife. Arabella is responsible for much of Jude's and Sue's troubles, preventing their marriage multiple times and interrupting their lives repeatedly. She is crass and lewd and has no sympathy whatsoever for Jude's higher goals and ambitions; as Jude puts it, there is "something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream" (84). Readers are invited by Jude, Sue, and Hardy himself to resent Arabella's disruptions and unruly presence. Why might a reader resist this invitation to condemn Arabella? What could readers possibly find attractive about Arabella?

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

Realism and Trompe-l'œil in Le Père Goriot

The transforming heroine: becoming a wife in the Austen marriage plot

Aspects of Characterisation in James Hadley Chase's Crime Fiction: Multiple Perspectives

London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aethetic

Rebellious Identification, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arabella

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