SOURCE: Thiher, Allen. “Balzac and the Unity of Knowledge.” In Fiction Rivals Science: The French Novel from Balzac to Proust, pp. 37-80. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Thiher claims that Balzac transformed the novel from philosophical allegory to a discussion about the nature of knowledge, and explores the author's attempt to offer a reality in his novel that would compete with the supposed total truths posited by scientific discourse.]

Qui ne pardonnerait ce dernier plaisir à un homme de science et de poésie?

[Who would not forgive a man of science and poetry for this last pleasure?]

—Balzac, La Peau de chagrin

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

1778:	Mesmer arrives in Paris with his medical theory based upon animal magnetism, sometimes viewed as the precursor to psychotherapy.
1785:	Coulomb publishes his research on the inverse square laws of electrical and magnetic attraction.
1789:	After several years of research that included the discovery of oxygen and the development of chemical nomenclature, Lavoisier publishes his Traité élémentaire de chimie containing the law of mass conservation.
1801:	Pinel caps neo-Hippocratic revival in medicine with Traité médico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mental ou la manie, often considered first modern work of psychiatry.
1800:	Bichat's Traité des membranes results from research that founds histology and experimental physiology.
1809:	In his Philosophie zoologique Lamarck proposes that species emerge from a gradual process of development going from the simple to the complex.
1811:	Jöns Jacob Berzelius states that electrical and chemical forces are one and the same.
1812:	Sir Humphry Davy publishes his Elements of Chemical Philosophy, the major work by this romantic scientist who refused Dalton's theory of atoms as basic elements.
1817:	Founding paleontology, Cuvier develops Linnaeus's system of classification with Le Règne animal.
1819:	Working after Young's experiments in light interference, Fresnel undertakes work on a wave theory of light, against Newtonian theory, reported in a mémoire to the Academy of Sciences.
1824:	Carnot's Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu first describes the relation of work and heat later developed in thermodynamics.
1827:	After Oersted's discovery of the magnetic field generated by an electric field, Ampère's work results in mathematical formulation of electromagnetism.
1829:	Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis publishes Du Calcul de l'effet des machines, giving definitions of work and kinetic energy.
1830:	Differences between antievolutionist Cuvier and transformationist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a defender of the morphological unity of all living beings, result in public debate at the Academy of Science. Goethe writes a report on it.
1830:	Stendhal publishes Le Rouge et le noir.
1831:	Balzac publishes La Peau de chagrin.

Moral discourse, pornography, utopian eroticism—these are some of the genres found in the fiction of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers also used the novel to explore philosophical conundrums. Names like Richardson, Defoe, Montesquieu, Sterne, Voltaire, Diderot, and Goethe, among others, come to mind as illustrative of fiction's capacity to embody philosophical thought. My thesis in this chapter is, however, that the novel changed when Balzac transformed it into a more capacious epistemic discourse than philosophical allegory. Balzac understood this change as a challenge to science. He saw himself engaged in rivalry with the scientific discourses of his time at the same time that he saw his mission to be that of a collaborative critic. He understood his rivalry to engage not only the new totalizing discourses of history and metaphysics, but also the new discipline of chemistry and the older one of Newtonian mechanics, as well as disciplines such as medicine, physiology, and biology that offer direct knowledge of life forms, and hence of humanity. Most importantly, after the natural history of Linnaeus and Buffon, and with the work of Lamarck, Cuvier, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, biology was emerging as the totalizing study of life forms as Balzac came to maturity. Moreover, geology and paleontology were taking their modern form; the story of the earth and its inhabitants was becoming precisely that: a story conceived as a history, or science as narrative.

The history of the novel, beginning with Balzac and, with some restrictions, Stendhal, is a tale of its reaction to, and interaction with, epistemic discourses as various as metaphysics, history, and natural science. Here I place the accent on the most neglected feature of that story: the novel's encounter with natural science. Only through successful competition with science, or so believed Balzac and a good many of his successors, could the novel justify its claims to offer access to reality in ways that might even be superior to scientific discourses with their claims to represent the totality of knowledge.

Balzac endorsed the view that knowledge is ultimately granted by a unified discourse. If reality is a single totality—a wistful axiom that contemporary physics pursues in its own way with its dream of a final, unified theory—it is not unreasonable to believe there should be a single, totalizing discourse that offers knowledge of that reality. Or as Balzac's alter ego scientist, Louis Lambert, says, “Aujourd'hui, la science est une”—knowledge is one. In the context of Balzac's novel, this proposition is not, however, a straightforward endorsement of a nineteenth-century version of the belief in a unified theory: Louis Lambert is a scientist who goes mad pursing the axiom that “il est impossible de toucher à la politique sans s'occuper de morale, et la morale tient à toutes les questions scientifiques” [it is impossible to separate politics and morality, and that morality involves all scientific questions].¹ Lambert goes mad pursuing the Enlightment dream of totalizing knowledge. And this madness marks a significant change of attitude about the belief in the unity of all discourses that was characteristic of much Enlightenment thought. As we have seen, this unity is presupposed by Condorcet's attempt to figure physical and moral probability, and it underwrites Kant's view that pure reason can give rise to synthetic a priori propositions for both mathematics and morals. From a comprehensive historical perspective, it is clear that many Enlightenment axioms about knowledge continued in France, in science and history, well into the nineteenth century, and that romantics like Balzac and Stendhal, the romantics who invented modern realism, basically accepted the epistemic axioms of the Enlightenment. But Lambert's madness, perhaps like Faust's damnation before him, points to a certain loss of confidence. And, in the case of Balzac, it suggests that he sometimes accepted Enlightenment axioms the better to contest them.

Lambert goes insane in his quest for knowledge, and this insanity can be interpreted as a critique of the Enlightenment beliefs that Balzac acquired through his education. In his earliest essays, Balzac shows himself to be a Lockean nominalist, but he is also enough of a Cartesian (or Laplacean) physicist to believe that he could not affirm the existence of an eternal “principle” until “everything had been explained mathematically.”² Locke, Descartes, Condorcet, and Malbranche, among others, provided a rationalist education for the young novelist growing up during the Empire. The other side of his education was provided by those eighteenth-century novelists, from Defoe through Richardson, who had produced a realist discourse more or less respecting the probabilistic knowledge that one supposedly garnered, through the senses, about everyday reality. Ultimately, however, at least to the contemporary reader, the realism of these novelists subordinates representation to moral discourse: epistemic interests are often sacrificed to more or less allegorical demonstrations. It hardly seem contestable that a reader has gained little knowledge, though much edification, when, after reading Moll Flanders, he or she can affirm that it is good to be virtuous when one is rich.

It is possible, of course, to argue that there is a moral dimension to Balzac's work—though that dimension is not so easily encapsulated as in a work by an English puritan. The difference between eighteenth-century fiction and Balzac's realism is evident, I think, in the way in which the moral dimension in Balzac is subordinated to an epistemic desire. Ethical judgments about the world, of which there are many in a Balzacian novel, are subordinated to the totalizing knowledge that the novel can offer in the first place. Knowledge precedes evaluation. In its most radical form, Balzac's desire to create an epistemic discourse results in what he called “philosophical” works, or novels that intend to promote the development of a unitary science or field of knowledge as Balzac conceived it. Viewed from this perspective, realism and metaphysical speculation can be seen as part of the same epistemic impulse in Balzac, for speculation is intended to promote epistemic ends. The quest for knowledge results in the realism of a Père Goriot, but also in the fantastic metascientific discourse of Séraphita as well as the extravagant allegory of La Peau de chagrin.

Although the Enlightenment framework sets out the most widely accepted criteria for what constituted the real and the knowable in the early nineteenth century, this framework was being challenged as Balzac was developing as a novelist. The latter part of the eighteenth century had already seen, in medicine and natural history, the vitalist challenge to the mechanistic paradigm. Vitalists postulated a life force that could explain human physiology and psychology, a life force that could not be described in mechanical terms. (Some literary romantics wanted to see in the vitalist challenge to the comprehensiveness of Newtonian mechanics a sign that physics and dynamics had no relevance for knowledge about life, but this was a minority movement.) The critique of the scope of Newtonian mechanics was hardly unique to vitalists. The challenge to its totalizing scope occurred in several quarters in the early nineteenth century. In the France of the 1820s, a critique of Laplacian physics was undertaken by physicists such as Ampère, with his work in electrodynamics, and Fresnel, whose renewal of a wave theory of light largely discredited Newton's particle theory. Fourier had begun the study of thermal conduction and was certain that heat was part of a class of phenomena that could not be explained by mechanical forces.³ And Sadi Carnot had theorized that the amount of energy produced by a steam engine is dependent only upon the temperature differential between the beginning and end phase of its cycle. This principle was to lead to an understanding of heat as a form of kinetic energy. Carnot's thought about energy was not only a nascent revolution in science that demonstrated an area in which Newtonian laws of motion were not relevant, but, as we shall see, it finds pertinent resonance in Balzac's own way of thinking about forces in conceiving the causes of events in fiction.

The active critique of scientific disciplines found in Balzac's novels is part of an ongoing historical debate. Largely centered on Paris in the first decades of the century, this debate was promoted by scientists who felt too limited by Newtonian or Kantian metaphysics, or found simply that Newtonian explanations did not fit the data, as in the case of light waves and thermal conduction. In general terms one can say that the early nineteenth century witnessed a number of debates, by scientists as well as philosophers, concerning the frameworks that offered access to reality. In the context of these active debates, Balzac believed that he could actively contribute, in terms that were scientifically viable, to the solution of these debates—debates, for example, as to what constitutes mind, matter, and life forces. To take Balzac's epistemic quest seriously requires one to place these questions in the foreground of reading Balzac.

Balzac embarrasses some of his most partisan readers with his claims to have knowledge about, say, imponderable forces and spiritual fluids that, from the viewpoint of today's science, seem rather quirky indeed. But it seems to me that this embarrassment comes from having only a partial grasp of the conditions of possibility for knowledge in the first part of the nineteenth century—for Balzac is, often, no more quirky than mainline scientists of the time. Some of the “models” Balzac proposes for scientific understanding have disappeared—such as the physics of imponderables, mesmerism, and phrenology. Mesmerism and phrenology are, for example, historical oddities belonging to the realm of failed theories (though some revisionist historians want to see in these parasciences the beginnings of psychotherapy or even of neurological determinism). Imponderables, on the other hand, were a rational solution to problems that could not be accounted for in other terms: before Carnot, nobody had found a way of measuring thermal energy, so heat seemed to be a weightless imponderable. (It required an “epistemological engine” like the steam engine to make this measurement possible.) A history of European culture—scientific and literary—should take into account the existence of many odd and unsuccessful theories, as well as the successful ones, for the history of culture is as much a history of the role of unsuccessful theories as of those relatively few that have survived. Moreover, unsuccessful theories often reveal that the line of demarcation between science and literature can be tenuous.

Literary history, I add, should certainly deal with these theories, and not only because they interested major writers like Balzac. Literature is concerned with impossible discourses as well as renditions of the possible. Literary historians can look upon failed scientific theories as a domain of the imaginary that, drawing upon Borges, one can call a realm of fantastic literature. One may speak of unsuccessful paradigms with regard to unsuccessful scientific theories—though I take my distance from the view that the history of science is punctuated by so-called paradigm shifts. Indeed, it seems to me that the history of most scientific disciplines is the history of a series of questionings and shifts that, over a period of time, has evolved continuously to such an extent that the early founding thought of a given discipline finally looks like a fantasy. Rarely does this evolution entail a dramatic rupture between one paradigm and another—though one can argue this point indefinitely. For example, Buffon's idea that animal families were created by degeneration from an original stock seems bizarre today, but it can be argued that this now “fantastic” idea generated a development that runs continuously from eighteenth-century natural history through Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, then Darwin, to culminate in our own neo-Darwinian theories of evolution.

When historically situated, Balzac's interest in, say, animal magnetism is not simply eccentric, but part of his creative participation in the debate about imponderable substances and the nature of “immaterial” forces such as heat and electricity, for which there were several theories in the early part of his century. Imponderable substances—substances without weight—were put forward as an almost plausible theory with which one could explain everything—from the mysteries of electricity and magnetism, to the form heat assumed as a transferable substance called caloric—before energy was finally a received concept. (In fact, even at the end of the nineteenth century, one could find a few retrograde physicists who persisted in viewing the doctrine of imponderables as a plausible doctrine.) Balzac's relation to the sciences of his time is sometimes complex and subtle, sometimes bullying and full of braggadocio, but in the main it is not greatly out of step, for he constantly studied science of all sorts. Quite simply, Balzac wanted the novel to offer knowledge that could rival the sciences in their quest for totalization. This enterprise meant that Balzac accepted some scientific models, rejected others, and considered all of them. His intent was really nothing less than a revision of science so as to bring it in harmony with the knowledge he could offer in the novel—in his creation of an epistemic totalization that was, by a priori definition, the ultimate goal of knowledge.

Balzac explicitly criticized scientific models for various purposes. However, most of his realist novels by and large implicitly accept the Newtonian-Laplacian worldview of post-Revolutionary science. Several of his “philosophical” works offer a critique of Newton and explore non-Newtonian theories of knowledge and the world. However, in such realist works as Le Père Goriot or Le Curé de Tours, Balzac does not challenge the materialist causality of celestial mechanics and terrestrial dynamics that Newton's French followers, such as Lagrange and Laplace, had succeeded in making into the dominant scientific model of the early nineteenth century—the model that served well into that century as an ultimate court of appeal for deciding what was knowledge of the real. This acceptance and criticism reflects historical struggles with Newton, as well as Balzac's own psychological make-up. He was educated in the mechanistic worldview, which sometimes caused him to believe that he himself was a victim of that “fatal” modern education in mathematics and science that the avowedly reactionary Count de Mortsauf deplores in Le Lys dans la vallée (The Lily of the Valley): “L'éducation modern est fatale aux enfants. … Nous les bourrons de mathématiques, nous les tuons à coups de science, et les usons avant le temps” [Modern education is fatal for children. … We stuff them with mathematics, we kill with doses of science, and wear them out before their time].⁴ But Balzac could not overthrow the education that he criticized, for it gave him the grounds for criticizing the Enlightenment.

With this education, Balzac could stay abreast of contemporary scientific developments. For example, with regard to chemistry, Balzac knew quite well that Lavoisier (1743-1794) had given shape to modern chemistry with his work on elements and atomic weights; and that, during Balzac's youth, the atomism of Dalton (1766-1844) had taken chemistry a step farther toward a way of understanding the basic elements. Dalton's atomism had then been rationalized and given its modern symbolism by the Swedish chemist Berzelius (1779-1848)—whom Balzac literally memorized and rather much plagiarized for his own theorizing in his novel centering on research in chemistry, La Recherche de l'absolu. Balzac was equally as attentive to the way the foundations of modern biology were established in the Paris of his youth. A very young Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), who became Balzac's friend later in life, was, in 1793, the first professor of zoology at the Museum of Natural History, and the zoologist Cuvier, for whom Balzac expressed great admiration, introduced comparative anatomy into zoology for the first time shortly thereafter. Balzac knew that their contrasting theories about the unity of nature came to a head in their public debate of 1830, a debate that can be taken as emblematic of the unsettled nature of the biological theory Balzac confronted and theorized upon just as he began to write La Comédie humaine. Balzac found himself drawn to the viewpoints of both scientists. In defending an evolutionary view of the unfolding of life forms, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire proposed that all animals tend to repeat the same archetype, and that homologies of form demonstrate the principles of connection that all animals manifested. Cuvier denied evolution, maintaining that animal functions derive from morphology—a principle Cuvier put to use in inventing the science of paleontology. As we shall presently discuss, Balzac's own invention of character, his nonpsychological development of types, owes much to both scientists.

In brief, Balzac confronted a situation in the Paris of his youth in which Lavoisier's chemistry, the electrodynamics of Ampère, and Cuvier's biology were issues of public debate. Even an ancient discipline like medicine was receiving new foundations. Bichat, a model for Balzac's ideal doctor, had founded histology, and Magendie was undertaking the experiments that led to experimental physiology. (Medicine largely remained, however, an eclectic mixture of medieval humors theory, mechanistic explanation opposed by vitalism, and rudimentary physiology, for a modern theory of disease based on microbiology was some decades away—Pasteur was born in 1822.) In the context of this unique situation in which Paris became, for at least a generation, the world's most important center for scientific thought, it is not surprising that Balzac felt it incumbent to take part in scientific debates—for how else could the novel be transformed into something with an epistemic status that could rival the success of the sciences? Simply by being in the Paris of Magendie and Ampère, of Cuvier and Lamark, of Carnot and Fresnel, a novelist alive to what was shaping the world was obliged to pay attention to the scientific theories transforming epistemic discourse—which included at the time controversial ideas, such as mesmerism and animal magnetism, that strike us today as failed theories. In résumé, the Paris of 1830, to name a symbolic date, was a place in which rivalry among various theories and epistemic models was intense. The totalizing worldview proposed by Laplacian-Newtonian mechanics came under criticism for its views of physiology, optics, and heat, but, for at least another generation, it remained a, if not the, fundamental model for understanding the world.

Balzac drew upon these debates for theories that he in turn translated into, and elaborated as, literary models. He used the nascent science of biology as well as the taxonomic tradition of natural history, arguably for the first time, as categories for understanding the human world. In his novels, Balzac wants to describe not just isolated classical “types” or caractères of the moraliste tradition, but related taxa that can be defined in terms of a totality of interrelationships. This is not to say that Balzac does this taxonomy systematically. Rather, taxonomy proposes an ideal model for understanding, drawn largely from nascent biology. Balzac theorized that, since human nature is encompassed by the presupposed totalization of knowledge, the nature of human society can be explained through its homologies with the entire natural world. This is analogous to an understanding of nature such as Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire understood it. But Balzac's totalizing synthesis also understands taxonomy in terms of morphological differences—whence Balzac's admiration for Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's opponent, Cuvier. Balzac's totalization aims at reconciling the divergent theses of these adversaries by reconciling synthesis with analysis—to use the terms that Goethe used in his rather confused reports on the debate between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier. Synthesis means linking characters in terms of totalization, whereas analysis led to characterization by means of the distinctive trait—traits drawn from Balzac's own ideas about the morphology of the human species.

In this description of the epistemic rivalry between Balzac and natural science, it is perhaps a bit misleading to maintain that Balzac was influenced by the biology that was being formulated in Paris by Lamark, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Cuvier. It is more accurate to speak of a convergence of theoretical interests in which Balzac found, in contemporary biology, analogies with his own epistemic vision. Early biology and Balzac's novels manifest the same concerns with vision, taxonomy, and figuring the relation of the particular to the whole—the Ganzheit that is the ultimate referent of early nineteenth-century natural philosophy. Balzac was in a sense predestined to get along with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and his historicizing the totality of life forces evolving and undergoing transformation in time. It is not immediately clear, in spite of my comment above, why Balzac honors so effusively the taxonomical observer that he found in the comparative anatomist Cuvier. Cuvier refused for religious, as well as scientific, reasons to accept transformism, but his work in paleontology was nonetheless crucial in proving that there have been successive extinctions of many species. Between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, biological science was historicized toward the past and toward the future, and in the two scientists Balzac encountered thinkers who, in different ways, placed individual species in contact with the totality of the biological and, for Balzac, the social sphere. Balzac admired both scientists for underwriting different aspects of his own totalizing theory in which society and nature are fused as a unity. If one wants to find a powerful source for this shared vision, one should look back to the naturalist Buffon, whose influence on both Balzac and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, though not Cuvier, is notable. Buffon promoted a nominalism in taxonomy that rejected Linnaeus and his taxonomy in favor of a view proposing the interconnected totality of nature and natural beings. According to the Buffon of the “Premier discours” of his Histoire naturelle (1749)—a major Enlightenment source for the belief in totalization—natural history is nothing less than the everramifying story of everything that the universe offers us.

With these epistemic themes in mind, let us turn, first, to works in which Balzac explicitly deals with issues of knowledge, and then to examples of his realist work in which the novel is used as a vehicle for knowledge of the world. This division corresponds roughly to a difference between works that are metaepistemic and works, especially the realist works, in which the work itself embodies the epistemic project in the description of the world and the events that take place therein. The first Balzacian novel to illustrate this epistemic play is La Peau de chagrin (translated variously as The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass's Skin), an ironic allegory about knowledge that shows the critical distance Balzac could take from the sciences of his time. This relatively early novel was written in part after the debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and published as a book in 1831. In it, Balzac clearly manifests a desire to rival scientific discourse. He does so in the novel through an ironic critique of science's claims to knowledge. The overlap of the novel's creation with the debate of 1830 on the unity of nature is significant. It is quite likely that the open conflict of two major scientific minds gave Balzac warrant to consider himself capable of entering scientific debate and to criticize science while pursuing his own epistemic aims. When the experts disagree, then it is up the independent-minded individual to enter the fray, to weigh the evidence, and to criticize errors. (This is, I add, a relevant lesson for critizens facing the claims of genetics today.) This critical strategy is central not only to La Peau de chagrin but also to several successive early novels in La Comédie humaine, such as Louis Lambert (first version in 1832), La Recherche de l'absolu (first version in 1834), and Séraphita (1835). These are all works that explicitly enact critiques of science and procedures of knowledge. Taken together, they offer an overview of Balzac as self-conscious epistemologist.

The marvelous allegory of La Peau de chagrin introduces Balzac's epistemic critique in the guise of an exercise in aspect-seeing. Aspect-seeing, or seeing according to the perspective adopted on foreground and background, demonstrates that the very relativity of knowledge entails, as a consequence, that the novel must be considered an ideal vehicle for an epistemic quest. The relativity of knowledge allows the novel to rival science. (I use the notion of relativity here in its classical sense that, from Galileo through the nineteenth century, proposed that knowledge is relative to position.) Knowledge is relative to the perspective adopted by the observer confronting phenomena that may allow different explanations—and for which the novel is an ideal medium. At least two perspectives on the world are proposed in La Peau de chagrin. The novel's hero, Raphael, experiences a rise and fall that, on the one hand, may be explained by the natural forces that make him extremely lucky and then cause him to die from tuberculosis, or, on the other hand, the hero's death may be fatefully caused by a magic ass's skin that perceptibly shrinks each time it seemingly grants the hero one of his desires. So it is imperative, from a scientific standpoint, to explain why the skin shortens with each wish granted.

Raphael had himself been a Faustian seeker of knowledge whose passion for learning found expression in a treatise that he wrote offering a theory of the will. However, at the novel's outset, he is ready to commit suicide when he encounters a Mephisto-like antiquarian who gives him the wish-granting ass's skin. Raphael learns that he may anticipate that his every desire will be granted—except the desire not to desire. Balzac's allusion to Faust underscores the epistemic allegory here, since Faust's surfeit of knowledge leads him to desire to desire and thus to the infernal pact. Raphael's leap into desire suggests an allegory with a different epistemic slant. His is an allegory figuring the limits of desire that, when exceeded, portend the loss of the energy fueling desire. Energy is a term that is not quite yet in its place here, for the modern notion of the conservation of energy, or energy itself for that matter, was only first being theorized at the time that Balzac set out to write La Comédie humaine. Paralleling the development of the concept of energy, Balzac's allegory is about energy as the fuel propelling both desire and knowledge, so it is worth exploring analogies between the development of energy as a scientific theory and Balzac's literary knowledge of energy.

Balzac's contemporary Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) made one of the first modern attempts at theorizing energy in 1824, but his work on the “motive force of fire” went virtually unnoticed for another generation. Carnot died of cholera the year after Balzac published La Peau de chagrin. Remarkably, Balzac's concept of desire as energy strikes a coincident note with Carnot's view that heat energy is nothing other the motion of the particles of bodies, coincident in the sense that Balzac theorizes about “motive force” as something that can be defined as other than itself. This is analogous with the way Carnot was working toward the idea that heat and energy are interconvertible and equivalent.⁵ It would be hyperbole to claim an exact correspondence here, but it is important to see that, in tying characterization to a force like energy, Balzac was participating in the search for new ways of theorizing motion and acts, and the power that lies behind them. Balzac was among the first to equate desire and what we now call energy, and he was among the first to relate desire and energy to the epistemic project itself: desire and energy are part of the knowing subject. In La Peau de chagrin, Balzac's allegory about knowing points up the limits of knowing, since to desire to know entails an expense of energy—as do all other forms of desire. Knowledge itself is the desire to go beyond what one can immediately see, which is the epistemic desire par excellence of Newtonian physics. But such desire leads to boundless expenditures of energy and, finally, death.

Balzac's epistemic allegory figures the limits of vision, though in rather comic terms. In La Peau de chagrin, an epistemic comedy is enacted in the way the supernatural seems to have become a part of the natural world. With the regularity of a Bergsonian comic machine, the magical shrinking skin is a diabolical causal agent, shrinking as energy is expended, that is as natural as death. From another perspective, however, the skin is simply one of those millions of things that one sees drying up and for which there is usually no explanation. Science is limited, since explanations are always relative to the epistemological framework involved. In his critique, Balzac makes a heavy-handed demonstration of the scientists' impotence to explain the shrinking of the skin, for it can be explained differently by every science, and thus seemingly by none. However, Balzac's demonstration seems less emphatic if we recall that, immediately before the novel was published, all of Europe had witnessed the edifying spectacle of two of the leading natural scientists of the time trying to destroy each other in their public debate of 1830: Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier had equally plausible theories about life and its variegated manifestations. With his shrinking skin, Balzac seems to imply that life, like any other magical phenomena, allows multiple and relative theories to explain it.

Most pointedly in the novel, then, Balzac undertakes a satire of natural history and medicine that shows the distance he could take from his masters and the confidence he felt in demonstrating the limits of received forms of knowledge. Toward the novel's end, when Raphael is near death from his successive wishes, he takes the skin to a zoologist who is classifying ducks in the hopes of producing a new species (a probable allusion to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's attempt to produce monster chickens by modifying their eggs). To explain the skin's shrinking, Balzac's zoologist uses rhetorical overkill with empty explanations drawing upon natural history, explanations that are something of a parody of Buffon's verbosity. These epistemic pirouettes leave Raphael with the opinion, reflecting what Buffon did hold in fact about Linnaeus, that all classification in natural history is merely a nominalist matter of nomenclature. The issue of aspect-seeing is central here: the naturalist sees the skin as an excuse for taxonomy, the harried romantic hero sees the skin as the central mystery of his expiring life.

Raphael goes to see a mechanical philosopher who views the skin as another illustration of the central mystery that mechanical philosophy has yet to explain: movement. And a mechanic sees the skin as a substance to be manipulated—something that he can't do. Nor can a chemist proceed to do much with the skin, although he views it as a substance to be decomposed into its basic elements, that is, until, confronting failure, he finally decides to view it as part of the class of things that one should not mention to the Academy.

Raphael takes his own decrepit body to doctors who view him according to the lights provided by their doctrines. Balzac does quick overviews, with comic overtones, of several reigning medical doctrines of the early nineteenth century. Each theory determines what one sees, since knowledge is relative to the perspective provided by an epistemic doctrine. A materialist doctor, representing the doctrines of the then-famous Broussais, sees only what Broussais always saw: general inflammation giving rise to monomania. A vitalist doctor, looking for the iatrochemist Van Helmont's mystical life force, the archea, finds in Raphael that the mind has attacked the epigaster, the locus of the life force. And a sceptic, closely resembling the experimental physiologist Magendie, is willing to experiment in order to see what will happen when Broussais's treatment using leeches or, alternatively, a “moral treatment,” recalling the psychiatrist Pinel, have been applied to Raphael. These doctors are in turn commented upon by the ideal all-round doctor Bianchon, Balzac's own totalizing theorist. Bianchon explains that his colleagues' nosologies are so-many forms of aspect-viewing related to the three spheres of soul, body, and reason. This is a classical eclecticism that Greco-Roman medicine might have found amenable, though the final therapy is provided by Bianchon's reminder that at best one must trust nature—nature or that total curative agent that a Renaissance doctor like Rabelais, recalling Hippocrates, would have prescribed.

The novel's overview of sciences and medical doctrines presents Balzac's amused critique of any partial or relative vision that claims to understand human totality. However, this critique of science as partial vision risks turning against the novel itself, for what knowledge can the novel propose other than its own system of vision? And, moreover, even if one could be enlightened, can knowledge overcome the blindness of desire? Balzac represents this predicament in the novel itself. Raphael never achieves his quest to know what has befallen him or how to handle his desire. Rather, this quester for knowledge finds himself figured at the novel's end by a blind minstrel that he encounters on the route to Paris and in whom Raphael sees a fantastic image of his own desire. And a blind minstrel might well figure the novelist himself.

Raphael finally tries to elude desire and the quest. Most interestingly, before his death he tries to live like a natural being, like an oyster on a rock, making a fusion between himself and the totality of nature, becoming lost “in the sanctuary of life.”⁶ In this fusion he is “like a plant in the sun, like a hare in its lair” (282). But in this attempt to elude the quest, he undergoes an epistemic epiphany in which he seizes the plan of nature's organization. Every variety of life form appears as the development of a single substance. Lost in a dream of total science, Raphael has the impression that he is saved. Romantic biology is, however, therapeutic only in psychological terms, for Raphael awakes to hear another character describing his condition—and from this exterior perspective, it sounds as if he has an advanced case of tuberculosis.

Fleeing death, Raphael returns to Paris and tries to lose himself in slumber produced by opium, in a sleep without desire. But the renewed presence of the beloved Pauline renews his yearning. In his recognition of desire, he confronts the final flames in which desire consumes his energy. Raphael burns a fatal letter Pauline sends him, only to see in the ashes an “image trop vive de son amour et de sa fatale vie” [a too vivid image of his love and his destiny] reduced now to ashes by the loss of the energy that has fueled his quest (306). At last Pauline adventures to Raphael's bed where, igniting his last gasp of desire, she kills him. Raphael's knowledge of nature has not saved him, nor does it seem that knowledge of any sort could have enabled him to avoid destruction.

It remains an open question as to whether anyone could know what has been Raphael's destiny, other than the universal destiny of human desire and the depletion of energy expended in the service of that desire. Physics is related to physiology from this Faustian perspective. There is a clear intertextual relation between Raphael's desire and Faust's desire, as well as between Balzac's novel and the Faustian critique of an unbounded desire for knowledge. But Faust is not the only scientist who stands as a patron saint to Balzac's project of seizing the social world in La Comédie humaine. Balzac's title for his totalizing project recalls, with appropriate hubris, its intertextual relationship to perhaps the most impressive totalizing work of the Christian West, Dante's summation of all true knowledge in the Divina Commedia. Like many a scientist in the Paris that surrounded him—scientists who might be likened to so many contemporary versions of Faust—Balzac could view his own epistemic desire as excessive, and the warning written in Sanskrit on the ass's skin undoubtedly haunted him from the moment he began La Comédie humaine: determine your desires by your life (“règle tes souhaits sur ta vie”). La Peau de chagrin is a unique work in that it proposes a critique of excessive desire that could put in question Balzac's project of a totalizing natural history of society, as he phrased it some years later in the “Avant-Propos” that he wrote in 1842 for La Comédie humaine.

Balzac's belief in his understanding of epistemology, in 1832, was nonetheless confident, and it is worth contrasting the critical doubts of La Peau de chagrin with the confidence embodied in a published letter Balzac wrote to a writer of fantastic tales, Charles Nodier. Writing in effect a public manifesto in this admonishing letter, Balzac showed that he was at once admiring of, and impatient with, contemporary science—and quick to make judgments. The infinite spaces of distant nebulae that Herschel's telescope revealed were as much a cause of wonder as the thousands of years that Laplace's calculations had added to the world's age. But, Balzac assured, the time and space that we use for knowledge depend uniquely upon human perception: and dream and sleep show that one can travel outside of these coordinates. The fact that all knowledge is relative to the subject is a cause for optimism as well as for a belief that the subject can be liberated. Indeed, one day, Balzac predicted, some savant will explore sleep to show that, just as Cuvier and Laplace “have torn facts from an ocean of thoughts,” human beings possess the exorbitant faculty to annihilate, in relation to themselves, “space which exists only in relation” to themselves.⁷ In our present darkness, however, humanity is obliged to accept the Newtonian-Kantian coordinates of time and space to find reality—while knowing that other worlds await the traveler who can enter the obscurity of dream, madness, and the fantastic. Magnetism and electricity, psychic or nervous fluids, the imponderables of late eighteenth century chemistry, these all suggest that there will be applications of science to create a new science of the human mind:

Les bornes d'une simple lettre ne me permettent pas d'embrasser autrement que par l'énumération les magnifiques irraditions de cette science nouvelle; mais les prodiges de la volonté en seront le lien commun, auquel se rattachent et les découvertes de Gall, celle du fluide nerveux, troisième circulation de notre appareil, et celle du principe constituant de l'électricité; puis les innombrables effets magnétiques, ceux du somnabulisme naturel et artificiel dont s'occupent les savants de Danemark, de Suède, de Berlin, d'Angleterre, d'Italie, et que nient ceux de notre Paris.

[The limits imposed by a letter do not allow me to grasp, except by enumeration, the magnificent radiations of the new science. But the prodigies of will power [volonté] will be what ties it to all others; and to which are linked the discoveries of Gall, that of nervous fluid, the third circulatory system of our body, and that of the principle constitutive of electricity, and also innumerable magnetic effects, such as those of natural and artificial somnambulism that are occupying scientists in Denmark, Sweden, Berlin, England, Italy, and whose existence our Parisian scientists deny.]

(176-77)

Clearly impatient with the reigning empiricism of Parisian science, Balzac wanted to muster support for new theories that would displace the Kantian interpretation of Newton—as he shows in this letter to Nodier by twisting Kantian metaphysics so as to suggest the possible abolition of space and the willful freeing of the subject from the constraints of Kantian rationalism. Emanating from the subject, the new sciences of which Balzac is a herald should lend themselves to a unified science of the will.

A treatise on the will is supposedly written not only by the hero of La Peau de chagrin, but also by the hero of Balzac's slightly later work, Louis Lambert. This novel is a fictional biography that describes the failure to give birth to the new science that Balzac hailed in his letter to Nodier. Louis Lambert is an ambiguous metaepistemic work in that its hero, a savant whom the novel's narrator cannot quite understand, dies after a bout with insanity. Flaubert was duly impressed by this hero, in whom he undoubtedly saw a double, driven mad, as Flaubert noted, by thinking about intangible things.⁸ Written with the sobriety of a biographical dictionary entry, Louis Lambert portrays the search for illumination as seen from without by a commonsensical narrator who can only surmise the inner mystical knowledge that Lambert has reached in his research. The novel's narrator is Lambert's best friend from their school days, a time when Lambert devoured every available source in an attempt to amalgamate religion, history, philosophy, and physics and thus arrive at a potential totality of knowledge. Lambert is rather like a schoolboy incarnation of some Hegelian world-mind whose development would ultimately result in the synthesis of all knowledge. Like young Cuvier, reconstituting a total organism from small fossilized remains, Lambert constructs totalities from traces of evidence (621). Presumably following in the footsteps of Swedenborg and Mesmer, Lavater and Gall, Lambert is a “chemist of the will” who wants to invent a new science. Hardly a Lavoisierian materialist, he wants to found his science on the fundamental axiom of human doubleness (622-23). This axiom is the basis for the prodigy's “Treatise on the Will” that an ignorant curate teacher confiscates.

As described by the narrator, Lambert could have become a Pascal, a Lavoisier, or a Laplace, but not due to the university studies that he later undertakes in Paris, which Balzac portrays as an intellectual desert. There, literature is taught by the repetition of tautologies, and science is fragmented into separate academies that have destroyed the dreamed-of unity of science that Lambert, before Balzac's Séraphita, hopes to formulate. Balzac was right historically in that Paris was indeed the place where empirically oriented chemists, physicists, and biologists were developing separate scientific disciplines that, in practical terms, did not rely upon a presupposed unity of science. The totalization Laplace's physics had proposed, for example, was foundering not only on its impracticality, but also on the development of disciplines, such as optics, electricity, and heat, that could claim their own autonomy vis-à-vis Newtonian mechanics. In a sense, then, Lambert's view of contemporary science is as “reactionary” as were Balzac's putative politics. (Or, if one prefers, perhaps as “radical” as the Marx who also declared that there would be one science: “es wird eine Wissenschaft sein.”)⁹

Like Hegel and Marx, Balzac defends a utopian view of science that would at once integrate literature and all epistemic discourses into a grand totality. And, so formulated, this utopian view condemns actual scientific discourse to the status of a fallen discourse that needs literature to supplement it as its totalizing other. This is one side of Balzac's attempt to compete with science, for he does indeed condemn theories that respect the narrow limits of rational empiricism. Yet, even the rather summary plot of Louis Lambert shows Balzac's critical self-awareness at work: Balzac's totalizing scientist, in his desire to encompass all of knowledge, goes insane, at least in the eyes of the world. Lambert could be viewed as a new kind of scientist in this madness, since, from Balzac's romantic perspective, madness liberates Lambert from the restrictive limits of space and time that prevent a total epistemic synthesis. But Balzac does not pursue this point here. Rather, Lambert seems to founder on the immensity of the task at hand, on the incommensurable distance between the real and the knowledge he can imagine. At times Balzac's utopian total knowledge is, like some Borgesian science, a form of imaginary totalizing knowledge that, because we can imagine it, serves to condemn real science and literature for their necessary partiality—when judged by the imagination.

Balzac's belief in, and desire for, the unity of knowledge finds correlates in the German Naturphilosophie that Schelling and Fichte underwrote, and, as I noted earlier, in the natural history of his friend, the zoologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Opposing Cuvier's rigid taxonomical separation of the animal kingdom into four orders, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire argued, with increasing vehemence, for the unity of all animal orders as derivative from a basic model—what Raphael discovered in his communion with the totality of nature. The specifics of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's demonstration of what we call today homologies are less important for Balzac than the epistemic model that argued for connections underlying all apparent morphological differences in the animal kingdom. Balzac admired the genius with which Cuvier identified species—Balzac's own concept of a social species defined by a distinguishing trait is closer, I think, to Cuvier than to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. But the utopian epistemic impulse is one he shared with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—and vice versa, since the scientist liked to quote Balzac's Lambert to the effect that science is one. Finally, of course, we see that Balzac shared the Enlightenment desire to unite physical and moral sciences with one total methodology. Balzac was not overly fond of mathematics, but he, like many others, was also enticed by the belief that one might find a moral calculus equivalent to the calculus of probabilities used by the physical sciences. For the early successes of probability theory promoted a belief in a total methodology that would produce the knowledge—the utopian knowledge—Balzac dreamed of.

There is, however, a dark side to the Faustian pact that underwrites Balzac's science. Opposing the utopian belief in totality is the belief that the desire to know is a destroyer of limits: Hence, the desire for knowledge brings about dissolution. Faustian desire refuses limits, a refusal demonstrated by the epistemic-erotic allegory enacted in La Peau de chagrin. That Balzac further developed this theme of destruction in La Recherche de l'absolu (The Quest of the Absolute, 1834) testifies to the ongoing rivalry he felt with the sciences, for in this novel Balzac rectifies the “mistakes” of contemporary chemistry while undertaking to show the hubris of modern research. In this “search for the absolute,” Balzac portrays a demented chemist who, having nearly ruined his family with his exorbitant experiments, dies still believing that he can find the absolute. Through this portrayal of a chemist, Balzac intended to attack his rivals, the successful Parisian empirical scientists who were transforming chemistry as well as physics and biology and who, in their hubris, struck a Faustian note. La Recherche has also been read as a call for the creation of a latter-day alchemy. It is true that Balzac saw a line of historical continuity running from alchemy to the chemistry then being developed in the wake of Lavoisier's revolution in chemical theorizing. Balzac's chemist hero, Claes, is called an alchemist by the local folk who think, rightfully, he is insane in his obsession with research. However, historically speaking, Claes is working in the mainstream of nineteenth-century chemistry. He wants to decompose azote, or nitrogen. This experiment would show that the system of classification of elements, some fifty-three as Balzac got them from reading Berzelius, is not absolute, for any decomposition would suggest a more elementary substance than that of the atom. Claes, once a student of Lavoisier, wants to reduce the elements to an elementary unity. This desire for unity may have characterized his alchemical predecessors, and it also constituted a leitmotif in romantic biology.

However, with regard to chemistry, there was nothing intrinsically alchemical or even romantic about the early nineteenth century debate among chemists as to what might constitute an elementary substance. William H. Brock underscores, in The Norton History of Chemistry, the doubts that nineteenth-century chemists entertained about their science: “At the start of the nineteenth century several chemists, including Davy, found it impossible to believe that God would have wished to design a world from some fifty different building blocks. Their skepticism that Lavoisier had identified the truly elementary blocks was reinforced by Davy's experimental work in which he showed that several of Lavoisier's elements, including the alkaline earths, were not truly elementary.” So the English chemist Davy, whose work Berzelius systematized, preferred “undecompounded body” to the term “element” and its suggestion of some ultimate nature.¹⁰ The debate on the elementary nature of atoms was unfolding, and many felt doubts that anticipate what some contemporary physicists may feel about the proliferating particles that the standard model allows today in particle physics. Balzac wanted to participate in the debate about the foundations of matter by elaborating a critique of chemistry—through much cribbing from Berzelius. Through his portrayal of research, Balzac wanted to show that literature can at once participate in the elaboration of scientific discourse and, with its superior dramatic means, enact a critique of the scientific hubris that desires to go beyond limits. And if one inevitably thinks of Faust in this regard, it is because Faust is a constant model in the nineteenth century for pointing up the destructive side of epistemic hubris.

La Recherche de l'absolu is, however, more a realist work than an allegory, for Balzac wants to confront contemporary science by more or less embodying its research protocols in the novel. The novel's narrator self-consciously points this up when he says that he takes his epistemology from Cuvier. For this narrative undertaking, the narrator compares himself to an archeologist doing for society what the comparative anatomist does for nature: “Une mosaïque révèle toute une société comme un squelette d'ichthyosaure sous-entend toute une création. De part et d'autre, tout se déduit, tout s'enchaîne. La cause fait deviner un effet, comme chaque effet permet de remonter à une cause” [A mosaic reveals an entire society just as the skeleton of an ichthyosaur presupposes an entire creation. In both realms all can be deduced, all is related. A cause allows one to guess an effect, just as each effect allows one to go back to a cause].¹¹ Balzac's narrator, perhaps not consciously echoing Laplace, invokes the principle of sufficient reason to explain his deductions about parts and the totality, for the epistemological principle that declares all has a cause underwrites the probability theory that is the basis for scientific rationality—including the reasoning behind such recently created taxa as the ichthyosaur. In Balzac's work causality also dovetails with probability theory to provide a model for aesthetic realism, since the narrator need only see what probability has produced to know what must be the case—and then proceed back to show what must be the causes. Through a slight of hand that Diderot's Jacques the fatalist would have approved, Balzac's narrator draws upon contemporary epistemology to justify his own procedures of representation.

As stated in the introduction, the development of realism is underwritten by the development of probability reasoning. Reasoning about the causes of events in a novel is analogous to reasoning from effects to probable causes (that form of probabilistic reasoning that led to the theory developed in Bayes's theorem about conditional probability). Probability theory underwrote a theory of rhetoric that could be used for writing fictions, for, in Laplace's terms, probability is the description of how psychological, as well as mathematical, certainty is induced, and the effect of certainty is what the rhetoric of realist fiction aims to create. In his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814), Laplace is a conscious rhetorician when he claims that a récit or narration can always be constructed by probable reasoning from effects to causes, and that psychological certainty can be derived from a narrative line constructed by analogy with the probability of drawing lots. All this results in the assurance that the theory of probability is just common sense reduced to a calculus.¹² Conversely, this means that a calculus can be extended to a demonstration of common sense through narration. Laplace describes, really quite directly, how one can generate a narrative form, like a novel, narrating probable events.

Or, to reason like Cuvier and Balzac's narrator, what is the probability that a fossilized jaw bone belonged to a Marsupial species that is no longer extant in Europe? To make this kind of question into a generator of fictions entails that Balzac, as novelist, must link effects and causes, drawing upon effects that might plausibly be found before his narrator's eyes in the variegated undertakings of contemporary society. Here we see why the materialism of the Laplacian worldview is in fact the bedrock for Balzac's way of construing the arraignment of forces and probabilities in his realist works. The Balzacian realist narrator is often a version of the superior intelligence that Laplace placed at the center of the cosmos for the seizure of total knowledge. And if Balzac never challenges the theories of probability that found expression in Laplace's Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, this is because the Balzacian narrator implicitly, when not explicitly, appeals to Laplacian notions of probability to justify his knowledge of events and causes. From the perspective of Enlightenment mathematics, probability was a measure of ignorance of true causes. Conversely, the Balzacian narrator relies upon probability to establish the measure of his knowledge of the world. Balzac's narrator is not unlike the scientist whose impulse is to reduce the universe to a series of equations—working in effect toward the converse of a measure of ignorance. Given an “effect,” the Balzacian narrator asks what probable causes can be adduced to explain, say, the presence of the “species” in question. The answer is a récit, to use Laplace's term, which is to say, a narration like La Recherche de l'absolu and all the other realist works that argue at once from the existence of the species back to probable causes and forward to the evolution of the type.

Balzac's chemist in La Recherche de l'absolu, Claes, is a type. Claes studied with Lavoisier, became a good father and respected citizen, and then neglected all his duties to pursue his passion for chemistry. If classified by nineteenth-century psychiatric nosology, he seems to be a monomaniac. Balzac introduces a bit of medical diagnosis to give an additional cachet of scientific authenticity to his character portrayal, though most monomaniacs did not pursue the absolute, and Balzac knows that the probable genesis of this type must be found in the historical context. The context is the scientific “mania” for knowledge that leads to the Faustian contract: Claes once met a Polish chemist who, Mephisto-like, awakened in Claes the epistemic mania that drives him beyond limits, to a death in which he “perhaps” found the key to the enigma of life: the absolute grasped by the bony fingers of Death.

Perhaps myth is always ready to invest realist narration. Especially when dealing with madness, reason seemingly must have recourse to myth, since myth is often the only means by which reason can represent its contrary, unreason or the irrational. In a sense, myth is the work of reason; indeed, it is an epistemic attempt to deal with what science cannot reduce to reason. In Balzac's novel, myth and a scientific hypothesis share common traits, or so it appears now that the nineteenth-century hypothesis about an absolute substance no longer has any currency as a theory. From today's perspective the absolute functioned as a myth, but it also generated theory. The hypothetical absolute is, in the Polish chemist's words, a substance common to all creations, modified by a unique force, though this unique force gives rise immediately to a mysterious “ternary”—the triadic substance Balzac saw characterizing everything from alchemy to Christianity. With his hypothesis about an absolute substance, Balzac's Claes joins in fact the post-Kantian search for what Kant said could never be known, the ultimate Ding an sich. Claes is seeking the ultimate inner substance behind all the variegated phenomenal manifestations that we can know, as subjects, looking at phenomenal objects unfolding in space and time. In this regard, romantic metaphysics and early nineteenth-century chemistry shared a common search.

Balzac wanted to foster this common search, since he thought that anti-Kantian metaphysics of the German sort should be melded with the positive sciences to produce the totalizing knowledge he sought. The recipe for this totalizing knowledge is expounded in Balzac's most explicitly “metascientific” novel, Séraphita (or Séraphîta, as this name is sometimes written). In this most theoretical of works, Balzac recast Swedenborgian cosmology to offer a critique of the claims of science, though a critique that should ultimately help science fulfill itself as a total explanation of the universe. Séraphita can be called a “mystical” novel, for the main character is an androgynous angel who reasons, however, more like an epistemologist than a seraphic being capable of revealing the hidden Kantian noumena. Religion is a matter of faith, s/he says, and, with that, s/he maintains that the question of religion, in epistemic terms, has been settled (which was Balzac's personal position in his letter to Nodier, as well as in his correspondence to Madame Hanska). However, Sériphita, like Balzac, also wants to show the inadequacies of any system of thought that might propose to replace religion, and by system of thought s/he especially has in mind the religion of science or reason that recent French history had elevated to a supreme position. S/he proposes, al contrario, the use of “mystical science” to complete the truncated knowledge proposed by unbelieving Parisian scientists (as Balzac also puts it in the Préface du livre mystique). It is dubious that, after the positivist revolution of the midcentury, anyone could ever speak of mystical science again—except from the margins of culture. In 1830 the notion was still polemical, though clearly a notion on the wane. But, fearing no polemic, Balzac wants to show that there is an epistemic relation that can mediate between mystical vision and knowledge in some nearly Kantian sense (which Kant would of course have denied). The most appropriate speaker for this mixed mediation is the creation who unites all opposites, the beautiful Séraphita-Séraphitus, a pre-pre-Raphaelite angel dwelling in an imaginary Norway, in an icy soul-scape that resembles a landscape of contrasts such as the painter Caspar David Friedrich gave us in his towering projections of the inner world. But the flora and fauna contained in this imaginary world are “real”—much as we see in mystical landscapes in early Renaissance paintings in which we recognize European birds and plants inhabiting a mystical, imaginary Jerusalem. The real and the revealed should thus complete each other, much as should natural history and mystical cosmology—or so Balzac hoped.

Swedenborgian cosmology, as recast by Balzac and explained by the novel's skeptical pastor, is less impressive than Séraphita's critique of science. Through this angelic character and the critique that s/he elaborates, Balzac wants to carve out an epistemic space in which his novels can take their place with other discourses of knowledge. In this move toward self-reflexive justification, Séraphita is an apology for those novels in which Balzac offers mere “realist” knowledge of the world, novels in which, from Le Père Goriot (1834) to La Cousine Bette (1846), there occurs, to say the least, no revelation of mystical science. In these realist works, one finds only the relative knowledge of ordinary causes and effects. Ordinary realism, like ordinary science, as Séraphita puts it, is simply a description of the fallen world. Realism relies upon the “langage du monde temporel”—language of the world fallen into time—and knowledge given by this language, s/he says, can only produce sadness. Hence Séraphita's claim that science is a melancholy state of affairs: “la science attriste l'homme.”¹³ To work within the confines of Newtonian space and time is, to paraphrase Séraphita, to exclude oneself from the realm of love—which certainly is the case in most of Balzac's realist works. Portraying far more greed than love, these novels describe a fallen world resolutely within the confines of Newtonian space and time.

Séraphita is an epistemological angel, reconciling all scientific and philosophical contraries, for s/he has read Locke, Buffon, Laplace, and Balzac's other favored scientific sources. S/he needs little mystical illumination for the epistemic views s/he defends. Séraphita's critique of science appeals to Lockean nominalism to show that the Newtonian-Laplacian worldview must lead, if one is logical, to a belief in the existence of things beyond the world of mechanical philosophy. As s/he explains knowledge to Wildrid, the young man courting her feminine side, true vision must represent the effects of moral nature as well as those of physical nature in their common and unified appearance. Though s/he seems to refer to mystical vision, Séraphita's terminology is couched in terms of causality that appeal to probability theory. Actually, s/he is more Laplacian than Laplace, since s/he claims that s/he carries within a mirror in which moral nature is reflected with all its causes and effects [“Eh bien, il est en moi comme un miroir où vient se réfléchir la nature morale avec ses causes et ses effets”] (795). In effect, s/he applies, like Laplace's hypothetical total observer, the principle of sufficient reason to all the phenomena in the universe, moral as well as physical. Since all has a cause, s/he sees that nothing is uncertain: past and present are present to the observer's eyes. Going beyond Laplace, s/he extends this abolition of uncertainty to the moral world, proposing thus to realize the Enlightenment's fondest hope of uniting moral and physical sciences—a project that theoretically, if not actually, underwrites Balzac's intentions for La Comédie humaine.

Séraphita wants to use science to combat the singleminded materialism and skeptical doubt that s/he finds characterizing the modern scientific mind (though s/he also is quite hostile to traditional theology). As a chemist and physicist, s/he defends the waning doctrine of imponderable forces in order to explain human thought on the model of magnetism. Magnetic force was construed as an imponderable substance united to a material body, and so, by analogy, one could argue that immaterial thought is attached to the human body. As an epistemologist, s/he also claims that science's faith in mathematics shows that even the most resolute materialists are willing to believe in abstractions—such as the infinite. Why then, s/he asks, do they doubt other abstractions, such as God, abstractions that exist, like the infinite, beyond their comprehension?

Balzac is endorsing here a kind of Pythagorean philosophy of mathematics to maintain that Number, the source of the mathematics used to describe time and space, is beyond knowledge and hence an object of faith. Balzac's grasp of the infinite is not beside the point, since most pre-Cantorian mathematicians readily admitted that the infinite was a necessary concept, but not a comprehensible one. (The greatest mathematician of the early nineteenth century, Gauss, doubted that one could speak of an actual infinite.) Moreover, Balzac's thirst for the unity of knowledge must posit something like God, for, from the perspective of this mathematical mysticism, God is the principle of unity that necessarily engenders the multiple. Using this kind of mathematical reasoning, Séraphita says that the multiple is derived from unity through movement (819). And since number and movement are the basis for science and knowledge, one must conclude that Newtonian dynamics is in some sense mystically grounded. Whether this theory can justify a leap of faith is questionable, but it is of the greatest interest that Balzac wants to demonstrate here that the crown of Newtonian physics—quantified gravitational attraction and repulsion—can be used in all epistemic quests, including the novel, once quantification is understood in analogical terms. And this generative principle implies that larger epistemic ensembles—like a novel—may be more accurate than physics in its own sphere. Or as Séraphita says with physics in mind: “Votre numération, appliquée aux choses finies et non à l'Infini, est donc vraie par rapport aux details que vous percevez, mais fausse par rapport à l'ensemble que vous ne percevez point” [Your calculation, applied to finite things and not to the infinite, is thus true relative to the details that you can perceive, but false relative to the totality that you cannot perceive] (820). The totality is the backdrop that provides the criteria for truth and knowledge, and this totality should thus be the ultimate object of knowledge—at least when one is thinking like a physicist.

Thinking like a biologist, Balzac gives his nominalism expression in Séraphita's doubt about the possibility of quantification. This may seem contradictory in light of the above defense of totality, but let us consider what are the concepts that natural history, now becoming biology, imposes:

Si la nature est semblable à elle-même dans les forces organisantes ou dans ses principes qui sont infinis, elle ne l'est jamais dans ses effets finis. Ainsi vous ne rencontrez nulle part dans la nature deux objets identiques: dans l'Ordre Naturel, deux et deux ne peuvent donc jamais faire quatre, car il faudrait assembler des unités exactement pareilles, et vous savez qu'il est impossible de trouver deux feuilles semblable sur un même arbre, ni deux sujets semblables dans la même espece d'arbre.

[If nature is uniform in its organizing forces or in its principles that are infinite, it is never uniform in its finite effects. Thus you will never encounter anywhere in nature two identical objects: in the Natural Order, two and two can never be four, since one would have to bring together exactly similar unities, and you know that it is impossible to find two identical leaves on the same tree, or two identical examples of the same species of trees.]

(820)

The doctrine of the absolute specificity of natural objects also holds for the moral world, says Séraphita, linking together once more, like Balzac's other post-Enlightenment narrators, the natural world and the human world. Séraphita's biological nominalism sounds somewhat backward looking, recalling the epistemology that led Buffon to deny any interest to Linnaeus's taxonomy. However, in claiming radical specificity for the individual, Séraphita's idea of privileging the individual also points toward the post-Darwinian thought about populations that modern evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr has described. Such a privileging means that, for the naturalist and the novelist, knowledge demands the realization of a general taxonomy of the individual type. Balzac was convinced that this project could be realized in the novel through what he called, in his “Avant-Propos” of 1842 to La Comédie humaine, the description of the social species—by individualizing the type, and creating a type based on the individual.¹⁴

Nominalism leads, moreover, to Séraphita's paradoxical denial that two plus two equals four. The naturalist in Séraphita denies the role of quantification in knowledge, at least as far as the individual is concerned. The description of an individual has the essential epistemic role, which in one sense denies that quantification is possible in every realm of knowledge, for one cannot simply add up unique individuals to have meaningful aggregates. Natural scientists were, and are, divided on the meaning of quantification, and I do not think any philosophically consistent explanation of what quantification is, or why it works, has yet been offered. In any case, in a context in which biology is defining itself as a science not based on physics, Balzac's epistemological angel knows well that her discourse will find acceptance among those for whom the basic unit of knowledge is the individual understood in its relation to the whole—such as for a naturalist like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who maintained that connections or “analogies” exist among all vertebrates and perhaps invertebrate species.

Novels like La Peau de chagrin or Séraphita may be considered something like a preface to what most readers take to be Balzac's major achievement: the creation of a new type of realist novel. His early metascientific works, or the “philosophical” works if one prefers, are a complementary aspect of the totalizing that Balzac saw as his complete task as a novelist. Realism was conceived as a response to complete this totalizing, a totalizing that necessarily had to take account of the accomplishments of science. To this end Balzac created a type of novel that is largely consonant with the science of the early nineteenth century, which is to say that in his realist novels he created a novelistic form endowed with an epistemic dimension. The quest for the totalization of knowledge demanded that Balzac in fact call upon science for the epistemic coordinates for defining the real. In incorporating into fiction these coordinates—such as those of Newtonian cosmology and dynamics, the taxonomical understanding of biology, or then-nascent energetics—Balzac made the scientific understanding of reality a ground for the practice of fiction. In brief, Balzac's use of science to define the real was part of a programmatic effort to demonstrate that the novel as a genre can propose knowledge. Balzac's enthusiasm for his own research program may seem dated today, but it seems incontrovertible that, with this program, the novel became an instrument for defining the real—an instrument that even some of today's postmoderns still respect whenever they acknowledge that the novel offers access to, and hence knowledge of, reality that no other discourse offers.

Balzac published Séraphita in the same year as Le Père Goriot (translated sometimes as Old Goriot). For many generations of readers, it is of course Le Père Goriot that represents, to the extent any single work can, the novel that invents the axioms for the modern novel. Coming after Balzac's metascientific works, Le Père Goriot is, perhaps with Eugenie Grandet (1833), a test case for his desire to rival sicence by offering knowledge of human society now conceived as a branch of natural history. But the novel also reflects an understanding of basic physics and dynamics. Balzac's use of the novel for purposes of epistemic investigation means that a full reading of a realist novel like Le Père Goriot must be attentive to the several epistemic discourses Balzac calls up, combines, and juxtaposes to produce what aims at being the unique exemplar of a partial totalization of reality. In the interest of clarity, then, let me offer a brief recapitulation of the epistemic frameworks presupposed by Balzac's realist works before turning specifically to Le Père Goriot.

Newtonian dynamics was still the dominant science in the 1830s, and it is hardly surprising that Balzac respects a Newtonian framework to frame the configuration of forces present in the novel. In the broadest sense, the framework is set up by the parameters of public space and time within which one can plot out the movement of the characters as so many bodies in motion. Within this framework Balzac takes into account the evidential probabilities determining the possibility of events. Of some historical interest is Balzac's frequent suggestion that the chemistry of imponderable substances might explain the human consciousness portrayed in the novel. Far more important, however, is the attention Balzac gives to types or species as they are shaped by a historically determined milieu to which these human types struggle to adapt. As a naturalist observer, Balzac was keenly aware of the way species do or do not adapt to their milieu, a milieu undergoing constant modification in time. The possible and probable extinction of types is a recurrent theme in Balzac's work. (For example, in Le Père Goriot survival is a leit-motif in the consciousness of a survival artist like Vautrin or an arriviste aristocrat like Rastignac.) Cuvier's vision of successive extinctions is an accepted fact for Balzac's natural history of the human animal.

Balzac scholar Madelaine Fargeaud-Ambrière even speaks of the mathematics of Balzac's science.¹⁵ By this comment, I understand that, in Balzac's post-Enlightenment mind, much that he describes should be amenable, theoretically at least, to some potential Laplacian quantification—which throws light on a good many of Balzac's analogies. This attraction to mathematics brings up an interesting caveat about epistemic paradox when reading Balzac. In spite of Séraphita's paradox, Balzac could hardly deny the epistemic power of mathematical discourse. When thinking as a social physicist, neither Balzac nor his angel could deny, on its own terms, the Laplacian belief in the finality of mathematical explanation. Only when thinking as a biologist or historian does Balzac push forward the recognition that the historization of knowledge entails the rejection of the epistemic primacy of the quantification of experience. Historical knowledge is of a different order of being from mechanical or systemic quantification, a fact to which history and nascent sciences like evolutionary biology, paleontology, and geology have all attested. Balzac, moreover, often seems to want to combine metaphorical quantification and a description of the unique history of a living being. Such contradictory tensions underlie what can appear to be a paradox involved in the attempt of Balzac's realism to seize individual types. These tensions generated by apparent paradox—that an individual can be a type—point up how directly Balzac was enmeshed in the epistemological debates of nascent scientific modernity. True, the paradox later finds a solution in Darwin, in a theory that allows individual difference to generate changes in populations, but that lessens none of the interest one takes in Balzac's attempt to represent the relation between a type and his truly individualized characters.

Balzac theorized his views about type and individual in his novels, some ten years after Séraphita, in 1842 when he wrote the “Avant-Propos” to La Comédie humaine. This document is of first-rate intellectual interest for what it tells us about Balzac's conception of his work's relation to science. Unabashedly explaining his competence to rival biology, he spells out in this forward how he could apply Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's notion of the “unity of plan” of natural beings to his literary work, since “There is only one animal. The creator having used only one and the same pattern for all organized beings.”¹⁶ Saluting Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire as the victor over Cuvier on this point, Balzac goes on to explain that differences in form are due to the milieu in which the species develops, and, most importantly, society is the milieu that creates the specific differences that constitute the various “species” of humanity. Using the technical term milieu, Balzac links his writing here with the epistemic project of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and implicitly with Lamarck, and more distantly with Buffon—for he claims to have understood that society resembles nature before knowing about the debates that culminated in the polemic of 1830. The separation of nature and culture that Rousseau had proclaimed is in effect dismissed by Balzac, since society functions as a natural milieu in which adaptation leads to new species.

In his “Avant-Propos,” Balzac not only plays with the idea that the notion of species, as used by natural history, can be applied to society since one finds there “social species.” He also resolutely endorses the transformationist view that allows types or species to change—in Balzac's world, grocers can become peers of the realm. Balzac is thus claiming for fiction the capacity to participate in the great taxonomic endeavors that, from Linnaeus to Cuvier, were mapping the natural world. Moreover, what was (and is) a hypothesis for the natural world—the transformationist origins of species—is more of a demonstrable fact in the social world: transformations of society exist as documented history. The recent work of a historical novelist like Scott, Balzac suggests, demonstrates that the historical dimension of knowledge can be fully incorporated in the novel through its investigation of transformations of the social milieu.

What is innovative in Balzac is that he is writing a discourse in which human beings are squarely recognized as part of the animal kingdom. In other words, there is no ontological break between the natural realm and the social realm. Even the most atheistic philosophers of the Enlightenment had not usually been ready to embrace such a complete naturalism—say, the atheistic doctor La Mettrie who, in describing “machine man,” still wanted to consider “man” the pinnacle of creation. In spite of his atheistic belief in mechanical physiology, La Mettrie unwittingly slipped God back into the human machine when he proclaimed that humans have a unique capacity for language—in the form of that logos that is the arche of theology. By contrast, the more or less Christian Balzac depicts, in Le Père Goriot and many later novels, a world in which human beings belong to Cuvier's embranchement of vertebrate beings. They share the analogies that Geoffroy described as characterizing all other animals, for humans and animals are all zoological beings differentiated in terms of a common plan that unites them in what biologists today call homologies. Their “morphology”—to use the term Goethe had recently invented—is shaped, moreover, by the natural forces of the milieu Balzac studies with such great detail. And finally, Balzac's fiction coincides with nascent biology in his search for the type, or the singular, real specimen that is the basis for the naturalist's creation of a tax-on—something like what later biology came to call the holotype, the single specimen chosen to be an exemplar for a new species. Balzac clearly believed that the ontology of fiction and of natural history coincide in this epistemological quest for the unique individual that is nonetheless the type for a species.

Such types are found in the realist works like Le Père Goriot. Dedicated to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, though several years after its original publication in 1835, this realistic novel might be taken as the antithesis of Séraphita. It contains no fantastic elements, no androgynous angels making metascientific perorations. Moreover, it contains hardly any metascientific discourses justifying the unitary materialism Balzac thought would explain mental and physical phenomena. The novel simply demonstrates that unitary materialism, and thus contains nothing that the atheistic scientific community could not accept. It is a novel rigorously situated in the here and now of physical space, an ordinary epistemic space, open to every investigator interested in the quotidian. The novel's title outlines its limited subject matter, relating the demise of a single human being, in this case, a once prosperous pasta manufacturer who allows himself to be exploited by his two greedy and vain daughters. Balzac could not limit himself to a single case study, and the work does introduce other major characters, such as Rastignac, a prototypical impoverished member of the provincial nobility whose education takes up much of the novel. This education consists largely in discovering the unscrupulous nature of the struggle necessary to succeed in a world in which, as old Goriot says, money is life. Another important character is the unscrupulous swindler and convict Vautrin, a philosophical villain whose cynicism is almost unbearable. These characters recur in other novels, though the recurrence of characters is of lesser interest than the way Balzac invented, in these characters, the individual type.

The novel is constructed to elicit knowledge about these types and the milieu in which they have developed. Though composed of four titled sections, the structure of Le Père Goriot can be divided into three parts. In the first section, the introduction, Balzac's narrator describes the milieu, set in Paris, that is first centered on the Vauquer boarding house. The narrator begins by framing a series of questions that are so many requests for knowledge. This section sets out an epistemic demand for answers that can elucidate these implicit and explicit questions. The novel's second part, comprising the sections called “L'Entrée dans le monde” and “Trompe-la-mort,” answer these questions by tracing out the trajectories of the characters encountered in the boarding house in which the questions were first generated. Answers to these questions take the reader into other milieux, most notably that of the hereditary aristocracy and the newly created aristocracy of the moneyed elite. The final structural movement coincides with the last named section, “La mort du père.” This section works out, with geometrical precision, the final movement leading to the father's demise—emptied of all force and all his wealth—and traces the general geometry of rising and falling that the various characters undergo in struggling in a milieu in which only the crassest instincts have survival value. Most notably, the young pauper aristocrat, Rastignac, discovers that his ascension has only begun.

In Le Père Goriot, the narrator offers a plot organized as so many microsequences. These sequences are narrated in response to a desire for knowledge that might explain various puzzles and enigmas brought about when an observer looks at the world. Balzac begins the novel, for instance, with the famous demonstration of how one goes about describing a social milieu with his depiction of the Vauquer boarding house. The narrator proposes a model of homological description in which, as he puts it, the character of the landlady explains the boarding house, and the boarding house implies the existence of the landlady. Typed as resembling all women who have known misfortune, Madame Vauquer is nonetheless an individual specimen. She has adapted to the milieu that has shaped her: “L'embonpoint blafard de cette petite femme est le produit de cette vie, comme le typhus est la conséquence des exhalaisons d'un hôpital” [The pale portliness of this little woman is the product of this life, just as typhus is the result of the exhalations of a hospital].¹⁷ Mixing medical discourse and natural history, the narrator invents a composite epistemic discourse that wants to explain type, milieu, and phenotype through their interaction.

Metaphorically at least, the narrator is a natural historian when he explains why most of the boarders cannot answer the questions raised by father Goriot's curious presence in the boarding house: “Les vieilles gens dont la curiosité s'éveilla sur son compte ne sortaient pas du quartier et vivaient dans la pension comme des huîtres sur un rocher” [The old people whose curiosity was awakened by him never left the neighborhood and lived in the boarding house like oysters on a rock] (54). These mollusk-like characters do, however, have epistemic desires and can want to know. For example, characters invent explanations of Goriot's presence in the boarding house so that finally Goriot is typed—wrongly—by an employee of the natural history museum as “un colimaçon, un mollusque anthropomorphe à classer dans les Casquettifères” [a snail, an anthropomorphic mollusk to be classified among the Casquettiferous] (55). Balzac's playful invention of taxonomy shows the distance he can take vis-à-vis the scientific discourse that he adopts at the same time he satirizes it. There is something intrinsically comic about the fact that this Parisian biotope is also the biotope to which must adapt the scientists who produce the concepts that should describe the scientists who live in it, in Paris, that unique milieu for homo scientificus.

Buoyed by these epistemic explanations, plot is generated by the narrator's playing with the readers' probabilistic expectations. Opening Le Père Goriot, a knowledgeable reader automatically questions the probability of finding a rich old man, one moreover visited by two beautiful young women, in a less than elegant boarding house. To explain his presence, and even more so that of two beautiful young women, probability theory demands that one be able inductively to offer probable causes for these seemingly improbable events. The entire novel is, in this regard, a kind of inductive demonstration of probable causes. Few earlier novels rely so overtly upon inductive strategies to motivate narration (except parodistically in works by those writers like the Diderot and Sterne to whom Balzac duly pays homage). Balzac's strategy in creating plot is not to use “suspense”—that baroque device that poses an enigma or problem to be resolved and then titillates the reader by keeping the resolution at bay. Rather, Balzac's narrator sets out his inquiry as one that is to be solved by ferreting out probabilistic causes—and this inquiry in turn becomes an education for Rastignac as the young noble undertakes the quest that gives the data needed to elucidate the mystery. In his need to survive, if not to conquer, Rastignac is an epistemic quester possessed by a “furieuse envie de savoir la vérité”—a furious desire to know the truth (75).

Rastignac has to know the nature of the milieu to which he must adapt, and, in seeking this knowledge, he discovers what will best facilitate his quest: a knowledge of probabilities is necessary for survival. Like a Dante with a perverse Virgil, Rastignac has been preceded on this quest by the criminal Vautrin, the savant who already knows the milieu and how it can destroy those who don't know it. The notion of milieu here acquires the biological sense of an environment to which specific species adapt. The milieu found in the natural history incorporated in the novel is quite precisely a bourbier, or a mire, in which, as the ever knowledgeable Vautrin says, those who get filthy while in a coach are honest people, whereas those who get filthy on foot are scoundrels (76). Vautrin's quick lesson in basic social taxonomy is the best preparation that Rastignac receives to acquaint himself with the milieu frequented by the elegant women, whom one would normally not expect to be connected to old Goriot. But plot unfolds and demonstrates that the improbable can be shown to be probable, and that the complex workings of the milieu make these relations possible. Beautiful aristocratic women can frequent a run-down boarding house when they are exploiting a father who lets himself be bled by them.

Motivated first by the desire for knowledge, Rastignac finds that his desire transforms itself into a desire for what knowledge and power can obtain. Rastignac is set on a trajectory that, in terms of narrative geometry, aims at ascension. In Balzac's work, ascension describes metaphorically a successful quest, in conventional terms, but it also figures the expenditure of force. As Newton teaches, to rise is to exert force against opposing forces as dynamics. Rastignac's quest for knowledge and for social success is threatened by his own contradictory desires and the force they demand. Or perhaps one might say that he wants to catapult himself up by using contradictory forces for which there is no vector resolution. Balzac uses a mathematical image to describe the threat to Rastignac's ascension: “Rastignac résolut d'ouvrir deux tranchées parallèles pour arriver à la fortune, de s'appuyer sur la science et sur l'amour, d'être un savant docteur et un homme à la mode. Il était encore bien enfant! Ces deux lignes sont des asymptotes qui ne peuvent jamais se joindre” [Rastignac resolved to open two parallel trenches in order to pursue his fortune, he would rely upon science and love, he would be a savant doctor and a man of fashion. How childish he still was! These two lines are asymptotes that can never join up with each other] (118). By dispersing his energy along two asymptotic lines, his twin projects will not come together like intersecting lines. Each project would be like a straight line approaching the tangent of a curve, coming closer and closer to the points of the curve as it approaches infinity, but never reaching it. This is an analogy Balzac uses several times in his work. Desire is geometricized as an infinite undertaking. And it can never join the trajectory of force moving knowledge, since knowledge follows a different, Faustian line, one also moving like an asymptote toward the infinite. Behind these metaphors stand undoubtedly Fichte's thoughts on the infinite as the object of all human quest. (Balzac recommended Fichte to Nodier with enthusiasm.) But we also recognize here Balzac's concept of energy and his attempt to plot the vectors in the expenditure of energy.

Balzac is romantic in many respects, and in this regard we might speak of romantic physics: desire and knowledge can be represented as vectors of a potentially infinite expenditure of energy, to use a technical concept not yet available to Balzac. Desire and knowledge cannot be reconciled, since the infinite is incomprehensible, and perhaps they can never even be realized. What could it mean to find an infinite force to motivate them? In Séraphita the infinite confounds knowledge by imposing upon knowledge a recognition of its limits. Perhaps like desire, knowledge is condemned to failure, for there can be no infinite expenditure of energy in the service of either. Just as the engineer Carnot relied upon the axiom that there can be no perpetual motion machine to demonstrate the nature of the expenditure of energy, so Balzac accepts as axiomatic that all energy is limited, and thus knowledge and desire are limited. The finite nature of energy sets the limits of reality. This is a bedrock axiom of realism, for Balzac and for today.

Mathematics is a frequent source for the figures and images that stage Balzac's world for epistemic purposes. Mathematical metaphors work well for the geometry figuring desire and the plot that results from it. However, Balzac's desire for quantification is sometimes contradictory, for the historical knowledge that underwrites the Balzacian novel is not amenable to the application of mechanical dynamics. In spite of his own historicizing of knowledge, Balzac, like a literary Laplace in quest of totalization, accepts the a priori possibility that most experience could conceivably be measured and quantified in some sense. This belief surfaces throughout the realist novels, as in the following passage in which a Newtonian concept of force is combined with a belief in the materiality of an imponderable such as human thought. Passages such as these present not just metaphorical fioriture, but sum up Balzac's somewhat contradictory worldview about a possible quantification, if not an exact vector sum, of all the forces in the world: “Pendant ces huit jours Eugène et Vautrin étaient restés silencieusement en présence et s'observaient l'un l'autre. L'étudiant se demandait vainement pourquoi. Sans doute les idées se projettent en raison directe de la force avec laquelle elles se conçoivent, et vont frapper là où le cerveau les envoie, par une loi mathématique comparable à celle qui dirige les bombes au sortir du mortier” [During those eight days Eugene and Vautrin had remained silently in each other's presence as they observed each other. The student wondered in vain why. Probably ideas are projected forward in direct proportion to the force that conceives them and go to strike where the brain sends them, according to a mathematical law comparable to the one that directs shells when they are shot from a mortar] (139). Like Goethe experimenting with the chemical notion of elective affinities, Balzac is trying here to conceive something like an algorithm to express the interaction between character types as they engage in their struggle for mastery. The image of the cannon shot is of course a metaphor of struggle and combat, but the metaphorical quantification of struggle is part of the attempt to measure ineffable or imponderable substances—like human thought or, equally as interesting, force and power. From a broader historical perspective, the attempt to understand force has been part of the larger European quest for rationality since Machiavelli as well as Galileo. Beginning with these thinkers evolved the idea that power and force, in their respective domains, are ultimate realities behind all phenomena. Balzac brings to the novel an epistemic concern in which the metaphorical notion of power links up with the non-metaphorical use of force as a way of defining the real, for the notion of force can be used for a quantitative expression of individual relations in the material world. Marx was not wrong in his judgment that Balzac, for all his contradictions, is more in contact with historical reality than any other novelist in the first half of the nineteenth century: Balzac well understood that the multifaceted concept of force was a notion that provides for a definition of the real in diverse contexts. Marx wanted to do the same thing for the “forces” of history (though by the end of the century Hertz thought that force had been so overextended as a concept that it should be banished as a foundational concept in physics).

Balzac's attempt to understand force underlies the development of the narratives in his novels. Larger narrative patterns are motivated by Balzac's desire to link dynamics to the unfolding of events. Each character is pushed forward by his or her energy, pursuing a trajectory that unfolds in terms of sequential events. Balzac's understanding of force is in this regard modern: force is a vector with both magnitude and direction (I say modern because the vector notion is only implicit in Newton's earlier definition of force). For example, in Le Père Goriot, Goriot himself follows a line of development that ends in a depleted state of energy—to use a concept that, I recall, was being invented as Balzac wrote the novel. By contrast, the vector of a character's development can take an upward movement, as in the case of Rastignac, and perhaps Goriot's ambitious daughter Delphine. But Goriot's trajectory is most clear: once he has given up every material possession that could benefit his daughters, once all his energy is expended, he dies. With no money, he has no energy, for money, by his own definition, is the essential force in this milieu. Another nascent capitalist, the criminal Vautrin is at least momentarily stopped in his trajectory, since the opposing force of the police neutralize his upward ascension and prevent him from becoming a rich slave owner in the United States. He is literally and figuratively arrested in his ascension in Le Père Goriot.

Goriot's daughters are threatened with a fall once the force propelling them is met by a counterforce. At the novel's end, when neither daughter comes to her father's funeral, it is an open question as to whether they can continue upon their path in society. Rastignac's first move after the funeral is to accept the challenge of struggle among competing forces in society. He will remain Delphine's lover, which suggests that, whatever be the outcome of his struggle, he believes he can gain a boost in force by attaching his trajectory to hers. By contrast, the failure of the force of desire is clearly illustrated in the moving example of Rastignac's cousin, Madame de Beauséant. Upon being betrayed by her lover, who prefers a rich marriage to fidelity, she decides to spend the rest of her life in seclusion. Her choice to abandon society for “exile” in Normandy is equivalent to expending one's force. There is a rich overdetermination to these trajectories: Madame de Beauséant's move reflects at once the classical moralist's belief in the ravages of passion and the modern epistemologist's view that all conflicting forces must eventuate in a vector resolution in which weaker forces are annulled and absorbed by greater powers.

In résumé, then, what strikes the literary historian upon considering Balzac's tempestuous encounter with science is the way in which he naturalizes Laplace's physics and probability theory. He embodies theory in the fabric of his novels in ways that had not occurred in literature before. Linear dynamics and the calculus of probability are intrinsic to the figuring of experience in Balzac, for events are determined in terms of vector relationships that link up as causal chains. Finally, in Balzac's realist work we find a world of probable forces unfolding causally in terms of the materialism that Marx, among others, wanted to make into the hallmark of historical totalization.

To conclude these considerations, let me adduce another example of the way in which Balzac's energetics is the basis for his realistic plot development, especially with regard to how his characters interact in a determined milieu. Balzac often conceived of the milieu as a closed system in which each character's force can only be augmented or diminished by clashes with other characters to whom energy is transferred or from whom it is extracted. In their own way, works like La Peau de chagrin and La Recherche de l'absolu illustrate this principle, though an even more pointed example of contrasting vectors can be found in a realist work like Le Curé de Tours (The curate of Tours, though, curiously, the title is left in French for the one translation I have found). Energetics is placed in the foreground in this novel narrating a struggle for power between two priests, albeit one of the priests is too naive to be aware that a struggle is taking place. The central character is a curate, Father Birotteau, who does not realize he is being dispossessed by Troubert, an ambitious priest who desires to ascend in the church hierarchy. The ascent of the power-obsessed, yet ascetic Troubert is exactly balanced by the decline and fall of the hedonist, though well-intentioned curate Birotteau. In his ascent, Troubert strips Birotteau of all his possessions, deprives him of all resources, and leaves the poor priest at the end of the novel exiled, across the river from Tours, in a village. From this vantage point the once happy Birotteau is reduced to contemplating in anguish his beloved cathedral, now seen in the distance, as upwardly rising Troubert leaves to occupy a bishopric. The gain and loss of energy is symmetrical. One priest is empowered to move up to become a bishop, and the other loses all energy to end disenfranchised in exile. Or to express this movement in terms of more classical dynamics, the chiasmatic resolution of forces follows rigorous geometry: Troubert's ascension is proportional to Birotteau's decline. And in the most palpable realist terms, the transfer of power as energy can be measured by the loss of possessions, of place, and even of flesh. The once portly priest Birotteau becomes sickly and emaciated after he loses his position and possessions. With no energy, bereft of all force, he collapses immobile in his exile.

Newton knew that he had not explained motion, that he had simply described it in quantified terms as a product of forces that are amenable to public purview. At times a literary Newtonian, Balzac also believed that motion remained the great material mystery. He intuitively sensed that something like the concept of energy would remove some of the mystery. His own vector geometries show that he conceived of the energy available in the social milieu to be finite, mobile, and subject to transfer. In this sense he seems to be groping, like Carnot and others at the time, for a theory to explain force and movement. With these themes in mind I want to conclude with a bit of speculation. I recall that Carnot was working out, in the 1820s, the principles that would later be the basis for the laws of thermodynamics, for entropy and the conservation of energy. Although Balzac probably did not know that Carnot had published the beginnings of a theory of thermodynamics in 1824 in a small book called Reflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire), it is clear that Balzac shared the same concern about energy that, in Carnot's work, was leading toward a kinetic theory of heat and energy. In his encounter with the science of his time, in his desire to compete with science on its own terrain, Balzac applied a concept something like energy to character development, an application that is fundamental to the development of the novel. In this sense it seems justified to compare Balzac's development of literary form with the development of Carnot's work in thermodynamics. One led to literary realism and the novel as we understand it; the other led to the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, breaking the visegrip of mechanistic philosophy.

Of course, neither Balzac nor Carnot are a permanent stopping point in our intellectual history. A generation after Carnot's death, the first law of thermodynamics reformulated his work in the principle of the conservation of energy. But the second law of thermodynamics then proposed that this energy, in its distribution, would tend toward equal distribution, and hence all things would run down. The process of time is the inevitable increase of disorder. This interpretation meant the end of the reign of classical dynamics and its laws of equilibrium, for the order of the world, once seen as based on synchronic processes, must have an inevitable historical dimension. Or as Cecil J. Schneer puts it in his classic The Evolution of Physical Science, “Processes, even mechanical processes, were now seen to change with time. There was an evolution, not merely to living things as Darwin had asserted, but even to the inorganic world.”¹⁸ After Balzac and Carnot, the next generation formulated that entropy, a measure of unavailable energy, is the most probable process of any system.

With the understanding that entropy is also a measure of the necessary dissolution of energy, the nineteenth century's project of epistemic totalization came to an end, for the concept of entropy undermines the very idea of the closed system, with that fixed totalization of which Laplace, Hegel, and Balzac had dreamed. Any system is necessarily an open system, evolving through time, as energy is displaced. Totalization is irrelevant for describing those random entropic processes by which the lowest level of energy of a system is in the long run the most probable. So Balzac's energetics is homologous to an early stage in the development of the concept of energy, when one thought as much in terms of forces as in terms of energy. What Balzac developed was the idea that the vector array of forces, describing the way in which the powerful were rapaciously destroying the weak, was as evident as the earth's attraction to the sun. This naturalizing of social forces in the Balzacian novel makes of Balzac one of the great contributors to knowledge in the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-George Castex, vol. 11, 655.

2. Balzac, “Discours sur l'immortalité de l'âme,” in Oeuvres diverses, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 1, 545.

3. Stephen F. Mason, A History of the Sciences, 488.

4. Balzac, Le Lys dans la vallée, 77.

5. My discussion of Carnot draws upon, among other sources, Mason, A History of the Sciences, as well as Cecil J. Schneer, The Evolution of Physical Science, and Emilio Segrè, From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves: Classical Physicists and Their Discoveries. I also recommend highly the ever useful Princeton Dictionary of the History of Science, ed. W. F. Byynum, E. J. Browne, and Roy Porter.

6. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Castex, vol. 10, 282.

7. Balzac, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 23, 177.

8. Flaubert quoted in Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Castex, vol. 11, 561.

9. I quote from the Habermas text, in which a contemporary neo-Marxist shows that he is unhappy that Marx actually believed in the totalizing thought that he held up as the epistemic ideal. From Jurgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse, 63.

10. Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry, 160-61.

11. Balzac, La Recherche de l'absolu, 20. In his introduction to this edition, Raymond Abellio relates the novel to the development of science fiction.

12. Laplace, Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 95.

13. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Castex, vol. 11, 781.

14. In his study of Le Père Goriot, Uwe Dethloff emphasizes the importance of the Lettres à Madame Hanska for understanding how Balzac viewed his work in this regard. Dethloff quotes Balzac: “Aussi dans les Etudes de moeurs sont les individualités typisées; dans les Etudes philosophiques sont les types individualisés. Ainsi partout j'aurai donné la vie—au type, en l'individualisant, à l'individu en le typisant” [Thus in the Studies of mores are individuals typed, and in the Philosophical studies are types individualized. So everywhere I will have reproduced life—in the type by individualizing it, in the individual by making a type of it]. See Uwe Dethloff, Balzac: “Le Père Goriot”: Honoré de Balzacs Gesellschaftsdarstellung im Kontext der Realismus Debatte, 37.

15. Fargeaud-Ambrière, “Balzac, Homme de science(s),” in Balzac, l'invention du roman, ed. Claude Duchet, 54. Fargeaud-Ambrière has done much useful work on Balzac and science. In addition to the many other scholars I have used here—Pierre Barbéris, Philippe Bertault, Albert Béguin, Geneviève Delattre, Ernst Robert Curtius, etc.—I call attention here to two especially useful books on questions of Balzac and science: Moise Le Yaquanc, Nosographie de l'humanité balzacienne, and Per Nykrog, La Pensée de Balzac dans “La Comédie Humaine.”

16. Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Castex, vol. 1, 8.

17. Balzac, Le Père Goriot, 29. This edition has a useful preface by Félicien Marceau.

18. Schneer, Evolution of Physical Science, 202.

Bibliography

Balzac, Honoré de. La Comédie humaine. Ed. Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Editions de la Pléïade, 1976-1981.

———. “Discours sur l'immortalité de l'âme. In Oeuvres diverses, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Editions de la Pléïade, 1990.

———. Le Lys dans la vallée. Paris: Editions Garnier-Flammarion, 1972.

———. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Club de l'honnête homme, 1956.

———. La Recherche de l'absolu. Introduction by Raymond Abellio. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1967.

———. Le Père Goriot. Preface by Félicien Marceau. Paris: Editions Folio, 1971.

Brock, Norton. The Norton History of Chemistry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

Byynum, W. F., E. J. Browne, and Roy Porter, eds. Dictionary of the History of Science. Princeton: The Princeton University Press, 1985.

Dethloff, Uwe. Balzac: “Le Père Goriot”: Honoré de Balzacs Gesellschaftsdarstellung im Kontext der Realismus Debatte. Tubingen: Francke Verlag, 1989.

Fargeaud-Ambrière, Madeleine. “Balzac, Homme de science(s).” In Balzac, L'invention du roman, ed. Claude Duchet. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1982.

Habermas, Jurgen. Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968.

Laplace, Pierre Simon. Essai philosophique sur les probabilités. Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1967. [Reprint of 1814 edition.]

Le Yaquanc, Moise. Nosographie de l'Humanité balzacienne. Paris: Maloine, 1959.

Mason, Stephen F. A History of the Sciences, rev. ed. New York: MacMillan, 1962.

Nykrog, Per. La Pensée de Balzac dans “La Comédie Humaine.” Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1965.

Schneer, Cecil J. The Evolution of Physical Science. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

Segrè, Emilio. From Falling Bodies to Radio Waves: Classical Physicists and Their Discoveries. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1984. [Also cited from Die grossen Physiker und ihre Entdeckungen, trans. into German by Hainer Kober. Munich: Piper, 1990.]