[In the following essay, McCarthy explores the attention Balzac paid in his novels to the craft of writing as well as to the reader's creative activity of reading, using for her analysis reception theory and touching too on other literary theories that examine the relationship between author, text, reader, and meaning.]

C'est toujours à cause de la manière dont une histoire est racontée que nous nous y intéressons. Chaque sujet a sa forme spéciale.

(It is always because of the way in which a story is told that we are interested in it. Every subject has its own special form.)

Balzac, “Lettres sur la littérature”

Our image of Balzac as an artist has been much influenced by the copious correspondence through which we glimpse the artist at work. From his many letters, and of course the works themselves, we have constructed an image of the frenetic worker, the author driven by a sense of his art, by debt, and by need and at the same time propelled by a vision of a masterwork. Although his was a grandiose plan for the historical portrayal of his own time, his vision was as much artistic as it was historical. His letters and critical writing portray an intense awareness of craft, the self-consciousness of the creative artist. As Balzac states in the “Avant-Propos” to La Comédie humaine, the task of writing history in a literary form was more difficult than the “simple” writing of history.¹ History and artistry came together naturally and smoothly for the author as his own description of his vision demonstrates.

En dressant l'inventaire des vices et des vertus, en rassemblant les principaux faits des passions, en peignant les caractères, en choisissant les événements principaux de la Société, en composant des types par la réunion des traits de plusieurs caractères homogènes, peut-être pouvais-je arriver à écrire l'histoire oubliée par tant d'historiens, celle des moeurs.

(1:11)

(In preparing an inventory of vices and virtues, assembling the facts of emotions, portraying character, selecting Society's important events, constructing models with the traits of several homogeneous personalities, perhaps I can write the history that is forgotten by so many historians, that of manners.)

Although he begins on a note of objectivity, as if he were, as he claimed to be, simply the recorder of an era, his description points to a consciousness of craft and of art within his work and a preview of the creativity at the heart of La Comédie humaine. He sought both in and through his writing the “sens caché,” the hidden reality of society, the most profound meanings and motivations within the actions of its members. The search was both the privilege and the responsibility of the artist. “Le talent [de l'auteur] éclate dans la peinture des causes qui engendrent les faits, dans les mystères du coeur humain dont les mouvements sont négligés par les historiens”² (“An author's talent bursts forth in the portrayal of causes that produce the facts, in the mysteries of the human heart, the movements of which are neglected by historians”). Thus, the world the author creates for us, his readers, is that of his day as he perceived it, as well as that which was beyond, within, behind the visible surface as he was able to divine or imagine it. It was a duality of nature, of the person, and of society, a duality at once material and spiritual, which he sought to explore through his writings and which has been much discussed by the critics.³ We find the evidence of that exploration at every level of La Comédie humaine. In the “Préface de la Première Edition” (1838) Balzac wrote of Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau:

Ce livre est le premier côté d'une médaille qui roulera dans toutes les sociétés, le revers est La Maison Nucingen. … Toute oeuvre comique est nécessairement bilatérale. L'écrivain, ce grand rapporteur de procès, doit mettre les adversaires face à face. Alceste, quoique lumineux par lui-même, reçoit son vrai jour de Philinte:

“Si tanta licet componere parvis.” (6:35)

(This book is the first side of a coin present in all societies; the opposite side is La Maison Nucingen. … Every comic work is necessarily bilateral. The author, that recorder of process, must place adversaries face to face. Alceste, although luminous in his own right, is seen in full light opposite Philinte:

“If it is permitted to compare such great things to such small.”)

While the duality of the world became a subject implicit in much of Balzac's writing, his choice of the fictional mode implied for him a further dual relationship, that of the reader and the text, and it is his recognition of that relationship that is the topic of this study. The fictional universe he fashioned for us is of course a mixture of historical writing and artistic creation. A fictional reality, or, more correctly, our illusion of it, is the result not only of the objective portrayal of what Balzac so adroitly observed, not only of his subjective representation, but also of the strategies and devices upon which his narrations are built, of the complicated construction of the text on multiple levels of theme, structure, and stylistics. Only because of its artistic rendering are we able to participate in Balzac's fictional world. Only through art, and what it demands of us as recipients, can that world transcend the epoch, the culture, and the man that it reflects. It is the author's construction of the work, with careful attention to the pleasure and to the creativity of the reader, that permits us to become so thoroughly engaged in the fictional universe of La Comédie humaine. That construction and its relationship to the reader deserve our careful attention if we wish to understand more deeply our fascination with this literature.

That Balzac should have chosen the literary form for his representation of a historical moment and for his investigation of its most profound meanings reflects a number of assumptions. Although it is in part to state the obvious, it is important to consider these assumptions and their implications. Of course, the choice of the novel form implies a craft to be mastered and attended to. It implies representation not only through realistic portrayal, but also through the use of such artistic devices as symbols, metaphors, descriptions, hyperbole, or minimization. Balzac certainly exercised his poetic privilege in the evocation-creation of a universe, and, as his own definition cited above indicates, the creation of a fictional reality was not in the representation of that which one knew, but in the creative assembly, choice, and composition of aspects of that reality, and in the structuring of these aspects and others into narrative form.

Of course, the literary form also implies readers, not mere recipients of the narration but active participants in completing the meaning that the story begins. The textual strategies to be studied here are evidence of the healthy respect that Balzac had for the power and imagination of the reader. He criticized his contemporary E. Sue, who, as he put it, “[prenait] ses lecteurs pour des ignorants”⁴ “([took] his readers for know-nothings”).

There are in Balzac's correspondence frequent references to the reading public, frequent requests, especially to Mme Hanska and other women, for response, criticism, and reaction. We know that the response to Balzac's work during his lifetime was mixed and that he strove for a long time, despite later protestations, to please the readers of his own day.⁵

The nature of that reading public, however, is significant because it greatly influenced the shape of Balzac's texts. A widening distance between artist and audience forced writers of the nineteenth century to abstract their audience far more than did writers of an earlier age. Thus it is that Balzac and his contemporaries seem to us at times to have been confounded by an audience they did not understand. According to Christopher Prendergast,

The “mysterious” nature of the public is not just a matter of a failure to discover the evidence or to elaborate adequate methods of research; it is rooted in the particular realities of the nineteenth century, where the anonymity of the reading public is of the essence. In earlier periods there is frequently a close relationship between artist and public; indeed many writers are directly acquainted with many members of an anyway severely restricted circle of readers. In the nineteenth century, however, that intimacy begins to disappear; the relationship between writer and reader tends to become a basically economic one, mediated by the workings of the market, that is, by something essentially impersonal.⁶

As the author's concept of reader becomes gradually more abstract, the strategies to accommodate that reader within a text must, we may assume, demand closer attention and more subtle treatment. Although Balzac did at times take himself as the model of the reader (in his discussions of Cooper and Stendhal, for example), he did indeed formulate his narrative strategies and theories with an abstracted notion of the reader in mind.

La vérité littéraire consiste à choisir des faits et des caractères, à les éléver à un point de vue d'où chacun les croie vrais en les apercevant, car chacun a son vrai particulier, et chacun doit reconnaître la teinte du sien dans la couleur générale du type présenté par le romancier.⁷

(Literary truth requires that an author select facts and personalities and elevate them so that everyone, upon seeing them, believes them to be true. What is truthful is different for everyone, and each reader must recognize shades of his own truth in the general color of that which is presented as typical by the novelist.)

As this passage indicates, the work could be constructed in such a way that an author could reach individual readers, permitting them to play out their individuality while at the same time exerting a measure of control over each response. Balzac accommodated the unknown reader of his day, unknown in temperament and taste,⁸ as well as readers such as ourselves, in part through the construction of the narration that clearly defined the role to be played by the reader. Displayed in Balzac's writing, there are strong efforts to situate the reader in relationship to the narration, to then invite an active participation in the production of literary meaning, and to communicate the nature of that participation through the numerous strategies laid within the text. When he praised Stendhal for his “magnifique croquis militaire” (“magnificent military sketch”), the battle of Waterloo scene of La Chartreuse de Parme, Balzac portrayed himself as one such active reader, guided and inspired in his reading by the author's skillful style.

[M. Beyle] ne s'est pas jeté dans la peinture complète de la bataille de Waterloo, il l'a côtoyée sur les derrières de l'armée, il a donné deux ou trois épisodes de la déroute; mais si puissant a été son coup de pinceau, que l'esprit voit au-delà: l'oeil embrasse tout le champ de bataille et le grand désastre.⁹

([M. Beyle] did not attempt a complete portrayal of the battle of Waterloo. Instead he concentrated upon the rear of the army, giving two or three episodes of the rout; but so powerful was his presentation that one imagines beyond it: the eye takes in the entire battlefield and the terrible disaster.)

Indeed, we find in the critical writings of Balzac a significant attention to the craft of writing. He was highly critical, to cite but one example, of the feuilletonistes (serial writers) who composed their works on a day-to-day basis and for whom an installment of a story would be influenced, if not dictated, by the audience response to its predecessor. “[T]ous ceux qui publient leurs ouvrages en feuilletons n'ont plus la liberté de la forme”¹⁰ (“All those who publish their novels in installments forfeit the benefits of the form”) wrote Balzac. Even those works Balzac himself published en feuilletons were written, if he was at all able, in their entirety before the presentation of the first installment.

More interesting, however, than his criticism of others is the image we receive of Balzac himself: an artist on the cutting edge of artistic invention.¹¹ Balzac realized that the novel was the genre on the rise, the genre in which innovation was possible. He was aware of the revolutionary nature of Walter Scott's fiction and set his goals high in his desire to better the master in the formation and development of the historical novel. As Martin Kanes has pointed out, Balzac “took the first steps toward the contemporary self-consciousness of fiction, toward the break-down of mimesis as the conscious and accepted mode of narration.”¹²

The attention to the nature of the reader's participation in the work that Balzac's writing manifests may well have led him to approve of, if not to enhance, twentieth-century critical tendencies, in particular those of reception theory. Literary criticism that has in the recent past emphasized scientific methodology, objective truth, and interpretation of the text in isolation has more recently turned toward a recognition of the importance of the reader and the considerable subjectivity inherent in the act of reading. In so doing, it makes tacit admission that all criticism, despite its most sincere efforts to remain objective and scientific, is, to a degree, subjective. That simple proposal, which has generated no little controversy, acknowledges the liberty and diversity that criticism represents and must tolerate. Critics now recognize and accept that each reader experiences a given work differently at different times and that the experience of literature will always be subjective. For the purposes of this study it is necessary to analyze the nature of the literary text in relation to its readers and, indeed, to examine the act of reading itself.

When I. A. Richards was working on Practical Criticism he was acutely aware of the subjectivity of the reader.¹³ Richards did not appreciate the diversity he found in reader response, but rather sought to correct what he perceived to be misreadings and to bring about a uniformity of response. Were Richards writing today, he would perhaps again be interested in correcting erroneous readings that stem from misunderstandings of language, form, or history. But the direction of contemporary criticism might have led him to a greater appreciation of the valid diversity of response that is the object of so much attention. In “The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology and Criticism,”¹⁴ critic David Bleich suggests that subjectivity is the paradigm to be found at the very foundation of our intellectual era. It replaces, for him, an objective paradigm that, as the basis of intellectual activity, permitted many to believe in the possibility of a totally objective truth as well as in those purely scientific and objective methods believed capable of leading us to the truth. As criticism has recognized the subjectivity involved in the process of evaluation and interpretation, it has concerned itself more with the transaction between text and reader in the same way that it has always attended to the transaction between author and text. Literary criticism has been highly active, then, in the study of the subjective paradigm of which Bleich speaks.

One of the objections raised against reader-response criticism has been that it precludes the possibility of a definitive reading, that is, any one true and final interpretation. It is precisely this point, however, that is its strength and essence, because no method of analysis can reduce a literary text to a single meaning. The very nature of the literary work defies this sort of reduction. Furthermore, every text, as it is read, becomes intimately bound to the personality and to the environment of the reader. Equally, it is bound to the personality and environment of the author, making the study of a writer's biography and history important in the understanding of a work. Readers in the twentieth century, however, cannot know the psyche of a nineteenth-century author. We have only history (both of the writer and of the time), the text, and ourselves with which to work. Literary meaning cannot be separated from the reader, just as the meaning and definition of the object cannot be separated from the observer. Indeed, the two are closely linked through the act of observation, or, in the case of literature, through the act of reading. Despite the small measure of disorder the diversity of subjective response admits into the body of criticism, attention to that response allows us to consider many valid interpretations without violating the integrity of the text itself. Even more importantly, such attention reveals to us numerous subtleties within a text that have heretofore gone unnoticed. It permits us to combine our roles of reader and critic, at once admitting our personal involvement in the text and making use of the many clear, precise, and scientific tools with which we analyze the text, ourselves, and the transaction between the two.¹⁵ Reception theory has engendered not only interesting textual analyses but also compelling studies of aesthetic perception and the process of reading.

The approach used in this study is based on current reception theory.¹⁶ I treat the literary text as a highly dynamic entity, defining it as the vehicle of meaning, the axis of communication between author and reader, the creative field in which meaning is generated through the cooperative efforts of these two. A work can then be seen, I believe, in its fullest dimensions, not as a blank screen upon which are projected the fantasies of the reader, but as a skillfully constructed ensemble of story, language, and image that awaits its reader's dramatic fulfillment. Moreover, with each reading of a masterpiece, we evolve new levels of interpretation, progressively uncovering new depths and creating new meaning within. A significant work is constructed so as to allow and to guide our creativity. Balzac's Comédie humaine is a combination of a great many such works and is thus, because of its breadth and unity, a particularly rich object of study. The intricacy of Balzac's work and the author's clear concern in his texts for the reader's creative activity render our involvement in La Comédie humaine both complex and essential. At the same time, however, his conception of the whole and his sophisticated use of stylistic techniques define and control our participation in and contribution to the work.

As critical interest in reader response has grown throughout the twentieth century, the definition of the nature of the literary work and its relation to the reader as well as the understanding of how literary meaning is produced have changed.

In 1929, I. A. Richards greatly altered the perspective of both criticism and teaching with the publication of Practical Criticism. Clearly, Richards believed in the objective text and in the possibility of arriving at a definitive interpretation. But his analysis of students' responses to some poems was one of the first efforts of a critic to confront the reader's subjectivity. Richards did not hesitate to admit that the source of diversity in reader response lay deep in the unconscious. He denied, however, the value of any probing therein and sought only to correct errors in reading.¹⁷

In 1954, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley decried what they called “The Affective Fallacy,” a confusion between the poem and its results.¹⁸ For them the meaning of a literary work was quite separate from its effect on the reader, and subjectivity in criticism led only to impressionism and relativism.

In 1957, Fiction and the Unconscious, by Simon Lesser, a strict follower of Freud, was published.¹⁹ Indeed, Lesser initiated the serious use of psychoanalytic principles in the study of literature. He believed that literature “represents an attempt to augment the meager satisfactions offered by experience through the creation of a more harmonious world to which one can repair, however briefly, for refuge, solace and pleasure.”²⁰ In Lesser's analysis, the material of fiction is psychic conflict that arouses tension in the reader and then relieves it; he thus defined the literary work in terms of the experience it provokes. Reading, in Lesser's terms, is a source of satisfaction for the psyche as defined by Freud. Fully ten years after his book appeared, the active study of reader response began.

The first significant book to build upon Lesser's study was The Dynamics of Literary Response by Norman N. Holland, which proposed the model of literature as transformation of the basic psychic issues or as the transformation of a central fantasy to be discovered and interpreted by the reader.²¹ In 5 Readers Reading, Holland analyzed not only the vastly different responses of five students of literature to Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” but also the very process of reading that evolves and permits such diversity of response.²² He altered his original model of literature in demonstrating that a transformation can take place only in the reader—not in the text. It is in the transaction or convergence between text and reader, he argued, that the transformation of psychic issues is to be found. The principles of that transformation are proposed in four clearly defined steps in the process of reading.

Equally significant, although more philosophically oriented, are the writings of David Bleich.²³ For Bleich, no literary meaning exists independent of that which the subjective reader creates. All critical interpretation is subjective, despite the obvious and quite natural attempt on the reader's part to objectify response. In “The Subjective Character of Critical Interpretation,” Bleich claimed,

the truth about something that requires an audience to gain reality is a different sort of thing than the truth about something that does not. The truth about the Newtonian Bible is different from the truth about the Newtonian apple. The truth of the Bible requires the faith of the reader; the truth of the acceleration of gravity does not. The truth about literature has no meaning independent of the truth about the reader.²⁴

Other critics have considered the question of the reader in a significantly different manner. In “The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction,” Walter J. Ong suggested that every writer fictionalizes an audience, casts it in a specific role, and calls upon it to assume that role.²⁵ He further analyzed the question of communication between author and reader through the text by suggesting that the audience also must fictionalize itself and accept the role imposed on it by the author. Ong did not in this article test his theory by examining a work in order to show through what means the text communicates to its readers the role that the author has fictionalized for them or in what ways the readers play out the role that they see for themselves within the text.

In The Implied Reader,²⁶ Wolfgang Iser concentrated not upon the reader but upon the text, in order to lay the foundation for a theory about the nature of literary effects and reader reactions, which he put forth in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.²⁷ Iser's thesis is that the text contains a prestructured potential meaning that is actualized by the reader through the process of reading, which is itself a highly dynamic activity. Reading is the convergence of the text and the reader's imagination, the point at which meaning appears, not in one or the other but in the combination of the two. This approach permits Iser to study not only the contribution of an objective text but also the process by which the reader reads, in order to understand the reasons behind interpretations. The convergence of text and reader is what Iser refers to as the text's “virtual dimension.”²⁸ This, of course, is the very transaction of which Holland spoke.

Combining approaches that concentrate on the text with those that focus on the reading process is essential to our understanding of the literary work as a form of communication: “Le texte de fiction doit être considéré avant tout comme une communication et l'acte de lecture, comme une relation dialogique”²⁹ (“The fictional text must be considered before all else as communication and reading as a dialogue”). To consider the text as squarely placed between the author and the reader permits us to see it as a transformation in and of itself, but also as existing in a constant state of transformation because it is a dynamic structure upon which interpretations are continually (or with each reading) made. The transformations worked through the literary text by author and reader alike are of stories themselves, of psychic conflicts and constructs, of the individual perception of social reality, and even of history.

In this study, I will pay primary attention to textual analysis, in order to delineate and refine an understanding of the processes through which meaning is produced in Balzac's work. It is, of course, within the text that the author has laid the plan for his reader, and it is on the work that we focus in our inevitable subjective interpretation and elaboration of the narration.

The diversity of interpretation given to a single literary text testifies to an author's ability to exert only partial control over the reception of his or her work, however. “Meaning is the referential totality which is implied by the aspects contained in the text and which must be assembled in the course of reading.”³⁰ This process of assembly is our function as readers and our source of pleasure within the act of reading. A narrative must be constructed so as to take into account the many active readers who will interpret the fictional material in ways proper to their own experience. Thus, strategies that operate on many levels at once for the accommodation and manipulation of the active participant in the literary process are essential to narration. It is not hard to imagine that Balzac, an author who created an environment of social determinism for his characters, created one as well for his readers. I hope to demonstrate that Balzac did indeed create for us a deterministic setting, a social milieu of the reading that guides our thought and shapes our response, thus defining for us the basis of our interpretation.

The reading process itself, then, must be seen in the larger context of communication, of a special dual relationship, of a pact between author and reader. It is, of course, more than a simple decoding of the complexities built into the text. Inevitably, reading calls upon the past and present experience of the reader and plays upon the chaotic material of the unconscious. An individual reading is a rich blend of the cognitive and the sensuous; although we must respond cognitively to the words of the text, we are drawn in as well by its sensuousness, by rhythm, rhyme, and sound. We react both emotionally and intellectually to all levels of the narration, and at times we even respond physically. Grasped cognitively by the reader and elaborated subjectively, the text expands endlessly. The potential for this enormous expansion is present at all times within the text as the cognitive, that is, literal, material of the work assumes its broader dimensions through the reading process. Were the emotional and the sensuous carefully incorporated in the text itself, we would all receive approximately the same meaning, relative to the degree of our perspicacity, which, of course, we do not. In other types of communication, conversation for example, the listener has the advantage (if it is indeed an advantage) of such aids as voice, gesture, attitude, or facial expression to guide the interpretation. In literature, however, the depths of meaning that the work assumes and the reactions that it evokes depend on the reader's participation, which the author must subtly control through the text itself.³¹

Manipulating, shaping, and reshaping of the text are the activities of author and reader alike. The literary work is approached from both poles of the axis of communication. Iser has articulated the task of the reader vis-à-vis the text.

Each sentence correlate contains what one might call a hollow section, which looks forward to the next correlate, and a retrospective section, which answers the expectations of the preceding sentence (now a part of the remembered background). Thus every moment of reading is a dialectic of protension and retension, conveying a future horizon yet to be occupied, along with a past (and continually fading) horizon already filled; the wandering viewpoint carves its passage through both at the same time and leaves them to merge together in its wake. There is no escaping this process, for … the text cannot at any one moment be grasped as a whole. … the aesthetic object is constantly being structured and restructured.³²

It is revealing to consider the text in this light, especially realizing that it is just this sort of activity that the author must anticipate when designing the narration.

It is significant within this context to ask why we enter into the relationship required by the reading of imaginative literature. The many answers to the question explain some of the expectations that we bring to a work. The most fundamental and, one would hope, the most pervasive answer is that we read for the sheer pleasure of it. Pleasure, like so much else that touches us, is linked to our psyche and orientation, and pleasure, it can be argued, is linked to our need and desire for mastery.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud speculated that play and the active representation by children of real-life situations are means by which they gain mastery of those parts of their lives over which they have little control.³³ In another essay, he further proposed that the adult activities of creative imagining and daydreaming are simply continuations of that play and serve a similar purpose.³⁴ If writing, which is the imposition of order and meaning upon the unordered, is a form of mastery, which it clearly is, then we can justly suppose that reading is also an activity that seeks to gain control and mastery, for it too imposes order and meaning. This is, of course, a widely held view of reading. But the activity of the reader is further similar to writing in the process by which meaning is produced. Reading is the restructuring of material already structured into meaning. We achieve an interpretation through our imaginative reconstruction of the author's written structure in the way that our own psychic orientation wishes and allows. If this model of a mental process is valid, then reading is an activity closely tied to the pleasure principle, which Freud defined as “a tendency … to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible.”³⁵ The excitation of which Freud speaks here is a psychic excitation that is a source of “unpleasure,” the state that the psychic apparatus seeks at most times to avoid. Reading is an activity clearly in the service of the pleasure principle. We simply do not (unless specifically required to do so by some outside force) read works that arouse great conflict and then do not resolve it. It is not difficult to imagine, for example, that scene after scene of bodily violence in a story might arouse more conflict and discomfort than a reader could bear. Freud believed that at the heart of every literary text there was a “raw issue,” a central or focal conflict, and that the genius of the great writer was to disguise it in so acceptable a form that it would be recognized by readers without arousing in them a need to defend against it. In Freud's terms, the inferior work is one that offers its audience either too little or too much conflict. In either case, the reader would put the book aside. Thus, if violence were unacceptable to the given reader's psyche, that reader would defend against it by exercising the ultimate control, closing the book. This definition of an artistic creation is highly reductive, and it was written to serve Freud's own theories. It is, nevertheless, an interesting perspective from which to view literature, especially when we consider a reader's expectations.

Although it may seem obvious that a reader does not read that which arouses too much conflict, it is an important observation. That we can reject a text at any moment in our reading allows us to involve ourselves in it safely. The distance that we enjoy from a text, the constant knowledge that it is only a story, allows us a freedom we do not enjoy in our daily intercourse. Sensing that reading is a safe activity and that we are ultimately in control, we can allow such internal conflicts to be aroused as would ordinarily be unacceptable to us. Because we are not threatened by any real consequences, we can take psychic risks that would, in our other activities, be too conflictive. Indeed, we often enjoy literature that is a good deal more adventuresome than our lives, because reading allows us control, mastery, and resolution of conflict.

However, it is not only for the danger and the adventure that we enjoy reading. We also read with some interest that which is quite familiar to us. Balzac fully recognized and exploited the interest that we have in ourselves and our own milieu. But this interest is also psychically based. It is far more than simply seeing how a common situation may be handled within a fictional setting. It is permitting familiar tensions to well up once again, but without any real threat and with assurance of resolution. Although reading can be an escape from the daily routine, it can also be an escape into the self, without the dangerous consequences that we know and defend ourselves against daily. We would seem then to answer the question “Why do we read?” by saying that we read in part for therapeutic gains that result from communication at a psychic level. An author, then, must within the narration accommodate our expectations of involvement, escape from and into self, conflict and its resolution, and manipulation, yet disguise that control sufficiently so as to allow us our creativity.

Acknowledging that we read not only for the objective and conscious reasons we would all offer in response to the question of why one reads but also for far deeper, highly subjective, and probably unconscious reasons as well, leads us to question the process of reading itself and to pose yet another question, “How do we read?”

Wayne C. Booth was the first to speak of the “mock reader,” a term he coined in discussing his own “inability or refusal to take on the characteristics [Lawrence] requires of his ‘mock reader.’”³⁶ Other writers since Booth have used other names for this reader who is a mental (conscious or unconscious) construct of the author. Gérard Genette named him the “narrataire,”³⁷ a term referring to a fictional recipient of the text who can be either intratextual or extratextual. The narrataire becomes a construct of the text (if only during its writing) by playing the role of the reader, whether in the author's mind or in the text itself. When this construct truly plays a part in a story, that is, becomes an actual character, the reader cannot help but identify with the role of recipient, if not with the actual character. The transaction between reader and mock reader differs with each work and with each reader. In general, we attempt to reduce the distance between the actual self and the fictional self, an activity in part controlled by the text itself. Assuming the role of the mock reader, accepting the role imposed on us (be it that of confidant, eavesdropper, removed audience, or simple spectator) is a form of role playing, and aside from being among the great pleasures of reading, it is one of the primary maneuvers that reading requires. As Walter J. Ong has pointed out,

Readers over the ages have had to learn this game of literacy, how to conform themselves to the projections of the writers they read, or at least how to operate in terms of these projections. They have to know how to play the game of being a member of an audience that “really” does not exist. And they have to adjust when the rules change, even though no rules thus far have ever been published and even though the changes in the unpublished rules are themselves for the most part only implied.³⁸

The reader's entry into the narration is, then, the actual taking on of the role of reader; it is becoming a member of an audience. It is more than the willing suspension of disbelief of which Coleridge spoke, although that is certainly part of it. By taking on the role of reader, we assume a position in relation to the work, that of recipient, actualizer, and recreator. We make an effort to become the narrataire within the text, and we act as if we were—that is, we have a sense of being addressed when we read. Our goal is to break down the barrier between ourselves and the text in order to internalize the narration. Only upon internalization can fiction be objectified, and only then can it be manipulated subjectively.

Norman N. Holland has described in considerable detail this process of internalization and manipulation, acknowledging thereby the individual creativity of the reader. As he states in his preface to 5 Readers Reading, literary response involves “a transformation by means of forms acting like defenses, of drives, impulses, and fantasies back and forth from the most primitive strata of psychic life to the highest.”³⁹ He delineates four principles of literary experience that chronologically outline the four stages of reading necessary to effect internalization of the message. According to Holland, we first test a text to see that it will gratify us in a psychically satisfactory fashion. We seek, he states, defenses and adaptations that are acceptable, if not similar to our own. In these stages, we treat the fictional narrative as an outside reality. If, however, it passes our psychic tests of fire, we allow it to be internalized; we become fully engaged in the reading. In the next phase, we use the text and our reading of it to build wish-fulfilling fantasies consistent with our psychic life. Finally, we will receive, shape, and interpret the text in a way characteristic of all our subjective activity. Having accepted the text, we master it along with our own unconscious conflicts.

The transaction between text and reader, however, is not dominated consistently by the reader, whose activity is in constant tension with the text that exerts its influence and control. Just as the reading process is essential to actualization of the text, so too the guidance of the strategies within the text is essential to the reading process. As Iser has clearly established, literary meaning remains always virtual, wholly present neither in the reality of the text nor in the disposition of the reader. The dynamic nature of the text itself is linked to this virtuality. We become involved in movement within the text and within ourselves, linking past, present, and future of the reading, building intratextual memories and expectations, associating and combining elements of the text, and hypothetically completing it. The truly dynamic and challenging text is the one that resists our efforts to maintain equilibrium, that keeps us off balance by continually frustrating our expectations and destroying our illusions, thus forcing us into an ever more active reading. “In seeking the balance we inevitably have to start out with certain expectations, the shattering of which is integral to the esthetic experience.”⁴⁰ But this free movement within the text permits us to unify it and to see relationships that are significant in and of themselves. If the aesthetic pleasure of reading depends in part on this dynamic process within the context of an individual story or novel, how much greater must be the pleasure for the reader of La Comédie humaine, in which each work is related to a network of others and in which we perform our operations intertextually as well as intratextually.

The philosophical stance of reception theorists is significant for the purposes of this study. They stress the dynamism of the transaction effected through the reading process and the centrality of manipulation of the text by author and reader alike. They acknowledge the goal of internalization and objectification that is part of our response to the text, and they recognize the importance of our psychic, historical, and cultural orientation. What is not stressed in their work, however, although it is certainly implied, is the relationship of the influence that the work exerts to the design of the author. The narrative strategies constituting that design precede and shape our reading, and an understanding of how they operate in Balzac's writing will permit us to grasp more fully the meaning of his work, his mastery of his craft, and our continued pleasure and fascination with his fictional world. It will permit us to illuminate the creative process by which the fictional universe of La Comédie humaine is shaped.

Notes

1. Honoré de Balzac, “Avant-Propos,” La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre Georges Castex, Edition de la Pléïade, 1:7-20. All references to Balzac's work in this study are to the new Pléïade edition of La Comédie humaine unless otherwise noted. Quotations from it will be followed by an indication of both volume and page numbers.

2. Honoré de Balzac, “Lettres sur la littérature,” in Oeuvres complètes de Honoré de Balzac, 40:278.

3. For an interesting discussion of this concept, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, pp. 110-52.

4. Balzac, “Lettres sur la littérature,” 40:289.

5. See Christopher Prendergast, “Balzac and the Reading Public,” in Balzac, Fiction and Melodrama, pp. 17-38.

6. Ibid., p. 20.

7. Balzac, “Lettres sur la littérature,” 40:278.

8. It would be naive to believe that Balzac was totally ignorant of his own audience. As Prendergast pointed out, however, the reading public grew rapidly during the years of Balzac's production. Equally, the popularity of serialization imposed new and different demands upon an author interested in appealing to the taste of the day. Tastes were changing rapidly, in part influenced by the growing industry of literature, which paid little heed to artistic merit.

9. Balzac, “Lettres sur la littérature,” 40:287.

10. “Avertissement quasi-littéraire,” Le Cousin Pons, cited by Prendergast, p. 28.

11. For a complete discussion of Balzac as critic and innovative artist, see Geneviève Delattre, Les Opinions littéraires de Balzac.

12. Martin Kanes, Balzac's Comedy of Words, p. 219.

13. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism.

14. David Bleich, “The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology and Criticism,” New Literary History.

15. I am not saying that all readings of a given text are correct. There can and frequently do exist blatant misreadings upon which may rest a very false interpretation. I am speaking here of the interpretation of a competent reader who knows fully the language of the text in all its connotative depth, who brings to the text full communicative skills, and who has a certain degree of literary sophistication and experience.

16. For a clear description of the range of assumptions and practices of these theorists in America, see Steven Mailloux, “Learning to Read: Interpretation and Reader-Response Criticism,” Studies in Literary Imagination 12 (1979): 93-108.

17. In 1929, Richards was being avant-garde in confronting so directly the question of psychic motivation and subjectivity in critical interpretation. A footnote (on p. 7) reveals to us how these issues were viewed. Comparing the difficulty of dealing with the complex diversity of response to the difficulty of following “the ravings of mania or the dream maunderings of a neurotic,” Richards excused himself for the implication and then stated in a footnote, “A few touches of the clinical manner will, however, be not out of place in these pages, if only to counteract the indecent tendencies of the scene. For here are our friends and neighbours—nay our very brothers and sisters—caught at a moment of abandon giving themselves and their literary reputations away with an unexampled freedom. It is indeed a sobering spectacle, but like some sights of the hospital ward very serviceable to restore proportions and recall to us what humanity, behind all its lendings and pretenses, is like.”

18. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon, pp. 21-39.

19. Simon Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious.

20. Ibid., p. 21.

21. Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response.

22. Norman N. Holland, 5 Readers Reading.

23. See David Bleich, “The Determination of Literary Value”; “The Subjective Character of Critical Interpretation”; Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism; “The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology and Criticism”; and Subjective Criticism.

24. Bleich, “The Subjective Character,” p. 745.

25. Walter J. Ong, “The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction.”

26. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett.

27. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.

28. Iser, The Implied Reader, p. 279.

29. Wolfgang Iser, “La Fiction en effet,” p. 279.

30. Iser, The Act of Reading, p. 151.

31. Obviously, when we study a text we have more to draw upon than the simple word. We have the author's other writings, our other readings, dictionaries, biographies, and histories. I refer here to that inevitable first reading, to a reading when our major involvement is with the text itself. At that time, our emotional involvement may be at its highest.

32. Iser, The Act of Reading, p. 112.

33. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 18:7-64.

34. Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” 9:143-53.

35. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 18:62.

36. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 138-39.

37. Gérard Genette, Figures III, pp. 265-67. In English, the term “narrataire” translates as the rather awkward ”narratee.” Cf. Gerald Prince, “Notes Towards a Categorization of Fictional ‘Narratees’,” Genre IV (1971): 100-5.

38. Ong, “The Writer's Audience,” p. 12.

39. Holland, 5 Readers Reading, p. xii.

40. Iser, The Implied Reader, p. 287. Iser used as a primary example of this aesthetic experience James Joyce's Ulysses, which encourages a pattern of response but immediately destroys it with each new chapter.

Bibliography

I. Primary

Balzac, Honoré de. La Comédie humaine. Edited by Pierre-Georges Castex. 12 vols. Bibliothèque de la Pléïade. Paris: Gallimard, 1976-1981.

———. “Lettres sur la littérature.” In Oeuvres complètes de Honoré de Balzac. Vol. 40, pp. 271-329. Paris: Louis Conard, 1940.

II. Secondary

a. On La Comédie humaine

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination, Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.

Delattre, Geneviève. Les Opinions littéraires de Balzac. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1961.

Kanes, Martin. Balzac's Comedy of Words. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Prendergast, Christopher. Balzac, Fiction and Melodrama. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978.

b. Theory

Bleich, David. “The Determination of Literary Value.” Literature and Psychology 17 (1967):19-30.

———. Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975.

———. “The Subjective Character of Critical Interpretation.” College English 36 (1975):739-55.

———. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

———. “The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology and Criticism.” New Literary History 7 (1976):313-34.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-analysis, 1953-1974.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

———. “Frontières du récit.” Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969.

Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

———. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

———. “La Fiction en effet.” Poétique 19 (1979):275-98.

———. The Implied Reader, Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Lesser, Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious. 2d ed. 1957. Reprint. New York: Vintage Books, 1962.

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975):9-21.

Prince, Gerald. “Notes Towards a Categorization of Fictional ‘Narratees’.” Genre 4 (1971):100-5.

Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929.

Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., and Beardsley, Monroe C. The Verbal Icon. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954.