72 REVIEWS and his flowering in opera. Scribe is not of course an author who could ever find favour with the aficionados of literary anguish and morbidity, and it is easy to mock his facility and theatrical adherence to the Cleopatra's nose school of history. It is even possible to find a few flaws in this book, such as the unfortunate comparison of 'piece bien faite' with a frontage 'bien fait' in the Preface and EUGENE (sic) on the spine. But without exaggerating Scribe's literary qualities the authors make a good case for recognizing his achievements Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/XXXVIII/1/72/573627 by guest on 01 October 2021 as one of the foremost men of the theatre of the first half of the nineteenth century, not just in France, but in Europe. He is indeed unique among French writers for the theatre in the number of recent major productions and broadcasts in this country, to cite only Le Comle Ory and L'Africaine. Readers inclined to minimize Scribe's contribution to such operas should show that they are better judges of a librettist than the musicians who appreciated his expertise, including Auber, Boieldieu, Cherubini, Donizetti, Gounod, Hal6vy, Meyer- beer, Offenbach, Rossini, Thomas, Verdi, and Weber. On his election to the Acad6mie Francaise Scribe noted that, however true to life comedy may appear, it always rejects as well as reflects the society which it represents, to compensate, to cover up. His own direct testimony on Parisian life in his time is doubtless considerable, especially his dialogue as a witness to colloquial French. But he is probably even better as an indirect witness to the aspirations and the inhibitions of the vast bourgeois and popular audiences who flocked to his plays. His continued popularity, together with his extensive collaboration with musicians, entertainers, and writers of all sorts, would seem to lend his writings unusual value simply as documents in the history of Parisian sensibility, not as it ought to have been, but as it was. u ~ „ hi. CJASTON rlALL WARWICK Honori de Balzac. Herausgegeben von HANS-ULRICH GUMBRECHT, KARL- HEINZ STIERLE, RAINER WARNING. (Uni-Taschenbiicher, 977). Munchen: Fink. 1980. 494 pp. DM 19.80. This book is a symposium of thirteen articles which range widely over Balzac's literary achievement. Four deal with Balzac's view of reality and with the narrative models followed by him in his writing of the Com&die kumaine. Four deal with various features of his narrative technique and more especially with his descriptive methods. Aspects of the actual narrative discourse of the Comidie humaine and the Contes drolatiques, and their interpretability by the critic and the general reader, are discussed in the remaining five. The subjects considered in this symposium include the role of descriptive language in Le Curd de village (Franchise van Rossum-Guyon), the descriptive techniques of LaMaison du chat-qui-pelou (Wolf-Dieter Stempel), the functions of symbolism in La Bourse (the joint contribution of Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and Jurgen Muller), and the idyllic element in the Seines de la vie de campagne with particular reference to Les Paysans, discussed by Reinhold Grimm in a most perceptive analysis of that novel's ambiguity. The intertextuality of Balzac's writing, and the problems consequently connected with any assessment of his REVIEWS 73 'realism', are interestingly discussed by several authors. The influence exerted by earlier novelists and playwrights upon Balzac's concept of (tragic and tragicomic) 'terror' is the subject of Karl Maurer's long but somewhat inconclusive survey. Karlheinz Stierle's essay on 'epische Naivitat und burgerliche Welt' emphasizes the indebtedness of the Comidie humaine both to Diderot's drame bourgeois and to Sebastien Mercier's Tableaux de Paris; it has a few excellent pages on Le Colonel Chabert. Charles Grivel, in a penetrating Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/XXXVIII/1/72/573627 by guest on 01 October 2021 discussion of the significance of facial expressions (in particular, Esther van Gobseck's), and of the extent of Balzac's indebtedness to Lavater, rejects any clear semiotic correspondence between facial features and traits of character. The problem of the novelist's 'realism' is well expressed by Gerhard Goebel, who in the course of a textual analysis of an extract from Les Paysans stresses that the only yardstick by which it is possible for us to assess that 'realism' is by reference to other writers. It is indeed the unifying theme of this volume that the 'realism' of the Comidie humaine — as distinct from its inner, self-referential and intertextual 'reality' — is of scarcely more than marginal importance. The matter is not even considered at all by Wolfgang Preisendanz, who promises to give it his attention in a future work. His attention is focused in this symposium on the comic aspects of the Comidie humaine as exemplified by the 'Karnevali- sierung' of the narrative discourse of Les Parents pauvres. The tension, in La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, between sombre subject-matter and ironical jesting word-play is an aspect of these late works which has never before been adequately considered; tie metalanguage of Les Parents pauvres has still not been fully explored now. As one of their number readily admits, the authors of these essays come to the Comidie humaine unversed in the latest findings of Balzacian textual criticism: 'bewandert im Werk Balzacs, aber keineswegs in der Balzac-Forschung' is Preisendanz's way of describing himself. This in itself need hardly be of any consequence, except that when (for example) Stierle refers to the old 1876 edition of Balzac's correspondence for a quotation from Balzac's letters to M™ Hanska, unfamiliarity with 'Balzac-Forschung' has surely gone too far. _ . 3 b DONALD ADAMSON LONDON Balzac: Illusions perdues. By DONALD ADAMSON. (Critical Guides to French Texts, 7). London: Grant and Cutler. 1981. 90 pp. £1.80. This is a clever and faithful reading of Illusions perdues. Not its least virtue is to correct unostentatiously, or nip in the bud, the commonest undergraduate fallacies about Balzac. Adamson demonstrates, for instance, the specificity of Balzac's narrative technique (in a convincing comparison with Middlemarch); is keenly alive to the paradoxes and complexity of his characters; makes excellent remarks on the ludic aspects of his 'maxims'; and shows the importance of his silences and mysteries: 'Balzac is tantalizingly selective in applying and releasing the pressure of authorial emphasis' (64). The 'bite' of such observa- tions will, no doubt, be appreciated still more by specialists who may, over a period of years, have been irritated by modernist critics' claims that the.