Interior spaces as traces in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine

Abstract

This article focuses on how Balzacian interiors and their dwellers signal a new experience and understanding of the past and the present that emerged during the Revolution and its aftermath. In this context, two interiors are analyzed: the interior of the Hôtel d’Esgrignon in Le Cabinet des Antiques and the antique shop passage in La Peau de chagrin. Both literary interiors in different ways embody traces of an “absent present” and constitute a solipsist mimesis of reciprocity between dweller and dwelling. These literary interiors signal fundamental aspects of a century that was marked by the loss of the past to history and by the experience of present time as but an elusive, fragile trace. Like the two sides of the same coin, this was also the time of vivification of absent images that are simulated, imitated in interiors of presentification, like the stereographic cabinet or the panoramic theatre. These interiors radicalize the traditional cabinet and its imagery, like Walter Benjamin’s typification of the window shop and the panoramic theatre would show. The Hôtel d’Esgrignon substantiates an absence-less presence with reality. Balzac conceives the mimetic relationship between the cénacle des antiques and its Hôtel as a sophisticated subtext that reveals the illusionary nature of the ambition to establish such an absolute present. Those who reside in the Hôtel constitute the object-like and lifeless parody of a dynamics of representation played out and that reveals the fundamental absence they stand for. In La Peau de chagrin, isolated objects are fragmented, eclectic bits and pieces of representations that are vivified, and not imitated, by imagination. The cabinet as a place that is the objects it arranges and shows, is internalized as a mental space of imagination, of hyperbolic possibilities of representational assemblage. The hybridity of its visitor is that of imagination itself being represented. Here, Balzac points forward to a literary development in which spatial settings, par excellence that of a vast, fantastic, endless space, will become an image of (literary) representation itself. This paper is published as part of a collection on interiorities.