The Wild Ass's Skin (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  The Wild Ass’s Skin

  Translated by

  HELEN CONSTANTINE

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  PATRICK COLEMAN

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THE WILD ASS’S SKIN

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC was born in 1799 at Tours, the son of a civil servant. Put out to nurse and sent later to boarding-school, he had, except between the ages of four and eight, little contact with home. In 1814 the family moved to Paris, where Honoré continued his boarding-school education for two years, and then studied law at the Sorbonne. From 1816 to 1819 he worked in a lawyer’s office, but having completed his legal training he knew he wanted to be a writer. While his family gave meagre financial support he wrote a play, Cromwell, but it was a complete failure. He also collaborated with other writers to produce popular novels. During the 1820s he dabbled in journalism, and tried to make money in printing and publishing ventures, whose lack of success laid the foundation for debts that plagued him for the rest of his life.

  In 1829 Balzac published his first novel under his own name, Le Dernier Chouan (later Les Chouans), and La Physiologie du mariage. In 1830 came a collection of six stories called Scènes de la vie privée. Self-styled ‘de Balzac’, he became fashionable in the literary and social world of Paris, and over the next twenty years, as well as plays and articles, wrote more than ninety novels and stories. In 1842 many of these were published in seventeen volumes as La Comédie humaine. Important works were still to come, but ill-health interfered with his creativity and marred the last years of his life.

  In 1832, in his extensive fan-mail, Balzac received a letter from the Polish Countess Hanska, whose elderly husband owned a vast estate in the Ukraine. The next year he met Madame Hanska in Switzerland, and in 1835 the couple agreed to marry after Count Hanska’s death. For seventeen years, with intermissions, they conducted a voluminous correspondence, until their marriage finally took place in March 1850. Balzac died three months later in Paris.

  HELEN CONSTANTINE has published three volumes of translated stories, Paris Tales, French Tales, and Paris Metro Tales for OUP. She has translated Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and translated and edited Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons for Penguin.

  PATRICK COLEMAN is Professor of French at the University of Los Angeles, California. He has edited Rousseau’s Confessions and Discourse on Inequality, and Constant’s Adolphe for Oxford World’s Classics. His most recent book is Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer (OUP, 2011).

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Translator’s Note

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Honoré de Balzac

  Map: Paris in 1830

  THE WILD ASS’S SKIN

  The Talisman

  The Woman without a Heart

  The Death Agony

  Epilogue

  Appendix: Balzac’s Preface to the First Edition, August 1831

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  THE reader who comes to The Wild Ass’s Skin expecting the kind of realistic narrative often labelled ‘Balzacian’ is likely to be surprised by the extravagance of the plot and the sudden shifts in narrative tone. Certainly we find the trademark flair for revealing personality through detailed descriptions of the character’s material environment, as well as Balzac’s typical fascination with the ways fortunes are made and spent. But the patient unearthing of the ordinary greed and grudges, the frustrated desires, and the unwitnessed crimes concealed beneath the surface of social life that we see in works such as Eugénie Grandet, Père Goriot, or Cousin Bette is not the focus here. Instead, Balzac spins a fantastic tale about a magic skin which grants its possessor his every wish, but which shrinks as each desire is fulfilled until the hero is confronted with the prospect of ineluctable death.

  In other Balzac novels we see how thoughts and emotions rooted in the routine circumstances of everyday life produce surprisingly extended ramifications. Those characters who understand this dynamic know when to take risks with the best chance of success, and the discerning reader, Balzac implies, will gain a similar benefit. The Wild Ass’s Skin reverses this pattern. Setting the story in motion is a ‘talisman’ that comes from the world of the supernatural, bursting the bounds of earthly existence. Yet its primary effect is to narrow the perspective of its possessor. Raphael, a young man introduced to us as a budding genius of unlimited potential, finds himself obsessing about sheer physical survival, the key to which, ironically enough, would seem to be the adoption of a wholly habitual, routine way of life, a life from which all desire, let alone action, has been banished. Can such a project succeed, and what are we supposed to make of it?

  The challenge to our understanding is compounded by the way Balzac tells his story. While Raphael’s obsessive first-person account of his plight in the middle section of the novel portrays a quest that is literally as well as metaphorically all-consuming, the unflagging verve of the framing third-person narrative belies the pessimistic notion that the fulfilment of desire only hastens the ulti
mate dissipation of human energy. Driving home the point is the novel’s provocative and open-ended epilogue. Its message, conveyed in a language by turns sentimental and ironic, is that the resolution of the plot is not the end of the matter. The reader’s desire to know what it all means is not supposed to have been exhausted at the point the story stops; on the contrary, the confident author assumes his novel will go on spurring that desire even after the reader closes the book.

  The tantalizing juxtaposition of opposing attitudes in the epilogue in fact characterizes the work as a whole. How do we reconcile the narrative’s lucid perspective on Raphael’s plight with the fantastic premise of the story, which requires the suspension of our disbelief? We might see the fatal power of the magic skin as in some sense a projection of the hero’s fantasies, and a number of critics have offered helpful psychoanalytical interpretations of Raphael’s fetishistic desires and death-wish. These are helpful to the extent that they recognize the seriousness with which Balzac approaches the supernatural or spiritual elements in the story, and so acknowledge that what are in play are not merely fantasies, in the sense of idiosyncratic psychological puzzles which can be explained and then dismissed. In contrast with a Gothic novel such as Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), no rational explanation of fantastic events eventually emerges to soothe the reader’s anxieties. Nor is the story set, like some other supernaturally tinged stories of doomed heroes Balzac enjoyed—such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Byron’s Manfred (1816–17), or Goethe’s Faust (Gérard de Nerval’s French translation of Part One appeared in 1828)—in the distant past, an exotic foreign country, or a mythical landscape, where superstitious beliefs might well hold unenlightened people in their grip and strange things might plausibly happen. The Wild Ass’s Skin is set firmly in the Paris of 1829 to 1831, and with the exception of the magic skin itself, the pattern of cause and effect in the world the book depicts is much as might be expected. In fact, all too expected, in the sense that nothing seems to have the power to interrupt the everyday pursuit of material interests—not even the revolution of 1830, which occurs offstage in the middle of Raphael’s story, and which is treated as a non-event. The Wild Ass’s Skin belongs, along with Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, to what Balzac calls the ‘school of disenchantment’ in one of the Letters on Paris he published while he was writing the novel, and what he means by disenchantment is precisely the feeling that the energy and ideals of the past have been exhausted, and that the prospect of being surprised by life, or by a genuinely novel event, has now dimmed.

  While the fantasy and flatness that together define the world of The Wild Ass’s Skin might seem to be contradictory extremes, framing an absent middle of realistic fullness—the kind of world Balzac explores in many later novels—they are not in fact as opposed as they might seem. As we shall see, Balzac’s use of the fantastic is not an escapist gesture, but an invitation to a renewal of critical thought; his disenchanted derision not merely deflationary, but a way of clearing the ground for a reconstructed idealism. It is the clash and ultimate convergence of these attitudes that gives The Wild Ass’s Skin its particular character and its enduring vitality. Indeed, almost two hundred years on, at a time when worry about depleting the earth’s resources is inescapable and we cast about for sources of renewable energy—fuel, not just for our industries, but for the will to face the daunting moral and political challenges of a world of limits—and when a pervasive disenchantment coexists with unexpected outbursts of optimism for change, Balzac’s novel speaks to the mixture of moods in many readers today no less than it did to the conflicted French public of 1831.

  Although it may seem obvious to examine the original context in which a novel was written and published for clues to its meaning, in the case of Balzac the controlling context of interpretation for many years was La Comédie humaine, the edition of Balzac’s collected works whose publication began in 1842 and stretched over several years as new works were added. Novels and stories that had originally been published as self-standing works, or as part of smaller groupings, were now presented as the building-blocks of this massive edifice, whose architecture Balzac laid out in a programmatic ‘Foreword’. This document, composed with the confidence of an author who considered his achievement to be as solid and secure as that of Dante’s Divine Comedy, has usually been taken as the definitive statement of his aims and ambitions. The teleological idea of the Comédie humaine also served as a lens through which individual novels should be read. In the collected edition, The Wild Ass’s Skin appears as the first of the ‘Philosophical Studies’ which occupy the middle section of the Comédie, after the ‘Studies of Manners’ and before the ‘Analytical Studies’. It is said by Balzac in the ‘Foreword’ to link the first section, which traces the concrete effects of thought and will, those distinctively human powers, to the second section, which examines the causes of those effects, that is, the ambivalent nature of those powers, which corrupt as much as they ennoble. It does so by means of ‘an almost oriental fantasy in which Life itself is depicted in its struggle with Desire, the principle of all Passion’.1 The third part of the Comédie would then go on to formulate the ‘principles’ for analysing, perhaps directing, the pattern of cause and effect, or for deciding when that cannot be done. What all this means in practice is difficult to determine, in part because of Balzac’s fondness for abstract concepts he never fully defines, in part because the author’s premature death prevented him from completing all the works designed to illustrate them. The ‘Analytical Studies’, for example, include only one work, the very early Physiology of Marriage, whose composition in fact preceded that of The Wild Ass’s Skin, and is better seen as a prelude to the novel rather than as a meta-comment on it, as we shall see below. Indeed, scholars of Balzac’s work now believe it useful to work both backwards and forwards in tracing a career so complex in its evolution, and so fascinating in its circumstantial detail that any totalizing statements—not least the author’s own—must themselves be seen as provisional. A key collection of French essays has even argued that the monumental project of the Comédie humaine is itself only a ‘moment’ in a career that was still evolving as the July Monarchy gave way, in a new cycle of hope and disenchantment, to the precarious Republic of 1848.2

  By the time they were included in the Comédie humaine, early works such as The Wild Ass’s Skin had in fact already been revised and repackaged several times. One particularly notable move was to change the names of some of the characters in earlier books in order to merge them with similar characters invented for later ones. Thus, the doctor in The Wild Ass’s Skin, originally named Prosper, became Horace Bianchon, whose student days are depicted in Père Goriot (1835), and who plays a supporting role in many other novels as one of the Comédie’s rare moral anchors. Real-life writers such as Lamartine or Hugo, named or clearly alluded to alongside Raphael in the dinner-party scene, were transmuted into the fictional poets or artists Balzac portrays in more (and often damning) detail elsewhere. This system of ‘reappearing characters’ is one of the most striking features of the Comédie humaine, powerfully contributing to that impression of a unified, overall representation of French society of which Balzac boasts in his ‘Foreword’.

  These large-scale changes were accompanied by significant revisions of style and language, most of them representing gains in sophistication. An interesting example in The Wild Ass’s Skin involves the conversations between Raphael and the Countess Foedora. Better acquaintance with the etiquette of the French nobility (partly through his own pursuit of the Marquise de Castries, a real-life ‘woman without a heart’) taught Balzac that even when they became familiar, Raphael would not address Foedora by her first name, but as ‘Madame’. On these grounds, most French editions of Balzac’s works, and almost all translations, including the new one offered here, are made from the copy of the collected edition on which Balzac added some final handwritten corrections (see the Note on the Text). Those revisio
ns that most significantly affected the shape or character of Balzac’s narrative are, however, indicated in the Explanatory Notes.

  Yet the Balzac of the mid-1840s, who presents himself in the ‘Foreword’, with the modesty of deep pride, as the ‘secretary’ of all of nineteenth-century French society, that is, as a novelist whose characters’ existence is as convincingly real as that of any lives recorded in the archives of the state,3 should not obscure the more tentative Balzac of the early 1830s. This Balzac had been chastened by the bankruptcy of his printing company and demoralized by the failure of his first attempts to write ‘serious’ fiction: the historical novel The Last Chouan, or Brittany in 1800 (1829, later retitled The Chouans), and the contemporary Scenes of Private Life (1830). Both of these works would later be hailed as major achievements, but at the time they did not sell. Turning to journalism and short fiction, he experimented with a variety of styles and genres in a search to make his writing career more viable. He was not seeking to build a literary monument but to capture the attention of fickle readers looking for something new and fresh. The Wild Ass’s Skin bears the mark of its journalistic origins in its opening words, ‘Toward the end of last October …’. They draw attention to the moment when the story is told, and that moment, as the dating of events in the story confirms, is August 1831, the novel’s date of publication. It is surely significant that, despite numerous revisions of detail elsewhere in the novel, this beginning was never changed, even though only a few months had to pass before the phrase ‘last October’ ceased to refer to the year 1830. Despite the passage of time, the narrator’s speaking continues to be ‘dated’ 1831, even though Balzac (as some later translators have done) could easily have revised the text to say ‘October 1830’. The fact that Balzac, at the risk of creating some uncertainty in the reader’s mind, kept the same opening words suggests that appreciating the original ‘moment’ of The Wild Ass’s Skin remains crucial to understanding the book.