The Wild Ass's Skin Read online

  In accordance with this principle, this edition of The Wild Ass’s Skin is the first in English to include Balzac’s original preface of 1831 (see the Appendix). One of the most important changes Balzac made in the edition of the Comédie humaine was to delete the prefaces to the individual novels. A first reason was the practical one of saving space. Another was conceptual. To the extent that these books could now be considered as themselves merely chapters in one all-encompassing work, it made sense to provide them with a single introduction and summing-up. Yet prefaces such as the one to The Wild Ass’s Skin provide important clues to how Balzac understood what he was trying to do, and for whom. Thus, in accordance with recent trends in Balzac criticism, which has sought a more circumstantially grounded view of the interplay between literature and its cultural contexts, it is appropriate to include it here. Balzac himself thought his preface of enough significance that he had the bulk of it reproduced in the introduction his friend Philarète Chasles composed (under Balzac’s direction) for the second edition of The Wild Ass’s Skin, which was accompanied by twelve other works under the title Philosophical Novels and Tales, published in September 1831. For indeed, the three interrelated problems the author addresses in this preface—whether it is possible to inspire a jaded public that demands and yet despises a disenchanted art; whether the thought-processes of the artist should be conceived in materialist or spiritualist terms; and whether his own enterprise will be understood as destructive or constructive—are those that shaped the story he tells in the book.

  Summing up France’s cultural situation in the aftermath of the 1830 July Revolution, Balzac claims that the only way ‘we’ can respond to the world is to make a joke out of everything. This ‘we’ includes the artist as much as it does the man in the street. Revolutions are a fraud, religion is dead, and kings are held in so little awe that they can be pensioned off when their services are no longer required. Even the elegance of fashion is neglected. The Bourbon monarchy had been restored in 1815, but its attempt to re-establish the authority of throne and altar had proved hollow and ineffective. The hopes of recapturing the optimism and social solidarity of the revolution of 1789 by overthrowing the Bourbons again in 1830 have been dashed just as thoroughly. The installation of King Louis-Philippe has only led to a reshuffling of the same political deck. The new ‘bourgeois’ ministers are just like the aristocratic ones who preceded them: they think only of personal gain. In the novel, the conversation at Taillefer’s dinnerparty, celebrating the founding of a newspaper that will make fun of all ideologies while taking care not to upset the actual power structure, develops this theme, until even the most hard-bitten hacks yearn to drown their cynicism in an orgy of women and wine.

  The notion that historical upheavals are now only pale parodies of epoch-changing events has a literary consequence as well. Like other French writers in the 1820s, Balzac had been inspired by the novels of Walter Scott, which were bestsellers in France. He turned to historical fiction as a way of giving the genre of the novel dignity and depth—and marketability. By setting the story in a past of colourful costumes and curious customs, Balzac could give his book readerly appeal, but he could also explore the long-term trends underlying the surface conflicts of kings and nobles that formed the matter of conventional chronicles. Yet his innovative account in The Chouans of the struggle between royalist peasants in the Vendée and the republican government in Paris as a clash between different mental universes had been met with incomprehension. The conclusion Balzac draws in the preface is that one cannot hope to compensate for the mediocrity of the present by offering a jaded public ‘Walterscotted’ dramas of the past.

  The disillusionment of which Balzac speaks extends beyond politics and history to the apparently more solid domains of science and medicine. In a manner reminiscent of Molière, The Wild Ass’s Skin includes comic scenes in which experts of opposing schools of thought fail to analyse the nature of the magic skin or to diagnose the hero’s ailments with any certainty. The apparent conclusion, that scientific concepts are nothing more than labels with no grip on reality, is strangely at odds with the respectful references elsewhere in the novel to some of the outstanding real-life figures (Arago and Dupuytren, among others) whose discoveries testify to the scientific liveliness of the period. But it becomes clear that the expressions of disappointment must be understood in terms of the expectation, which Balzac shared with many others of the day, that science would provide, not just solutions to empirical problems, but a life-enhancing framework of meaning and belief. Indeed, underlying the opposing evaluations of science is a struggle to determine what was at stake in choosing between materialist and spiritualist worldviews, an issue Raphael does not resolve but which Balzac will address in the preface in relation to the writer and the reader.

  There is, however, according to Balzac, a further and final aspect of contemporary disenchantment that complicates the picture. The reading public of 1831 is not only disillusioned; it is disillusioned with disillusionment. The ‘languorous elegies’ of ‘nebulous bards’ (a clear swipe at Romantic poets such as Lamartine) and the laments of melancholy youths, pursued by a cruel but often equally nebulous fate (like the hero of Chateaubriand’s René, no doubt) have so saturated the market as to provoke in readers a reaction not only against this literature but against that part of themselves that liked to wallow in it. In the novel, Balzac captures this double disenchantment in a pun. As he gazes at a painting by the great Italian painter Raphael, the hero, who we learn a few pages later is also named Raphael, is said to be ‘tired of Raphael’ (p. 18). The painter Raphael was one of Balzac’s cultural heroes, a symbol of artistic (and erotic) energy whose work embodies an ideal of aesthetic perfection. That the hero is sick of such a genius shows the depth of his alienation from the cultural riches of the past. But Raphael is also tired of himself, of the selfabsorbed and ineffectual Raphael who is caught between his delusions of grandeur and the perverse enjoyment of his own victimization. We see both these tendencies in his response to the doctors who try to diagnose him. He takes the futility of their efforts for granted and derives a strange kind of status from the supposed uniqueness of his plight, but neither of these reactions prevents him from seeking a cure somewhere else, however improbable its prospect might be. In this respect, Raphael also represents Balzac’s readers, bored with being jaded and ready to undertake a mental journey toward a cure for the depletion of their imagination. That journey will consist less in travel to a faraway world than in a path through the fantastic to a different view of the one close at hand. Balzac’s historical novel, which is set in a past within living memory, and his contemporary ‘scenes’ of a private life too homely to have been judged noteworthy before, had invited readers on such a journey, but the invitation had not been taken up. By recasting that invitation in the form of a fantastic tale, Balzac has now found a genre more appropriate to what he calls a ‘moribund’ society. The magic skin that shrinks with every granted wish is both unbelievable, something no one can take seriously, and a distancing device for gaining some perspective on the kind of unbelief that itself destroys moral energy. Balzac’s wager is that if he can get his readers to suspend disbelief long enough to enter into Raphael’s story, he might succeed, by means of the novel that contains that story, in opening up a space for a renewed imagination.

  For what is clear is that such perspective cannot be reached from within the bounds of Raphael’s world-view. His use of the magic skin makes that clear. When they are told stories about a fairy who grants someone three wishes, clever children often wonder why no one ever uses a wish to ask for more wishes. The reply, ‘that’s not how the story works’, is not so much an answer as an invitation to drop the question as beside the point. If, however, one asks why Raphael never uses the skin to wish for more life, or to succeed in his pursuit of the elusive Foedora, Balzac will show us the reason: it is because the idea of the depletion of his physical and moral resources exerts so powerful a hold on Raphael�
��s imagination that it prevents him from thinking outside the terms of what he thinks of as his fate. When, for example, he considers how best to use his meagre inheritance, he devises what he believes is a clever plan to make the money last three years. By following a strict budget, he hopes to have enough time to complete an ambitious philosophical Treatise on the Will which will bring him fame and fortune. It never occurs to him to invest any of the money or find some other way to increase his resources in the meantime; he can only think of making what he has last as long as possible until it runs out, as it inevitably must. Even then, we learn that his calculations are off and that he would not have survived the three years without the financial help of the beautiful Pauline and her mother. He had been blissfully blind to the disparity between the scheme in which he took such pride and the reality of his circumstances. Nor, oddly, does Raphael make any effort to promote his book when it is finished. Since it doesn’t bring him instant fame, it does not occur to him to do anything more with it. To describe the situation in the vocabulary of today, what the magic skin shows us is a Raphael incapable of ‘thinking outside the box’.

  But is it possible actually to escape the box? Raphael’s fascination with depletion may be an extreme case—extreme enough that only the genre of the fantastic can convey its quality—but he is not wrong in his belief that the energy of any mortal being will eventually be exhausted. In 1829, two years before the publication of The Wild Ass’s Skin, Balzac himself had baldly declared that every ‘man has a given sum of energy’.4 Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Yet he did not say it in the context of a ‘languorous elegy’ but in the Physiology of Marriage, a scandalously frank discussion of ‘conjugal happiness’. Playfully adapting the method of Brillat-Savarin’s gastronomic treatise, the Physiology of Taste of 1825, Balzac offers the married man a variety of recipes for resolving the ‘civil war’ between the sexes. One of these is to discourage infidelity in one’s wife by keeping her busy. If she is occupied with other activities, she will have no energy left for adultery. Nothing could be further from Raphael’s humourless obsession with depletion than this jocular recommendation. Balzac turns what is a potential source of anxiety into a joke.

  There are, however, jokes and jokes. Instead of reflecting a flattened, cynical view of the world, like the joke from the Physiology of Marriage (whose deliberate crassness, it should be said, can be read ironically), the jokes in The Wild Ass’s Skin are designed to serve a constructive purpose. Raphael may be the first to poke fun at pompous doctors, but it is just as significant that in other cases Raphael fails to laugh. He cannot step back from his own obsessions even to see the joke in, for example, the thought that he is ‘tired of Raphael’. This is because he cannot recognize that a thought or a situation may have different levels or varying scopes of meaning. It is precisely this more complex kind of awareness that the novel is designed to foster in the reader. When, in the course of Taillefer’s dinner-party, the journalist Émile reacts to Raphael’s long-winded confession by urging him to cut short his preamble and ‘come to the action’ (p. 61), this is on one level a dig at the hero’s self-absorption. On another, given that Raphael has just acquired the magic skin, which he was told will cut short his life once he abandons thinking for acting, it is a macabre wish to hasten the hero’s doom. Raphael fails completely to notice the irony. In fact, the author is really sharing it over the hero’s head with readers who want the story to move forward as much as Émile does. On yet another level, however, the ‘preamble’—the story of Raphael’s youth, stunted by an oppressive father who sacrifices his son to his own vanity—is crucial to the story. Raphael’s dreams may be misdirected, but the dreaming itself is worthy of respect and sympathy. We must not forget that the cynical Émile is a morally compromised journalist who has sold out his talent. The joke here is on the readers who cannot step back from their own impatient desire to discover what happens in the end. Perhaps it is even a joke the author directs at himself, defensively aware that his lead-in to Raphael’s drama is not as compelling as he might wish.

  By making his jokes multidimensional and self-involving, Balzac seeks to foster a more nuanced and morally complex view of the world without lapsing into a moralism that would be as one-dimensional as the disenchantment he seeks to remedy. He is convinced such a project is feasible because it has been successfully undertaken before in times when old certainties were shaken. He says in the preface that his model is the sprightly literature of the eighteenth century, ‘when, without discussing drama, poetry, and morals at every turn, there was nonetheless drama, poetry, and work of a vigorous morality’ (p. 229). This appeal to the eighteenth century is a striking one, since the prevailing view among many French Romantics was that eighteenth-century literature was thin and brittle, desiccated by the reductive materialism of the Enlightenment. But the eighteenth-century model Balzac has in mind is the multi-levelled humour of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to which the Romantic critique hardly applies. Balzac also takes a positive view of eighteenth-century comic and ironic writing because he believes it to be part of a longer tradition going back to Rabelais, with whose linguistic inventiveness Balzac strongly identified and whose influence can be felt in the exuberant comic dialogues of the novel. Rabelais had set an important example by employing phantasmagorical tales to moral purpose at a moment when medieval culture was being undermined by religious doubts and a wave of scientific and geographical discoveries. Yet Balzac’s conception of the writer’s mission is closely linked to what he sees as the particular needs of his own day. If Raphael cannot see his life from the outside, neither his friends nor the scientists who examine his ‘case’ can appreciate what Raphael’s experience feels like from the inside; and if, as Balzac implies in his jokes, there is a similar failure of communication between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ perspectives within the mind of his readers, disenchanted as they are with disenchantment yet still in thrall to it, since in a world of sham ideals it is the only authentic experience they can call their own; then it is the role of the modern artist to bridge that gap.

  In his Theory of Gait (démarche), a little-known 1833 sequel to the Physiology of Marriage in which a sociological analysis of deportment opens onto a general discussion of how human energy is embodied, Balzac will define the artist’s mediating role in terms that are relevant here:

  A fool is a man who sees a pit and falls into it. The savant [the term includes the scientist, the expert, and the scholar] hears him fall, takes his gauge, measures the distance, builds a staircase, goes down, comes back up, and rubs his hands together after telling the world:

  ‘This pit is eighteen hundred and two feet deep, the temperature at the bottom is two degrees higher than in our atmosphere’… God knows whether the fool or the savant was closer to the truth. Empedocles was the first savant to play both roles.5

  The artist, too, must be able to play both roles if he is to take the full human measure of our experience. It is an enterprise with both risks and temptations. According to legend, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles ended his life by throwing himself into the volcano of Mount Etna. Balzac does not tell us what he thought of this gesture. Some believed it was a suicide while other accounts claim it was an attempt by Empedocles to become a god, or at least make people believe his disappearance was proof of his immortality. Whatever the case, this savant failed to keep the balance between the two sides of his mission. As Balzac goes on to say: ‘there is not a single one of our movements, not a single one of our actions, that is not a pit in which the wisest man cannot lose his reason’ in attempting to fathom it.6

  How, then, might the author succeed in his mission? The preface to The Wild Ass’s Skin provides some clues. In order to have access to ‘all effects, all natures’, that is to say, the whole variety of natural and human phenomena, the artist ‘must have within him a sort of concentric mirror in which, according to his imagination, the universe comes to be reflected’ (p. 227). The image combines the scientific precision of
the savant’s measuring-gauge with a typically Romantic reference to light. But Balzac goes on to offer a different image. ‘Has man the ability to make the universe enter his mind, or is his mind a talisman with which he abolishes the laws of time and space?’ (p. 229). The word ‘talisman’ comes from the same world of oriental magic as the wild ass’s skin, and is used in the novel to describe it. Indeed, in a later edition Balzac changed the title of the first part of the novel from ‘The Wild Ass’s Skin’ to ‘The Talisman’, as if to continue to draw the reader’s attention to the term after the preface itself was deleted.

  Balzac is quite aware that to call the mind a ‘talisman’ is not to explain anything; by itself, it is only a name for a ‘psychological phenomenon, inexplicable and wonderful, which science can only grasp with difficulty’ (p. 228). In the story itself, when Raphael consults the scientists in the hope of stretching the skin and prolonging his life, he denounces as useless the recourse to fancy terms devoid of explanatory value. Explanation, however, is not really the point. What matters is how one uses the gift one has been given, and from this point of view there is a crucial difference between the author and the hero’s relation to his talisman. For Raphael, the talisman is a reified external power to be exploited for narrowly self-centred ends; for Balzac, it is an internal capacity enabling the artist to connect with the world beyond his personal experience. Raphael is focused on the consumption of goods; Balzac on the production of meaning.

  One should also note that whereas the concentric mirror is the property only of the artistic genius, talismanic mobility is a power latent in every human mind, even if in practice only a few are able to exploit its potential. The anti-elitism, or rather, the open elitism of Balzac’s more considered metaphor is an important corrective to the narcissism which risks leading the would-be genius astray. At the time he wrote the novel, Balzac was concerned that his portrayal of Raphael might be seen as too sympathetic, and so in the preface he uses the talisman image to warn the reader against identifying the hero with the author. The ability to imagine corruption or crime does not mean one is corrupt or a criminal. Balzac uses the ‘talismanic’ image as a way of saying that the mind which enters into or absorbs other lives is not the author’s everyday self. He wants to defend himself against the charge of immorality he felt would be directed at him as the author of the scandalous Physiology of Marriage. The passages in the preface arguing that the ability to imagine corruption or crime does not imply that one is corrupt or a criminal are tied to this particular circumstance, and were rightly dropped as soon as the novel proved to be a success. They also obscure the more subtle aspects of the moral point Balzac makes in the story itself. In The Wild Ass’s Skin, Raphael is quick to boast to Foedora of his ‘second sight’ (an image that in the preface Balzac also uses to describe the writer’s intuitions of the truth), yet he fails to gain any hold over her with it. He even fails to understand how his quest to uncover her supposed ‘secret’ is a projection of his effort to deny the possibility that his own self may be less than transparent to itself in complete and visible unity, that it might indeed be divided internally. That denial is driven by the unspoken fear that acknowledging such a split will lead, not to a greater potential for creative action, but to a total disintegration of self. For Raphael, the artistic and the instrumental mind must be one. Although many details of Raphael’s garret existence as a lonely and misunderstood young writer are drawn from Balzac’s early struggles to launch his literary career, the hero’s self-image as an ‘artist’ is only one side of his creator’s more rounded view. Balzac understands Raphael from within, as the lengthy narrative of the hero’s confession shows, because he also understands him from without, as evidenced by the embedding of that confession in a more nuanced third-person account of how artistic ambitions may be distorted by the failure to step back from too single-minded an investment in them.