Balzac's Lives Quotes

“Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Everywhere in Balzac desire is an urge to find out, to know (Freud’s epistemophilia), which is to say that the drive to know is itself sexualized.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“To possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others: this I think captures our love of and our need for novels, for fictional accounts of the world that let us experience it beyond the limits of our own pair of eyes, to imagine it, provisionally, as it is seen and felt by someone else, however different that person may be.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Sigmund Freud finished what was to be his final reading. “Freud did not read at random,” Schur tells us, “but carefully selected books from his library.”8 His final choice fell on Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. When he finished the book—the day before he called for the fatal injection—he remarked to Schur: “This was the proper book for me to read; it deals with shrinking and starvation.” Not only with shrinking and starvation but with all that precedes the final outcome of human desire: wanting, having, possessing, devouring.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“everything,” Balzac claims, “is a mosaic.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“There is no resting place; you have to keeping trying to get it all down on the page. Silence threatens: as for Balzac’s fictional Dante, writing is a constant skirmish with nothingness.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“As Baudelaire remarked, even Balzac’s concierges have genius; everyone in his world is “stuffed with willpower from head to toe.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Balzac knew intuitively the need for invented persons to represent life for us, with an enhanced sense of the odds and stakes of life. Representation for Balzac always touched on the theatrical, offering life bathed in starker, more revealing light.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Through fictions, we accommodate ourselves to a world that is not ours, much less ourselves. As psychoanalysts and child psychologists confirm, we cannot cope with reality without made-up stories”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Henry James in “The Lesson of Balzac” praised his precursor for giving his characters “the long rope,” for acting themselves out. That grant of freedom to his created life was for James crucial to Balzac’s success in representation of persons in the world. James saw Balzac’s creation of character as ultimately motivated by love: “The love, as we call it, the joy in their communicated and exhibited”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“And by attempting to explain everything, even as it recognizes that this is impossible since the very principles of explanation are themselves obscure. Balzac necessarily ends up like Scheherazade, telling stories night after night to stave off the silence of the end.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“It’s possibly, in the manner of Facino Cane, one more allegory of the novelist: the abuse of the power to enter others’ lives, to animate them and tell their stories, leads to disaster. Humans have to be accorded a greater freedom, perhaps, even when that freedom means nonconformity to human definitions of reason and relationship.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Balzac’s semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“This is why Rastignac’s and Lucien’s tailor thinks of himself as a “hyphen” between a young man’s present and his future. Given the right outfit, a young man may be able to make a marriage that will put a reality behind his social appearance.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Facino’s vision of vast riches and the novelist’s vision of the motives of human behavior are both attuned to the hidden, the dramatic, that, like Freud’s analyses, suggest an erotic charge that animates the world. They may speak also of a power beyond what is permitted to humankind”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Blindness and madness punish the hubris of the man who possesses and employs a faculty for knowledge not given to other men.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Here we sense a parallel: Facino’s conviction that his power to “see” gold has blinded him sounds very much like the narrator’s fear that his preternatural insight into the lives of others, allowing him passage into their very bodies and souls, may be an abuse of his mental faculties—the word “abus” is used in both these instances.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Perhaps Balzac’s crazed philosopher Louis Lambert, another loner, identifies a corresponding vulnerability of the social world when he posits what he calls the “law of disorganization,” according to which the more complex a society becomes, the more differentiated in role and function, the more it loses cohesion. Lambert states: “When the effect produced is no longer related to its cause, there is disorganization.” That disorganization calls for heroic gestures in response, but they are doomed to succumb to social inertia.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Like Raphaël de Valentin, recounted in his brief, flaming trajectory between desire and death, Chabert, the specter of the suppressed past, is one of the key mythic presences in The Human Comedy. His life story represents more than itself.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“We need novels in order to enter the minds of others. But that project can run up against the opacities of other minds and spirits. When a man tells us of a woman’s desiring, we should beware of blindness.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“No woman, believe me, will want to rub elbows with the dead woman you keep in your heart.” (CG 254/P 9:1127) Félix, she understands, cannot detach himself from the dead Henriette. And also from himself: she accuses him of an incurable egotism. If he continues to unburden himself to other women as he has to her, they will perceive “the aridity of your heart, and you will always be unhappy”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Collin, the man who cannot be killed off, whose identity is both branded on him and rendered illegible, challenges, or defies, the very coherence of such an entity, suggesting the possibility that the very subject of The Human Comedy, human society itself, is at bottom an illusion if not a fraud.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Balzac clearly is haunted by these Faustian figures, who seek to go beyond what is permitted to ordinary humans, only to reach an impasse where their very medium of expression is blocked or destroyed.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“In his last incarnation, Collin sees only one position for himself: to serve the power that weighs on us all. He proposes to replace Bibi-Lupin as head of the Sûreté. “I have no other ambition than to be an instrument of law and repression instead of corruption. . . . I am the general of the underworld and I surrender.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Journalism, it turns out, is just so much hot air, hot type rather, that has an extraordinary importance at the moment but leaves nothing behind. It is the very opposite of the true poetic word that endures—what Lucien originally aspired to but betrayed”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“newspapers are “poison shops,” and Vignon piles on: The newspaper, instead of being a sacred mission, has become an arm for the political parties; and from that it became a commercial enterprise; and like all commercial enterprises it knows neither faith nor law. Every newspaper, as Blondet puts it, is a shop where one sells to the public words in whatever color it likes . . . all newspapers will in due course be cowardly, hypocritical, shameless, mendacious, murderous; they will kill ideas, systems, men, and will thrive from doing so.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“if you don’t desire anything, the world is without appeal, it loses its beauty. You lack for everything, yet nothing now triggers the need to devour, to incorporate, to make the beautiful object one’s own. If the self ’s relation to the external world no longer is subtended by desire, it loses all meaning. Raphaël’s life is a kind of vegetation, a life without movement or meaning.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Yet when Raphaël envies their life of wild abandon, Aquilina’s response is sobering: “ ‘Happy!’ said Aquilina with a smile of pity, or terror, in giving the two friends a horrible look. ‘Oh! You don’t know what it’s like to be condemned to pleasure with death in your heart.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Balzac, very much like Freud in his most speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, discovers that the pleasure principle is inextricably bound up with its opposite, the death drive.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Androgyny was a subject of some interest in Balzac’s time. The Girodet painting of Endymion for which the castrato Zambinella served, in Balzac’s fiction, as a far-off model offers a visual androgyny. And perhaps androgyny is a metaphor for the artist who creates life from his sole self and body.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives