Eugénie
Grandet (Balzac)
Rereading Eugénie Grandet, one of
Balzac’s finest novels, I was struck by the role of commercial transactions in
characterization. The entire narrative
is built around the disposition of Grandet’s fortune and his clever
transactions express his nature.
Similarly the machinations of the de Grassines and the Cruchots,
Charles’ alienation from Eugénie, the town’s interest in the winegrower’s
affairs, all have a financial base. The
rise of the capitalist cash nexus as the lens through which things make most
sense is explicit. Each of the
succeeding regimes of France offered the miser opportunities he was shrewd
enough to seize.
Yet, stripped of the political, economic,
and social elements that so engaged Balzac, the story might have been written
centuries earlier. Eugénie is after all
a saintly type, too good for this world, while her father is a model of the sin
of greed, Charles a selfish liar (enriched by the wicked practice of slavery),
and the townspeople idle gossips. Poor
Eugénie is that perennial favorite, a lovely and long-suffering woman. For all the nineteenth century socio-economic
analysis, most of the plot would not be out of place in medieval
hagiography.
Like other portions of his Comédie
humaine this story preserves a provincial tranche de vie in the author’s straightforward, often uninspired, style, sometimes including superfluous
data in the interest of history. Yet he
also punctuates the illusion of the plot as an objectively recorded “reality
show” with asides and addresses to the reader that highlight the artifice of
the text, generating a satisfying dialectic.
.
Der
Biberpelz (Hauptmann)
Moe dramatically viable than most of
Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalistic dramas, Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat) in its farcical
elements reminds me of the Second Shepherd’s Play with its comic
thievery. Only whereas the Miracle Play
ends with the dazzling radiance of Christ’s birth, here we never depart from
the social theme. An obtuse official, von Wehrhahn, is too interested in
sniffing out liberal subversives such Dr. Fleischer to attend to actual
crimes. Hauptmann’s satire in a way anticipates works like Hašek’s Good
Soldier Švejk (1923) and Zuckmayer’s Captain of Kōpinick
(1931). Krȗger is an amusing example of
an aggrieved bourgeois, exasperated at his loss of property while Frau Wolff is
a cool and clever miscreant. Brecht was fond of this play and it was filmed in
Germany three times (1928, 1937, and 1949), but it has been infrequently
produced on English stages. Some of the
same characters appear in a sequel Der Rote Hahn (1901, called in English The Conflagration)
which concludes in a far graver tone.
In the
Beauty of the Lilies
(Updike)
With perhaps a bit of the magisterial
ambition that might naturally arise in an acclaimed writer, Updike has spread
an epic canvas, stretching over nearly a century, with generations of
characters urban and semi-rural, with odd variations like Hollywood types and
apocalyptic cultists to punch up the plot.
Basically working the vein still of nineteenth century realism, Updike
includes, as is his custom, references to the news and the pop culture of
several generations. The research shows
a bit too clearly sometimes, but an amusing aspect of Lilies is the
consistent references to films, giving the sense of a sort of history of the
United States in all of its collective fantasies. The grim conclusion is foreseeable from a
considerable distance, but Updike’s readers will appreciate the solidity of the
plot-line, and the emotional weight he lends his characters, whose
peregrinations, though they may feel lost and wandering seem, when seen as here
in the long view, to hang together and make a sort of sense. Too weak to be fully tragic actors, Updike’s
people’s lives may strike the reader as reassuringly less competent than their
own, at least until they think twice.
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