The letter as a narrative device in the novels of Balzac.
Item
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Title
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The letter as a narrative device in the novels of Balzac.
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Identifier
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AAI9029987
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identifier
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9029987
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Creator
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Wassner, Marian.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Rosette Lamont
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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Letters abound in Balzac's novels: letters of courtship and love, moralizing and philosophical letters, letters of confidence and confession. This dissertation will examine epistolary texts in La Comedie humaine to see how Balzac made them serve the requirements of his fiction.;Balzac used letters to construct plot and manipulate action: prospectively, to impinge upon the course of events; retrospectively, to influence our interpretation of their meaning; or dispersed at key junctures, to highlight critical nodes of narrative structure. This master of prose fiction distilled the lyricism inherent in epistolary discourse; by using letters to elaborate thematic elements, he enhanced the poetic resonance of his narratives. Balzac exploited letters to complete the portraits sketched by his narrator, balancing the latter's less-than-omniscient perspective with biographical information from other sources. These missives stand, like all personal documents, as powerful, irrefutable testimony in which characters exonerate or indict themselves, without the narrator's often biased support or accusations.;Letters, Balzac realized, firmly supported the didactic orientation of his fictional enterprise: to describe the social world in its myriad manifestations, to explain the causes and laws regulating its functioning, to analyze the principles underlying its existence. The moral, political, or philosophical disquisitions that advance such an endeavor--lengthy, abstract, and ponderous--are readily accommodated by the epistolary form. Balzac also recognized that as a narrative instrument, the power of the letter is magnified by its linguistic status. In substance, letters are words, and as such, they deploy all of language's wily and duplicitous potential--a potential that can boomerang, betraying the unwary writer just as readily as it misleads and mystifies the hapless reader. In form, letters replicate the relationship of author to reader, and Balzac exploited this mirroring to benefit both parties, the one engaged in the process of inventing and shaping narrative, the other, in the equally creative process of interpreting it.;Thus, the correspondences that fill the pages of La Comedie humaine develop the structures, themes, characters, and ideas of its narratives in a variety of aesthetically valuable ways.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
