Classics Revisited
A world view driven by materialism
BY RAVI VYAS
For Europeans, especially the French, the novel is often a philosophy expressed in images. And in great novels the philosophy conveys one single idea without which no work of imagination could endure.
Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette, Honoré de Balzac, Penguin Books. First published in modern translations in 1965. Originally published around 1835-1850. Prices not stated.
WHAT Keats once said about Shakespeeare, "he left nothing to say about nothing or anything", could be said about Honoré de Balzac, who has often been described as the Shakespeare of the novel. And this is because of his great cycle of novels, called The Human Comedy (projected to be 115 volumes, with 85 completed) in which he tries to capture the panorama of French life in mid-19th century: some of the novels dealt with town life, others with the provinces. But every class of society is represented and the characters flit from book to book through which he creates a world of his own.
Kaleidoscope of life
Yet, each novel is meant to stand on its own. The result is a fictional kaleidoscope — characters of all ages, types and social positions come and go, in many ways to become something totally different. Two important novels in the larger project are Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons which complement each other because they deal with the common theme of "poor relations".
Philosophy in images
For Europeans, especially the French, the novel is often a philosophy expressed in images. And in great novels the philosophy conveys one single idea without which no work of imagination could endure. For Balzac, the central idea was materialism. Like the petit bourgeois the world over, who are always engaged in the process of primary accumulation, all his novels discuss money, and most of his characters are motivated largely by greed, and occasionally by lust. Balzac is the quintessential realist because nothing drives out sentimentality than discussions about cash. Monetary anxiety is the common feature of Balzac's novels, partly because opposing temptations of greed and true feeling offer moral choices to characters and reveal their "true" selves. Money and money alone is the motor that drives Balzac's numerous plots, as the central character in Le Père Goriot (translated as Old Goriot) says: "But what about money? cried a voice from within. Where will you get it? You need money for everything."
After the good life
Both Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons are poor. They are not destitute but poverty drives both in search of the good life. They fall back on wealthy relatives who mould their lives. Bette is a plain-looking girl with no special virtues; her benefactor has been married for long to a rake whom she loves very much. This woman, Baroness Hulot, tries to help Bette but she does not reciprocate and in fact, has built her own resentments. She tries to harm the family in every possible way although she pretends to be grateful and affectionate.
Cousin Pons is a small-time musician but a big-time connoisseur and collector of art. Because of his devotion to art (which costs money) he continues to remain poor. But he is interested in the good life, especially food, and therefore seeks out the wealthy benefactors. Over time they get fed up of him and throw him out. With the exception of his friend, Schmücke, who is an innocent fool, no one suspects that Pons is sitting on a pot of gold. But he is unable to help him against the vultures who gather around when the news of the wealth emerges. Much of the novel describes Pons' decline toward death as everyone, with the exception of Schmücke and a few friends, scheme to steal, defraud and even murder.
Balzac's characters come from the lower depths: inhumanly greedy, callous, cruel, almost inhuman. Bette is one of these; on her deathbed, "quite wretched at the good fortune that was shining on her family", her only consolation is that "they have no idea how she hates them and are, therefore mourning her as the good angel of the family". Baron Hulot, who is at the end redeemed by all the suffering of his wife and family, doesn't quite change his spots. He ends up in the bed of the kitchen maid; his saintly wife overhears him say to the girl: "My wife hasn't long to live, and if you like you can be a baroness."
Sense of timing
Balzac works at even more parallel predicaments than Shakespeare in "King Lear", and they are interwoven to maximum effect. And he has the rarest of gifts: an absolute sense of timing that every dramatist of fiction must have. What then do we make of the two Cousins? That humans are unredeemed and apparently unredeemable? That it is status anxiety that motivates the down and out and makes them what they are? Like all great novels, Bette and Pons are not single stories, told as if they were the only ones.
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