#balzaq — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

"While Balzac chronicled the rise of the bourgeoisie after the revolution of 1789, Houellebecq has canvassed the social void created by the so-called second revolution of 1989, where a newly global capitalism achieved its uneasy triumph worldwide. As literary critic Peter Brooks noted in 1999 about the “monarchist Marxists could love,” Balzac also “had the advantage of living in an age of revolution, which made the passing of the old order starkly perceptible.” Both were vitriolic critics of the new society with unending fondness for the old one. For Balzac, it was the ancient aristocracy and kings; for Houellebecq, the communist parties, country priests, and Gaullist politicians. “It’s true that the Communist Party isn’t what it used to be,” the latter could still claim in 1994, even though “a country whose population is becoming impoverished, senses that it’s going to become more and more impoverished, and is also convinced that all its misfortunes come from international economic competition” deserved better. Both were also from relatively modest backgrounds — the aristocratic particle “de” was Balzac’s own confection, while Houellebecq prides himself on not sharing the credentials of the Parisian citadel he now inhabits.

The analogies hardly end there. In the 1830s and ’40s, when Balzac wrote, the dominant repertoire of social action was the petition, the riot, and the street march, in a left-wing political culture not yet organized around unions, parties, or large membership organizations, as Daniel Zamora has noted. Confusion and fear of place characterize his novels through and through, with a breakdown of social order and frenzied groping for status. Yet for Balzac at least, the world was suffused with a sense of sociological color; this was a world of individuals as members of classes, not the isolated “elementary particles” of Houellebecq’s early novels."

https://jacobin.com/2024/10/michel-houellebecq-the-unhappy-oracle/

#Literature #France #Liberalism #Realism #Balzaq #Houellebecq
#Marxism