le père goriot (balzac, tr ellen marriage)

Reading Balzac, in a similar way to reading Zola or Proust, is to dive into a corner of a vast sea. La Comédie Humaine, “consists of 91 finished works… and 46 unfinished works” (cf wikipedia). To read one of these works on its own seems a bit akin to watching a single episode of an endless TV soap. There is no way of placing the work in context, because the reader is lacking the other 140+ pieces of context, and to spring to quickfire conclusions seems an act of ignorance.

So, having completed my first novel from this vast collection, Père Goriot, to offer any kind of commentary feels ‘atrevido’. The novel tells the story of an impoverished father who continues to support his two daughters, in spite of the fact that they are married to figures from high society and are ostensibly well-off. Goriot lives in a boarding house with the young legal student Rastignac, among others, whose own ambitions to move into high society will be conditioned by his strange friendship with the devoted father, who is taken advantage of by his ungrateful daughters.

The thrust of the novel’s moral education for both Rastignac and reader is clear and the study of Paris’ social worlds is effusive. One of the most intriguing elements of the novel concerns its pre-history. Goriot, we are told, made his fortune in the wake of the revolution. At a time of food scarcity, he began to control wheat supplies and this lead to him becoming rich. Later in the novel, impoverished and near his end, he repeatedly says he will go to Odessa to return to the wheat business. Within the course of a single generation, the whole upheaval of the revolution, as described in the novel, has been forgotten. The aristocracy have regained complete control of society and absorbed any social differences. Goriot’s sole ambition is to get his daughters into that society, which he achieves, only to find that this offers none of the security either for them or for him he imagined. The result is that the revolution, the most seismic event in the recent history of Europe, as well as Goriot’s life, is reduced to a footnote. It becomes, in the novel, a kind of black hole, with Parisian society accelerating away from its centre at warp speed. The poor are poorer than ever and the rich more venal than ever. History has moved on without, it seems, having taken on any of the lessons that the years of strife might have imparted.