When a 20-year-old Honore de Balzac passed his baccalaureat - albeit without flying colours - in 1819, he had ambitious plans. Comparing his future exploits to those of Napoleon, whose glory days were firmly in the past, Balzac said: "What he left undone with the sword, I shall finish with the pen". It is the fulfilment of this prophesy that France and Balzac fans everywhere are now celebrating during "Balzac Year", which began on May 20th, the bicentenary of the author's birth in Tours, and continues until August 18th, 2000 - the 150th anniversary of his death.
Even the optimistic Balzac would be astonished were he here to witness the scale of the ongoing celebrations. In typical French style, good food and fetes go hand in hand: for instance, in Tours at least 14 local restaurants are adding "Balzac specialities" to their menus. Not surprisingly, the anniversaries have also provided a golden opportunity for academics, writers, museums and art galleries to go on a Balzac "binge". Exhibitions, colloquia and publications are in plentiful supply, and an Internet site (www.liv.ac.uk/www/french/ dix-neuf/balzac.html) has been set up to provide information on forthcoming events and make some of Balzac's novels available online. One of the academic highlights will be a gathering of Balzac scholars in the University of Aarhus in Denmark, on October 14th and 15th. for an international colloquium entitled Apres Balzac.
Balzac was a reluctant writer. There is ample evidence to suggest that the main impetus for most of his work was financial difficulty. At the age of 26, having failed to attract either public recognition or positive critical comment for a few published works, he decided to become a publisher, then a printer. But success eluded him again and he ended up massively in debt: Balzac would spend his whole life avoiding people to whom he owed money.
Honore de Balzac is primarily remembered for his monumental La Comedie Humaine, which was planned to encompass 137 novels, populated by thousands of characters. The idea was to create a universe of characters in which all human "types" were represented; to document the reality of everyday life and, above all, to study Man in his habitat. For Balzac bases his La Comedie Humaine on the premise that there exist, and have always existed, "social species" much in the same way as there are "zoological species". This tendency should not, however, be seen as a facile labelling process. As Balzac wrote: "I have attempted everywhere to give life: to the type, by bringing out his individuality, and to the individual, by rendering him as a type".
If Balzac was a reluctant writer, then it is also true, but rarely recognised, that his readership has also been in need of a little encouragement. Serialisation of his novels in the press was not only a way of keeping the cash rolling in, but also of "hooking " as many readers as possible. By finishing a chapter or even a complete novel on a note of suspense, Balzac tried to convince his readers that they wanted to read all of the 137 projected novels of his monumental tome.
The sheer size of the project was not only beyond Balzac's lifespan, however - he died leaving some 50 of its planned novels unwritten - it has also discouraged many would-be readers, who don't feel up to getting acquainted with the 2,500 and more characters who inhabit the universe of La Comedie Humaine. Most readers confine themselves to reading what are considered the "most representative" Balzac novel(s). But to do so is to deny the whole point of La Comedie Humaine: to miss the experience of entering a monde en petit and enjoying all its detail and variety, its completeness, becoming familiar with the 573 characters who, throughout the 85 completed novels, "reappear" in various roles and at various stages of development.
This phenomenon of reappearing characters and their relationships with new and old characters creates an entire web of interconnected families. The full extent of this tracery is evident when you open the Genealogy of the Characters in La Comedie Humaine, which is available from the Maison de Balzac museum in Paris and which constructs what is in essence a family-tree of Balzac's characters: the chart is over two and a quarter metres long and still manages to look rather cramped. What's more, the family trees of Balzac's peasants, and of some other characters, aren't even on it: they're shown on another (thankfully smaller) chart. The extended Irish family shrinks to Chinese proportions in comparison. Under the circumstances, Balzac has to be pardoned the odd chronological inconsistency in La Comedie Humaine with which he is often charged.
Elements of Balzac's style also alienate the average reader. In particular, his penchant for detail, born of his desire to be the "recorder " of his time in all its aspects. Architects studying this period may appreciate this aspect of Balzac's style to the point of relying on the accuracy of his descriptions in preference to the somewhat lacunary state records. For the non-specialist reader, however, long and excruciatingly detailed passages (sometimes occupying the space of a few chapters) provide ample excuse not to read Balzac.
Those who do find a complete Balzacian text a bit of a chore will be delighted to learn that many of the author's novels have been adapted to the bande dessinee genre, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1950s Ren Giffey, one of France's finest realist illustrators, summarised Une te nebreuse affaire on 20 plates which are currently on show in the Maison de Balzac museum (47, rue Raynouard, 75016 Paris). Examples of other novels adapted to this form include La Peau de Chagrin, Le Lys dans la Vallee, Trompe-la-mort, and La Duchesse de Langeais.
Still, reading Balzac is in vogue. The uninitiated, the already-familiar and even the specialists are turning to Balzac texts: Salman Rushdie, for instance, intends " having a Balzac jag" starting with La Cousine Bette, Le Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet. However, the question for new and old Balzac readers is not only where to start reading in La Comedie Humaine, as Graham Robb re-asked recently, but why start with La Comedie Humaine at all. It is perhaps not well known that there are a number of other works which, for the "sin" of not falling within the borders of his huge epic, are systematically ignored, even by Balzac specialists: works like L'Heritiere de Birague, Clotilde de Lusignan or Annette et le Criminel. Depending on one's choice of text, a satirical, a comical, a fantasising - in short, a forgotten Balzac can be discovered in works such as Contes drolatiques, Les Fantaisies de la Gina, Le Voyage de Paris a Java, Peines de coeur d'une chatte anglaise . . .
Many of these works were written during the time La Comedie Humaine was taking shape and if Balzac considered them important enough to take time out from his main writing enterprise, then we should certainly not dismiss them. A final warning for those who do opt for La Comedie humaine: certainly take part in le monde balzacien, but don't forget about the real world. It is reported that on his deathbed and with his mind racing, Balzac called out for his doctor Bianchon. The doctor never arrived, as he only tended to the characters of La Comedie Humaine. In the end, fiction overtook reality in Balzac's mind.
Alan English is an academic who specialises in 19th-century French literature. From next month he will be teaching in the French Department at the University of Limerick