A ‘Corporama of Historical Facts:’ Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and the Pre-cinematic Imagination

The tradition of commentators of the Human Comedy following Baudelaire has often separated the realist inspiration from the visionary one. Balzac’s mimesis, according to the majority of these studies, is based on painterly conventions. Some other critics have recognised in Balzac’s disposition of episodes, and in the shifting of focus that his narrative voice operates, an anticipation of the technology of cinema. The material history of nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles, which has never been analysed in the whole cycle of Balzac novels, proves to be particularly revealing in this debate for it offers a correlative not only of the epistemological concern that sustains the kind of fiction Balzac envisions, by what he calls the ‘écrivains a synthèse,’ but a compelling poetics that helps us reconcile the apparent fragmentation of the parts, as well as the vexata quaestio of the unity of the whole Comédie Humaine.