Third reading: D.W. Buffa on "Père Goriot"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot. It begins:

In December of l875, Henry James published a review of the French writer Honoré de Balzac that ran nearly seventeen thousand words. The review can be found in the Library of America’s edition entitled, Henry James: European Writers and The Prefaces. It should be read by anyone with a serious interest in Balzac, and a serious concern with how far the 21st century has fallen below the literary standards, and perhaps not just the literary standards, of the 19th century.

One of the great, if least noticed, differences between what was written then and what is written now, is that writers devoted their lives to what they did. Born in 1799, Balzac spent three years working in a lawyer’s office, the necessary apprenticeship to practice law in France, and then, over the protests of his family, decided to become a writer, and before he was thirty he had written a number of unreadable novels which left him as impoverished as he had been when he started. He learned from his failures, and instead of narrowing, broadened the scope of his ambition. He would write a series of novels that would together describe the human condition, that is to say, the human comedy, the world as it really existed, or at least that part of the world known as Paris. The best of these novels is Père Goriot, a novel Henry James considered among “the few greatest novels we possess.”

Père Goriot begins with nothing of what is usually considered action, nothing that immediately captures the reader’s attention, nothing that creates a sense of mystery or adventure or even anticipation. It opens with the description of a place, a boarding house where no one would live if they could afford something better. Everything about it is dismal.

“In the whole of Paris there is no district more hideous, and none, we must add, more unknown.” The boarding house is four stories high, and of a “squalid appearance,” every squalid detail of which is described. The boarders have their meals on “a long table covered with oilcloth so greasy that a playful diner can autograph it with his finger.” It is a place of poverty, “pinched, concentrated, threadbare poverty,” a place “where all hope and eagerness have been extinguished.”

This goes on for pages, one grim, depressing detail after another. And it is all quite deliberate. “The place in which an event occurred,” explains Henry James, was in Balzac’s view, “of equal moment with the event itself; it was part of the action; it was not a thing to take or to leave, or to be vaguely and gracefully indicated; it imposed itself; it had a part to play; and need to be made as definite as anything else.” It is the same thing with persons as with things....[read on]

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Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot.

--Marshal Zeringue