Balzacian Montage: Configuring La Comédie Humaine

Balzac's monumental work, La Comédie humaine, consists of a wide range of novels, stories, and other writings which, he maintained, were to be read and understood as a whole. In this illuminating study Allen H. Pasco explores the work's unifying elements which lend weight to Balzac's claim.

Pasco articulates the principles against which he measures the unity of La Comédie humaine: the relation of narrative to description; the relation of description to images and concept; how images are linked to each other and to the whole; the esthetic vision and unchronological arrangement of the work; the relationship between implicit frame and explicit context, and college vs montage. Pasco offers insightful readers of one or more novels as he considers each principle.

He concludes that Balzac is the master not of collage - the construction of a whole from isolated pieces - but of montage: he regularly constructs wholes from other wholes.