Balzac’s Golden Triangles in the Colonial Genealogies of French Modernism

Abstract

The past decade has seen far-reaching shifts and revisions in scholars’ use of the terms modern, modernity, and modernism as periodizing and critical lenses. Prompted by the stark divergences between disciplinary understandings of the terms, Mary Gluck (intellectual and cultural historian) and Susan Stanford Friedman (feminist literary and cultural critic) take the divergent disciplinary definitions as grounds to ask how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholars can productively rethink these terms. Friedman identifies one of the most stymieing divergences when she writes that, ‘the epitome of modernity for those in the social sciences is precisely what modernity dismantles for those in the humanities’ (Chapter 1, 20). As Friedman and Gluck both note, from their interdisciplinary sites, if social scientists tend to follow historians, and define modernity through reference to the initial break with Medieval institutions and the gradual emergence of secular, rational humanism, the bourgeoisie, the nation state, and transitions to urban culture, by contrast, scholars in the humanities understand the modern as a break away from, or interruption to, many of those developments. Both scholars of modernism, however, work with and through such disciplinary divergences. For Friedman, ‘definitional dissonance matters’ (29) and she suggests that scholars resist attempts to further corral the definitions from outside, so to speak, and work instead from the midst of the dissonance.

Sometimes, however, the compensatory fantasies of the naive man are more accurate about the world than the realist Balzac is credited with being. The alienation that occasioned his writing—it is as though every sentence of his industrious pen were constructing a bridge into the unknown—is itself the secret life he was trying to discover by guesswork. The same thing that separates people from one another and keeps the writer isolated from them is what keeps the movement of society going, the movement whose rhythm Balzac’s novels are imitating.

(Theodor W. Adorno ‘Reading Balzac’)