Allan H. Pasco

Literature as Historical Archive

While it is always desirable to develop new archives, it is especially important for late eighteenth century France. A number of cultural historians have suggested that our sense of historical reality would be augmented if it were infused by the information provided by art and literature. The last half of the eighteenth century gives reason to believe that literature offers a particularly useful opening onto the reality of peoples lives. Because the methods of literary patronage had changed, for the first time the financing of publication required a mass market. Fortunately, literacy was increasing significantly, thus producing sufficient numbers of paying customers to support a burgeoning publishing industry. People read for entertainment and, it seems, for information. Writers increasingly claimed their works were realistic. Numerous scholars have used these works for illustration of conclusions reached about the period; a few have turned to them as the source of indications of that reality. While literature in one way or another reflects the period of its creation, better methodology needs to be developed for using literature as an opening onto the age. Single works do not in isolation provide trustworthy insights into the thought, feelings, customs, and details of everyday life. Still, reliability increases as the novels and plays included in the archive become more numerous and common elements emerge. Multiplicity of example and congruence of significance are essential for using literature and the arts as reliable historical archives. If a large percentage of the actual works of art not only turn around but focus, for example, on the reasons for emigration, or the anguish of divorce, or incest, or suicide, it seems obvious that literature is responding to contemporary conditions and attitudes. Of course, any conclusions are particularly useful when they are buttressed by other, traditional resources.

Should Graduate Students Publish

Most graduate students in the humanities have the intelligence and insight required to publish outstanding studies, though, of course, they may lack the knowledge and persistence required of successful professionals. Whether or not they should publish remains an open question, with a number of issues that must be evaluated. Publication should be entertained only if neither graduate students’ own classes nor those they teach would suffer. They should, moreover, make the attempt only if the potential article makes a significant contribution to the field. Nonetheless, students who wish to be competitive would be wise to have something accepted for publication when they look for a job. A faculty mentor is helpful, both to ensure that the manuscript is sufficiently expert, well written, and organized and to put negative, sometimes hurtful reviews in context. While the process of turning papers into first-rate publications can be a wonderfully useful experience, it can also take more time than students can afford and be undeservedly damaging to their self-confidence.

On Defining Short Stories

This is the publishers version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/stable/469046?origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

The play of terror in nineteenth-century France

This work brings together seventeen papers originally presented at the nineteenth annual Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies held at the University of Kansas in 1993. Contributors include well-known critics as well as younger scholars working in the field.

Balzacian montage : configuring La Comédie humaine

Balzacs monumental work, La Comedie 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 works unifying elements which lend weight to Balzacs claim. Pasco articulates the principles against which he measures the unity of La Comedie 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.

Balzac's "L'illustre Gaudissart" and Nascent Capitalism

Felix Gaudissart, the main character and the prince of commis voyageurs, is the butt of a practical joke in this novel by Balzac, yet the true comedy mocks provincials who cannot move into the world of the aborning Industrial Revolution and are thus condemned to remain immured in their limited and stultifying way of life in a French province.

A “Divine” Comedy: Eugénie Grandet

“The ‘Divine’ Comedy” of Eugenie Grandet exploits some of the results of the decisions to strip the church of all material property, if not all of its spiritual authority. Revolutionary dechristianization had infuriated many of the faithful, though Balzac understood that the Church’s real problems came from a competing religion that was strengthening, that of Mammon, the god of material wealth. We watch as Monsieur Grandet becomes enormously rich and increasingly besotted with his worship of gold. When Eugenie falls in love with Charles and is later abandoned, the novel plays on an allusion to Christ’s promised return at the end of the age. On a spiritual level, Eugenie turns from gold to God. The developing maturity of her gentle nature indicates returning force in the Catholic Church of Balzac’s day.

The Tangible and the Intangible: Le Curé de Tours

“The Tangible and the Intangible” turns to Le Cure de Tours. It tells the pitiable story of a country priest, who is incapable of divining the forces moving against him and thus loses the meager but tangible joys of his self-centered life. While burlesque always serves to ridicule, Balzac’s creation also envisages the French church after the Revolution. Denuded of property, its former power has largely dissipated, leaving degraded ecclesiastical functionaries that care only for themselves, capable only of hurting each other and the similarly disinherited aristocrats. The moral nobility that once marked the Church and the Aristocracy has been exhausted by the jealous pettiness of unproductive celibates.

The Gerontocracy and Youth: Pierrette

“The Gerontocracy and Youth” opens with Pierrette’s implicit promise of a joyous tale of young love, as Balzac exploits mock heroic in a desolate account of the abuse of the nation’s young by the elderly. Youth was everywhere frustrated, for avenues to positions where they might work the changes desperately needed by society had been closed. Pierrette was invited to join her aunt and uncle in the hope of receiving an inheritance. Instead, she is beaten, intimidated, and, indeed, killed, leaving a disconsolate young man and triumphant elders, thus emphasizing the tragedy of an unrestrained gerontocracy committed to their own welfare.

The Dying Patriarchy: La Rabouilleuse

“The Dying Patriarchy” turns to Balzac’s exploitation of La Rabouilleuse’s innovative narration to unveil the dire reality of a society dominated by the bourgeoisie, where virtue is unimportant, where only money matters. The unrolling narration exposes the dire results of generations of war that left fatherless young men who lack respect for truth, family, and law. The plot does not follow a character, as is traditional, but rather it focuses on the Rouget inheritance as it passes from the old doctor, to his son and their mistress, to Max, to Philippe, and finally to Joseph and the predatory du Tillet and Nucingen. Everything but the inheritance changes, as we move from the provinces to Paris and back again.