After the initial fascination with cyber-shopping, cyber-relations, cyber-sex, cyber-etcetera has worn off, a lot of people nowadays are getting their vicarious living from simulation computer games. "The Sims", "SimCity", and "Sid Meier's Civilization". have extended the range of simulation from shooting and destroying things to navigating characters through the complexities of life in a simple world like Sims-Ville or Sims City. As a result they have brought whole sections of the population into the ranks of computer gamers. The most notable of these is women, 50% of the population for whom computer games previously did not hold much interest until now.
As I speak, a classic of world literature, the gigantic 100 volume Comedie Humaine, Balzac's mini fictional world within a world, is waiting patiently on library shelves, waiting patiently to satisfy this modern impulse to vicarious living, to be rewritten as a computer game, to be mined for its potential as a dynamic historical simulation of French society from 1815 to 1848.... (or by extension any society during any historical period, see Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities").
All the great characters and human relationships of the Comedy Humaine, are sleeping, for 200 years they have slept, and now they just wait, wait to be resurrected and transformed into some masquerade party of a multi-player computer game where men and women participate equally.
The Comedie Humaine has the necessary ingredients for a successful computer game. The encyclopedic database of French culture from 1815 to 1848 that it contains, provides it with all the realistic detail necessary to make the game interesting. The exhaustive analysis of the laws of social success that it contains provides it with a detailed set of rules to play the game by.
One way of interpreting Balzac stories has a very computer-gamish flavor to it: doll-like simulations of reality with author as god moving his dolls around in a gigantic dollhouse, the imaginary social world he creates in prose. Even before his death, even as he wrote Balzac had the genealogies of his characters spread over the walls of his home and doll sized replicas of his recurring characters sitting on his desk. (Robb, 253) Balzac himself tells us that with respect to his characters he is god. (Robb, 255) How many Sims City players have had the same thoughts?
Instead of the frequent trips to the refrigerator and the bathroom that we have in "The Sims" we have animated characters navigating their way through aristocratic households simulating conversations with powerful people in prominent salons, adding to their store of social success, almost as if Balzac had written them himself.
Proust argued that Balzac's actual life as he lived in it in letters and fantasies was itself a fine handcrafted piece of simulation, a piece of fiction that he composed in parallel with the Comedie Humaine, sometimes the novel borrowing from the life, and sometimes vice-versa, life borrowing from the novel, until the boundary between life and novel all but disappeared. The most detailed example that Proust provides is how Balzac's courtship of a Polish aristocrat (Madame Hanska) towards the end of his life was mirrored almost exactly in the letters and stories he was writing at the time. Proust found this almost incestuous mixture of life and art "vulgar" just as many find virtual pets or over-indulgence in the "The Sims" lacking in taste, but this mixture clearly points towards practical uses of simulation at a personal level.
This appropriation and reuse of material from life to novel, from novel to novel, the reuse of people, details, events, and opinions, together with the constant burden of debt that drove him to produce to satisfy that debt, allowed Balzac to become the most prolific writer in history, writing over one hundred novels and tales. Freely incorporating details from life into fiction and details from fiction into life allowed him to extend his life by a factor of two. Sometimes it seems as if the only thing modern technology has not provided us with is additional hours beyond the 24 hours in each day, this is what the occupation of writing provided Balzac with.
War games were historically the first simulations, used at army staff colleges and think tanks like SRI to dress rehearse battles and strategy. Proust's judgement on Balzac: his simulations are dress rehearsals for life. For Balzac novels are a sort of sophisticated personal planning tool, a pocket organizer, a PDA for arranging one's life into an aesthetic whole, pleasing for other's to behold.
The recipe Balzac uses for weaving fiction out of life? Proust describes what amounts to a perpetual motion machine of method used by Balzac to compose hiw works. First, Balzac "gives concrete examples, instead of extricating what they may contain..." Then with concrete examples, "he dogs every word with what he thinks of it, and the ideas it calls up in him," for example, "If he mentions an artist he immediately says what he knows of him." (129) And these minor digressions give rise to even larger digressions: "...when he has to supply an explanation, Balzac does not go round-about: he writes, 'this is why' and a chapter follows." (129) The whole process is reminiscent of an anthropologist eliciting cultural facts from an informant in the field or a knowledge engineer eliciting rules for an expert system from a knowledgable expert, only in this case the process of elicitation is directed not towards others, but rather inwards to the raw material of one's own life. It is the method by which Balzac becomes a writer.
Balzac's "notorious passion for detail," his propensity to supply extensive detail for detail's sake, has its origin in this method, in this perpetual motion machine, leaving no stone unturned. Critics compared Balzac "descriptive passages to an auctioneer's catalogue." (Robb, 351) Saint-Beuve remarked that among the young people Balzac was the favorite author of gluttons (Robb, 348) Balzac himself called for a universal culinary language (Robb, 347) Proust shows the nostalgic aristocrats of his time decorating their homes with Balzac's detailed descriptions. The description of a boudoir in "The Girl with the Golden Eyes" was itself used as a source of home decorating tips in a French magazine of Balzac's time.
Proust defines style as "the transformation imposed on reality by the writers mind." (127) He tells us that Balzac's style doesn't really exist; Balzac doesn't transform reality, that "all the elements of a style that is still to come exist together, undigested and untransformed," (127) but it isn't pure unalloyed reality that Balzac provides us with either:
Because of this half-baked realism, too fabulous for life, too prosaic for literature, we often get very much the same kind of pleasure from Balzac's books that we get from life. (Proust)
So when we read a Balzac novel we get our life secondhand, a simulcra of life from a different time and place dredged up from depths of Balzac's memory and served with a heavy helping of Balzacian arrogance and indulgence. As simulations often do, Balzac provides the reader with the pleasure of vicarious participation:
"..in Balzac we can still feel and almost gratify those cravings that great literature ought to allay in us. With Tolstoi, the account of an evening party in high society is dominated by the mind of the author, and, as Aristotle would say, we are purged of our worldliness while we read it; with Balzac, we feel almost a worldly satisfaction in taking part in it." (126)
It is almost as if we have been there ourselves, as we put the novel down and swagger out of the library. Balzac wove the story we just read from the very fiber of his life.
Will we weave our own life out of his fiction?
An extended meditation follows on what a Comedie Humaine simulation would consist of:
Balzac's character's are goal driven characters and social success is the goal they are driven towards. Balzac "could not conceive how social success should not be the goal of all goals" (Proust,Sainte-Beuve and Balzac, 119).
In the final scene of Balzac's most famous novel "Pere Goriot" in Pere Lachaise cemetery overlooking Paris, the character who will become Balzac's archetype of social success challenges society to a duel:
He stared at that humming hive as if sucking out its honey in advance, and pronounced these impressive words: "It's you or me now." And by way of throwing down the gauntlet to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Madame de Nucingen. (Pere Goriot, End)
This scene takes place in 1819. Madame de Nucingen eventually becomes his doorway to high society and social success. The next time we encounter him in 1821 (Lost Illusions II) he is poking fun at Lucien de Rubempre at the opera and already seems to fairly well-placed in society.
As goal driven characters, some characters lose and some characters win. Rastignac plays and wins, Lucien Rubempre plays and loses, but there are gradations of success, there is the temporary success of a journalist won by manipulating a corrupt system (Lousteau, others in Lost Illusions, Part II), and there is the more permanent hard-won success of the serious writer of meaningful long lasting classics (Daniel Arthez, Lost Illusions).
As goal driven characters all Balzac's "characters are gifted with that ardour of life that animated himself" (415 robb, baudel 75-76 II 120). The drive, will-power (or even Nietszchean will-to-power) exhibited by Balzac characters has a hyperbolic exaggerated quality to it: "all the actors of his Comedy are more greedy for life, more active and cunning in the struggle, more patient in misfortune, more gluttonous in the gratification of desire, more angelic in devotion, than they appear in the comedy of the real world."
In Balzac's world social success cannot be directly measured in money. Misers in Balzac's world are not enviable characters. (cf Two Brothers, Gobseck, Elie Magus in Cousin Pons) They are sad, curious anomalies, sometimes possessing redeeming qualities, like the profound insight into the workings of capitalism. of the Diogenes-like Gobseck (see "Gobseck"), but they are the inverse of a typical Balzac character, they put money before social success.
Fame contributes to social success, whether it is realized through the publication of a successful book, being appointed to high government office, being awarded a title of nobility, or wearing the ever-present ribbon of the legion of honor. (for the Legion of Honor see "Cesar Birotteau" and "The Lesser Bourgeousie", for titles and appointments see the career of Rastignac)
If money does not directly measure social success, the things that money can buy often do. An extravagant life-style and all its trappings including food, clothing, and one's residence, even if it is financed, is a measure of success. As these things are consumed, as they are ostentatiously displayed and offered for society itself to in turn consume. They are transformed, almost as lead is turned into gold by social alchemists like Rastignac into social success, and although social success once it is achieved cannot be directly seen in the same way that gold bars can be seen, it still exists distributed over all the minds, the preferences and prejudices of which collectively constitute society. Any count or duchesse in need of cash can in fact withdraw from their account of social success by taking out a loan from a usurer like Gobseck, who knows that the sanctity of the family name is often the best security for a loan. (of course, he always requires additional hard security, just in case).
Debt often seems to be essential for success. Possessing the things that money can buy, but not really possessing them because you went massively into debt to buy them, is still measured as success even though it might be of the temporary kind as it is in the case of Lucien Rubempre or Victurnien in the Cabinet of Antiquities.
The most prominent character in Balzac is the young man of ambition arriving from the provinces in Paris to start in a new career. All these young men desire success, but at least initially, due to their lack of experience in Paris, they neither know how to achieve it nor even exactly what of what it actually consists. In the process of navigating themselves through Parisian society they learn the rules of the Parisian world as well as the costs and benefits of the various careers they could embark on.
Let's compare the "SimCity" simulation game that preceded "The Sims" with a Balzac simulation. "SimCity" ...
presents the player with a schematic picture of a riverside city site, and places him or her in the role of mayor. The player is free to build the city however he or she would like, by adding to the model on the screen office buildings, factories, homes, a sewer system, electric power plants, a public transportation system, highways, schools, and so on. The software calculates the effects of each change by using models very like the ones used by social scientists and policymakers to study urban systems. (Janet Murray, 87-88)
In a Balzac simulation the young man embarking on a career takes the place of the mayor and his career the place of the city itself. The schematic picture of the city site would be replaced by the young man's background including all the flaws and fine points that could contribute to his ascendancy or downfall like self-discipline, propensity towards being a drunken rogue, perseverance in the face of hardship, the social standing, class, and wealth of his parents, the appearance that he cuts in society, whether he is handsome or ugly, how witty he is and his ability to shine in conversation, and probably most important of all, his ability to take risks and incur large debts as a sort of advance on his future success and then the audacity and confidence to ride out all the threats to his freedom and good name when his debtors inevitably come knocking at his door, for it's this that distinguishes those who succeed in a big way like Rastignac from the mediocre successes.
The most prominent of all young men of ambition in Balzac is Lucien de Rubempre in Lost Illusions. In Lost Illusions Lucien finds out that being a poet isn't economically feasible and that journalism has immediate rewards. The example of Daniel Artez and the Cenacle literary circle teach him that the serious writing that he initially wanted to pursue requires many years of painstaking devotion for an uncertain return. He chooses the easier path, but his lack of character and a few bad decisions along the way lead to failure and ultimately to suicide.
How is the success of a Balzac character measured? Well, first of all one would have to say "by not failing." "The fallen" is an explicit type of character that is found in almost every Balzac novel. The fall and subsequent rise of a character provides the plot of many novels. The most well-known of "the fallen" is of course the phoenix-like career of Lucien Rubempre in Lost Illusions" and "The Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans" which plots the rise, the fall, the rise again, and the final fall of Lucien Rubempre. In "Modeste Mignon" the trading house ran by Charles Mignon get's caught in the bankruptcy of a debtor, he ships out to China and recoups the loss in time to arrange a good marriage for his daughter. Oscar Clapart in "A Start in Life" botches everything up by insulting the very count his mother is sending him to curry favor with in a stage-coach in which the count is travelling incognito. He serves his apprenticeship as a lawyer but is he lacks the stamina to pass some of the profession's moral tests. He's called upon to attend a party with his colleagues and entrusted with money and an important transaction. The gambling table divests him of the money. Wine and women lead him all night debauchery that makes him late for his appointment. Oscar Clapart finally enlists in the army and takes the long, hard path to climbing the social ladder. He finally succeeds and rises again to some modicum of social respectability.
In addition to embarking upon a good career, a good marriage is an important element of success for the young man. A good marriage provides a large dowry and social alliances that can help him in his career. However, the more promise he shows in his chosen career, the better the marriage that he'll be able to contract, aristocratic titles and even wealth itself do not appear to be important as they once might have been, Aristocratic titles are not as important because of the transfer of wealth the French Revolution witnessed between the aristocracy and the bourgeousie. Wealth itself becomes less important because it is so easily dissipated, especially by the rogue sons of aristocracy in the provinces who have not adjusted to the post-revolutionary economic situation (cf. Victurnien in the "Cabinet of Antiquities")
For men, as for women, love is not so important in making a good marriage. Balzac's admonition that behind every influential man there is an influential woman can be seen in the choices of Lucien Rubempre. Choosing an actress over an aristocratic woman of influence who Balzac let's on he could have reclaimed after initially losing allows for his abandonment by the aristocracy at the exact moment when he has gone over to their side in the profession of journalism. (Lost Illusions II)
Physiognomy also plays a role. Black hair and blue eyes "are the attributes of characters who control their own destiny" and are "bound for social success," whereas "men with fair hair like Lucien de Rubempre, tend to lack will-power and usually fall prey to domineering personalities." (Robb, 254)
The following are some factors and rules in the lives of young men of ambition in Balzac's narratives:
Success or failure for the women in Balzac's novels is initially determined by who they marry. In the worst case a bad choice can lead to poverty and even death (cf "The Vendetta").
The average case in Balzac's world is a little harder to figure out because he simple avoids it, although it's still there in a sense lurking in the margins. Although Balzac has a whole series of tales that deal with the topic of "virtuous wives" normal average domestic harmony does not make for a good plot. It is the movement towards or away from domestic peace and harmony, from faithfulness, that makes for interesting plots. The short story "Domestic Peace" is about how a young bride reclaims the love of her husband. The woman to whom she lost his love becomes a tiny blip on the big screen of history a few years later when she dies in a fire during a ball. In a "Daughter of Eve" a young woman, ushered straight from girlhood into matrimony without any intervening edifying life experiences or disappointments in love, succumbs to the Parisian fashion of taking on a lover. Her husband, older and world-wise, finds out and brings the affair to a quiet and expeditious close.
Another common scenario among the aristocracy is that of separate lives lead by the husband and wife. The necessity of maintaining the family pedigree among the aristocracy lead to a lot of marriages that are pretty much finished when the children necessary to carry on the family name have been produced. Among Balzac's bourgeousie characters men frequently have mistresses, but one never really meets or becomes acquainted with the wives of these men. One might assume that their life is taken up in domestic concerns like child-raising, preparing meals, and housework. Among Balzac's aristocratic characters you usually meet both the husband and wife (cf Duchesse de Langeais). One might assume that domestic servants assuming all domestic responsibilities leave the women free to devote 100% of their time to the social world, a world dominated by appearances. If she is beautiful and wealthy (but not necessarilly young) the wife will be courted by several young men.
In fact, Balzac often seems to be providing a guide to mate selection for young women that reflects the mores of his time along with the main narrative thread of his novels. "Modeste Mignon" for instance, pits an gold-digging ego-centric poet, a duke who displays all the virtues and grace of the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy despite the fact that his family seems to be on a little bit of a decline (wealth-wise at least), and a level-headed young lawyer who honestly loves her in a contest for the hand of a young woman. Despite having the lowest social status of the three, the lawyer is favored by the young woman's father and ultimately wins. All this seems to be in accord with Balzac's social law for young men: "A promising career increases marriage prospects." "Albert Savarus" is a cautionary tale. Do not meddle in the long-hallowed traditions of parents arranging good marriages for their children. The heroine goes so far as to steal and read the mail of her loved one and try to re-arrange his life for him on the sly. As a result, she misses the opportunity that her father's death and a large inheritance give her to make a good match. Her mother remarries and snatches it up. Luck finally deals the heroine a bad card and she gets hideously injured and deformed in a traffic accident. But it's too late she didn't cut a deal when she had the cars in her hand and she lives out the remainder of her days in an unenviable unmarried state.
A set of factors or "needs" are used to measure the progress of players in a Sims simulation. They include: hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, fun, social, and room.
If one were to distill a set of attributes that measure the well-being of a Balzac character what would these be? And what order of importance would they take? Wealth, Friendship, Love and Fame seem to be broad all-inclusive measures of well-being for Balzac characters. Love and wealth being so well elaborated in rich detail by Balzac, that they need little further explanation. Friendship and Fame, however, include a wide variety of similar phenomenon.
Friendship would include the ubquitous confraternity of males that we see in every Balzac novel whether it be the Cenacle literary circle, the circle of journalists of liberal persuasion that Lousteau, Finot, and Vinet are members of (Lost Illusions II), The Society of the Thirteen and their semi-legal activities, The Brotherhood of Consolation and their Christian acts of charity,....etc.
Fame would also include it's inverse, "being infamous," the avoidance of which provides a major impetus to action in Balzac characters. According to the aristocratic code of morals that existed prior to the French revolution if one someone tarnished your family name a duel should shortly follow, but if you yourself tarnished your family name suicide should shortly follow (cf. "The Cabinet of Antiquities"). Suicide is in fact chosen by several characters when they fail to achieve social success. Retiring to a religious order for the remainder of their life is also one solution. (cf "Albert Savarus" and "Duchesse de Langeais") Biteing the bullet and eking out some meagre obscure existence outside the view of society like Z. Marcus does with his legal copying work that brings him a subsistence income, is yet another, though less desirable, alternative. (see Z. Marcus).
Fame in fact incorporates the eternal gaze and assessment by society as to whether one has succeeded or not. It is to a large extent internalized within characters, they know when people would look down on them if they were to show their face in public, so they do not. Lucien's reappearance at the opera after his long downward fall is a good case in point. He knows that his powerful protector Vautrin has guaranteed his re-ascendance but know one else present knows this. (see "The Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans") To a large extent Fame tracks the other measures of well-being. If one is wealthy and cultivates friends with this wealth (i.e. one is not a miser) then fame will follow.
(Compare measures of well-being with the English notion of utility. Show why Bourdeau's notion of social capital is better than the notion of utility from economics.)
Every character belonging to the aristocracy is given an advantage or head-start, they are endowed with a large quantum of fame and usually wealth to begin with. They in fact constitute the basic structure of the society that others must master if they wish to advance. As Proust observes:
(We see...in a gazetteer of the works of Balzac, where the most illustrious personages figure only according to their connection with the Comedie Humaine, Napoleon occupying a space considerably less than that alloted to Rastignac, and occupy that space solely because he once spoke to the young ladies of the Cinq-Cygne.) Similarly, the aristocracy with its heavy structure, pierced with rare windows, admitting a scanty daylight, shewing the same incapacity to soar but also the same massive and blind force as the architecture of the romanesque age, embodies all our history, immures it, beetles over it. (Proust, Guermantes Way Part Two, Moncrieff)
One plays "The Sims" by making decisions and choices. One chooses when to eat, when to send your character to the bathroom, what career to pursue, when to study and read, when to socialize, when to marry and when to have children. One buys furniture or builds a pool. Play reflects various aspects of life in late 20th century family-centered consumer culture.
Life in Balzac's world is quite different. The family is almost an appendage of society, so the element of socializing that is only present in the margins of "The Sims" becomes central in Balzac's simulations.
The bathroom is wholly non-existent, but the boudoir becomes an indicator of social intimacy between a married woman and the men who are contesting for her hand. (cf. "Lost Illusions III" and "The Duchesse de Langeais")
Dining rooms become mere appendages of the most central place in the whole simulation, the salons or drawing rooms of the prominent, those who have already attained social success and maintain it through the social gatherings they organize. Sometimes these social gatherings can themselves lead to the downfall of the person organizing them as they did in the case of Cesar Birotteau whose extravagant ball to celebrate his being awarded the legion of honor, necessitated the remodelling of his house and led ultimately to his bankruptcy.