Conception versus réception

Abstract

There is a simple but fundamental incongruity in Honore de Balzac’s relationship with England: the conception and reception of his work. Composed in deep intertextual dialogue with writers from across the Channel, La Comedie humaine nonetheless had a rough return journey. While integrating three approaches toward studies of reception, this paper challenges three common hypotheses around this phenomenon: first, that Balzac’s novels construct a fundamentally national space; second, that their moral depravity was unappealing to Victorian tastes; and third, that they belong to the genre of realism. Calling on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, the article proposes a fourth hypothesis: the linguistic pluralism that enabled a diverse French readership to identify with the novels precluded a British one from doing so. In conclusion, it re-examines British consecration of Balzac’s work during the fin-de-siecle period, proposing that this turn was contingent on the Comedie being transmuted into a common cosmopolitan denominator, its heteroglossia reduced to a single voice.