LACRIMOSA

In his introduction, Fredric Jameson writes:

Indeed, it seems to me least misleading to characterize the 'realism' of Eugénie Grandet from the outset as the production of a new kind of poetic object: namely the as yet unnamed emotion that is disengaged by the contemplation of the unique social form which is the provincial small town, and which can be approached from its physical features and the backwater tranquility of its empty streets fully as much as through the lives and feelings or emotions of its inhabitants.

This poetic object he speaks of is, of course, the melancholy with which Balzac soaks his narrative. Certainly the feeling of melancholy had existed before Balzac, but Jameson suggests that he at least contributed to its use as a literary mechanism, and my review of the text has illuminated the mastery with which he did so.

According to Jameson, Balzac used melancholic passages not only to develop the setting and the emotions of his characters, but also to represent one of two directions in which Eugénie's destiny could unravel. The first, effectuated by the text's gloomier sections, is that she might inherit her father's miserly spirit; the second, alluded to in the light and optimistic (often religiously influenced) passages, is that her "devotion, persistence, and resignation" might allow her to rise above the aforementioned fate.

Balzac's ambitions with this novel, and his Comédie humaine as a whole certainly went beyond this type of stylistic embellishment, but from our discussions in class and Jameson's writings, it's clear they are essential to his relation of grander themes.

I cropped the image above from Juan de Valdés Leal's Finis Gloriae Mundi ("The End of the Glory of Earth"), and superimposed (translated) lyrics from the Lacrimosa movement of Mozart's Requiem.