Balzac descriptions seems to fulfill the accentuating the nature of its characters.

At

the same time separating them, setting the possibilities of their action and

preserving the existential formalities of the novel. Thus, for example at the

beginning of the novel, we find the first description of David:

David's physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter, the man

born to struggle in obscurity, or with the eyes of all men turned upon him

(clatantes). The strong shoulders, rising above the broad chest, were in

keeping with the full development of his whole frame. With his thick crop of

black hair, his fleshy, high-colored, swarthy face, supported by a thick neck,

he looked at first sight like one of Boileau's canons: but on a second glance

there was that in the lines about the thick lips, in the dimple of the chin, in

the turn of the square nostrils, with the broad irregular line of central

cleavage, and, above all, in the eyes, with the steady light of an all-absorbing

love that burned in them, which revealed the real character of the manthe

wisdom of the thinker, the strenuous melancholy of a spirit that discerns the

horizon on either side, and sees clearly to the end of winding ways, turning

the clear light of analysis upon the joys of fruition, known as yet in idea alone,

and quick to turn from them in disgust. You might look for the flash of genius

from such a face; you could not miss the ashes of the volcano; hopes

extinguished beneath a profound sense of the social annihilation to which

lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind.

The first phrase, which will be supported indirectly by the others give us the certain

generalities of the Davids character on the whole novel. David is that one who

would work in the densest obscurity of retreat and prison, at the same time the

most clatantes activities. Being the being fighter, David is for Balzac the

representation of one of the extremes of the relationship between man and society.

For Balzac, always a man can be described as a social individual, and what relates

them with society is their desire to find their essence. The strenuous melancholy of

a spirit that discerns the horizon on either side, and sees clearly to the end of

winding ways, turning the clear light of analysis upon the joys of fruition, known as

yet in ideal alone, and quick to turn from them in disgust. The distinction between

the real position of a character and its ideal guides the actions whose orchestration

are the essence of the balzacian novel. Thats what Lukcs would call the subjective-

psychological demonism,3 a sense of homelessness produced by the historical

separation of essence and existence, meaning and life. A different way to put it In

modern societies, the ends of life are not given at the beginning of life; they are

thought to be created or discovered. The reproduction of the customs and practices

of the group is no longer the chief purpose of existence; the idea is not to repeat, but

to change, to move the world forward.4 Davids homelessness is defined, at this

point on the novel, by its critical position towards the ideal. Socially, the individual is

charge with task of existence, and that this reality is constructed as the immanent

ultimate reality, the principle of all essential (practical, historical, human) action5

is the also special to Balzac. The heroic necessity of self-perfecting on Wilhelm

Meisters main character is transform into the socially necessary form of existence,
but with the meaning of this notion itself came to be problematized. Thus, David

here is particularly treated as the inventor, and abstractly it represents the

possibility of labor as an end in itself.

Another feature of Balzac descriptions are their outwardly assimilating, subjective

standpoint. They seem to contain a characters nature, but as a social individual, and

thus from the perspective of another observant, understanding subject. This allows

the seemly profoundest characteristics of a personage, to be able to change through

their practical contact with the external world and their judgment of it. This would

be more comparing two descriptions of Louise before and after her meeting with

Lucien and analyzing their specific context:

Mme. de Bargeton, following a new fashion, wore a coif of slashed black

velvet, a headdress that recalls memories of mediaeval legend to a young

imagination, to amplify, as it were, the dignity of womanhood. Her red-gold

hair, escaping from under her cap, hung loose; bright golden color in the

light, red in the rounded shadow of the curls that only partially hid her neck.

Beneath a massive white brow, clean cut and strongly outlined, shone a pair

of bright gray eyes encircled by a margin of mother-of-pearl, two blue veins

on each side of the nose bringing out the whiteness of that delicate setting.

The Bourbon curve of the nose added to the ardent expression of an oval

face; it was as if the royal temper of the House of Conde shone conspicuous in

this feature. The careless cross-folds of the bodice left a white throat bare,

and half revealed the outlines of a still youthful figure and shapely, well-
 placed contours beneath.

Without stooping to long in issues that would be approach latter, I would just like to

remark the general tone emphasized in this paragraph and how it relate to my claim

before about the use of descriptions in Balzac. The paragraph describes Louise as a

dignified aristocrat. The stagnation of her life before this point is pointed on the

epithets and similes: she evokes medieval legends, has a Bourbon curve of the nose,

the royal temper of the House of Conde. Her feature competes, are ambiguously

sensual and inert, the line following this description starts with fingers tapering

and well-kept, though somewhat too thin (the last adjective is actually more

suggestive, secs, which literally means dry), she expresses the dignity of

womanhood, but her red-golden hair escapes her, gilded by the light. Her ardent in

the curls, and her shining grey eyes are full of a passion, which Balzac tries to

balance to her more pacify and delicate toilette. At this point of the novel Mme.

Bargeton-Louise is still a dormant character with interior sensuality contained and

ripped to be liberated by the contact with the world; and Balzac is able to contain all

this pre-history of a personage, and crystalized into a description that has the

position of being a social expression. The description comes just after and exchange

of looks between Mme. Bargeton-Louise and Lucien, and in the context of a social

meeting. One might be able to argue that this view of Mme. Bargeton, being

objectify, pertains too to the worlds of the characters, is part of the view Lucien and

Chatelet, which are both at this moment present, observe and realize through her

exteriority this characteristics of Mme. Bargeton. To consider here that this two

characters, being the pretending lovers of the described, would affect the tone of the
description would not be out of tone. They contain within their interests the

possibility for looking a Mme. Bargeton in this two ways. Finally, this description of

her social individual, in as far as it renders her nature present within the existence

as contradictory, and mediates it by their her own interest, points to her possibility

to change herself by practical life.

An analysis of a second paragraph will help to rend this last point more clear. A few

pages later Mme. Bargeton is described as:

At this moment Mme. de Bargeton appeared in all the glory of an elaborate

toilette. She wore a Jewess' turban, enriched with an Eastern clasp. The

cameos on her neck gleamed through the gauze scarf gracefully wound about

her shoulders; the sleeves of her printed muslin dress were short so as to

display a series of bracelets on her shapely white arms. Lucien was charmed

with this theatrical style of dress. M. du Chatelet gallantly plied the queen

with fulsome compliments that made her smile with pleasure; she was so

glad to be praised in Lucien's hearing.6

From the beginning the two contradictory points presented before; i.e. her

aristocratic stagnation and her inherent desirous beauty, seem to have dissolve into

carefulness and luxuriousness. Her beauty finds expression through the

sumptuousness of aristocratic forms and manners: Jewesss turbans, gauze scarfs, a

muslin dress and her bracelets. Additionally, the synecdoche used on the phrase

Chatelet gallantly plied the queen; the idea of her as a queen is the more precise

synthesis of her movement from stagnation and lethargic beauty. That this

description comes attach to a different character observation on her just confirms

what was pointed before about the relevant of the context on this apparent

objective descriptions.

What has happened between and the second description would have to be carefully

analyze to get a better on how this movement correlates.

Luckas define LIllusions Perdues as the originator of the novel of disillusion, which

he defines as representing how fake ideas (ideals), even though necessary, of the

characters of the world, shatter obligatorily at their contact with the brutal force of

the life under capitalism 48

The transcendental character of David is the possibility to change the world even

despite societys desire.

The comedic tone introduced by the idea of the Boileaus canon, referring to the Le

Lutrin, an epopee burlesque sets up also the light tone with which David enterprise

will be taken. Balzac is a lover of great passions. As Baudelaure would say: Bref,

chacun, chez Balzac, mmes les portires, a du gnie. Toutes les mes sont des mes

charges de volont jusqu' la gueule. C'est bien Balzac lui-mme. Anyways, every

character in Balzac, even the concierge, has genius. All the souls are souls fill with

(volont) Will up to the neck. That is like Balzac himself.

Balzac chose a completely different path towards epic immanence. For him the
subjective-psychological demonism which is characteristic of his work is an ultimate
reality, the principle of all essential action which objectivizes itself in heroic deeds;
its inadequate relation to the outside world is intensified to the utmost, but this
intensification has a purely immanent counterweight: the outside world is a purely
human one and is essentially peopled by human beings with similar mental
structures, although with completely different orientations and contents.
The notion of individualism on the novel, the theory of the hero (or antihero) plot

meaning, mimics shamefully the current economic conditions. Its untrue masks the

possibility of a real individuality, wrestled from the apparent omnipotence of the

social order not as the cripple mind who seem to wrestle every single one of their

ideas from an eternal and infuriating battle, just to show the power of its biceps,

their violence1; but with conscious self-control, restrain and discipline. The

individual as the complement of the social, not as its opposite, and the volont

gnrale (general will) as nowhere but embodied in the social individual, seems to

have become one of those forgotten time-honored concepts, whose reified evils we

carry with us as dead corpses.

On the other hand, everything social seems to have acquired a power of its own.

Integration, being total, is naturalized; it seems to come as a property of the blood.

Its positive character, however, the creation of a universal society based on the free

exchange of labor, which on its turn would allow the individual to unreservedly

develop its own human capacities seems a thing of the past. Societal development is

so overwhelming, that the idea of any participation on it is only source of anxiety or

charm. Nonetheless, its structure stills conserves certain consistency, if only

negatively. To redeem the possibilities of what is absent, through a historical

investigation, is the essence of this essay.

Bourgeois society created immanent forms of art appropriate to their historical

development. The form of the commodity relationship, its dialectical intertwined

between different and apparent opposite categories, such as the particular- general,

concrete- abstract, social-individual, being-becoming, pervaded all its phenomena.

The crisis of these categories, consisting on their reification, was the outcome of the

changes on praxis, the movement of history. The best attempt to comprehend the

novel in its declined was