Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
– Philip Larkin, This be the Verse

What is the ecological niche of children? Are they parasitic? For a while, I suppose so. We are, until far into our development, more or less entirely dependent on our parents, to who we give nothing of material value in return. If not parasitic to our parents, then to society in general, perhaps, for the same reasons. A great number of resources are expended on feeding and educating and socialising the emergent generations.

How fair is that? I really can’t say. We don’t like to think of ourselves as having been leeches. As having been a burden that must simply be borne across years, even as we so often struggle and increase our own weight. Borne out of a sense of… what? Duty? Again, the reasons are imprecise, although one way of modelling the concept might be to see it as an investment in the future. Investments, as the advertising is legally obliged to reiterate, can go up or down. Children, perhaps, could be conceived of as a high volatility asset. So, borne these burdens are, with no guarantee that all this effort and expenditure and investment will in some manner pay off, or that any of its promised and hoped-for interest will accumulate and compound.

Is it uncomfortable to talk about the early stages of human life in such terms? Possibly, if we are sentimental. Yet, when talking about Honoré de Balzac’s novel, Old Goriot, it becomes almost necessary.

I can only conclude that any wholesale denial of the potential gamble with regards to the material costs of children, is rooted in a desire to downplay the facts, and may be inaccurate. Whether this is personal or rooted in societal peer pressure-esque bullying, it remains a possibility. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever run into anyone to whom the behaviour of Jean-Joachim Goriot’s daughters applies. That is a relief, to be sure. Everyone I have ever befriended in one way or another had a reasonable understanding of the resources and relative incomes of their own families, if only in an abstract sense. Certainly, none of them were so ignorant as to view their own parents as money taps. But then, I don’t know any rich people. Maybe that’s the difference.

Goriot’s daughters, you see, are a burden to their father. That’s not a kind thing to write, but tell me I’m wrong. You could fairly easily turn this realist novel into a gothic narrative, trading these women for vampires and money for blood, and the effect would be much the same. Thankfully we are not dealing with a gothic novel, much as I enjoy the aesthetics; instead Honoré de Balzac is one of the foundational writers in the ‘realist‘ style. While these emergent French writers were highly influenced by the Romantics, had he stuck with the poetic aesthetics of the romantics, he’d probably have crafted something half as compelling. Goriot’s strength is in its unflinching attempt to portray a world as is, where action and consequence proceed from one another in a rational manner. In doing so, it invites a more considered examination of actions and circumstances, both on and off the page, if we are forced to conclude that nothing is either good or bad in its own right, but can only be judged in regards to its respective context. And this, against Balzac’s literary backdrop, is important.

Do we ever become symbiotic? Or do we simply ‘detach’, so to speak?

From a societal perspective, we can get jobs and pay our taxes and contribute to the economy. Doing so effectively squares us. We uphold our end of the contract. We pay our debts. Any other problems anybody else has is literally their own personal concerns. Any attempt to impose anything further on any individual is a gross violation of that individual’s free will. From a familial perspective, the question is murkier. The general model of society assumes that the parents sacrifice for the child so the child, in turn, can sacrifice for the parents when they are no longer able to work or possibly care for themselves. However, few families operate on this mechanical economic-style contract.

While I noted that events in the novel make sense respective to their occurrence, the events and interactions are not necessarily simplistic. Much of this novel is concerned with the vagaries of social status and appearance. Whether an aristocrat is denying the ascension of an outsider to maintain group exclusivity, or a heavily indebted individual is hell bent on maintaining excessive spending in a bid to signal to their peers that they are financially powerful. As in life, a good deal of communication and social interaction in this novel, depends more on what is not said, than what is.

In contrast to the parents inadvertently handing misery to their offspring, however, in this instance we have the parent figure, Goriot, handing quite the opposite to his daughters. They have prospered, entered into lucrative marriages, and are surrounded by wealth and plenty. Given the historical context, you’d think they’d belt up. Instead, we see the daughters handing misery to their father. Or, more accurately, taking greedily from him and causing a steady decline, from run-of-the-mill impoverishment to bloodless pauperism. His health and wealth decline in tandem, but neither progeny are ever glutted.

Old Goriot, or Le Père Goriot, was published in 1835, part of the broader works by Honoré de Balzac known as ‘La Comédie Humaine‘. If you hadn’t cottoned on, the bloke was French.

Balzac’s contemporaries span a range of interesting figures – Alexandre Dumas, author of Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo; Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose works include Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov; and Charles Dickens, author of many works including Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities.

The novel explores the potential for the conditions of a person’s environment to effect their behaviours. This would later birth the Naturalists, a branch of writers preoccupied with an almost scientific approach to narrative. This was made manifest in Emile Zola’s 1880 novel, ‘The Experimental Novel‘. He could have done with a copywriter… One benefit of this approach seems to be that characters are less likely to hurl themselves into fits of amateur dramatics at the drop of a hat, like an American horror film script, purely because the author is incapable of distinguishing melodrama from tension. In any case, for Balzac, apparently, the rustic simplicity of the French provinces are comparably more healthy for a person’s character than the urban environment of Paris, in which everyone must climb over one another, or at least appear to do so, to advance their social position and thus capacity to accumulate resources.

This, as the novel portrays, leads to a world in which many immaterial forms of value are sidelined in favour of the material – of wealth, property, or assets. Counter to this, social status, or the appearance thereof, is just as important to this society as their physical assets. This is because, in the same way that social media clout may be exchanged for, or leveraged to attain opportunities for, financial gain in our modern world, the same parallels can be extrapolated from prominent clothing and jewellery, elaborate carriages, and large bodies of property. We tend to think of reputation being viewed as an asset, as being a relatively modern invention; however the concept of a person being their own brand has existed in one form or another for a very long time, and Balzac’s novel illustrates this.

But then why would filial ties be any less valuable if they occupy the same immaterial space as social status? Can you trade your mother’s love for a Snickers bar? No. On the other hand, you might be able to wrangle a sponsorship deal with the marketing department of Snickers in exchange for your ability to promote them to a wide audience. You tell thousands of people to buy Snickers bars, of which only one or two percent actually will, but if that one or two percent of purchases amounts to more than Snickers paid you for your promotion, then they plug the figures into their spreadsheets. The green lines goes up, the boss is happy, you get your contract renewed, they get a bonus at the end of the year and a raise after the annual review, the boss gets a raise from the board, the board gives themselves more shares, money money, money, everyone’s a winner, we all fall down.

Which is not to say that your mother’s love for you has no real value if it cannot be exchanged for goods and services. In a purely material sense, the reason that filial affection cannot be exchanged is twofold: the first is that the prospective buyer probably has their own stock from their own source, and the second is that you cannot transfer or redirect your parent’s love from you towards a stranger.

And, no, before you argue, “oh, but my mum gives lots of love to lots to people, and she makes money from it!” – that’s not the same thing. Look, the intricacies of that particular mode of exchange are a topic for another day. For the moment, just take my word for it, ok?

There are a lot of names and sometimes I’m not sure some of them even belong to people we’ve met. It’s another one of those books where you get the impression it should’ve been sold with a corkboard and pins so you can make some kind of conspiracy chart to keep track of random courtly relationships and connections; which cake-gobbling aristocrats are fucking and who is using who for coke while they search for a new dealer, etc.

Jean-Joachim Goriot was a French vermicelli merchant who amassed a vast fortune early in his life, passed the wealth onto his daughters, who promptly forgot about his existence, and now lives in a squalid boarding house surrounded by idiots and grifters.

Goriot’s daughters are Anastasie and Delphine, they are both unhappily married into wealth and prey on their father’s love in order to extract more wealth out of him.

Delphine de Nucingen is married to a banker who only cares about her father’s money. She dreams of becoming part of the aristocracy and is jealous of her sister, Anastasie.

Anastasie de Restaud is married to Count de Restaud, a wealthy aristocrat who provides her with social status. She’s fucking Maxime de Trailles on the side, another aristocrat inundated with debts who can’t manage his money or control his spending habits. They’re made for each other.

She’s obsessed with her social status, prioritising her appearance over anything. Everything is done to give the appearance of grand wealth and fortune, but she lacks any genuine connection and even her material affairs are a mess. All style, no substance. She’s a modern-day influencer, basically.

She is also effectively a parasite. Due to her inability to manage her money and live within her means, she is constantly trying to extract ever more wealth from her impoverished father, who cannot afford to meet her demands but tries at his own expense anyway. She has an even larger impact on his ongoing decline than her sister. Unlike Delphine, however, she provides nothing of value in return – not sparing even the façade of familial affection.

All of which is an accurate reflection of the aristocracy she embodies, in any time. A financially bankrupt, morally empty class of hypocrites who feel entitled to parasitise the rest of the world and believe every other person is there to cover for their complete and total inability to contribute in any way, shape, or form.

Eugène de Rastignac the protagonist of our rags-to-riches story. A student from a poor background with a powerful ambition to rise through the ranks of early 19th century Parisian society. Along the way his moral compass spins like a weathervane in a tornado. He’s not the personification of a philosophical ideal, more he comes across as someone attempting to navigate a system he recognises to be repugnant, while simultaneously recognising how ineffective and naïve it is to attempt to prosper outside of it. In taking the pragmatic option, while acknowledging the harm that very option is responsible for, he performs a sort of social high-wire act.

Vautrin is Eugene’s mentor figure of sorts. A charismatic man with his head on his shoulders and enough street smarts to know how to get things done. He sees the naivete of Eugene’s adoption of the usual quaint notions that permeate all societies, ‘nobility’, ‘honour’ and so on, and sets about educating the young man on some of the less palatable realities of life. Vautrin is a brilliant character. Not a magnificent bastard, just a bastard. You can trust him to be a bastard, and that’s worth something. He’s frequently a dispenser of wisdom that Rastignac would rather not hear or accept.

A smart person cultivates a fantastic public image. The greatest cities in the world can trace a good chunk of their profitability in the modern age down to public relations and marketing campaigns that draw in tourism. And like any marketing campaign, the reality is always less glossy.

Paris, like most major cities, has an excellent PR team. The Japanese have so romanticised it that they have spawned a phenomenon known as ‘Paris Syndrome‘. Paris is associated with high romance – the streets sparkle, there is music and poetry on every corner. Suave attractive men swan down the roads, they hand out roses and champagne to every woman and they fuck like stallions. The reality is a bog standard European city. The streets are streaked with chewing gum and dirt, every corner reeks of piss, and the locals are internationally infamous for their hostility to outsiders.

I wouldn’t know whether they fuck like stallions, but according to the media even the famously amorous French are falling foul of the global sex recession. Nothing is sacred.

Sure, from the outside big cities are nice to visit, to see the attractions; but you don’t have to work and live there day to day, and so you don’t really notice the details or understand the connections and context of what you’re looking at. Rome is lovely, but the station is crawling with armed soldiers, there are homeless people everywhere, and every tourist attraction is crawling with charlatans attempting to befriend you and “give” you a “homemade” leather bracelet or belt or whatever. And that’s just the surface I saw.

And now that I have attacked two of Europe’s finest, how about home, London…? No, we’ll be here all day. Don’t get me started on London.

Love, in Balzac’s novel, as embodied by Goriot, is an admirable thing. In the environment of Paris, however, it becomes a weapon with which one extracts resources from those closest to them, without the target feeling entitled to object to their wounding if the wielder is smart enough to convince them that their suffering is a noble sacrifice. Ironically, for the city of romance, it is perhaps the last of love that Paris will ever see.

In that way many things share a similar glamour with Paris, and by the extension, the vaunted aristocracy everybody is striving to embed themselves in throughout Balzac’s novel. Many jobs, from Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs to publishing to streaming platform content creators also trade on this same logic. Weaponising creative passion and topical investment, their respective narratives are full of great promises, visions of improving the future, and fortunes, but the realities of their day-to-days drive waves of disillusionment, burnout and disconnect.

Which is to illustrate that just below the surface, the reality is usually seedier. To quote Vautrin:

“Quite right; I should be sorry to hear you speak otherwise,” answered the tempter. “You are a fine young fellow, honourable, brave as a lion, and as gentle as a young girl. You would be a fine haul for the devil! I like youngsters of your sort. Get rid of one or two more prejudices, and you will see the world as it is. Make a little scene now and then, and act a virtuous part in it, and a man with a head on his shoulders can do exactly as he likes amid deafening applause from the fools in the gallery. Ah! a few days yet, and you will be with us; and if you would only be tutored by me, I would put you in the way of achieving all your ambitions. You should no sooner form a wish than it should be realized to the full; you should have all your desires — honours, wealth, or women. Civilization should flow with milk and honey for you. You should be our pet and favourite, our Benjamin. We would all work ourselves to death for you with pleasure; every obstacle should be removed from your path. You have a few prejudices left; so you think that I am a scoundrel, do you? Well, Monsieur de Turenne, quite as honourable a man as you take yourself to be, had some little private transactions with bandits, and did not feel that his honour was tarnished. You would rather not lie under any obligation to me, eh? You need not draw back on that account,” Vautrin went on, and a smile stole over his lips. “Take these bits of paper and write across this,” he added, producing a piece of stamped paper, “Accepted the sum of three thousand five hundred francs due this day twelvemonth, and fill in the date. The rate of interest is stiff enough to silence any scruples on your part; it gives you the right to call me a Jew. You can call quits with me on the score of gratitude. I am quite willing that you should despise me to-day, because I am sure that you will have a kindlier feeling towards me later on. You will find out fathomless depths in my nature, enormous and concentrated forces that weaklings call vices, but you will never find me base or ungrateful. In short, I am neither a pawn nor a bishop, but a castle, a tower of strength, my boy.”

“What manner of man are you?” cried Eugene. “Were you created to torment me?”

“Why no; I am a good-natured fellow, who is willing to do a dirty piece of work to put you high and dry above the mire for the rest of your days. Do you ask the reason of this devotion? All right; I will tell you that some of these days. A word or two in your ear will explain it. I have begun by shocking you, by showing you the way to ring the changes, and giving you a sight of the mechanism of the social machine; but your first fright will go off like a conscript’s terror on the battlefield. You will grow used to regarding men as common soldiers who have made up their minds to lose their lives for some self-constituted king. Times have altered strangely. Once you could say to a bravo, ‘Here are a hundred crowns; go and kill Monsieur So-and-so for me,’ and you could sup quietly after turning some one off into the dark for the least thing in the world. But nowadays I propose to put you in the way of a handsome fortune; you have only to nod your head, it won’t compromise you in any way, and you hesitate. ‘Tis an effeminate age.”

Everything is equal in this quote, high and low alike. Rastignac’s prejudices work up to the point where the shoe is on his foot, and then he is no better than Vautrin. Vautrin for his part is happy to play the mafioso-style money man (unfortunately the ever-present anti-Semitism rears its ugly head even here), but is honest enough to let the obvious threat he represents to stand on its own merit. The people Rastignac idolises are no better than Vautrin – happy to do deals with people like Vautrin and send men to their deaths at a word, innocent or guilty. The only deciding factor, in the end, is the ability to pay.

And this is makes itself crassly apparent from start to finish. Even as the book is reaching its close, characters steal sentimental ornaments from dead men for the sale price of the metal and workers do the bare minimum to earn their wage before holding dirt-covered palms out. Despite the obvious frustration belying these moments, they are not met with yet another futile and fatuous lecture from the pulpit. Money changes hands. Resentments are born and strengthened. The world turns.

Nick Land prophesied in his 1995 paper, Meltdown, “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.“

Seen through this lens, I’m not sure that anything human made it out of the past, either. Alternatively, if the pervasive trendline indicates that human greed is exacerbated by urbanisation, and we broadly expect urbanisation to continue and expand as humanity crawls into the future, then we seem to get a feedback loop of Capital as both greed and urbanisation deepen over time. Capital is only interested in amplifying itself. Perhaps humanity and Capital are melting together, both becoming more human than human through the transactional intensifications of the 21st century. The city becomes the tomb of Nietzsche’s Last Man and the womb of the emergent Zarathustrian post-human Overman. But this is a work of fiction we’re dealing with, so let’s not go too crazy with the extrapolation.

People applaud all manner do soppy-eyed dross and romanticised bollocks, but Balzac’s novel has some stones, and about time too. Why don’t I hear Goriot being shouted about? Why isn’t Balzac on more of the untouched spine-out shelves? God knows someone might actually open one of those books that the “thought leaders” are convinced everybody should love for reasons nobody knows, aside from the grand social clout game everybody is playing. Could do worse than name drop an author worth reading once in a while.

Dickens is well known for his focus on the British working class and their eternal state of social degradation, exploitation, and poverty; however, in keeping with the simplistic sermonising of the age, fails to retain any particular efficacy. Instead, he seemed to slavishly adhere to the fatuous conviction of the British gentry that every story had to be some kind of instruction manual for social mores and so we got Dickens, sludging through page after page after fucking page of turgid prose full of dreary, uninteresting protagonists who exist solely to be a paragon of virtue in a world corrupted, while they stick out like a shard of glass in an eye socket, because they are so tediously and obviously artificial. This wilting adherence to trying to simultaneously depict the horrors of working class London, while teaching the ideals of an upper class who were directly responsible for the horrors he was trying to draw attention to, is mind boggling. The result is that Dickens’ London doesn’t feel like London.

Whereas Dickens goes to amusing lengths to insist on the usual tired notions of moral duality, with main characters embodying complete virtue, while the rest of the story bends over backwards to stand in cartoonish depraved contrast, Balzac takes a more mature approach. His characters are not figures of moral propriety or festering buboes on the face of civilisation. They are, instead, people with their own motivations. As this is a book that deals primarily with the acquisition of capital and social status, that is what more or less everyone is motivated by.

The narrative nuance comes in the various ways in which the characters react to their circumstances and strive to overcome them. The tertiary characters broadly accept their impoverished lot and languishing in squalor; the secondary characters exist on a financial tightrope and struggle along, utilising petty but ultimately limited means to advance what precarious footholds they have; and the primary characters attempting to play the societal game fully, going all in WallStreetBets style and risking financial independence or crippling debt. This makes them all compelling and recognisable. You have probably met some version of these people before in your life. They are infinitely more compelling than anything the moralists ever slopped out.

I will absolutely take this book over some of the more lauded fiction from this period any and every day of the week.

Raskolnikov’s farcical about-face at the end of Crime and Punishment seems to amount to a sad and desperate attempt by Dostoevsky to shoehorn in his own religious beliefs and some trivial message about redemption. “Oh my god, this bint has given me a Bible I see the light and-” piss off with this contemptible preaching!

Anna Karenina’s best parts concerned the political discussions, the weirdly specific detour into peasant farming methods, and Levin’s considerations on the nature of divinity. Everything surrounding the main character was a familiar run on the outrage that, good lord, a woman wants a divorce! There is therefor no explanation other than she is self-destructive and slightly insane, you know how these females are, probably the vapours of something. Anyway, did you know, actually that total melt she’s married to is a great Christian man, despite having the charisma of a discarded chair leg. So, you see, she must absolutely destroy herself and everyone around her because we can’t have people questioning societal institutions now, can we? Spare me.

Which is all to say that Goriot was actually refreshing. I did not go into this with high hopes, but I emerged from the other end with my faith that there are authors, besides someone like Ivan Turgenev, worth salvaging from Victorian era literature.

You tell me that literature is supposed reflect the world in some way, then this works for me. I recognise Old Goriot‘s world infinitely more than I do the worlds of the turgid tomes that every poor kid is browbeaten with in English Literature from Primary School to University. This is what I want from literature. I don’t give a fuck about the sanctimonious romances of the inbred Victorian sensibilities. They were pathetic lies crafted to keep people in line so the aristocracy could rob and exploit them.

Maybe that puts me at odds with some sort of puffed up literary establishment, if such a thing even exists; but fuck you, that’s my hill. 

Around page 100 or so there’s a big story about who Goriot is or was. One might seek to make some comment on the nature of ‘deserving’, perhaps. So and so exhibits X trait or thought and thus they deserve Y outcome. A notion tied to an abstracted concept of justice or fairness. This would, of course, be a mistake – illustrated nicely by a conversation between the Vicomtesse de Beauséant (also referred to as ‘madame’ to make things extra confusing) and the Duchesse de Langeais. The Vicomtesse remarks or concludes that “The world is vile.” The Duchesse corrects her: “Vile? No. It goes its way. That’s all.“

This of course does little to sway the Vicomtesse who exhibits the Holiday in Cambodia delusion we are prone to lapsing into when faced with an uncomfortable reality: “You’ve been to school for a year or two, and you know you’ve seen it all.” But we have not, of course. Nothing close. If we are fractionally wise, we will, with growing dismay, become steadily more aware of our bewildering and near-total ignorance. If we are fools we will persist with the comfortable failure of judgement that we know much about anything at all.

Anyway, off goes the Madame on a familiar Machiavellian rant:

“Although I am well-read in book of the world, there were pages I had not turned. Now I know it all. The more cold bloodedly you calculate, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly and you will be feared. Regard men and women only as you do post-horses that you will leave worn out at every stage, and so you shall arrive at the goal of your desires.“

Take that as you will. For my part I’d suggest care to neither accept it wholesale out of defensive cynicism, nor to discard it outright owing to some self-righteous delusion.

Or perhaps I am merely more a mouthpiece for the modern age than I think I am. A world in which people are smart enough not believe in heroes anymore, while Hollywood churns out endless cycles of Marvel movies year-in-year-out, wringing the last droplets of idealism from the rag of illusion, as if any of it represents any value beyond the infinite war for the accumulation of wealth and resources, and the survival-of-the-fittest paradigm that the 21st century wealth gap has resulted in.

Nobody is here to save you. Get your bag at any cost and get out. The parallels between the world Old Goriot depicts and the world we inhabit today are not difficult to spot, though your interpretation of those will depend on your position on the spectrum between optimism and pessimism.

I’m so tired of the idealisation and platitudes that many of the oft-recommended classics peddle. They don’t resonate. Their ideas are quaint and domestic. So many rich people clinging to some laughable code of ethics from atop a forest of ivory towers. I am also tired of adolescent wailing of much of the modern ‘grimdark’, so preoccupied with the horrific that its overwrought delivery becomes comical and juvenile. 

Horror is banality. The worst atrocities in the world are committed for decimal points and acres. That’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous, it’s not theatrical. It is amusing in its own way and it is authentic in some way. If you want your fiction to reflect a little more of the banal but fundamentally abrasive, then Old Goriot is arguably as good a starting point as you’ll find.