Balzac’s biography gave him direct bodily access to his era’s historical forces

Evidence

Whereas Balzac, for all his intellectual and moral criticism of the age of the middle classes, the secular corruption of the July Monarchy, lived out its basic ambitions and drives in his very bones, in his life passions, dreaming of the riches of the Sardinian silver mines, of a quick fortune made in the theater, feverishly collecting spurious treasures, furnishing one house after another, longing for the ultimate stability of the landed proprietor, finding the causal forces of his moment in history already full-blown within himself, without having to observe them in others, from the outside. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Henry James’s own portrait of Balzac, and sets up Sartre’s Flaubert analysis as a psychoanalytic refinement of the same model — the very lineage Jameson traces. — connects to: Balzac’s moment precedes the full formation of the bourgeois subject — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 4010

Broader Connections

• Balzac’s moment precedes the full formation of the bourgeois subject #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 4010