196
PETER BROOKS
the evocation of more and more fantastic possibilities, to make it
yield meaning, to make it give up to consciousness its full potential–
ities as "parable."
Throughout these first pages of
La Peau de chagrin,
we can
observe the narrator pressuring the surface of reality in order to make
it yield the full, true terms of his story. In the face of the old man
who takes the hat, says the narrator, we can read "the wretchedness
of hospital wards, aimless wanderings of ruined men, inquests on
countless suicides, life sentences at hard labor, exiles to penal col–
onies." The gambling house itself elicits a contrast between the "vulgar
poetry" of its evening denizens and the "quivering passion" of day–
time gamblers. The crowd of spectators is like the populace awaiting
an execution at the Place de Greve. Finally we reach this comment:
"Each of the spectators looked for a
drama
in the fate of this single
gold piece, perhaps the final scene of a noble life."
Use of the word "drama" is authorized here by the kind of
pressure which the narrator has exerted upon surface reality. We have
in fact witnessed the creation of drama - of an excessive, hyperbolic,
parabolic story - from the banal stuff of reality. States of being
beyond the immediate context of the narrative, and in excess of it,
have been brought to bear on it, to charge it with intenser
signif–
icances. The narrative voice, with its grandiose questions and hypo–
theses, leads us in a movement through and beyond the surface of
things to what lies behind, to the spiritual reality which
is
the true
scene of the highly colored drama to be played out in the novel. We
have entered into the drama of Raphael's last gold piece; that coin
has become the token of a superdrama involving life and death, per–
dition and redemption, heaven and hell, the force of desire caught
in a death struggle with the life force. The novel
is
constantly tensed
to catch this essential drama, to go beyond the surface of the real to
the truer, hidden reality, to open up the world of spirit.
One could adduce a multitude of other examples. There is al–
ways a moment in Balzac's descriptions of the world where the eye's
photographic registration of objects yields to the mind's effort to
pierce surface, to interrogate appearances. In
PeTe
Coriot,
after a few
initial lines of description of Mlle. Michonneau, the narrator shifts
into the interrogatory: "What acid had stripped this creature of her
female forms? She must once have been pretty and well-built: was
