From way to the movies, where I am going to see the adaptation of one of my favorite novels, I think of Ukraine while sipping coffee from a paper cup. Interestingly, the author of ‘The Lost Illusions’ also wrote that masterpiece with his head there, since he was in love with a countess born in the territory now invaded by the Russian army.
Balzac wrote ‘The Lost Illusions’ against the ropes. besieged by debt, he had only 21 days to dispatch a great work (he would start publishing it in 1836). It is said that he could indulge in writing marathons of up to 16 hours, during which he blunted up to twelve goose quills. To be able to write so many novels (and pay so many bills) was caffeine: one scholar claims that he downed 50,000 cups of coffee during his career.
In one week, Honoré Balzac, a guy who decided at the age of 29 that his name was Honoré de Balzac (the “de” as a mark of an unlikely aristocratic birth), turned all his financial anguish (and the humiliation suffered by a chubby-cheeked petite bourgeois with delusions of glory) in narrative electricity.
Set in the Paris of the Restoration, at the beginning of the 19th century, the novel poses The rise and fall of Lucien de Rubempré. Actually his surname is Chardon (thistle) but he changes it (as Balzac did) when he sets foot in the capital. There the Bourbon monarchy coexists with the rise of the bourgeoisie, cosmetics advertisements with the new tabloid press, great literary glory with the ingenuity of the hack, theatrical and pompous high society with the Boulevard du Crime, full of popular theaters. There the protagonist moves, debating, as he says Stefan Zweig in his biography of Balzac, between poetry and journalism, between art and moneyalways with the temptation to “fall into vulgarity out of impatience and greed & rdquor ;.
Rubempré discovers that the plot of interest that sustains that world is money. It is money that charges and exalts poets, that applauds actresses and makes prostitutes sick. And all this happens in one transition timewhen the printing press becomes more sophisticated (and allows large print runs of newspapers) and democratizes knowledge (which can be a sun that shines or fades, depending on who is looking at it).
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The recently released film that adapts the novel, directed by Xavier Giannoli, helps me to land all this in the now. The spread of the word experiences another acceleration, in this case digital. The tweets are not so different from the flashes of wit of that press. Some columnists drown in “the hothouse of praise & rdquor; and forget the novels they wanted to write. Lousteau, the journalist who introduces the protagonist to the bad arts, says: “Conscience, my friend, is one of those sticks that everyone takes to beat up their neighbor, but that no one ever uses for himself & rdquor ;. A phrase applicable to infinity of tweeters or chatterboxes (I one of them, if I apply the cane). At another point in the novel it is said: “Every newspaper is a shop where words of the color they want are sold to the public. If there were a newspaper for hunchbacks, they would prove morning and evening the beauty, goodness, and necessity of hunchbacks. It is not there to illustrate, but to flatter opinions & rdquor ;. And one cannot help but think of the ideological bubbles of our timein algorithms and networks that never expose us to the opinion that we dislike.
I leave the film sipping a glass of water. I think of all this and, like Balzac when he wrote the novel, nothing stops me from thinking about Ukraine.