In his literary work, Honore de Balzac sporadically denounces economic crimes, which, cleverly committed, may wind easily round the law. But it is mainly in his enigma novels that this denunciation becomes more forceful. From the narrators' perspective, fraud and assassination have enriched the Camps (Madame Firmiani) and Lanty (Sarrasine ) families, as well as the bankers---Taillefer (L'Auberge rouge) and Nucingen (La Maison Nucingen). Legal criminality, an eminently serious theme of Balzac's critical realism, is narrated by way of enigma games and their everlasting companion, mystification. / A better grasp of the plot's central role leads the reader to discover legal criminality, since the narrative structure restores order between fable (intricacy of the crime story) and discourse (invention of crime as an enigma). To relate circumstances leading to the solution of wealth enigmas, Balzac exploits enigma games as an essence of orality, thus giving his fiction the style of a conversational game. Furthermore, he uses a diversity of characters and narrative processes to create uncertainties, suggest clues, denounce inconsistencies. / The balzacian literary universe exploits the classical poetics of enigma, developing the enigma from a well-known fact: enrichment by criminal means is an open secret. The point of distinction between Balzac's enigmas and other novels is that they do not really aim at elucidating a mystifying crime, such as in Edgar Allan Poe's novels, but rather at revealing the subtle art of deception. Balzacian "intellectuals", criminals of a new kind, know how to evade the law and take advantage of its loopholes. The narrators, wishing to satisfy the readers' wish to know "the chemical process for oil burning in Aladdin's lamp", must not only specialize their narrative structure to achieve this goal, but also trick the readers into keeping interested in stories which must seem ever more captivating as they become more meaningless. / Set between Vidocq's loitering and Dupin's readings, between a spy's memory tracking and a detective's syllogistic intelligence, the dramaturgy of "Faits divers", in the world of Balzac, does not condone nor condemn any of these manifestations of enigma, as it is first and foremost a narrative adventure.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.34711 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Cournoyer, Céline. |
| Contributors | Morisot, Jean-Claude (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Département de langue et littérature françaises.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001615211, proquestno: NQ44394, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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