Review: Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

“It is hideous, is it not, to speak in a breath of money and affection.”
— Delphine to Eugène, Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Love and capital are the questions this novel pre-occupies itself with, like so many other novels of the nineteenth century. Let’s start with the topic of capital, leaving love to the end.

 

As in Villette (1853) and Persuasion (1817), Père Goriot (1835) reflects the tumult as the bourgeoisie overtakes the aristocracy in fits and bursts. The novel takes place during the first few years of the Bourbon restoration: aristocracy is back, baby. Goriot, a doting father and wealthy vermicelli merchant, thought himself lucky to have married his daughters to a Baron and a Comte during the Napoleonic era, when the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with the landed gentry. With a Louis back on a throne, Goriot is considered too gauche to grace the parlours of his now-genteel daughters. Showing remarkable composure, Goriot bids farewell to the dreams he had of spending his final years lounging in the well-appointed homes of his daughters — he gifted them nearly all his wealth as dowries — and retires to a humble boarding house, where we meet him. The first third of the novel is driven by the mystery of who this solitary old man is, who are the fancy women who visit him, and what caused his successive moves from the well-appointed room at 1200 francs a year to the drafty and threadbare room at 45 francs per month? (Like in David Copperfield, prices are detailed at every opportunity; the reader can never forget how very expensive it is to go on living.) We find out it is his daughters bleeding him dry — but I get ahead of myself. We are still discussing themes of capital, not love.

 

One of the other boarders is Eugène De Rastignac, a well-born but not well-off aristocratic lad. His family scrapes together just enough money to keep him in respectable quarters while he studies at the university in Paris. Granted a taste of life among the cream of society, he starts looking for get-rich-quick schemes. A fellow boarder, Veltran, teaches him the hard truths of the world: he can toil his way through school and the ranks of the bureaucracy, never earning more than a mediocre salary, or he can scheme his way into marriage with an heiress, and live a life of luxury. Veltran offers him a Faustian bargain: the hand of the wealthy heiress requires assassinating a man. Eugène quickly finds that high society has low morals — when everyone cheats, exploits, and lies, are his own minor transgressions really so bad? Besides, the moral road of the bourgeoisie is just as ruthless; Goriot is implied to have founded his fortune “selling flour for ten times its cost” during the Revolution of 1789. To gain entry to the class born to leisure, Eugène needs to raise funds for fashionable finery, so he begs his mother and sisters, bleeding them dry. Here, Eugène parallels both Goriot in his entrepreneurial mind as well as Goriot’s daughters in their exploitation of familial affection for personal gain. Perhaps it is not possible to discuss capital without also dealing with love?

 

Père Goriot is a tragic love story about not romantic but paternal love. Goriot’s affection for his daughters is obsessive, idolizing. It is an obscure form of love — infatuation without romance or eroticism. Every day, he walks to the Champs d'Elysees to watch their coaches go by, hoping to catch a glimpse of their visages as they pass him by. He spends his days in his damp and cramped quarters daydreaming about how they spend their evenings.

I love the very horses that draw them; I envy the little lap-dog on their knees. Their happiness is my life. Every one loves after his own fashion, and mine does no one any harm; why should people trouble their heads about me?

Goriot is delighted to discover Eugène and his (married) daughter Delphine have fallen in love. He lives vicariously through Eugène, and schemes to create a secret apartment for the couple to use to carry out their affair — including nearby quarters for himself. He basks in her reacquired company: “He lay at his daughter’s feet, kissed them, gazed into her eyes, rubbed his head against her dress; in short, no young lover could have been more extravagant or more tender.” Goriot’s sheer happiness is plain to see, but also uncomfortable to read: we see how little the daughters’ affections are returned, how self-centered they are, how blindly consuming Goriot's love for them is, and how poorly he understands the women his little girls have grown into.

 

Goriot’s daughters find themselves in dire financial straits and so he sells every last asset and trinket to address their pleas. Their tribulations cause him such distress that he falls ill, but with not a franc left for medicine or firewood. Goriot’s daughters do not visit his sickbed, too caught up in the dramas of their own lives. Instead, Eugène and another student boarder nurse Goriot as they listen to his dying ravings about the wonders and treacheries of the two women. Had he not given them his fortunes, they would have still showered him with affection, he deplores. He daydreams about how he will rebuild his wealth and buy back his daughters’ love by importing processed wheat goods — he remains to his deathbed a capitalist. It is heartbreaking to read Goriot discover his daughters are not coming to visit him, when just seeing their faces and hearing their voices would mean so much to him, and equally wrenching to see him finally come to terms with their natures. 

 

The daughters are just as uninvolved with his funeral, turning away requests for help with the dismissal that they are “in deep grief over their loss.” His gravestone thus bears the words “Here lies M. Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and the Baronne de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students.” Like living, the reader is reminded that dying is frightfully expensive. 

 

The three young people around Goriot lie at different points along the axis of moral corruption. Daughter Anastasie is cold, calculating and most aware of how much she exploits her father’s deluded love. It is ironic that she is just as deluded about her affair partner as her father is about her: she pours hundreds of thousands of francs into funding his gambling addiction. Passionate and romantic Delphine deceives herself into not seeing her abuse of her father’s love or finds ways to rationalize it (“Why did he allow us to marry when we did? Was it not his duty to think for us and foresee for us? Today I know he suffers as much as we do, but how can it be helped?”). Her outbursts are so spirited that it is tempting to dismiss her flaws and fall in love with her like Eugène does.

At this moment I have but one fear left, but one misery to dread—to lose the love that has made me feel glad to live. Everything is as nothing to me compared with our love; I care for nothing else, for you are all the world to me.

While Eugène cares tenderly for Goriot, he is easily distracted by the luxury of a ball, and derelict towards his own family. Like Delphine, he also finds ways to rationalize or ignore the immorality of his actions (“Eugène did not wish to see too clearly; he was ready to sacrifice his conscience to his mistress.”).

 

Balzac’s characters are flawed, but understandable. He shows us how each character’s decisions are shaped by social forces. It is Parisian culture that is skewered: its dazzling splendor is an artifice concealing a cut-throat, turbulent, and unhappy core. Characters like Delphine understand this but see no escape — “Half the women in Paris lead such lives as mine; they live in apparent luxury, and in their souls are tormented by anxiety” — despite the high price of playing the game. Lives are wasted on ingenuine relationships. It’s a beautifully written book, and though the Bourbon era is long gone its themes remain poignant: financial pressures, social pressures, and a culture of individuality still trouble the development of genuine love.

Review: Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Decades-old highly-influential books are typically difficult to assess because their reach dulls the brilliance of their original argument. With 130,000 citations on Google Scholar, Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most cited works from the 20th century. Most educators who have shaped me likely encountered Freire’s ideas during their own training, or as practicing teachers. But this work stands apart from other oft-quoted magnum opuses whose astute remarks now seem obvious: this book is so radical in its advocacy and instruction in revolution that its reach seems surprising. Rather than being dulled by time and spread, its polemic blazes brightly.

Perhaps most people who encounter his work don’t read the book in full? Chapter 2 compares the status-quo, oppressor model of education (the “banking model of education”) to liberatory, dialogue-based education (“problem-posing” education). The banking model of education teaches students to be passive components in an existing world, to adapt themselves to its tyrannies rather than try to change it:

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. … The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

Students may encounter Freire’s ideas summarized in textbooks, stripped of some of the polemic arguments for the need for revolution (Chapter 1) and the instructions for revolutionaries on how to organize the people and anticipate their foe’s blows (Chapter 4). Freire’s fire might also be diluted by his obfuscatory language: terms like “oppressor” and “oppressed” are vague enough that they can easily apply to any group that restricts you, without clearly delineating many of its readers as part of the oppressor class.

In many ways, this book is a repackaging of ideas found elsewhere for Freire’s own context of Latin American peasants. There’s nothing wrong with that — in fact I think it is essential work that requires considerable skill. But it makes for a more challenging read as someone in the West in the 21st century. Freire’s political persuasion was Christian Socialist, and his Christian influences shine through, particularly in some of the language he uses around love and the relationship between the leaders and the masses. Christianity is far less dominant here — at least in terms of faith given that its value system is endemic. Freire’s influences include some of the Frankfurt School of thought, and read somewhat dated 57 years later. He writes from a humanist angle, and his beliefs about what separates humans and animals are not born out by what we know about animal psychology. Freire presents ideas found in Mao, Fanon, Lenin and Hegel, but often without the same careful and thorough development (and often without clear attribution). His most unique contribution is indeed the one he is most cited for — the banking versus problem-posing modes of education (or perhaps I simply haven’t read his sources…). As a result, I think it’s a valuable read but not an essential read. Both in terms of content and in terms of form, the most important lesson to pick up from this book is how to communicate big, complex ideas to the people you want to organize with.

Postscript: On a personal note, I discovered my father really enjoyed this work when he read it in the late sixties or early seventies. Liberation theology has been an lifetime interest for my father. It was fun to share this book together.

Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

It’s been a year of re-reads, and this book I have re-read many times. Journeying through its pages is always part self-discovery: how did these characters and their surreal banter shape my view of the world?

I can try to remove myself from the reading experience, and assess its themes and messaging from a cool distance. I played around with the idea of Through The Looking Glass as a metaphor for the rise of the bourgeoisie. Alice is a commoner — a privileged one, with servants and a nanny, but a commoner — and she starts her journey in the looking glass world serving the aristocracy, lifting the red and white royalty (chess pieces, but a possible nod to the Tudors?) out of the ashes and tidying them up. Alice expresses her desire to be a queen, and the red queen promises her that she, too, can be a queen if she gets to the eighth square (after all, the aristocracy promised/permitted some wealth and power to the bourgeoisie in their ascent). Alice makes her way through a series of odd holdovers from the feudal days: a king, napping against a tree, uselessly, while his kingdom is a flurry of activity; a duel between two brothers, to settle a silly dispute, but fought with blunt swords and a gentleman’s agreement to end by dinner-time; a knight, who can neither stay seated on his horse nor invent useful products. The world is strange: it is filled with old, familiar nursery rhymes but none of the logic makes sense any more (perhaps a revolution is in order?). Alice reaches the eighth square and finds a golden crown on her head, but she is still subordinated to the red and white queen. She starts to assert herself over a battle of wits and of table manners, and eventually leads a revolution:

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

The white queen is shrunk down into a doll, while Alice shakes the red queen into a kitten. The power is all Alice's.

While I think this is a fun lens through which to enjoy the book, I can’t argue that this is the reading Carroll intended. The scenes are not crafted with the through-lines such a grand theme would need to pull it together. The sole commonality between each of her adventures that Alice remarks upon is the unexpected frequency of fish in the poetry of the looking glass world. Instead, the chapters are episodic — like an absurd version of The Odyssey — with each encounter playing on different expectations Alice has of the workings of the world, language and customs. But even if Carroll did not intend to tell the story of the bourgeoisie superseding the feudal system, that was the zeitgeist of the time (see, for example, Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens). It’s unsurprising that the strangeness of the new world order would find its way subconsciously into delightful children’s books.

Review: Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec

The Canadian and American states were founded on centuries of genocide. Now what? This is the question Krawec explores in Becoming Kin. Reconciliation requires understanding the harm done and proactive righting of wrongs. Appropriately, this essay collection starts with telling the story of the wrongs of settler colonialism (Chapters 1-5). To do so, Krawec weaves together personal stories, linguistics, history and myth — Anishnaabe and Christian peoples both come to understand themselves and their values through their myths. With these stories imparted, Krawec shifts towards the future, towards becoming kin — a relationship that comes with reciprocal responsibilities to each other. She explores kinship with the land (Chapter 6), the interrelatedness of people (Chapter 7), and practical considerations for rebuilding kinship (Chapter 8).

Krawec’s essays come with homework: each finishes in an aambe, an Anishnaabe term meaning “let’s go!” These sections ask the reader to participate by learning about the treaties that govern the relationships with the Indigenous peoples they share a home with, observing the absence of Indigenous stories in the media they consume, or finding a way to insist on Indigenous representation in your community in whatever form that might be. As the book progresses, her homework problems increasingly involve community building and outreach. 

At the outset, Krawec insists the reader read her book with a friend. Learning and doing are best done in community: “Reading books in solitude may alter our individual relationship with the world around us. But like our histories, our lives do not unfold in isolation. We exist collectively: as neighbours and community groups, as workplaces and sports teams, as book groups and families.” It is from this community that your ability to change the world grows: “Organizing is a scary word. We hear it, and we think about large-scale events and mass mobilizations, but it begins with finding one person you can disrupt with.”

It is this emphasis on practical steps via community and education that makes this book special. Indigenous history is told more completely elsewhere (see, for example, works by Dunbar-Ortiz or Nick Estes). Indigenous philosophy is told more compellingly for a popular audience in Braiding Sweetgrass. Krawec’s writing meanders, and sometimes takes on a lecturing tone. Her perspective is more spiritual than what resonates with me. But her book, particularly Chapter 8, is forward-looking and community-oriented. It urges you to act and also makes you realize those first few steps aren’t so hard after all. That’s rarely found in a book.

Review: The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx

Marx’s model of political economy is better laid out in Capital and more briefly laid out in Wage Labour and Capital, but it’s fun to see it in draft and wielded like an axe against Proudhon. Even if you are looking for Marxist economics delivered as a killing blow, this book is tough for the uninitiated. Although Marx quotes Proudhon at length, the reader is presumed to be familiar with the overall shape of his argument. I read this work in parallel with Marx's Inferno, and was glad of the extra context Roberts gives regarding Proudhon’s positions (particularly Chapter 5, but also Chapters 2-3).

Perhaps one of the most important take-home messages is that we should uphold correct pro-capitalist economists (in this work, Ricardo and Smith) and not placate incorrect anti-capitalists (like Proudhon) despite the appearance of shared goals. The work is structured in two parts, which correspond somewhat to parts 1-3 and part 4 of Capital. I particularly enjoyed the second section, in which Marx targets Proudhon’s clumsy and idealistic attempt to apply Hegel’s dialectics. The other works by Marx that I’ve read did not discuss dialectics as a tool and it was fun seeing Marx describe historical materialism in these terms. Unlike Capital, this was not a transformative read, but did help me better understand the development of his thought. Marx’s writing in this work is often quite vivid and fun, and I imagine I’ll return to it again when I’m looking for a colourful quote.

Review: Our History Is The Future by Nick Estes

In Our History Is The Future, Nick Estes documents the #NoDAPL resistance movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and connects it to the centuries of struggle for indigenous liberation that preceded it. Although Estes is an academic, he is also an activist, and this book reads as if it were written for training up the next generation of activists. This sets this work apart from others that might otherwise be competing in the same niche of US indigenous history. For example, Estes connects the struggle of indigenous nations in the US with the anti-imperialist writings of Lenin and Amilcar Cabral, figures too controversial for more mainstream audiences. Estes also does not seem to feel the need to sternly disapprove of militant protests while uplifting only lawfare. Because the book assumes little prior knowledge, it’s a reasonable entrypoint into indigenous liberation.

However, the book fell a bit flat for me. The historical sections are often dry, and while each chapter is centered on a broad theme, they tend to jump between topics without clear structure or chronology, making it hard to follow the argument or use the book as a reference. I would also have appreciated a more philosophical lens at times. For a book about national sovereignty, I was surprised how little development there was of what self-determination and nationhood mean. At several points, Estes emphasizes the difference between radical Indigenous internationalism and mere striving for status as a nation state, however how these goals differ in practice was more implied than defined. For example, in the passage below, Estes enticingly hints towards the difference between becoming a nation-state and ending imperialism, but it’s unclear how the nationhood sought by the Treaty Council varies from “the freedom associated with nation-states”:

Indigenous nationhood is often misunderstood as an exclusive project—the sole aspiration of just Indigenous peoples—or as confined within narrow definitions of the nation-state. This is similar to the way the “Indian problem” is treated as solely an Indian problem. According to the International Indian Treaty Council that first met at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 1974 and drafted the “Declaration of Continuing Independence,” the problem was not Indigenous peoples; the problem was, and always has been, imperialism. The aspiration for nationhood set the Treaty Council apart from other Red Power movements that sought the freedom associated with nation-states.

There are many indigenous nations, and it's possible Estes avoided precise definitions of nationhood and related terms out of fear of collapsing many diverse ideals into one. Still, the history of a struggle is also the history of a class coming to understand the struggle from a theoretical perspective, and this part of the history was lacking.

These shortcomings aside, the book is valuable in telling the stories of many of the key figures in indigenous liberation movements, and demonstrating both its connection with other movements and its internal diversity of thought. As Estes documents, #NoDAPL found support from #BlackLivesMatter and socialist parties. The indigenous struggles before it were closely connected to the USSR , to countries that overthrew their colonizers, and to Palestine, which still wages its war against its colonizer. The fall of the USSR and the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement slowed indigenous liberation movements, and allowed Western aggression to run rampant. 

One interesting example of internal struggle was the Treaty Council’s decision to file for non-governmental organization (NGO) status within the UN. As Estes describes, “To some, the channeling of energy into an NGO—arguably a non-revolutionary and non-sovereign entity—seemed in contradiction to their larger project.” The Treaty Council’s response remains an important reminder for our current movements too: “Decolonization, or a better term, liberation is a slow, painstaking process. What the colonialists accomplished over the past four centuries cannot be overcome easily.” The Council used their position as an NGO to push forward recognition of indigenous issues through events such as the 1977 Conference of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations in the Americas (which the US boycotted) and the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People (which the US voted against).

Our History is the Future focuses on history, but there’s a few glimpses of what Estes believes the future might be. He points to the mutually supportive, non-hierarchical and non-commodified structure of resistance camps, and he ends his book on the note “For the earth to live, capitalism must die.” There’s a very, very long path between protesting pipelines and the abolition of commodity exchange, and I am left with many, many questions about what that road looks like.

Review: And Quiet Flows The Don (Part 1) by Mikhail Sholokhov

This review is for Part 1 and the first 9 chapters of Part 2 only. Unbeknownst to me, my library had only this portion available on audiobook, and I haven’t been able to track down an audiobook for the rest. I’m reminded of the time I took The Name of the Wind as my cottage book, not realizing it was only book one in an unfinished trilogy. I hunted through every used bookstore in rural Canada until I found its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear. Ah well.

As a starting point for this review, let’s begin with its setting, evoked in the title: a small village on the banks of the Don river at the start of the 20th century. The Don flows constantly throughout the novel, the backdrop to emotional conversations or quotidian life. This is an area with a long history, and its people, the Cossacks, view themselves that way too; before the narrator can start with the story of Gregori, he first tells us of the unusual circumstances of his grandparents’ marriage. She was a Turkish war bride, was accused of witchcraft by the locals and was killed by a lynch mob, leaving behind a premature infant. He spent twelve years in a penal colony for avenging her death. Already in just this vignette, we have the unfurling of many themes of the book: match-making and love, nationality, patriarchy, community ties and community violence, the way war changes men’s lives. 

Gorky compared this novel to War and Peace, and the similarity is likely intentional on Sholokov’s part. Like Tolstoy’s work, And Quiet Flows the Don is a dramatic epic spanning times of peace and war. It also introduces us to a varied cast of people trying to navigate the waters of love and social expectations, following them through the heartbreaks of these decisions. But Tolstoy’s characters navigate the world of the aristocracy, while Sholokov's characters plow fields and work in mills.

Though agrarian, the Cossacks are relatively free: they are proud of their history as escaped serfs. The Cossack sense of national identity is explored chiefly through the eyes of Gregori, who is self-consciously aware of being only three-quarters Cossack. The Cossacks are particularly proud of their horsemanship — the lack thereof in outsiders is remarked upon, and the shame of not being able to acquire a suitable horse hangs over Gregori’s head. The emotion of a scene is often conveyed through the characters’ awareness of their horses: exhaustion, urgency, readiness.

The patriarchal and parochial Cossack society is romantically and sexually restrictive, and the tension of the novel comes from the characters rearing at these reins. Economic considerations and social shame weigh differently on men and women. Aksinia, a victim of sexual abuse at home, flees a violent husband to be with her lover, Gregori. Gregori is unsatisfied in his marriage with Natalia — a marriage negotiated as a business deal under the gaze of a portrait of the Tsar. Feeling no love for his young and devoted bride he leaves his family, like his grandfather, to be with Aksinia. But Gregori is a cold partner to her too, doubting the true paternity of his daughter with Aksinia. His military summons come as a form of relief, a promise of honour. Later, grieving the loss of her baby alone while Gregori is at war, Aksinia is coerced into sex by a wealthy lord. Gregori is aware of the powerlessness of women to economic and violent coercion: he fights off a squad of his fellow soldiers to save the woman they were raping. But Gregori cannot accept Aksinia’s lack of faithfulness nor the shame of being unable to compete with a wealthier man, and he returns to his wife. Although the reader spends the most time with Gregori, Aksinia and Natalia, we see glimpses of how all the other villagers manage their own quiet gender struggles: they are jilted lovers, bear unwanted pregnancies, or despair at the loneliness of an absent partner. 

Abuse, unhappy marriages, infant mortality. These tragedies are shaped by social structure and economic hardship. Although devastating for the people involved, these dramas remain domestic: their ripples aren’t felt past the banks of the Don. In the meantime, Europe comes to a boil. Rumours of a possible war with Austria start trickling into the village and are met with incredulity — how could they go to war with us? We supply all their grain! As another augur, an educated stranger moves to the village, and takes up playing cards with the mill workers in the evenings. He is arrested for possessing banned books, and is discovered to be a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (a precursor to the Bolsheviks). For the villagers, he is the first person they have seen “[dare] to act against the Tsar himself.”

The military summons finally arrive, and families are torn apart. War throws men into a deadly meat grinder — and into the company of others from distant parts of the country. Discontent and political education spread through the camps.

“You think you’re fighting for the Tsar, but what is the Tsar? The Tsar’s a nobody, and the Tsarina’s a chicken; but they’re both a weight on our backs. Don’t you see? The factory-owner drinks vodka, while the soldier kills the lice. The capitalist takes the profit, the worker goes bare. That’s the system we’ve got. Serve on, cossack, serve on!”

Russia is a tinderbox ready to explode, but the novel stops here.