Henry James, Honoré de Balzac, and the chronotope: the return to realism as a response to modernism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5902/2176148589979Keywords:
Time-space, Father Goriot, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden BowlAbstract
Henry James (1843-1916) demonstrates an ambivalent admiration for Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). While acknowledging the French novelist as a “prime genius,” James also identifies significant flaws in his work. How, then, can we explain that James, a forerunner of modernist aesthetics in the twentieth century, would nonetheless choose this nineteenth-century realist writer as his master? This article seeks to answer that question through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, examining works by both novelists. I argue that James assimilates Balzac’s realist chronotope – generally objective, chronological, and tangible – yet reshapes it into more subjective, disordered, and immaterial forms.
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