To Write the Caricature. Balzac, Dickens, and the Formation of Realist Poetics

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate that the literatures of Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens, around the same time, in the 1830s, defined their poetics in a constitutive relationship with caricature illustration, a modality of visual representation of great commercial productivity in the French and English literary markets. This relationship allows us to consider the “realisms” -as they were later called- of these poetics in another way, insofar as they presuppose various negotiations of the writing and literary projects of each of the authors with the demands of the literary markets, which often involve certain tensions with the artists, whose ideas about mimetic representation do not always agree with those of the writers. To this end, this article studies the different dynamics of literary-visual devices in Balzac and Dickens and the constitution of a new novel, "realist". It is divided into two main parts: the first partinvestigates the presence of caricature, in the epistemological sense, in one of Balzac's first texts, the Physiology of Marriage (Physiologie du mariage, 1829), and in the whole system of The Human Comedy (La Comédie humaine, 1842), as well as his collaborations in illustrated magazines, in particular, The Caricature (La Caricature, 1830). The second one reviews the constitutive link of the image with literature in Dickens, in his first two texts: the Sketches by Boz. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Everyday People (1836) and the caricatures of George Cruikshank; and The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837) and the drawings of Robert Seymour and Phiz.