ABSTRACT
The fictional figures who most obviously embody superior powers of observation and penetrating vision such as the antiquary in La Peau de chagrin, the miserly money lender Gobseck, or the criminal Vautrin are all subjected one way or another to a humbling irony. The transcendental perspective may be instrumental in the creation of Balzac's fiction but it is itself no more than a fiction, as the antiquary's fate spells out. The distance that separates spectator from the scene turns out to be the basic condition of life in Balzac's fictional world, as La Peau de chagrin spells out with the neatness of allegory. Seeing is equated, not with knowing, but with yearning and separation, desire and alienation, in such a way as to undermine the epistemological certainties implicit in Balzac's narration. In a contradictory, though characteristically Balzacian way, the story moves at the same time towards complicity with the lurid inner vision and towards exposure of the material basis of social life.
