ABSTRACT
Balzac's densely populated fictional universe was without parallel in the author's own time and to this day remains unrivalled in its size and scope. The opportunity for a writer to become the literary counterpart of Napoleon, which was Balzac's express desire, was of limited duration as increasing specialization became the norm in all realms of nineteenth-century life. Balzac himself was not content merely to exploit his creative imagination, he was fascinated by the very nature of creative activity. In Balzac's hands, it is further evidence of his success in finding the artistic means to accommodate the tensions of his age. The Balzacian encounter with the real is therefore inherently dramatic at the most fundamental level, that is before the question of narrative or story comes into play. Balzac's recourse to the heterogeneous and the disparate clearly renders impossible a formal unity of the kind laid down by any form of classical aesthetics.
