ABSTRACT
Jean-Pierre Richard, in an essay that opened the historically important first number of the review Poetique, explores the way Balzac's elementary 'situational grammar' nevertheless permits rich variations on the recurring figures that structure each one of his compositions. Although, through the influence of linguistic method, Richard's essay contrasts with the writings of the Geneva school in being concerned very much with describing the deep structures of the text rather than the author's creative consciousness, it nevertheless also displays a fascinating degree of continuity with them. The Balzacian struggle always implies a disparity, sometimes marked simply by the many imposing themselves upon the one, sometimes complicated by the intervention of a new dramatic axis, of action and reaction. Balzac thus delights in the turmoil of as the inter-sex: the tendency towards an internal splitting in two of the erotic roles, which, affecting, sooner or later, all the characters in love, increases to the same extent the field of their combinatory possibilities.
