ABSTRACT
Lucienne Frappier-Mazur concentrates on Balzac's use of certain alimentary metaphors of a pathological nature, relating them to the Freudian mechanism of displacement before assessing her findings against the in part contradictory accounts of metaphor given by Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan. This chapter examines some more restricted examples, though equally rich in implications, which have surfaced in the course of a study of alimentary metaphors in La Comedie humaine. It shows the relationship that can exist between the metaphors of eating and the monomania of illness that affects certain particular Balzacian characters. The entire network of alimentary metaphors, the meanings of which complement each other, are attached to the depiction of love, both sensual and mystical. However, as far as the aspect that concerns the operation of figurative terms in the reality of the novelistic world, the two mechanisms also express the relationship of cause and effect between metaphorical text and literal text.
