Balzac and ‘the mystery of fiction’: The Limits of Omniscience in Ferragus

Abstract: This article, taking its cue from the recent turn in literary scholarship towards cognitive approaches, considers how Balzac’s early novel Ferragus (1833), explores the mind-reading affordance of the novel, treating it as something that is morally and socially problematic, but also emotionally and aesthetically enabling. It argues that Balzac approaches this question both at the level of representational content, through the figure of the spy, and at the narratological level, through moving back and forth between external and zero focalization. The novel finally presents us with an image of human nature as fundamentally abyssal.