La flessibilità nell'epoca del capitalismo: Balzac e le Illusions perdues

According to the stereotyped perspective of Realism, the Bildungsroman is frequently a story of disillusionment – and it certainly is in the case of Illusions perdues. This formula, repeated by Lukács, weakens the dynamics of the Bildungsroman and emphasises the conflict between the aspirations of the protagonist and an hostile world with which he might at most compromise. First of all, this article criticises the notion of realism and the conception of truth as correspondence and rather focuses the attention on desire as desire of being. Balzac’s novel, as the Bildungsroman in general, describes the shaping of identity through processes of identification. The main line of the action represents the interplay between the identifications in which Lucien de Rubempré recognises himself and those he himself arouses. The true protagonist of Illusions perdues is therefore the flexibility of desire in the conflict between higher and lower possibilities.