Real Time. Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola (review)

What interests David Bell in Real Time. Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola is the restructuring of perception that resulted from a direct encounter with nineteenth-century French realist fiction.

In a first, deceptively simple gesture, Bell turns to the realist novel as a reflection of the real, asking it to provide “real insight into the way speed and communication were being woven into the fabric of social perception” during the 1830s and 1840s, the principal time frame of his study. He does so because, as he puts it, “novels highlight the effects of speed in particularly visible ways” (1), and because the novelists he treats here — Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas and Zola — are “four of the most acute social observers of their time” (1). In other words, Bell asks the realist novel to do its job: to tell us what things were really like.