I tried to find some harmony between the adventurous, picaresque inner rhythm that prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque.

If we consider that this peroration in favor of truly universal fraternité was written nearly one hundred and fifty years before the French revolution

Balzac, situated as he was at a nodal point in the history of literature, in a liminal experience, now visionary and now realistic

the manifold text, which replaces the oneness of a thinking "I" with a multiplicity of subjects, voices, and views of the world, on the model of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called "dialogic" or "polyphonic" or "carnivalesque,"