Let’s start a thought experiment that might not go anywhere.
Like Proust, I’ve heard of Balzac all of my life, but never read any of his works. And, like Proust, I foolishly started looking into him, more specifically La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). As it turns out, PG has (almost?) all of it, or at least all of it that he finished. (I haven’t found one of the analytical studies works yet, but it may be a not knowing the right name problem.)
The thought experiment is how it would be packaged, in the theoretical chance that someone(s) might want to work on it.
The
Wiki article is a good place to start (and I’m sure François can tell us everything it got wrong), but there are 90-100 different “works” that make up the whole thing, broken up into three categories:
- Study of manners
- Philosophical studies
- Analytical studies
Study of manners is itself broken into six subcategories:
- Scenes from private life
- Scenes from provincial life
- Scenes from Parisian life
- Scenes from political life
- Scenes from military life
- Scenes from country life
Some of the “works" are novels, some of them are novellas, and a few short stories. They were not written in order, some of them Balzac moved between Scenes over time, some of them he wrote independently but then included in La Comédie later, and many of them he modified over time, sometimes extensively.
The Wiki has what it claims is the “final plan,” but I haven’t found somewhere else that confirms that independently.
The thought experiment is that packaging all of a “Scene” together (for the Study of manners category) would make for a very large production for a couple of the Scenes, and we would still need to identify each individual work within it, while packaging each of the individual works means we would have some short ones (the first two in the Wiki list, e.g., are only 20K'ish words each). For the other two top categories, Analytical studies only has two works, while Philosophical studies has twenty.
I shudder to have to come up with 90-100 different covers, though. That might be enough to kill the thought experiment right there… (Seriously, I’m getting the hives just thinking about it.)
A couple of the sites I’ve found, including the site of a Balzac museum in Paris, says reading it in the order Balzac specified is not necessarily the way to go, which might speak against using the Scenes as packaging.
Scenes from a private life, e.g., has almost 30 works, and there are no “subsets” shown. Although the first two are short (20K), I don’t know about the rest, yet. Maybe it would only turn out to be 2M words or less, which wouldn’t be too bad. But if the rest are novel-sized, it could end being 3M-4M. If we did that, would we have to finish the entire Scene to publish it, or could we do it like we’re doing Proust, publish it in progress and add to it as works within the scene are finished?
In the case of Scenes from provincial life, there are a few subdivisions within it, none with more than three works, so if the entire Scene was too big, then we could theoretically use the already existing subdivisions.
Scenes from a Parisian life has about 20 works, and the remaining ones are only a handful each. So, really, only the private and Parisian scenes and Philosopical studies might potentially pose a problem, size-wise. But, again, maybe we don’t want to package the whole Scenes together, to let people read them in whatever order they want. (Which, yes, they could do even if they’re packaged as Scenes, it would just be more of a hassle.)
All but two or three of the PG transcriptions are in the 1000-2000 ID range, so they’re all relatively early, which doesn’t bode well for the quality of the transcription, but I haven’t looked at any of them (other than to estimate the size of the first two).
I realize more information is needed, especially the size of all the works (interestingly, a quick search hasn’t yet turned up how many words is in the whole thing), but I thought this would at least allow us to start thinking of additional questions that I haven’t thought of yet.