Snapchat Post: Balzac’s Correspondence and the Gaze

Balzac described his first meeting with Madame Hanska in 1833 as a turning point in his life and led him to proclaim the gaze to be the highest possible form of communication between two lovers; his letters henceforth denigrate language and clamour for physical proximity. This article shows how the progression of the Balzac–Hanska relationship from epistolary to physical introduces the dimension of the ‘gaze’ into the correspondence, demonstrating how Balzac’s letter writing subverts the gaze – both from and towards the absent partner – to his own ends. The discourse of the absent gaze is a literary device that masks the writer’s much more urgent preoccupation with the possibility of gazing at the correspondent unseen and curating his own (to use modern-day terms, Snapchat-worthy) version of her.