Want to understand Honoré de Balzac? Try Dungeons & Dragons instead of literary theory
Most people think originality comes from endless freedom. The role playing game Dungeons & Dragons suggests the opposite. It gives players a small number of races, classes and backgrounds and somehow produces characters that feel endlessly distinct. A half-elf paladin might be an immediately recognisable type, yet no two half-elf paladins ever feel the same once play begins. This is because identity in Dungeons & Dragons is not created by escaping structure, but by working through it.
Nineteenth-century readers encountered something strikingly similar in the novels of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. His vast fictional project, The Human Comedy (1829-1848) is built on a limited repertoire of social “types” that recur as characters across nearly 100 novels and short stories.
There are provincial newcomers arriving in Paris (Father Goriot, 1835), ambitious social climbers seeking rapid ascent, journalists willing to trade principles for influence (Lost Illusions, 1837-1843), dandies whose elegance masks insecurity (The Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans, 1838-1847), courtesans navigating power through intimacy (Cousin Betty, 1846), speculators driven by risk (The Firm of Nucingen, 1837), and the many “30-year-old women” seeking to break out of provincial monotony (The Muse of the Department, 1843). These figures are immediately legible, yet the characters who emerge from them feel uncannily alive. Far from producing stereotypes, Balzac’s work generates individuality through combination, overlap and circumstance.
This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.
Balzac was explicit about his “typological” method. In the preface to An Historical Mystery (1841), he defines a “type” as a character who “summarises in himself certain characteristic traits of all those who more or less resemble him; he is the model of the genre”. Such a figure is not a stereotype but a point of condensation, gathering shared traits without erasing individuality.
The Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács later developed this insight, claiming that Balzac’s characters synthesise the individual and the universal. He argued that they embody broad social forces such as ambition, speculation, artistic aspiration and political calculation, while remaining fully embedded within their social world.
What makes Dungeons & Dragons an especially useful lens here is that character creation does not stop with race and class. Players must also roll a 20-sided dice for attributes such as strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma. These values introduce chance into the system and ensure that no character ever perfectly conforms to an ideal model. Two characters can share the same class and background yet differ radically because one lacks charisma, another has fragile constitution, or a third possesses unexpectedly high intelligence. Chance does not undermine the system. It activates it.
Balzac understood this logic perfectly and made it explicit in the preface to The Human Comedy where he sets out the philosophy and structure of the entire project. Reflecting on how fiction produces lifelike characters, he wrote that “chance is the greatest novelist in the world; to be prolific, one need only study it”.
For Balzac, social types alone are never enough. What gives life to his characters is the way fixed positions collide with contingency, accidents, misjudgements and missed opportunities. A career turns on a chance encounter (Lost Illusions). A reputation collapses because of a rumour (Cousin Bette). A letter arrives too late (Eugénie Grandet, 1833). An ordinary life is overturned by a pact with supernatural forces (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831). These elements do not cancel typology; they work through it.
Seen across The Human Comedy, Balzac’s characters do not exist as isolated portraits but as part of a vast and carefully organised system. Figures recur across novels, reappear in new contexts, and are reframed by shifting social and historical pressures. A journalist encountered early in the corpus returns later compromised or triumphant. A provincial social climber resurfaces as a hardened social operator. A writer becomes a commercial failure or an institutional success. This recurrence is not repetition for its own sake. It is how individuality is forged.
The contrast between the characters Lucien de Rubempré and Eugène de Rastignac makes this logic especially clear. Both enter Paris as provincial newcomers (in Lost Illusions and Father Goriot). Both are ambitious, socially alert and acutely aware that success depends on visibility, patronage and strategic alliances.
Typologically, they occupy a similar position within Balzac’s social universe as aspiring provincial social climbers. Yet their trajectories diverge dramatically. Rastignac learns to read the system accurately and adapts himself to it with increasing success. Lucien mistakes recognition for belonging and talent for protection. Their difference emerges from how similar components interact with chance over time.
This pattern repeats throughout Balzac’s work. In each case, the type remains legible, but the personal trajectory is never fixed in advance. This is a crucial difference from other large-scale cyclical works of the 19th century, most notably Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893), where characters are ultimately governed by heredity and biological determinism. Balzac’s world is structured, but it is not closed. His characters are shaped by chance and choice, not locked into destiny by bloodlines.
Thinking about Balzac through Dungeons & Dragons helps make visible a logic of character creation that is often taken for granted.
Great novelists do not produce individuality by abandoning structure, but by working through it. Balzac’s insight was to recognise that social life is already organised into roles, hierarchies and expectations, and that fiction becomes most powerful when it shows how people navigate (and sometimes rebel against) these constraints.
The Human Comedy begins with a finite set of social types and generates endless variation through combination, chance, and choice. Far from limiting his characters, Balzac’s typology is precisely what allows them to feel so enduringly alive.
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Harsh Trivedi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.