“Living clocks” The body and time in Sarrasine

In Sarrasine, the function of bodies is to represent time, in its ruptures and continuities, as a break or succession. Constructing bodies as temporal oxymorons, Balzac develops a reflection on revenance. He thus explores a threat to the new regime of historicity that was established between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, namely the fear of a return of the past in a vision of time dominated by the idea of continuous progress.