For Susan Suleiman writing in the mid ’90s, a contemporary was broadly defined as someone who brings us to recognition of ourselves in relation to our time and place—a category that could include non-contemporaneous figures such as Shakespeare or Rembrandt, if they did this work. For her own intellectual purposes, however, Suleiman chose a more restrictive definition: her contemporaries would be those whose lives intersected with her own both in the intellectual sense of sharing a bond of experience, interest, curiosity, and in a material sense (‘breath[ing] the same air’; sharing ‘aspects of the same material culture’). Such personal crossings imply a subjective engagement through which the writer/critic's self is inherently at stake and at risk. It is through the concept of risk, explicitly invoked by Colette as well, that I would like to begin to reflect on this author as she writes about herself in relation to Balzac, a writer who spoke to her in ways that led to identification, self-recognition, and self-formation, though he was not her contemporary in Suleiman's strictest sense.

Writing of her early childhood reading of Balzac a decade before her own death and almost a century after his, Colette speaks of her risky entry as a seven-year-old into the ‘jungle’ of his writing. But let me be clear: the danger was not one of precocity or of innocence potentially bespoiled. There was no monitoring adult who feared exposing her young mind to the passions and manias of the author of La Comédie humaine, and the adult Colette writing was certainly not a prurient figure looking back in shock at her early reading adventures. What then was the nature of the risk proclaimed by the septuagenarian rereading Balzac and her childhood reading together as communicating mirrors? (‘Non que je ne courusse le risque de me meurtrir!’ she writes). How might the experience of reading Balzac have been risky: potentially ‘bruising’ or even ‘ravaging’ to the self?