Balzac retains from the German romantic episteme of totality the ambition for empirical knowledge and the method of an organised, encyclopaedic declension of material objects in order to put forward, through the novel, a complete representation of human society subsuming all causalities. More than a trope, metonymy is a figure of thinking itself and description reveals the moment of active thoughtfulness within the text. But the Balzacian thought of totality finds the truth of its ambition in the incomplete or fragmented nature of its whole, in the refusal of a totality of the whole.