Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Poétique balzacienne des noms de personnages: ‘faire concurrence à l’état civil’ . Par Ada Smaniotto

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knac125

1468-2931

Andrew Watts,

Historical and Literary Studies

Names were a key preoccupation of Balzac’s life and literary career. His father, Bernard-François, changed the family surname from Balssa to Balzac, symbolizing his rise from the southern peasantry to a position on the King’s Council, in 1786. Early in his career, the novelist published under the pseudonyms Lord R’Hoone and Horace de Saint-Aubin before signing himself Balzac in 1829 and subsequently adopting the particule de noblesse. La Comédie humaine reflects this authorial fascination with names. As Ada Smaniotto observes in this careful, detailed study, there are 1,842 fictional character names used in Balzac’s panorama of French society. This abundance of appellations, coupled with Balzac’s recurring concern with how best to name his characters, testifies to his stated ambition to ‘faire concurrence à l’état civil’ by producing a ‘total’ portrait of the world in which he lived. Smaniotto aligns her study with longstanding scholarly interest in names in La Comédie humaine. Jean Pommier (1953), Wayne Conner (1976), Éric Bordas (2003), and, more recently, Thomas Conrad (2016), among others, have all written on this subject. In contrast to the genetic and linguistic approaches that underpin much of this earlier research, Smaniotto explores the literary motivation behind Balzac’s choice of character names, and the tension between realism and imagination that drives the author’s naming strategies. The book is divided into three parts. Following an Introduction and prologue that document the historical evolution of naming conventions in French literature, Part One examines how Balzac’s determination to rival the civil registry results in the profusion, excess, and fundamental instability of names in his work (illustrated, for example, by Albert Savarus, in which the eponymous protagonist uses three different name variants as his fortunes shift through the upheavals of Restoration and July Monarchy). Part Two studies Balzac’s naming strategies from a historical and sociological perspective. In tandem with a discussion of the particule de noblesse, Smaniotto considers how specific characters invest their names with fame and prestige, whether through political skill in the case of Z. Marcas, or the clever repackaging of artistic mediocrity in relation to Pierre Grassou. Part Three reflects on the imaginative and sometimes talismanic properties associated with names in La Comédie humaine, including their capacity to provoke feelings of shame, regret, and erotic pleasure. The combined parts of this volume form an intricate and impressive work of scholarship. However, the analysis would have been strengthened by wider engagement with relevant anglophone research (in particular, the discussion of names of reappearing characters might usefully have been connected to Sotirios Paraschas’s Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Authorship, Originality, and Intellectual Property (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which explores Balzac’s famed technique as an authorial strategy against the repeated infringement of his intellectual property). Nevertheless, this relatively minor shortcoming should not prevent this book from being considered an essential reference on a subject of enduring interest.