Proper Name and Social Description: Balzac’s Poetics of Naming

Abstract

An expression summarizes the dimension of Balzac’s literary project: “to compete with the civil registry.” On the one hand, it provides a measure of the unprecedented realistic ambition with which Balzac has marked the genre of the novel, by giving it the power to describe the society. On the other, it also indicates the central place attributed to the proper name in The Human Comedy as a history of France in the 19th century. The purpose of this article is to analyze the poetics of naming in Balzac, examining the functions of the proper name in his work and the way he named his characters. My hypothesis is that the novelist has become a key chapter in the history of literary onomastics: with him, the proper name has become a fundamental issue in the novel, while its motivation has imposed itself as a true literary topos.