The Poetics of Identity

Abstract

Nineteenth-century narratives are shaped by a constant rewriting of identities that, while it accounts for so much creativity and innovation, is certainly one of the most controversial issues of the time. Although texts are all about the various strategies used to equivocate one’s identity (through the means of état civil, socially marked behaviors, and sometimes, of course, religious conversion), they reiterate that one cannot really escape identity. Thus, parvenus, who embody an unsteady identity, never appear as true characters. Rather, they are reduced to their physical appearance (and semiotic features), deprived of a depth and of a concrete fictional identity. While such a reduction, often synonymous with caricature, comes as no surprise in anti-Semitic texts, whose rhetoric relies on reducing its targets to a category,¹ it may surprise in other otherwise refined literary texts. Balzac’s Nucingen, for example, the archetypal Jewish banker, is almost an abstraction: “Nucingen … is but a silhouette … a name, and less than a voice— merely an accent, or something barely palpable.”² This reduction is justifiable because in most instances Nuncingen is used as a symbol of nineteenth-century capitalism. There is a certain logic to this: when Nucingen falls in love, in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, the novel fleshes out its character of the banker.³

La Banque est toujours baronne.

—Balzac, Modeste Mignon