In the nineteenth century, the proper name had become - in the words of Gustave Flaubert - "a key issue" for novelists. Machado de Assis also subscribed to this commonplace of his time; nevertheless, ever since his first novel,Ressurreição (1872), he sought to single out his poetics of nomination, relying on precepts distinct from those in vogue in Romanticism. Instead of abundant remarks on the names and the harmony between name and character, Machado de Assis created a narrator who does not comment on the characters' anthroponyms, but rather, resorts to homonymy and ironic naming. The objective of this text is to analyze how these two devices of nomination function inRessurreição, highlighting the paradoxical fact that, like the Romantic writers, the author turned the issue of love and marriage into the regulation of his protagonists' proper names.
Machado de Assis; proper name; Romanticism