Leaving and coming home. The importance of names in Proust

L'Age des Noms: that is the title Proust had thought of for the three parts in which the Recherche was to be divided, thus identifying one of the most familiar instances of poetic distortion of reality practiced by the youthful Marcel. The present essay suggests analysing the mechanisms underlying on the one hand the search for the motivation of proper names, and on the other the deconstruction of the supposed coincidence between name and thing. If the Name is an Unicum, expressing the charm of the irreducible single, it is nonetheless endowed with an intrinsic elasticity that occasionally permeates it with the various aspects of the person it designates and the context wherein it appears, shattering its image. Marcel's fantasies around place names differ by a process that is the opposite of the one related to names of persons, like in the case of the name Guermantes, whose magic sound gives way when faced with the flesh-and-blood person. Actually Balbec, the first of the destinations the narrator dreams of, springs from the desire for a real landscape, even if later the charm of the sound of the name gets the upper hand, spreading to other place names, too. The protagonist's emotional experience is replaced by an impersonal, scholarly analysis around the Name's fate: the genealogical interpretation that, expressed by the duke of Guermantes, reconstructs the continuity of families and endows seemingly insignificant names with allusions, and the philological interpretation that rectifies mistaken equivalences, especially of toponyms.