Self-Fashioned Voltaire—"With a Name Like Yours, You Might Be Any Shape, Almost"

"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully. "Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "My name means the shape I am—and a good and handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."

(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Chap. VI)

Attempts to seize Voltaire have abounded both in his lifetime and in posterity. Admirers would laud, critics would loathe him in his capacity as sharp-witted and sharp-tongued satirist. Verdicts about him have lacked unanimity even if the focus lay "merely" on determining a label for a single facet of his existence, such as for example his beliefs. Striking the pose of Quaker, rabbi, orthodox cleric, or Jew, Voltaire would pre-empt and contravene any attempt at unequivocal categorization in a humanist equivalent of Linnaean taxonomic classification. Intrigued by his Zelig complex, scholars have hence come to acknowledge Voltaire in the role of actor, host, correspondent, and traveller. Most importantly, they diagnosed a "chameleon's soul [which] adapts to all comers" (Mervaud 16; Goulbourne 102, Cronk, "The Letters" 233). Encountering a single part is not tantamount to knowing the whole. Voltaire fashioned his identity by breaking it down into many different, individual, complementary, sometimes even contradictory facets. He amasses a repertoire of voices to adopt, masks to don, names to appropriate and thus sharpens our awareness of the importance behind the Shakespearean line what's in a name?

Essential to the fashioning of individual identity, names hold together and overwrite the constructed selfhood. Pigeonholing constitutes a form of control: by ascribing a name, one reduces—forcibly, and sometimes willfully—complexity. If the labeling is beyond the influence of the person concerned, whoever categorizes can externally reshape and thereby partially control this identity, simply by choosing one tag over the other and by effectively effacing any (possibly unwelcome) unevenness in the façade. Yet, Voltaire resists satisfactory uniform labelling—through continuously fashioning his image in utter fluidity. He openly enjoyed and freely exploited the advantages the popular practices of anonymity and pseudonymity would grant, engaging in a game with his readership and acquaintances alike (see Cronk, "Voltaire and authorship" 40), and—in spite of its being incomplete (for it excludes the correspondence)—the index of pseudonyms in the general catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale gives a good sense of the frequency with which Voltaire adopted masks representing members of different, i.e. non-French speech communities. Yet, the use of pseudonyms and masks from different linguistic, hence national and, by extension, frequently different religious origins is clearly not limited to his fictional production.

Therefore, I aim to draw together Voltairean theatricality on both the fictional and the non-fictional plane in this article. I would like to suggest that it would be worthwhile to examine his polyglot personae more closely for, even though it might seem counter-intuitive at first sight, Voltaire's use of pseudonyms and masks in all situations of life can ultimately be seen as part of his endeavour to create, control and commodify his person as public image rather than as mere authorial persona (see Cronk, "Inventing Voltaire" 23; 41).

In order to examine Voltaire's constant reinvention of his self, let us start unraveling his overall use of pseudonyms on a fictional and a non-fictional level: the Voltairean trajectory of renaming takes its obvious point of departure in Voltaire's naming himself. A (near-) anagram, closest to a writer's legal name, should be a fairly straightforward form of pseudonymity. In Voltaire's case, however, the peculiarity is two-fold: first, the motivation behind his choice has never been unambiguously determined.¹ And second, it is debatable if we can actually consider this name in its three main variants (Arouet de Voltaire,² de Voltaire, or just Voltaire—without any aristocratic pretensions) a simple nom de plume. After all, it replaced his civic name not only in his capacity as a writer, but in almost all domains of his life. Unpicking the construct "Voltaire" clearly requires...