SOURCE: “The (Un)naming Process in Villon's Grand Testament,” in The French Review, Vol. 66, No. 2, 1992, pp. 216-28.

In this essay, Cholakian discusses Villon's widespread use of names in his Testament, suggesting that they serve to disempower those who are named and empower the narrator. The intense self-referentiality of the poem, he argues, further emphasizes Villon's use of naming as a means of asserting selfhood against dominating Others.

Many scholars have delved into the university, police, and municipal archives of fifteenth-century Paris to identify the names appearing in Villon's pseudo-testament.¹ My own interest in the Grand Testament's onomastic mysteries, however, is inspired by the psycho-literary principle that every text is invariably a fiction and even an auto-portrait.² I wish to explore the naming process and the ways in which it reveals the narrator's attitudes toward his imagined testamentary universe.³

While critics like Thuasne (III, 588), Regalado (65), Fox (31), Siciliano (517), and...