This is fascinating, particularly the conclusion. Your opening remarks on autofiction plus your note about the novels you’ve read recently intersect so directly with my forthcoming too-long essay on Alice Munro (autofiction in which (i) the mother, not the patriarch, is the center of interest, and (ii) the subject matter is incest) that I should really write a post…
Now down to the serious business of quibbling about funny names. I feel like the name Omnium was a trap Trollope fell into because of unanticipated sequels. It was a perfect name for the old Duke, because the old Duke’s place in society is drawn a bit more broadly than Plantagenet’s is. Plantagenet Palliser is also a wonderful name but it is ever so slightly less silly.
You’re probably right that Trollope is a better namer than James, but when he lets himself go James gets away with effrontery in the naming department that Trollope wouldn’t dare. Trollope would never name a character Fanny Assingham.
I agree that that's the genesis in many cases but he was always playing with fire and he seems serenely untroubled by the result. (He could, of course, just have introduced another character.)
Yes, but that's exactly the point! James goes awry when he tries this (and he's a lot closer than he admits) because he doesn't have the right sense of humor, or possibly much of one at all. I find his weird names awkward and embarrassing whereas Trollope's are always fun. Trollope can't write a scene with a beautifully luminous fusion of sense impressions, feeling, and thought, but he does have a sense of humor. And quite a shrewd sense of character.
Oh I love all of James’s most outré names like Ulick (from “The Pupil") or the Marquise de Cliché (from The Reverberator). I also love names that are less extreme but still evocative, Julianne mentions Isabel Archer but my favorite is the paring of Lambert Strether and Maria Gostrey. (I’m sure many people have said this but Lambert’s name combines “stray” and “tether” and Maria’s name says: go! stray!). But Julianne puts her finger on something about James’s names that I’ve always noticed but still can’t express well. There’s something off about them. One Madame Merle or Dr. Sloper is plausible, but in any given James novel something seems off when you consider all the names taken together. They aren’t normal names yet they aren’t clearly symbolic (like Squire Allworthy), there is a strange half-fairy tale aspect to them.
Yes, I agree with this. Maybe the thing that annoys me about them is that real names actually do encode a lot of meaning via the collective histories they reflect. James seems weirdly indifferent, or hostile, or opposed to this--it's not just not realistic but anti verisimilar. There's a lot of potential for American novels to really play with the multiple origins of American names, and of course many do!
This is really great and brought up so many thoughts and connections for me. The main one is abut Knausgaard's use of naming. Although he does use real names, as Hjorth points out, he doesn't use the name of his father, only referring to him as "dad" or "father." This, of course, creates a huge symbolic effect, especially when Knausgaard writes about being a father himself and when he becomes angry in the same way that his father did. His one goal as a father, he says, is to make sure his children aren't scared of him the way he was of his father.
But in Book 6 this all changes, and we learn the father's name, just like that, without having realized that the name has been withheld the whole time. In an interview about this Knausgaard said:
"Someone was talking to me about the book, and she said that when my father’s name first appears, it’s almost shocking. His presence is different when he has a name—it’s a connection to the real world. And literature always has a gap, a veil between it and the real world. It has to be like that, and it should be like that . . . and then I took real people and put them behind that veil, into this closed world. Seeing their names, it’s like a glimpse of their real existence."
What a great observation and a great quote. And of course with naming a parent, there's also this dizzying shift in perspective, the child's sudden ability to see the parent as a person rather than in terms of their social role.
Miles and miles away from this, but I thought about bringing up the first time Pepys's name appears in the diary (one of only two times over 3000 pages or so), which is when he's reading it in a poll tax register. Otherwise he's just "I."
There could be a great essay on the first appearance of names in fiction!
Fascinating - and beautifully written (as always).
I've been dipping into Iris Murdoch lately (I always am to some extent) who often chooses strange names for her characters which helps signal, I think, that you are entering her strange, charged fictional world.
I've been (very slowly!) working my way through a book called Onomastics of The Song of Roland. It's a huge book with a lot of interesting findings that have informed my understanding of the poem, but my favourite thing from it is that the author also looks at medieval registers of names to find out where names from the chansons de geste show up around France, and his finding is that there's a "Capetian exclusion zone" where names aren't found. Essentially, because of the anti-monarch satires of the poems, you find fewer/no names in areas more strongly held by the Capetian dynasty.
That sounds like an amazing book! So cool. I may have to check that out if I can somehow justify it to myself.
You always learn these incredible details about social or literary history through the field, and I think there's a lot more to do. Completely essential to the study of marriage patterns, social mobility, religious conversion, etc.
Dickens was quite fond of the aptronym, as well. I always assumed it was because his novels were frequently serialized and had lots of characters. It's easier to remember someone is supposed to be a villain if they have a name like Jasper Bogsquelch.
P. Adams Sitney’s last book was Marvelous Names in Literature and Cinema, in which he analyzed (somewhat onomastically) Moby Dick, Mallarmé’s “sonnet that names itself,” Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Michael Snow’s Wavelength, among other things. It’s a strange, interesting work, not as great as Sitney’s other books, but it’s the only one I know by a major film critic with such an approach.
Loved this! I wondered where you saw Nashe’s Jack Wilton in the gap between Everyman and Robinson Crusoe. Individuated by name and yet unindividuated by character? It seems to occupy an interesting, transitional position - but I wondered if you had any more insights!
Yeah, great question. I think it's part of the same, very slow movement toward realist prose fiction. It makes sense that the Elizabethans (well, Nashe: but it would be Nashe!) would get there first, and then it would prove abortive: in the case of English prose fiction, there are two phases, first in the 1590s, then again around the 1690s when things really take off, without that much being written in the middle (some exceptions; romances, The English Rogue).
There's a very good chapter in a book with the slightly silly name The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England that lays out the numbers. The thing that makes this a bit mysterious is that there are a lot of reprints throughout the seventeenth century of the Elizabethan stuff, just not that much new popular stuff. I think it's really true that (not just during the Civil War but even before) a lot of energy gets redirected toward religious writing and controversy--and to an extent into poetry.
If I'd had more time I'd have mentioned Don Quixote: as usual, Cervantes understood this first and best, since one of the running jokes is precisely the difference between real and romance names: Dulcinea vs. Sancho Panza.
Cervantes. Always ahead of the game, wasn't he? Out-thought everyone for centuries… I suppose re Nashe I was thinking about the late sixteenth century and the space between the ornately fictional Euphues and the self-referential, self-defined non-fiction (it's late where I am, and I'm on holiday, so I'm tempted to say 'auto-fictions') of Churchyard and Gascoigne, and the ways that Nashe chooses to occupy that complicated space - and also how none of those literary performances are novelistic, yet between them, maybe, you can see the novel slouching towards its birth…
I don't know. Probably I'm talking nonsense. It is really quite late.
In other news, my friend Andy Kesson edited The Elizabethan Top Ten. In all honesty, I haven't read it, although I know there are some wonderful contributors. But I have read Andy's book on John Lyly – John Lyly and Early-Modern Authorship – which I thought was brilliant. Well worth your time, if Lyly is of interest to you.
I didn't know you knew him! His work is great, I'm a huge admirer. Lyly has attracted more than his fair share of great scholars, I think--I absolutely LOVE that old G.K. Hunter book about him.
And totally agree with all of your points, which are eloquently put as usual.
It is interesting how Hjorth's comment about the crucial difference between using real names vs fictional ones returns us to chapter 9 of Aristotle's Poetics, where Aristotle makes considerable effort to deny any relevance to a crucial empirical difference between tragedies and comedies, namely, that comedies operate with fictional names, whereas tragedies use the names of actual people. The Philosopher wants to dismiss some obvious literary-historical objections to his famous distinction between history and poetry, between discourses dealing with the particular and the universal. Poetry engages with the universal through fictions, so Aristotle needs to show that what what distinguishes poetry from history is fictionality, which means both tragic and comic plots need to be fictional: made-up stories about made-up people.
The discussion of names takes place in this context. Aristotle acknowledges that tragedies often use historical, real names, whereas comedies don't, but then adds that there is nothing inevitable about what tragedians have been doing, because 1., he just said what the principal difference between poetry and history is, and 2., because he can think of ONE tragedy, Agathon's Antheus, that is using exclusively fictional characters. (There is no other such Greek tragedy, and Antheus also does not survive and is not mentioned anywhere else.)
In other words, Aristotle uses an exception as not just evidence of the possibility of something, but an instance of his ideal type, because he needs to bend literary reality to his brilliant (I am not being sarcastic here) systematization of discourse.
While the Philosopher seeks to erase a specific distinction between two genres, or rather, dismiss an actual, documented difference between two literary genres that seriously trubles his larger distinction between genres of history and fiction, the literary historian may want to resist this, and acknowledge the convention preserved in medieval and neoclassical treatments of the subject, namely, that tragedies were representations of (historically or mythologically) true events, whereas comedies (new comedies) represented fictions.
In the early modern period, this is of course by no means systematically true, and with the emergence of domestic tragedy, Aristotle's philosophical principle becomes the empirical reality of genres at last. It is worth noting that domestic tragedy, like the novel, is an English thing, at least when seen from the continent.
In Aristotle, the matrix of fictional storytelling is comedy. One might say that the novel grows out of the comic matrix, and that the historical novel and autofiction trouble or complicate this in different ways.
This is brilliant, thank you. You could see this as the comic subsuming the tragic, for reasons that connect to the other aspect of Aristotle's comic / tragic distinction: the low / high distinction. Via social history or (as per Auerbach) Christianity or both.
Yes, exactly. Because the low/high distinction is the distinction of having a name (in a particular, important sense of having a name that you also discuss).
One of the most bathetic names in fiction has to be Duncan Idaho from the Dune series. I can't seem to find any reason for it's choice amongst all the other unusual names
How interesting! I've never actually read Dune. I agree, that seems very random! Science fiction names would be a great topic in itself. I've come across articles on fantasy names, particularly inspired by Tolkien (who of course put a lot of thought into it like the good Anglo Saxonist he was), but I don't think I've read anything on science fiction names. I bet there are some interesting comparisons between character naming in science fiction and drug / chemical / tech naming.
This is fascinating, particularly the conclusion. Your opening remarks on autofiction plus your note about the novels you’ve read recently intersect so directly with my forthcoming too-long essay on Alice Munro (autofiction in which (i) the mother, not the patriarch, is the center of interest, and (ii) the subject matter is incest) that I should really write a post…
Now down to the serious business of quibbling about funny names. I feel like the name Omnium was a trap Trollope fell into because of unanticipated sequels. It was a perfect name for the old Duke, because the old Duke’s place in society is drawn a bit more broadly than Plantagenet’s is. Plantagenet Palliser is also a wonderful name but it is ever so slightly less silly.
You’re probably right that Trollope is a better namer than James, but when he lets himself go James gets away with effrontery in the naming department that Trollope wouldn’t dare. Trollope would never name a character Fanny Assingham.
I agree that that's the genesis in many cases but he was always playing with fire and he seems serenely untroubled by the result. (He could, of course, just have introduced another character.)
Yes, but that's exactly the point! James goes awry when he tries this (and he's a lot closer than he admits) because he doesn't have the right sense of humor, or possibly much of one at all. I find his weird names awkward and embarrassing whereas Trollope's are always fun. Trollope can't write a scene with a beautifully luminous fusion of sense impressions, feeling, and thought, but he does have a sense of humor. And quite a shrewd sense of character.
Oh, where's your piece coming out? And when? Definitely want to read it.
Fanny Assingham is a genius name though
Oh I love all of James’s most outré names like Ulick (from “The Pupil") or the Marquise de Cliché (from The Reverberator). I also love names that are less extreme but still evocative, Julianne mentions Isabel Archer but my favorite is the paring of Lambert Strether and Maria Gostrey. (I’m sure many people have said this but Lambert’s name combines “stray” and “tether” and Maria’s name says: go! stray!). But Julianne puts her finger on something about James’s names that I’ve always noticed but still can’t express well. There’s something off about them. One Madame Merle or Dr. Sloper is plausible, but in any given James novel something seems off when you consider all the names taken together. They aren’t normal names yet they aren’t clearly symbolic (like Squire Allworthy), there is a strange half-fairy tale aspect to them.
Yes, I agree with this. Maybe the thing that annoys me about them is that real names actually do encode a lot of meaning via the collective histories they reflect. James seems weirdly indifferent, or hostile, or opposed to this--it's not just not realistic but anti verisimilar. There's a lot of potential for American novels to really play with the multiple origins of American names, and of course many do!
This is really great and brought up so many thoughts and connections for me. The main one is abut Knausgaard's use of naming. Although he does use real names, as Hjorth points out, he doesn't use the name of his father, only referring to him as "dad" or "father." This, of course, creates a huge symbolic effect, especially when Knausgaard writes about being a father himself and when he becomes angry in the same way that his father did. His one goal as a father, he says, is to make sure his children aren't scared of him the way he was of his father.
But in Book 6 this all changes, and we learn the father's name, just like that, without having realized that the name has been withheld the whole time. In an interview about this Knausgaard said:
"Someone was talking to me about the book, and she said that when my father’s name first appears, it’s almost shocking. His presence is different when he has a name—it’s a connection to the real world. And literature always has a gap, a veil between it and the real world. It has to be like that, and it should be like that . . . and then I took real people and put them behind that veil, into this closed world. Seeing their names, it’s like a glimpse of their real existence."
What a great observation and a great quote. And of course with naming a parent, there's also this dizzying shift in perspective, the child's sudden ability to see the parent as a person rather than in terms of their social role.
Miles and miles away from this, but I thought about bringing up the first time Pepys's name appears in the diary (one of only two times over 3000 pages or so), which is when he's reading it in a poll tax register. Otherwise he's just "I."
There could be a great essay on the first appearance of names in fiction!
There could be - I hope you write it!
As a major Trollope fangirl, I have to do a shout out to Farmer Cheeseacre, Lawyer Bideawhile, and Dr. Fillgrave.
Fascinating - and beautifully written (as always).
I've been dipping into Iris Murdoch lately (I always am to some extent) who often chooses strange names for her characters which helps signal, I think, that you are entering her strange, charged fictional world.
Oh, good point, she's a great namer. I like "Lucas Graffe" a lot!
Hartley in The Sea The Sea is a great name
💖💖💖💖💖
I've been (very slowly!) working my way through a book called Onomastics of The Song of Roland. It's a huge book with a lot of interesting findings that have informed my understanding of the poem, but my favourite thing from it is that the author also looks at medieval registers of names to find out where names from the chansons de geste show up around France, and his finding is that there's a "Capetian exclusion zone" where names aren't found. Essentially, because of the anti-monarch satires of the poems, you find fewer/no names in areas more strongly held by the Capetian dynasty.
That sounds like an amazing book! So cool. I may have to check that out if I can somehow justify it to myself.
You always learn these incredible details about social or literary history through the field, and I think there's a lot more to do. Completely essential to the study of marriage patterns, social mobility, religious conversion, etc.
Dickens was quite fond of the aptronym, as well. I always assumed it was because his novels were frequently serialized and had lots of characters. It's easier to remember someone is supposed to be a villain if they have a name like Jasper Bogsquelch.
P. Adams Sitney’s last book was Marvelous Names in Literature and Cinema, in which he analyzed (somewhat onomastically) Moby Dick, Mallarmé’s “sonnet that names itself,” Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Michael Snow’s Wavelength, among other things. It’s a strange, interesting work, not as great as Sitney’s other books, but it’s the only one I know by a major film critic with such an approach.
Sounds fascinating. I've never read anything about names in cinema, maybe I'll check it out.
Loved this! I wondered where you saw Nashe’s Jack Wilton in the gap between Everyman and Robinson Crusoe. Individuated by name and yet unindividuated by character? It seems to occupy an interesting, transitional position - but I wondered if you had any more insights!
Yeah, great question. I think it's part of the same, very slow movement toward realist prose fiction. It makes sense that the Elizabethans (well, Nashe: but it would be Nashe!) would get there first, and then it would prove abortive: in the case of English prose fiction, there are two phases, first in the 1590s, then again around the 1690s when things really take off, without that much being written in the middle (some exceptions; romances, The English Rogue).
There's a very good chapter in a book with the slightly silly name The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England that lays out the numbers. The thing that makes this a bit mysterious is that there are a lot of reprints throughout the seventeenth century of the Elizabethan stuff, just not that much new popular stuff. I think it's really true that (not just during the Civil War but even before) a lot of energy gets redirected toward religious writing and controversy--and to an extent into poetry.
If I'd had more time I'd have mentioned Don Quixote: as usual, Cervantes understood this first and best, since one of the running jokes is precisely the difference between real and romance names: Dulcinea vs. Sancho Panza.
Cervantes. Always ahead of the game, wasn't he? Out-thought everyone for centuries… I suppose re Nashe I was thinking about the late sixteenth century and the space between the ornately fictional Euphues and the self-referential, self-defined non-fiction (it's late where I am, and I'm on holiday, so I'm tempted to say 'auto-fictions') of Churchyard and Gascoigne, and the ways that Nashe chooses to occupy that complicated space - and also how none of those literary performances are novelistic, yet between them, maybe, you can see the novel slouching towards its birth…
I don't know. Probably I'm talking nonsense. It is really quite late.
In other news, my friend Andy Kesson edited The Elizabethan Top Ten. In all honesty, I haven't read it, although I know there are some wonderful contributors. But I have read Andy's book on John Lyly – John Lyly and Early-Modern Authorship – which I thought was brilliant. Well worth your time, if Lyly is of interest to you.
I didn't know you knew him! His work is great, I'm a huge admirer. Lyly has attracted more than his fair share of great scholars, I think--I absolutely LOVE that old G.K. Hunter book about him.
And totally agree with all of your points, which are eloquently put as usual.
Thank you! No reason why you would know that tbh. I interviewed Andy when his Lyly book came out. Link is here, if you’re interested! https://mathewlyons.co.uk/2014/06/09/john-lyly-and-early-modern-authorship-an-interview-with-andy-kesson/
Tennessee Williams created all the best names - Brick, Big Mama, Big Daddy, Blanche Dubois, Stanley Kowalski etc.
It is interesting how Hjorth's comment about the crucial difference between using real names vs fictional ones returns us to chapter 9 of Aristotle's Poetics, where Aristotle makes considerable effort to deny any relevance to a crucial empirical difference between tragedies and comedies, namely, that comedies operate with fictional names, whereas tragedies use the names of actual people. The Philosopher wants to dismiss some obvious literary-historical objections to his famous distinction between history and poetry, between discourses dealing with the particular and the universal. Poetry engages with the universal through fictions, so Aristotle needs to show that what what distinguishes poetry from history is fictionality, which means both tragic and comic plots need to be fictional: made-up stories about made-up people.
The discussion of names takes place in this context. Aristotle acknowledges that tragedies often use historical, real names, whereas comedies don't, but then adds that there is nothing inevitable about what tragedians have been doing, because 1., he just said what the principal difference between poetry and history is, and 2., because he can think of ONE tragedy, Agathon's Antheus, that is using exclusively fictional characters. (There is no other such Greek tragedy, and Antheus also does not survive and is not mentioned anywhere else.)
In other words, Aristotle uses an exception as not just evidence of the possibility of something, but an instance of his ideal type, because he needs to bend literary reality to his brilliant (I am not being sarcastic here) systematization of discourse.
While the Philosopher seeks to erase a specific distinction between two genres, or rather, dismiss an actual, documented difference between two literary genres that seriously trubles his larger distinction between genres of history and fiction, the literary historian may want to resist this, and acknowledge the convention preserved in medieval and neoclassical treatments of the subject, namely, that tragedies were representations of (historically or mythologically) true events, whereas comedies (new comedies) represented fictions.
In the early modern period, this is of course by no means systematically true, and with the emergence of domestic tragedy, Aristotle's philosophical principle becomes the empirical reality of genres at last. It is worth noting that domestic tragedy, like the novel, is an English thing, at least when seen from the continent.
In Aristotle, the matrix of fictional storytelling is comedy. One might say that the novel grows out of the comic matrix, and that the historical novel and autofiction trouble or complicate this in different ways.
This is brilliant, thank you. You could see this as the comic subsuming the tragic, for reasons that connect to the other aspect of Aristotle's comic / tragic distinction: the low / high distinction. Via social history or (as per Auerbach) Christianity or both.
Yes, exactly. Because the low/high distinction is the distinction of having a name (in a particular, important sense of having a name that you also discuss).
Where is the number of our English dead?
Edward the duke of York, the earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire;
None else of name, and of all other men
But five and twenty.
Yes. And that's the perfect quote from Shakespeare.
“In den Büchern stehen die Namen von Königen.”
One of the most bathetic names in fiction has to be Duncan Idaho from the Dune series. I can't seem to find any reason for it's choice amongst all the other unusual names
How interesting! I've never actually read Dune. I agree, that seems very random! Science fiction names would be a great topic in itself. I've come across articles on fantasy names, particularly inspired by Tolkien (who of course put a lot of thought into it like the good Anglo Saxonist he was), but I don't think I've read anything on science fiction names. I bet there are some interesting comparisons between character naming in science fiction and drug / chemical / tech naming.